Keeping up the appearances of life

Visual Arts: Reviewed Save the Robots The Ark Children's Cultural Centre & Filmbase, Curved Street, Temple Bar. Tues-Sun 10.30am-5.30pm, until Sept 30 €8.50 /€6.50, tel: 01-6707788.

Save the Robots at The Ark and Filmbase in Temple Bar is, appropriately enough, a bit of a hybrid. It's a celebration of robots in their myriad incarnations: in history, in film, in art, in industry and at play, and more besides.

One of its incidental achievements is to demonstrate the extent to which robots, once regarded as the preserve of futuristic science fiction, have infiltrated the modern world on numerous levels. As with many other aspects of futurology, the robots we know are not quite the ones anticipated. In particular the widespread paranoia about intelligent machines, most bombastically expressed in the Terminator series, rather overstates their capabilities, impressive though they are.

There's nothing too threatening in Save the Robots, in fact the reassuring R2D2 is there, as is Robby from Fobidden Planet, a memorable sci-fi reworking of The Tempest. The rotund Robby is a reminder that nothing dates faster than our conceptions of the future. He suggests not cutting-edge robotics but the styling of the decade that dreamed him up. Any genealogy of robots must incorporate a host of cinematic stars, including the robotic Maria from Fritz Lang's Metropolis, surely the inspiration behind Lara Greene's imposing humanoid figure, which evokes another habitual robotic theme: the poignancy of a machine that can think and feel. All such fictional robots are showbiz creatures and, as the exhibition makes clear, somehow showbiz has always been inextricably linked to robotics.

This is partly because, as curator Michael John Gorman observes, late 20th-century assumptions that artificial intelligence might be readily achievable have reverted to an acceptance of the appearance, the impression, of AI. If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and defecates like duck, chances are it's a duck, right? Well, no. In this case it's Vaucanson's famous defecating duck, once famous throughout Europe, and it is an ingenious animated machine. A reconstructed version of it is on show and, like many of the other exhibits, it is extraordinary. More, its stunning intricacy is a testament to the deep-seated human instinct to generate the appearance, if not the fact of life, an instinct evident as far back as the Kabbalistic tales of the Golem, a startling, quasi-human precursor of Dr Frankenstein's creature.

To propose the creation of beings as complex as humans, long before the secrets of DNA were unravelled and cloning became a realistic prospect, was to aim high. Far too high. When a revolution in robotics theory came, it took the form of a pragmatic recognition of what might be possible. Rodney Brooks of MIT looked not to human beings in all their evolved complexity, but to less complex but encouragingly robust and versatile creatures. The result is Ghengis, a marvellous, modular, low-slung, robot that broke the mould by eschewing human models and looking to the insect world. In an unorthodox way it is without question a beautiful object: there is something appealing and intriguing about it, and there is the sense that it represents a new way of thinking.

How do you categorise such a thing? It's not strictly functional though obviously it opened up a host of functional possibilities. And without doubt it embodies a real, novel aesthetic. It also points to a way forward that has been explored subsequently by many, including a remarkable group at MIT.

Their work and the sea creatures they were inspired by are on view. Equally, though, surely toys such as robotic dogs stemmed from Ghengis. Australian artist Natalie Jeremijenko has worked with several kinds of robot toys, subverting their role as bland consumer products. Her feral robot dogs are enhanced to become environmental watchdogs, sniffing out volatile organic compounds and other pollutants.

The group RobotLab have worked with the enormous robotic arms that have largely replaced human beings on production lines in the manufacturing industry, reprogramming them to engage in such activities as DJ-ing, painting and, for a time during Save the Robots, drawing portraits of visitors to the exhibition. It is but one of several robotic devices moving into "creative" activities that we traditionally think of as being the preserve of humans. But then the show also includes a reconstruction of an android clarinet player from about 1830. While there were many such animated figures who faked it (with the help of concealed music boxes), this one does really play the clarinet.

The idea of finding or defining a common ground between science and art, regularly explored, earnestly desired and seldom demonstrated, is a bit like squaring the circle. Yet in the space of Save the Robots, there is common ground aplenty. Notwithstanding preconceptions, artists are not generally luddites and technophobes. Artists who have grown up in cultures incorporating robotics technologies - notably West Coast Americans it has to be said - are likely to come around to using those technologies, and such is the case with, for example, Bruce Schapiro.

In Sisyphus he has created something extraordinary. Actually it's a sort of self-generating Zen garden in motion. What looks likes a heavy ball-bearing marks out patterns on a table of sand. As with the infamous crop circles, the patterns are intricate. There is an odd, hypnotic fascination to watching the silver bearing methodically imprinting patterns on the sand, according to specified programmes.

Save the Robots, largely devised for and directed at children, is hugely informative and challenging on any number of levels for visitors of any age. One of its chief virtues is that it declines to become simply a passive entertainment. It continually emphasises human curiosity and inventiveness, and demands attentive engagement. It also never slips into the trap of complacency, of condescending to a technologically naive past from a notionally sophisticated present.

If anything, it demonstrates that robots have always been with us, and human ingenuity was every bit as competitive and formidable in the first as in the 21st century.