Robotic Art: Automated Art Creation and New Legal Issues

Although early examples of robotic art and theatre existed in ancient China (mechanical orchestra, flying mechanized doves and fish, angels and dragons etc.), the names of their creators have mostly been lost to history. Advances in engineering have created new possibilities for the automated creation of artworks, which is now booming with the advent if Artificial Intelligence.
On the one hand, robotics have now become a mode of expression for artists confronting fundamental issues and contradictions in our advanced industrial culture. This movement, known as Algorithmic Art, is the fruit of reflection by artists on the omnipresence of automated IT related tasks, managed daily by algorithms. It is also an understanding of the importance and the place of artists in the field of creation and the very notion of authorship.
On the other hand, algorithms are increasingly used to automatically create music, journalistic contents or databases with little or no human intervention, raising complex and mostly unresolved issues about existence, ownership and exploitation of copyrights and moral rights.
The legal impact and challenges of these issues will be discussed during this session.