Spiderbots At Semi-Permanent

Twitter. The one social platform that seems to cause a lot of confusion, particularly among those who've never had a go at it. If that's you and you'd like to cement that confusion, get a load of this as a headline:

"Robots, social media, spray cans and three of the world’s leading design creatives come together in Auckland this month to create what’s believed to be the world’s first art painted by Twitter-controlled bots."

WTF?

Ah, Semi-Permanent, trust you to bring the kookiest creative types out of the wood work. Taking place at this year's conference, Orcon Spider Art sees the live creation of three artworks by specially designed robots controlled remotely by the Twitter community. I can't even begin to think of the endless hashtag possibilites for a project like that. Three of this year's speakers, Alex Trochut, a rep from Melbourne design studio SouthSouthWest and Kelli Anderson, are lending their support by gifting bespoke stencils that will be affixed over three giant canvases.

During the two days of this year's conference the artworks will be completed by spray painting spiderbots. Don't worry if you didn't know what that means, I didn't either. But thanks to a quick Google I'm able to make an educated guess that they are robots armed with spray cans that will be controlled by people tweeting from the audience.

Spray paint and insects.. Is it lame to come up with a 'spray and walk away' joke here? Yeah, probably.

So the dilly is the audience tweets the coordinates of a square on a huge grid of their chosen artwork along with the colour they'd like it painted. Then the spiderbots scatter about and spray as commanded. At the end of the conference, once all squares have been painted, the stencils will be removed from the three canvases to reveal the final artworks.

Orcon brand and communications manager Quentin Reade says, “Spiders, Twitter and artwork are unusual bedfellows (ya don't say?) but we’re really excited about seeing this whole thing unfold and bringing another world-first to New Zealand. We’ve always said the internet is everything, and now it’s changing the way we create art.”

Having been to Semi-Permanent a couple of times when I was at design school, I can safely say that these kinds of live art displays are pretty incredible and inspiring. For a blow by blow of speaker info, click here, and grab a ticket. I mean, spiderbots? It truly is the world wide WEB.