ITP Professor, Jean-Marc Gauthier organized a group of recent ITP graduates of '04: Mark Argo, Ann Poochareon, and Daniel Hirschmann to create Nicebots, an urban installation commissioned by the Ville de Nice and the MAMAC Museum of Contemporary Art in Nice.
This project will be on display from September 18 to October 18, 2004.
The MAMAC installation, located on the piazza in front of the museum of contemporary art in Nice, allows visitors to discover various forms of digital art: robots, virtual spaces, video and to renew the experience of going to a museum. This new kind of interactive installation takes place outdoors, inside an urban space. The installation includes 50 automomous bots - each of them the size of a cigar box - that can roam around, play music, talk, display messages, interact with visitors of the museum and climb on the facades of the building. A couple of flying bots, dragonflies, were also created for this installation. They contribute to the landscape at night too, when some bots with glowing lights climb on the facades of the Museum. A robotics workshop for the construction and maintenance of the bots was shipped to Nice where it was open for visitors to see Ann, Mark and Daniel working and redesigning the bots for the one month duration of the
show.
More info can be found at http://www.tinkering.net/mamac
and http://nicebots.artgeek.org
