Ada Lovelace Day: Sabrina Raaf

"I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same."

Today is Ada Lovelace Day--the day to blog about a woman who works in technology. I'm one of 1,680 folks who pledged to do so. I chose Sabrina Raaf to write about. Raaf is a Chicago-based artist who works in experimental sculptural media and photography.


Raaf's Translator II: Grower 2004-6 (v2) is a robotic artwork that is activated by chance.

The robot navigates around the perimeter of a room, hugging the walls. A sensor near the ceiling detects the room’s CO2 level and transmits the information to the robot. Every few seconds the robot draws a vertical green line on the wall--the higher the level of carbon dioxide, the taller the line. The lines become both a representation of grass and a bar graph tracking the amount of carbon dioxide in the room over time. The act of observing the artwork literally changes it.

Raaf writes:

The height of the ‘grass’ directly reflects on the human activity or traffic in the space. The more people that visit that space, the more amenable that space is to my machine’s ability to create. This piece therefore makes visible how art institutions depend on their visitors to make them ‘healthy’ spaces for new art to evolve and flourish within.