The 2017 Vienna Biennale can be counted as a major art exhibition that systematically charted the field of robotics in recent two years. Robots have become ubiquitous around human life since their engagement in human productive labor. In addition to boosting human labor productivity to an unprecedented level today, robotics has radically altered the schema of our world. The field of robotics incubated the New Digital Humanism that proved to have an enduring and far-reaching influence on the modes of human life, speculation and creative practice at the present and in the future. The raison d’être of the 2017 Vienna Biennale lay not so much in discussing the notion of “artisticity” as in highlighting and reaffirming the caution that art communities shall no longer neglect the epoch-making, revolutionary nature of robots (or artificial intelligence) from some aspects of contemporary civilizations. Failing to meet the requirement of timeliness though, this report may after all be accepted as a valuable reference for us to deal with works of art in the era of artificial intelligence.

This essay restrictively construes robots as machine learning-based artificial intelligence. Given that artificial intelligence at the present stage hasn’t possessed the capability of learning algorithms in general yet, this essay is dedicated to identifying the functions of works of art in the post-human era when the order of symbolic signs is collapsing.

Fig.: Various Manufacturers, Vintage Toy Robots, 1956–1980 Courtesy private collection Photo: © Andreas Sütterlin, 2016 Use authorized only in direct reference to the exhibition Hello, Robot.Courtesy of Vienna Biennale