Agnieszka Pilat is calling to me from somewhere. I'm on the fourth floor of an enormous industrial building in Chelsea. There are numbers on the doors but they don't match hers. I tell her this on the phone.
"I'll shout," she bellows her voice coming from a long corridor. "We're in here!"
Pilat is an artist who paints with a robotic dog. It's not an easy thing to do, because the dog is not very good at painting. It was bred, as it were, by Boston Dynamics, a robotics company that developed a whole pack of mechanical canines, initially with funding from the US military. Spot was the lightest and most agile, and the idea was that it would go down mine shafts or into nuclear reactors. No one expected it to move to New York and make a living as an abstract artist.
But no one counted on Pilat. The woman is a force of nature and she has spent her short career boldly going where no other artist has gone before. Since finishing art school in San Francisco in 2014, she has become the painter for the Silicon Valley elite, winning the patronage of tech tycoons who had barely glanced at an oil painting before she came along. She was welcomed into their mansions and given access to their most sacred sanctums. Google let her hang out at Google X, its secret research facility. Boston Dynamics – a company which rarely so much as replies to my emails – let her into its headquarters and ended up lending her a Spot, its most celebrated creation. She's heading, fairly soon, for another residency at a space rocket company so reticent that she asks me not to mention its name. Residency is probably the wrong word, as it makes it sound like an established programme, when really, it's just her. None of these firms had such a thing until Pilat pitched up with her paints.
I can still hear her shouting, as I reach the end of a long corridor. There's one last set of double doors ahead of me now, and one of them is open, and as I approach, something comes barrelling through it towards me, at hip height, on four mechanical legs.
It's like that moment when you go to someone's house, and you know they have a dog, and you're not really a dog person. You're not scared, exactly, but you don't quite know what to do with yourself. This one has no head, but a vertical bottom-like groove where the head might be, and two green lights on either side of it. As it bears down on me its limbs make a mechanical whirring sound and its metal paws tramp on the floor. I wonder if it will knock me over. I wonder if it will jump up and try to lick me with its bottom.
It stops, just shy of my groin. Then a head appears around the door behind it. "Hello!" Pilat shouts again. She's wearing a yellow hoodie. We're going to take Spot for a walk and her tracksuit matches the colour of Spot's coat, so that people know the robot has an operator and do not immediately assume that they are living in The War of the Worlds.
Is it, um, a he, I ask. Or a she?
"She, obviously," she says. "In this political climate, a female robot is better than a male robot."
Pilat has had several Spots now; this one she has named Basia. In one of the paintings stapled to her studio wall, you can make out the dog's name, written in large, clunky letters, the "S" slightly misshapen. Because, as I said, the dog is a very poor draftsman.
"This is all Spot's work," says Pilat.
The paintings look like very rough engineering diagrams, or like an extremely elaborate game of hangman. Pilat has primed the canvas in blue or gold and then used Spot to score a series of black lines and circles.
"It's very abstract," Pilat says. "When you give a small child a pen and paper, that's the best they can do. She's good at small circles."
She had not originally planned to use Spot to make works of art. Her idea, when she first went to Boston Dynamics in 2019, was to capture the thing itself. She watched Spot walking down a flight of stairs and made a painting of the dog's descent, styled after Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2).
"A couple of the engineers saw the portrait," she says. They felt it should have included a mechanical arm they had made for Spot. It attaches to the dog's grooved face and rises up, like the neck of an ostrich. On the end of it, there's a beaky hand, for grasping things. At the time it was still in development, and not public knowledge. But the engineers "were very sad I was not painting the arm", she says. "Like, have you ever had a cat?"
I nod. Not a robotic one. An actual cat.
"So, you know when a cat brings you a dead mouse, they're like, 'Check it out! Play with it!' So that was the feeling I had, that there was these two engineers, coming with this weird thing, like, 'Oh my god, you should play with it, it's so great!' That's how the whole thing started."
Spot looks rather terrifying with the arm; like it might bite your nose off.
