Robots created the world's first piece of street art. The sketch was based on a scene depicting Achilles from the mosaic floor of the Roman villa La Olmeda, built in Spain in the mid-4th century AD during the Flavian dynasty. Using machine learning algorithms, a specially trained Yandex neural network reconstructed the missing elements of the Classical mosaic. The design generated by the neural network was applied to the side of the building at 9 Popova Street using a wall-climbing robotic printer, with technology and software developed by the Stenograffia creative team.
Anya Klets, the festival director: “The artist who crafted this mosaic in the 4th century AD could never have imagined that, nearly seventeen centuries later, his work would be restored by an intelligence on a completely different level. The design created by robots is a message to today’s artists: imagine what could happen in the future to you and what you create today? It is completely impossible to predict where technology might be in a couple of centuries. Any of us can create something that centuries later will be continued by someone from a completely different world.”