The East London design studio is giving the public the chance to explore Tate Britain at night, using four specially designed robots
Everyone’s fascinated, and equally terrified, by the thought of spending the night in a museum or a gallery – it’s even spawned (several) movies. The Egyptian mummies of the British Museum, the T-Rex at the Natural History Museum in London, Michelangelo’s ‘David’ at the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, Vigo the Carpathian in the awful Ghostbusters Two… perhaps they all come alive when the lights go out and the visitors have gone.
They don’t of course, but if there were to be something going on, London-based digital product design studio The Workers will capture it. Ross Cairns and Tomasso Lanza, along with collaborator David Di Duca, are winners of Tate Britain’s inaugural IK Prize for digital innovation.Their winning proposal, entitled After Dark, involves placing four robots in Tate Britain’s collections after dark, robots that will be controlled by the public via an online portal.
After three months of solid work on a £60,000 development budget, including input from RAL Space – who are currently working on the Mars Rovers – the project launched this week at the gallery on the banks of the Thames. The first to test it was Colonel Chris Hadfield, from his office in Toronto. The project runs for five nights.
“It’s a different way of experiencing the space,” says Tomasso Lanza via email. “It’s dark, you’re there, alone with your robot – you’re not supposed to be there. We hope it will be thrilling and unique.” The idea originated from numerous early mornings and late nights spent at Tate Modern working on another job. The duo was “in awe of how different the space felt without any visitors. All of a sudden you become more aware of the importance of the place. It becomes contemplative and playful at the same time.”
Here, The Workers share some of their technical drawings for the project. “What you’re looking at are the exported wireframes of the computer-aided design model we used to plan the mechanical and visual design of the robot,” says Lanza. “You can more or less see all the components, although the wireframes are not too intelligible for that purpose. We used a variety of materials and production techniques, including computer numerical control milling and laser cutting; the body shell is made of formed black polystyrene.
”The lights are LED – a few volts, not very powerful – and the top speed is less than a human stroll. The neck is fixed but the head tilts up and down. We strived to make them carbon copies of each other – there’s maybe a different cable here and there.” Have they grown attached to the robots or named them? “No names, though we hope there will be enough interest to allow us to expand on the idea, improve the technology and use it in different contexts in the future,” says Lanza.
Don’t worry about knocking into or damaging any of the artworks: the robots are equipped with sonar and will automatically stop if they get too close to an obstacle. Phew.
After Dark runs until 17 August at Tate Britain, London. Click for more details