"Visually, it looks much more charming without it," Pilat says. On the other hand, it means the dog can grasp an oil stick: a large crayon-like implement, made of very dry oil paint. Pilat can upload a PDF of an image, or draw on a screen, and "Spot will figure out how to translate this", though she's less keen on this method as she feels it reduces the dog to a glorified printer. After a little while at Boston Dynamics, another engineer approached her. "The engineers, they are f***ing insane," Pilat says. "It's almost if someone said, 'I have this side project I'm working on and it's brain surgery.' "
The engineer had rigged together a system using Oculus, the virtual reality headset, and motion capture, to make the dog's arm mimic the movements of her own. Still, her favourite way to paint with Spot is to operate the dog using its remote control console.
She trained as a figurative artist, as a portrait painter. "I like the limitations the robot imposes on me," she says. Spot is good at small circles "because of the engineering of the arm", Pilat says. "And very good at lines going up and down. Sideways lines, she's not very good at."
But it's not necessarily a bad thing, in the art world. Pablo Picasso once said, "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child." Pilat just needed a robot dog.
"For me it's a bit of a commentary about the current state of abstract art, what's called deskilling," the idea that "the less skill you have, the more conceptual the art, the idea matters more and more", she says. "So for me, it's a humorous commentary about that, that this is actually the best she can do. So, that's why it is abstract. There's no concept. The concept is, 'This is the best I can do.' That's the concept."
Robots, in her view, are at a primitive stage. They are like the ancient men and women who printed their hands on the walls of a cave. So it is with Spot. "I thought, OK, for the robot [the first work] would be a self-portrait," she says. The story of robot art has barely begun. Spot is writing its first chapter, laboriously, with her beaky hand.
'A car was such a dream'
Pilat, who is 48, grew up in communist Poland, in the city of Lodz, where her mother was a PE teacher and her father was a pastry chef. They lived, like everyone else, in government housing, in a one-bedroom flat with "my grandmother, my grandfather, my uncle, his son, my mom, my father, my brother and myself, so the seven, and a dog.
"I remember standing in lines for everything. Toilet paper, forget it. We used to get oranges from Cuba."
Once, for a joke, someone bought her father a car air freshener. "I remember they were laughing at him, like: 'Yeah, like you're ever going to have a car.' Because a car was such a dream… Nobody had cars."
She remembers a Christmas morning, when she was 10, when her mother overslept and ran around the flat shouting that they would have nothing to eat. Out of their window, they could see a line of people who had broken the curfew to queue up before 8am outside the grocery store. "She's like, 'By the time I get there, they're going to buy out everything,' " Pilat says. But as she watched, police vans arrived and arrested everyone in the line for breaking the curfew. "They would take people in these vans out to the countryside and you had to walk all the way home… So it wasn't like they were going to kill you, but it was still annoying," Pilat says. Her mother was delighted. "My mom said, 'Kids, this is the best Christmas ever! I'm going to be first in line.' "
When the communist regime came to an end, in 1989, the effect at casa Pilat was transformative. Her parents were allowed to buy the bakery where her father worked. He had been an alcoholic, now he stopped drinking. "He just got healed instantly, from one day to another, because he had to get a driver's licence. He had to drive his product. And he had a purpose in life… Within a few years, he had a car."
Pilat dropped out of college and worked on a start-up company with her boyfriend at the time, but the relationship turned sour. She wanted a fresh start, somewhere unreachable by a direct flight.
So, in 2004, she moved to San Francisco.
In California she married a software engineer who worked for Apple. "I took a long time off," she says. "I was having a hard time adjusting and learning how to be an American."
It was her hairdresser who suggested she should read Atlas Shrugged – the science fiction novel by Ayn Rand.
"It's an extremely cultish book, especially in Silicon Valley," Pilat says. "It's for unbridled selfishness and individualism. But in the context of how I grew up, it really resonated with me. Because I'm like, 'Yeah, government is horrible. Yeah, they're the oppressors.' " She also thought it was "so black and white. It should be a comic book."
She resolved to go to art school, and to make Atlas Shrugged into a graphic novel.
"I wanted to make the best graphic novel there is. So I thought, 'OK, I have to become a very good painter.' So I got heavy into painting figures." People praised her painting. She forgot about the graphic novel. "My ego as an artist just took over," she says.
When she finished art college, in 2014, she was doing a series featuring a small blonde girl, a ballet dancer. A Silicon Valley developer named Paul Stein, who was working on a new HQ for Airbnb, approached her and said, "I like how you paint, but could you paint a machine for me, because I don't want a figure."
