Artwork

📍 Kulturhaus Helferei

Labor

Liat Grayver

Daniel Berio

«Labor» combines generative graphics, robotic automation, and traditional painting to explore the relationship between embodied intelligence and artistic expression. It was developed in collaboration with the Nanoparticle Systems Engineering Lab at the ETH Zurich led by Prof. Dr. Inge Hermann. At the core of «Labor» is a large-scale painting composed of individually crafted tiles, derived from an electron microscope image of a human placenta – an organ essential to life yet hardly seen in medical research or cultural production. A nano image from Hermann's lab is translated into virtual brushstrokes, then painted live in collaboration with artists Daniel Berio and Liat Grayver. While the robot performs highly precise, precomputed swipes, the human artists intuitively respond to its movements, demonstrating the value of human intuition and manual labor. By connecting robotic automation with reproductive work, the installation challenges dominant stories of efficiency, optimization, and control in artificial “intelligence”.