With little time to bask in the critical success of current shows at the NGA (Hyper Real) and Art Gallery of Ballarat (Romancing the Skull), Melbourne artist Sam Jinks is back in his Coburg studio, surrounded by heads and moulds of body parts. The clay faces in front of him will be cast in silicone to form part of the skin of a new generation of life-like robots that will, Jinks believes, inevitably end up indistinguishable from humans.

For the past two years, Jinks has been involved in an ongoing collaboration with a robotics engineer based in the US to provide the “skin” for humanoid robots. As he notes,

“we seem to be on the cusp of having the engineering and process capabilities to create robots that not only perform amazing feats, but can imitate convincingly human movement and speech.”

The choice to involve an artist rather than a special effects technician is both unusual and revealing. A primary reason for this is aesthetic – someone will be making the skins for these robots and the inclusion of a sculptor avoids “clunkiness”, introduces subtlety, and helps to create a robot that could be mistaken for human, emerging on the other side of the uncanny valley.

However, the inclusion of artists and other people from the creative and humanities fields in the AI discourse is vital for other reasons. The quest to create a robot that is indistinguishable from humans has become all-consuming for many scientists, engineers and technicians.

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