He had salvaged some artefacts from the building he was remodelling. One of them was an old fire alarm, a giant red bell. He loved her painting, commissioned several more, and Pilat began knocking out portraits of famous old pieces of machinery, working in grave, heroic colours, as if they were old Dutchmen and she was Rembrandt.
Art, then life
The word spread in Silicon Valley. No one there was particularly well known for collecting art: they collected cars or planes or Hawaiian islands. But here was an artist who painted technology. "It was relatable to people in the valley," she says. The tech tycoons tended to feel, in spite of their money and power, rather unappreciated: that "they will not receive moral validation, that what they are doing is helping the world", Pilat says. "And I'm giving them this moral validation. And it comes from an authentic place."
She is not resentful of their enormous wealth. "They're obscenely wealthy, of course they are," she says. "But they work a ridiculous amount of time. They don't have a life outside their work… And I really respect that." She's the same way herself.
"I have very little private life," she says.
She divorced five years ago and is dating Matthew Stepka, a former vice-president of Google who runs a venture capital firm.
"I have a boyfriend, but he always is second fiddle," she says.
Steve Jurvetson, a venture capitalist, a friend of Elon Musk, asked her to paint several pieces from his collection of artefacts from the Apollo space programme. Ian Wright, a co-founder of Tesla, told her he had "a whole collection of old trucks. He said, 'You should come by,' " she said. "Silicon Valley is small; when you meet a few key people, you can meet a lot of people."
Some of them had an unusual approach to her art. Yuri Milner, one of the world's most successful tech investors, told her he had immediately placed her work in storage, never to be displayed except in digital form on one of the screens that line the interior of his home. His house is "like the Sistine Chapel, only it's not painted", she says. The ceiling appears absolutely covered in art, and then "everything changes, all of a sudden" and you realise it's a screen, she says.
I imagine he shouts, "Alexa: Cubism!" Or, "Pre-Raphaelites!" Or something.
"I guess so," she says. "So much electronics."
People flew her places by private jet. She remembers a New Year's Eve in St Barts, dining aboard the yacht of the casino magnate Steve Wynn, with an art collector and a famous Canadian singer who made piles of money crooning for Russian oligarchs. Wynn himself had a large art collection but he had steadily lost his vision and could no longer look at it, she says. Across the water she could see Roman Abramovich's gigantic yacht.
"I think like, 'I'm from communist Poland,' " Pilat says. "These are moments."
She has been to Richard Branson's island too, which was lovely, and gave her a chance to ask if she might do some painting at Virgin Galactic, though she's more of a city person really. "Wonderful. Very grateful. Beautiful," she says. In these retreats, "I'm always the poorest person in the room," she says.
Not all her art residencies were a roaring success. John Krafcik, the former head of Google's self-driving car programme, agreed to let her set up in the company's workshops, where she attempted to paint the LiDAR, the sonar system that allows autonomous vehicles to map their surroundings. After painting so many ancient machines, it was her first shot at a new piece of technology. "I was stressed out," she says.
New technology is harder to capture, she says. It's like "when you think of portraiture, when you paint old people, it's much more interesting". This was like painting a teenager. "It came out hostile."
Does that matter? Aren't you supposed to go where it takes you, as an artist?
"Well, it matters for me in the sense that… For practical reasons, I have relationships with these companies and they're not going to open their doors to me if I start portraying their machines as, like…"
Terrifying?
"Terrifying, right. That's [a] bad business plan." She likes to quote, at moments like this, from a speech Teddy Roosevelt gave at the Sorbonne, in 1910, arguing that "it is not the critic who counts… The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood."
Those men, in her view, are the tech bros of Silicon Valley. "These are the men in the arena," she says. "It's very sexy to criticise tech companies right now."
While you're waiting for your Amazon package to arrive.
"Exactly."
So what did you say to Google? Were they understanding, about you not finishing the painting?
"Yeah. I just didn't get paid," she laughs. "That's another reason I also have these relationships with companies… I never ask for anything."
People sometimes think that she's working for the companies, as a sort of in-house propagandist. She is not, she says. If she has a master, it is the technology they are making.
"I work for the machine," she says.
So if Elon Musk asked you over, you wouldn't be at all interested in painting him?
"Elon Musk, no," she says. "His technology, yes. Very much so, yeah."
