Light Painting with Taiyo Onorato

Light Painting is one of the six experiments of A Third Hand – Creative Applications for Robotics, a research project conducted at ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne, Switzerland by AATB (Andrea Anner and Thibault Brevet), Alain Bellet and Martin Hertig, developed in collaboration with the Swiss artist and photographer Taiyo Onorato.

Over four sessions at the AATB studio in Zurich and in Biel, Onorato and AATB used a UR10 robotic arm fitted with LEDs and sparklers to draw with light, recorded in long-exposure photographs. The drawings were made both from vector files, turned into robot moves with a custom UR SVG Planner, and by programming the arm directly on the teach pendant. The sparklers, burning for about 80 seconds, brought an imprecision that runs against the robot’s exact geometry.