manifest
Generative thesis of a robot
2008/2017

In an autonomous process, an industrial robot writes down manifestos and hand them out to the public. The machine is standing in front of a desk, holding a pen in hand and moves it continuously over the paper. After the writing process, the robot cuts the sheet off the paper that it falls down to the floor for the audience to take.
In the most recent version of the installation from 2017 the robot writes legislative texts for a utopian man-machine society. The manifestos consist of thesis-like sentences that the robot generates and writes down independently. To do so, it draws on a pool of terms from ethics, law, technology and society, as well as a collection of sentence structures from legal and fictional law texts, which it combines algorithmically. As a prototype of a robot avant-garde, the machine creatively interferes in the legislature of a future society in which humans and machines are equal subjects of the legal system.
In the original version of “manifest” from 2008 the robot writes philosophical theses about man-machine society. In this case it combines terms from art theory and philosophy with sentence structures from historical manifestos in art and politics.
Instead of mass reproducing a uniform text with a propagandistic message the machine mass produces numbered unique pieces, each with its own individual message. Unlike humans, robots have neither an inherent morality nor a will to justice and are thus free to formulate their legal hypotheses. The meaning of each manifest unfolds only by the perception of the human, who instinctively comprehends the meaning of the statements.
The term “manifest” (lat. manifestus, tangible, obvious, proven) refers to the connection between the robot's manual action (lat. manus, the hand) and the ceremonial act (lat. festus, festive, ceremonial) of the proclamation.
Format: 500 x 315 mm (HxW)
Duration: approx 20 minutes per manfesto depending on the text
Number of manifestos written to date (End 2024):
Philosophical manifestos: 37.776
Legal texts: 7.182