The power of Spot
It's a mutually beneficial arrangement, in her view. The tech firms have a "very male culture. [So they] like having a woman there. Fun, right?" she says. They are not anti-women, in her opinion. "They're like, geeky guys. They want women!"
She thinks it calms everyone down, to have an artist in the building. "They're wonderful, lovely tech geeks. They have no idea what's going on in the culture. So they're like, 'Wow.' "
To get in the door at these places, she relies on personal introductions, via her now formidable network of tech contacts.
The head of one of America's largest chip manufacturers, a friend of hers, had an executive under him who went to work for Boston Dynamics. Now that she works with Spot, or for Spot, as I suppose she would say, the company's robotic dog is like a calling card. She opens doors, literally and metaphorically speaking.
"You can meet anyone pretty much, with Spot," she says. "You will witness this outside. I've really made a lot of connections, and she's been just very good for me."
We step out along the corridor, the dog clanking along ahead of us. While we wait for the lift, Spot lies down. "She tries to be as human as possible, so laziness is a true human trait," Pilat says.
Out on the pavement, Spot is received like a celebrity. Everybody starts filming. Motorists driving past us are filming out of the window. By the river, two men from the parks department follow us, smiling at Pilat sheepishly until she says, "All right, very quickly, give me your phone." They rush over to Spot and crouch beside her, for the picture.
On the way back to her studio, she lets me drive Spot down the corridor. She's very responsive. You feel rather powerful, sending her tramping along ahead of you.
It's great to go to parties with Spot, Pilat says. They get a lot of invitations, as you can imagine. "I can get into character and be a little bit like, 'Oh, this is a young, aspiring artist. She has her own body of work. It's not so good. It's like, abstract. It's OK. She's trying.' So I can, in a sense, pitch my work without feeling like I'm pitching myself… So… it's not self-promotion. It gives me, like, an angle."
Has Spot made any sales?
"Yeah! She's sold work."
Back in the studio she takes my phone and snaps a photograph of me with Spot. I don't normally do this; it feels unprofessional. But I can't quite help myself.
Then, she hits a few buttons on the control pad and Spot lies down and rolls over beneath one of her paintings. "I think this is just so innocent," Pilat says, nodding at the canvas. "There's so much integrity in this work."
I ask her how she does the painting with Spot; if she has a plan, at the beginning. She does, "but then I try to think, 'OK, maybe there's something more interesting coming' ".
She frowns. "I don't like the yellow," she says, nodding at some yellow marks, at either end of the canvass. "I put the yellow there, I wish I didn't. I really hate it, actually."
Can't you paint over it? You're the artist, I say. And then, of course, I wonder if I should be talking to the dog.
"Without the yellow it would be stronger," she says, making up her mind. "I still have to have a little rendezvous with Basia. A powwow."
If you were to see them painting, "We are like, sweating," she says, laughing. They work together, woman and robot dog, straining every sinew and piston. "We are! It's like really serious, like a kid, like, 'Oh my god! Look at this! Like, a straight line! Amazing!' "
Meet my four-legged robot
By Georgina Roberts
1. Aibo
Over time, Sony's artificially intelligent robot puppy will get to know its name and respond when called, and learn when it hasn't obeyed a command such as "paw" correctly. It can also interact with other Aibo dogs. When the battery is low, Aibo will find its way to the charging station, using a camera on its bottom.
2. AlphaDog
The fastest robot dog on the market can be walked without remote control because it uses sensors to see and hear its environment. AlphaDog, developed by the Chinese tech firm Weilan, can obey commands thanks to visual and speech-recognition technology.
3. Petoi Bittle
A robot dog that fits in the palm of your hand. Perfect for learning basic robotics, because it has instructions on how to programme your Bittle to do tricks.
4. Petoi Nybble
Once you have assembled the bionic cat's wooden puzzle frame, you can programme it to walk and do tricks. It links to the Petoi app where you can make Nybble do push-ups, stretches and greetings, and control its walking speed.
5. MarsCat
The world's first fully autonomous robot cat runs, sleeps and stretches independently. It can feel your touch and according to the way you pet it, expresses emotions through meows and gestures. Made by the Chinese technology company Elephant Robotics.
Written by: Will Pavia
© The Times of London
