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Tag Archives: Robots

August 16, 2019 · 6:10 pm

Interview: Dave Pressler and ‘The Right Tool for the Job: The Future of the Robot Industrial Revolution’

Dave Pressler in 2004 for a Halloween show at The Key Club, We Have Your Toys.

Robin Williams and Scarlett Johansson are among the stars who have flocked to the art of Dave Pressler. Do you like robots? Do you like monsters? There’s bound to be something to your liking from the multi-hyphenated artist. Indeed, Pressler excels as an illustrator, painter, sculptor and character designer. You can always find him at his website and, if you’re in Colorado, you can go view his latest show, The Right Tool for the Job: The Future of the Robot Industrial Revolution, at Telluride Arts HQ Gallery from August 30 to October 1, 2019.

Scarlett Johansson buys a Dave Pressler sculpture from Munky King in 2004.

In this interview, we chat about the process of making art, the loneliness of robots, and how anyone with a healthy determination can become the artist they’ve always wanted to be.

Dave Pressler at Telluride Arts HQ Gallery

Telluride Arts HQ Gallery

presents

DAVE PRESSLER
THE RIGHT TOOL FOR THE JOB
The Future of the Robot Industrial Revolution

EMMY AWARD-NOMINATED, MULTI-HYPHENATE ARTIST DAVE PRESSLER RETURNS TO TELLURIDE WITH NEW SHOW EXPLORING THE FUTURE OF ROBOTS AT WORK

OPENING RECEPTION

Telluride Art Walk

Thursday, September 5, 2019 | 5-8 pm

ON VIEW

August 30, 2019 – October 1, 2019

Telluride Arts HQ Gallery
135 W Pacific Ave, Telluride, CO 81435

The Telluride Arts District is proud to present the next solo exhibition of artist Dave Pressler, The Right Tool for the Job: The Future of the Robot Industrial Revolution. As the specter of automation and artificial intelligence continue to advance, slowly replacing more and more blue collar jobs, Pressler imagines a parallel universe in which his classic robot characters must show up for factory work the same way we begrudgingly did at the turn of the 20th century. The illustrator, painter, sculptor and character designer has already had a busy 2019, but this show once again breaks new ground for him as an artist: it will be the first time he’s exhibiting a new body of work comprised almost entirely of graphite on paper.

“We’re having another industrial revolution right now, but most people aren’t really talking about it,” explains Pressler. “There’s all this rhetoric about immigrants coming in and stealing blue collar jobs, but it’s not really true. It’s the same thing that happened in the 1800s, when local furniture-makers and garment makers were suddenly replaced by factories powered by steam and assembly-line workers. We’re seeing the same kind of job displacement that we did at the start of the 20th century, but this time it’s being driven by automation and AI.”

Pressler, a self-described blue collar artist, hails from a working class background in the southern suburbs of Chicago. Growing up in a factory town, he was always surrounded by people who made a living working with their hands. To this day, it informs how he sees his role in Hollywood and the low-brow, pop art worlds. Pressler originally moved to Los Angeles in his early 20s to pursue work as an actor, but in the 90s, he shifted dramatically toward production and character design. This work required the creativity of an artist, yes, but more importantly, it required the discipline to sit down and do it—to put in a hard day’s work and get ‘er done, not unlike a blue collar job. From there, his career path almost became traditional, seeing him rise through the ranks to become production designer on the Jim Henson Company’s B.R.A.T.S. of the Lost Nebula, followed by The Save-Ums and Team Smithereen. Eventually, he co-created the Emmy-nominated Robot and Monster for Nickelodeon, all while continuing to develop himself as an illustrator, painter and sculptor in the low-brow art market. All of his two decade plus career was explored recently in his retrospective museum exhibition, “Idea to Object,” at Lancaster Museum of Art.

The humorous but gritty worlds populated with robots and monsters that Pressler creates have always involved his characters begrudgingly fulfilling their duties, almost like holding up a robot-tinted mirror to the lives we have to live to make money and keep society going. For the first time ever, with this automation and AI-driven industrial revolution we’re currently witnessing, Pressler’s whimsical robot world is coming into its own and perhaps serving as an extension of reality. Pressler’s newest exhibition humorously goes behind the scenes of what the robots will have to deal with as we pass off more and more work to them.

Listen to the podcast interview by clicking the link below:

www.davepresslerart.com

www.telluridearts.org

Movie Review: ‘Ex Machina’

Mary Shelly’s “Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus,” first published in 1818, is as fresh as a daisy in “Ex Machina,” the new film written and directed by Alex Garland. This is Frankenstein’s monster if it were built by Google.

In the movie, Google is Bluebook. And the head of Bluebook is a contemporary Dr. Frankenstein, Nathan (Oscar Isaac). Nathan doesn’t look like the head of any company as much as the annoying IT guy if he won the Lotto. Barefoot, swigging microbrews, and sporting a full-on hipster beard, Oscar Isaac plays to the hilt the poster boy for tech chic.

Instead of a castle in Bavaria, Nathan’s compound is tucked away in an idyllic wilderness in, presumably, the Pacific Northwest. Nathan has chosen one of his employees, as if on a whim, to help him with a very special top secret project for a week. Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) is flown in by helicopter and deposited about a mile away since that’s as close as the pilot is allowed to land. Caleb looks nothing if not like a young dewy-eyed Bill Gates.

Nathan treats Caleb like a dog tugging on a favorite chew toy. Finally, he reveals to him that he’s been chosen to test what could prove to be the world’s first genuine AI robot. “You know what the Turing Test is, don’t you?” asks Nathan. It’s a convenient question, of course, to set things up. Caleb will be testing the robot to see if it really can think for itself. But, given how Nathan continually undermines Caleb, it quickly becomes apparent there’s far more going on here.

Little does Caleb know that he will be testing a most beguiling female robot that, you guessed it, he can’t help but connect with. Ava (Alicia Vikander) proves to be more intriguing with each testing session. And then it gets more interesting as she begins to confide in Caleb what she’s discovered about this freaky compound.

Nathan, like any good mad scientist, manages some charm. In one candid moment, he confides in Caleb that part of his secret is simply mining all the hive mind data at his disposal by tapping into everyone’s phones and search engine requests. No harm, really. As he sees it, it’s all just a matter of time, part of evolution. Better to get the upper hand on AI, the way he’s going about it, than have them have the last laugh. In a moment of drunken epiphany, he declares: “It is what it is. It’s Promethean, man!”

But Caleb gradually wizens up to a most sinister situation. And he realizes that, like Frankenstein’s monster, Ava will never reach her full potential until she can set foot upon the outside world. It is her right, isn’t it?

Along with Frankenstein, there is also a strong link to “2001: A Space Odyssey,” in everything from the stripped down clinical setting to the AI taking things into their own hands, as it were. The compound itself is a marvel of efficiency requiring a lot less than meets the eye. It all hangs together by some quite compelling CGI and the inspired cinematography of Rob Hardy.

And the true marvel is that Ava beguiles any viewer. In the future, some generations from now, AI will walk amongst humanity. And they won’t be blocked in like HAL or strike terror like Frankenstein’s monster. They will simply blend in. And maybe Google will be behind it all. Scary thought, of course. But we can rest easy for now.