The Times Magazine 17“My ego as an artist just took over,” she says.
When she finished art college, in 2014, she
was doing a series featuring a small blonde
girl, a ballet dancer. A Silicon Valley developer
named Paul Stein, who was working on a
new HQ for Airbnb, approached her and said,
“I like how you paint, but could you paint a
machine for me, because I don’t want a figure.”
He had salvaged some artefacts from the
building he was remodelling. One of them was
an old fire alarm, a giant red bell. He loved
her painting, commissioned several more, and
Pilat began knocking out portraits of famous
old pieces of machinery, working in grave,
heroic colours, as if they were old Dutchmen
and she was Rembrandt.
The word spread in Silicon Valley. No
one there was particularly well known for
collecting art: they collected cars or planes or
Hawaiian islands. But here was an artist who
painted technology. “It was relatable to people
in the valley,” she says. The tech tycoons
tended to feel, in spite of their money and
power, rather unappreciated: that “they will
not receive moral validation, that what they
are doing is helping the world”, Pilat says.
“And I’m giving them this moral validation.
And it comes from an authentic place.”
She is not resentful of their enormous
wealth. “They’re obscenely wealthy, of course
they are,” she says. “But they work a ridiculous
amount of time. They don’t have a life outside
their work... And I really respect that.” She’s
the same way herself.
“I have very little private life,” she says.
She divorced five years ago and is dating“For me it’s a bit of a commentary about
the current state of abstract art, what’s called
deskilling,” the idea that “the less skill you
have, the more conceptual the art, the idea
matters more and more”, she says. “So for me,
it’s a humorous commentary about that, that
this is actually the best she can do. So, that’s
why it is abstract. There’s no concept. The
concept is, ‘This is the best I can do.’ That’s
the concept.”
Robots, in her view, are at a primitive stage.
They are like the ancient men and women
who printed their hands on the walls of a cave.
So it is with Spot. “I thought, OK, for the
robot [the first work] would be a self-portrait,”
she says. The story of robot art has barely
begun. Spot is writing its first chapter,
laboriously, with her beaky hand.
Pilat, who is 48, grew up in communist
Poland, in the city of Lodz, where her mother
was a PE teacher and her father was a
pastry chef. They lived, like everyone else, in
government housing, in a one-bedroom flat
with “my grandmother, my grandfather,
my uncle, his son, my mom, my father, my
brother and myself, so the seven, and a dog.
“I remember standing in lines for
everything. Toilet paper, forget it. We used
to get oranges from Cuba.”
Once, for a joke, someone bought her
father a car air freshener. “I remember they
were laughing at him, like: ‘Yeah, like you’re
ever going to have a car.’ Because a car was
such a dream... Nobody had cars.”
She remembers a Christmas morning, when
she was ten, when her mother overslept and
ran around the flat shouting that they would
have nothing to eat. Out of their window, they
could see a line of people who had broken the
curfew to queue up before 8am outside the
grocery store. “She’s like, ‘By the time I get
there, they’re going to buy out everything,’ ”
Pilat says. But as she watched, police vans
arrived and arrested everyone in the line
for breaking the curfew. “They would take
people in these vans out to the countryside
and you had to walk all the way home...
So it wasn’t like they were going to kill you,
but it was still annoying,” Pilat says. Her
mother was delighted. “My mom said, ‘Kids,
this is the best Christmas ever! I’m going to
be first in line.’ ”
When the communist regime came to
an end, in 1989, the effect at casa Pilat was
transformative. Her parents were allowed
to buy the bakery where her father worked.
He had been an alcoholic, now he stopped
drinking. “He just got healed instantly, from
one day to another, because he had to get a
driver’s licence. He had to drive his product.
And he had a purpose in life... Within a few
years, he had a car.”
Pilat’s dropped out of college and
worked on a start-up company with her
boyfriend at the time, but the relationship
turned sour. She wanted a fresh start,
somewhere unreachable by a direct flight.
So, in 2004, she moved to San Francisco.
In California she married a software
engineer who worked for Apple. “I took
a long time off,” she says. “I was having a
hard time adjusting and learning how to be
an American.”
It was her hairdresser who suggested she
should read Atlas Shrugged – the science
fiction novel by Ayn Rand.
“It’s an extremely cultish book, especially
in Silicon Valley,” Pilat says. “It’s for unbridled
selfishness and individualism. But in the
context of how I grew up, it really resonated
with me. Because I’m like, ‘Yeah, government
is horrible. Yeah, they’re the oppressors.’ ” She
also thought it was “so black and white. It
should be a comic book.”
She resolved to go to art school, and to
make Atlas Shrugged into a graphic novel.
“I wanted to make the best graphic novel
there is. So I thought, ‘OK, I have to
become a very good painter.’ So I got heavy
into painting figures.” People praised her
painting. She forgot about the graphic novel.‘MY CLIENTS ARE OBSCENELY
WEALTHY BUT THEY HAVE
NO LIFE OUTSIDE WORK.
I RESPECT THAT’
Meet my four-legged robot
- Aibo
Over time, Sony’s artificially intelligent
robot puppy will get to know its name
and respond when called, and learn
when it hasn’t obeyed a command such
as “paw” correctly. It can also interact
with other Aibo dogs. When the
battery is low, Aibo will find its way to
the charging station, using a camera
on its bottom. £2,145, us.aibo.com - AlphaDog
The fastest robot dog on the market
can be walked without remote control
because it uses sensors to see and
hear its environment. AlphaDog,
developed by the Chinese tech firm
Weilan, can obey commands thanks
to visual and speech-recognition
technology. £1,910, weilan.com - Petoi Bittle
A robot dog that fits in the palm of
your hand. Perfect for learning basic
robotics, because it has instructions
on how to programme your Bittle
to do tricks. £240, petoi.com- Petoi Nybble
Once you have assembled the bionic
cat’s wooden puzzle frame, you can
programme it to walk and do tricks.
It links to the Petoi app where
you can make Nybble do push-ups,
stretches and greetings, and control
its walking speed. £200, petoi.com - MarsCat
The world’s first fully autonomous
robot cat runs, sleeps and stretches
independently. It can feel your
touch and according to the way
you pet it, expresses emotions
through meows and gestures. Made
by the Chinese technology company
Elephant Robotics. £969, shop.
elephantrobotics.com
Georgina Roberts
13452