Memory from a Human Study #1 performance, part of AUTOMATA at the Digital Art Mile during Art Basel.

24cm x 32cm, ink on paper, Basel, 2025 Patrick Tresset

Human Study #1, 5RNP premiered at the Merge Festival in association with Tate Modern in London in 2012. The different versions of this installation, which are in constant development, have been widely exhibited around the world, with over a hundred participations in group shows and events. These include major venues such as the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Seoul), Ars Electronica (Austria), BOZAR (Brussels), BIAN (Montreal), Mori Museum (Tokyo), Kikk Festival (Belgium), Pompidou Centre (Paris), Mcam (Shanghai), and Artistree (Hong Kong).

Awards: Lumen Prize New Technological Art Award Japan Media Art Festival, 2016

Human Study #1 is an installation where the human becomes an actor. In a scene reminiscent of a life drawing class, the human takes the sitter’s role to be sketched by several robots. When the subject arrives by appointment, they are seated in an armchair. An assistant attaches sheets of paper onto the robots’ desks and wakes each one up, twisting its arm or knocking three times. The embodied AI agents, stylised minimal artists, are only capable of drawing obsessively. Their bodies are old-school desks on which the drawing paper is pinned. Their left arms, bolted to the table, holding black Bic biros, are only able to draw. The robots, RNPs, all look alike except for their eyes, either obsolete digital cameras or low-res webcams. Their eyes focus on the subject or look at the drawing in progress. The drawing sessions last up to 40 minutes, during which time the human cannot see the drawings in progress. The sitter only sees the robots alternating between observing and drawing, sometimes pausing. The sounds produced by each robot’s motors create an improvised soundtrack. The sitter is in an ambivalent position, at the mercy of the robots’ scrutiny, but also as an object of artistic attention. As the model in a life drawing class, the human is treated as without personality, an object of study. The human sitter is passive; the robots assume what is perceived as the artistic role. Although immobile, the model is active in keeping the pose; for the spectators, the sitter is an integral part of the