The Times Magazine 15gnieszka Pilat is calling to me from
somewhere. I’m on the fourth floor
of an enormous industrial building
in Chelsea. There are numbers
on the doors but they don’t match
hers. I tell her this on the phone.
“I’ll shout,” she bellows her
voice coming from a long corridor.
“We’re in here!”
Pilat is an artist who paints
with a robotic dog. It’s not an easy thing to do,
because the dog is not very good at painting.
It was bred, as it were, by Boston Dynamics,
a robotics company that developed a whole
pack of mechanical canines, initially with
funding from the US military. Spot was the
lightest and most agile, and the idea was that
it would go down mine shafts or into nuclear
reactors. No one expected it to move to New
York and make a living as an abstract artist.
But no one counted on Pilat. The woman
is a force of nature and she has spent her
short career boldly going where no other artist
has gone before. Since finishing art school in
San Francisco in 2014, she has become the
painter for the Silicon Valley elite, winning
the patronage of tech tycoons who had barely
glanced at an oil painting before she came
along. She was welcomed into their mansions
and given access to their most sacred
sanctums. Google let her hang out at Google X,
its secret research facility. Boston Dynamics- a company which rarely so much as replies
to my emails – let her into its headquarters
and ended up lending her a Spot, its most
celebrated creation. She’s heading, fairly
soon, for another residency at a space rocket
company so reticent that she asks me not
to mention its name. Residency is probably
the wrong word, as it makes it sound like an
established programme, when really, it’s just
her. None of these firms had such a thing
until Pilat pitched up with her paints.
I can still hear her shouting, as I reach the
end of a long corridor. There’s one last set of
double doors ahead of me now, and one of
them is open, and as I approach, something
comes barrelling through it towards me, at
hip height, on four mechanical legs.
It’s like that moment when you go to
someone’s house, and you know they have a
dog, and you’re not really a dog person. You’re
not scared, exactly, but you don’t quite know
what to do with yourself. This one has no
head, but a vertical bottom-like groove where
the head might be, and two green lights on
either side of it. As it bears down on me its
limbs make a mechanical whirring sound and
its metal paws tramp on the floor. I wonder
if it will knock me over. I wonder if it will
jump up and try to lick me with its bottom.
It stops, just shy of my groin. Then a head
appears around the door behind it. “Hello!”
Pilat shouts again. She’s wearing a yellow
the canvas in blue or gold and then used Spot
to score a series of black lines and circles.
“It’s very abstract,” Pilat says. “When you
give a small child a pen and paper, that’s the
best they can do. She’s good at small circles.”
She had not originally planned to use
Spot to make works of art. Her idea, when she
first went to Boston Dynamics in 2019, was
to capture the thing itself. She watched Spot
walking down a flight of stairs and made
a painting of the dog’s descent, styled
after Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending
a Staircase (No. 2).
“A couple of the engineers saw the
portrait,” she says. They felt it should have
included a mechanical arm they had made for
Spot. It attaches to the dog’s grooved face and
rises up, like the neck of an ostrich. On the
end of it, there’s a beaky hand, for grasping
things. At the time it was still in development,
and not public knowledge. But the engineers
“were very sad I was not painting the arm”,
she says. “Like, have you ever had a cat?”
I nod. Not a robotic one. An actual cat.
“So, you know when a cat brings you a
dead mouse, they’re like, ‘Check it out! Play
with it!’ So that was the feeling I had, that
there was these two engineers, coming with
this weird thing, like, ‘Oh my god, you should
play with it, it’s so great!’ That’s how the whole
thing started.”
Spot looks rather terrifying with the arm;
like it might bite your nose off.
“Visually, it looks much more charming
without it,” Pilat says. On the other hand, it
means the dog can grasp an oil stick: a large
crayon-like implement, made of very dry oil
paint. Pilat can upload a PDF of an image,
or draw on a screen, and “Spot will figure out
how to translate this”, though she’s less keen
on this method as she feels it reduces the
dog to a glorified printer. After a little while
at Boston Dynamics, another engineer
approached her. “The engineers, they are
f***ing insane,” Pilat says. “It’s almost if
someone said, ‘I have this side project I’m
working on and it’s brain surgery.’ ”
The engineer had rigged together a system
using Oculus, the virtual reality headset, and
motion capture, to make the dog’s arm mimic
the movements of her own. Still, her favourite
way to paint with Spot is to operate the dog
using its remote control console.
She trained as a figurative artist, as a
portrait painter. “I like the limitations the robot
imposes on me,” she says. Spot is good at small
circles “because of the engineering of the arm”,
Pilat says. “And very good at lines going up and
down. Sideways lines, she’s not very good at.”
But it’s not necessarily a bad thing, in the
art world. Pablo Picasso once said, “It took
me four years to paint like Raphael, but a
lifetime to paint like a child.” Pilat just needed
a robot dog.A
‘IT’S A SHE, OBVIOUSLY.
IN THIS POLITICAL CLIMATE,
A FEMALE ROBOT IS BETTER
THAN A MALE ROBOT’
Pilat with Mother 2021, an art work painted by SpotCOURTESY OF AGNIESZKA PILAT
One of Pilat’s own works: Red Paul, 2016hoodie. We’re going to take Spot for a walk
and her tracksuit matches the colour of Spot’s
coat, so that people know the robot has an
operator and do not immediately assume
that they are living in The War of the Worlds.
Is it, um, a he, I ask. Or a she?
“She, obviously,” she says. “In this
political climate, a female robot is better
than a male robot.”
Pilat has had several Spots now; this one
she has named Basia. In one of the paintings
stapled to her studio wall, you can make out
the dog’s name, written in large, clunky letters,
the “S” slightly misshapen. Because, as I said,
the dog is a very poor draftsman.
“This is all Spot’s work,” says Pilat.
The paintings look like very rough
engineering diagrams, or like an extremely
elaborate game of hangman. Pilat has primed