Agnieszka Pilat

Machines are a natural progression of human development. It is often by creating machines, that man is able to accomplish some of the most extraordinary things. The physical world around us is a manifestation of our dreams and desires and machines have always fulfilled the role of making them a reality. 

In my portraits of technology, I treat each machine as an individual. I consider my subjects to be noble and beautiful. They are manifestations of their parsimonious engineering: form following function. However, I do not look at a machine only in terms of the task for which it was made, but also consider its role as an actor on a broader technological stage. In this framing, all machines are important, they are all related and their most profound impact on society is collective. 

As a portrait painter, I aspire to reveal the truth. My task is to capture the essence of the subject, not the superficial. In this presentation I will explore the essence of robot technology and discuss how people and machines can work together as authentic beings, to create the future.

Biography:

Polish-born artist, Agnieszka Pilat is best known for her series of heroic portraits of technology and machines. She works and lives in New York City and in San Francisco and as a self-proclaimed machine chaser, she commutes between the east and west coasts in pursuit of emergent technologies.                         

“To understand the future, we must understand the machine”, says the artist. Pilat’s work has been featured in many publications, including WIRED, Artnet, New York Magazine, and The Times of London. She was an artist-in-residence at Boston Dynamics, GoogleX and she’s currently a guest artist at Agility Robotics and at SpaceX.

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