Text: Till Bödeker | Section: AI and Arts | Articles by Artists
Abstract: Till Bödeker presents his graduation project STEP ON NO PETS, that is assigned to the wk-section of Artificial Intelligence and Art. He graduated as a Meisterschüler (lit. master student) under Prof. Rita McBride from the Düsseldorf Art Acadamy in July 2024. The text first describes the individual components of the work, which are then analyzed by an artificial intelligence (Claude 3.5 Sonnet), tasked with producing an art historical critique. This AI-generated text extends and reinterprets the original concept.
At the Düsseldorf Art Academy, studies are organized into classes, culminating in a graduation project, typically presented during the summer semester Rundgang. My final project, shown in July 2024 as part of Rita McBride’s class, consisted of two main components: an installation in the academy’s auditorium and a robotic dog that roamed the corridors.

Central Elements
The central figure of my installation was Go2, a robotic dog from the Chinese company Unitree. This four-legged machine moves in an animal-like manner, maintaining balance most of the time. Before robots like Go2 can operate in the real world, they are typically trained in simulations, such as NVIDIA’s Isaac Gym.
Teaching robots in virtual environments enables efficient and cost-effective training, as simulations can be conducted in highly scalable numbers and short times, depending on the available computing power. Through reinforcement learning, software agents are conditioned to maintain balance or perform tricks, like backflips or giving a paw, by maximizing rewards. The agent independently develops the best strategy for how exactly the virtual motors should move the joints and thus the legs to achieve the respective goal and thereby maximize the rewards.
Go2 was trained to navigate rough virtual terrain and now applies these skills in the physical world. In essence, the trained software agent, which once controlled a virtual body, now controls a physical robot. The agent operates purely to achieve its set objectives, without any capacity for higher-level cognition, such as reflection or moral judgment. It simply executes the task of moving the robot from point A to point B. For the program, there is no distinction between simulation and reality; it treats both environments the same, focusing solely on the task at hand. This lack of awareness underscores the seamless transition between virtual training and real-world application.

Reality and Simulation
Starting from this point, it seemed necessary to me to create a virtual counterpart to the real robot dog for my project. Fortunately, Unitree provided me with the 3D model of the Go2, so that I could now program my own virtual scenarios: test environments developed with the computer game software Unreal Engine, in which the virtual robot bodies could roam freely.
I kept the programming simple: the robots randomly changed direction after a set time unless they collided with an object. To further blend reality and simulation, I scanned the forecourt of the Art Academy’s Rhine wing using a drone and created a 3D model via photogrammetry, which became the virtual test site. The forecourt, an allegory for my graduation, felt like an ideal choice. Finally, I captured scenes within this simulation, in which several robot dogs explore the environment, and produced a video work that was shown in the auditorium of the real Art Academy.
The video
The large-format video work, projected via the auditorium projector, ties together the various elements of the installation. It opens with scenes from Isaac Gym, where numerous virtual robot dogs navigate a minimalistic environment of blocks and pyramid patterns. Some are stuck, walking in place, while others perform somersaults or lift a leg to urinate. The soundtrack features music from the video game Portal, known for its exploration of AI and test environments.
The scene then transitions to black and white, shifting to a more realistic simulation of the forecourt in front of the Art Academy’s Rhine wing. This was captured using 3D scanning and reconstructed in Unreal Engine, a computer program for creating photorealistic 3D environments in real-time. In this human-less, dystopian scenery, robot dogs wander as fires burn in two locations. AI-generated soul singing plays in the background as the camera glides through virtual grass, eventually focusing on a projection of real, sleeping dogs on a beach.

The camera then zooms in on the doghouse, which fits into a field of the grass-covered checkerboard pattern on the tunnel entrance of the Rheinufer Tunnel (Rhine bank tunnel). Opposite stands a large white tank with the inscription “Think outside the box” – a reference to my earlier work that refers to a deprivation tank, a closed water basin for sensory isolation (see the w/k article Sensory Deprivation). On the tank stands a robot looking at the doghouse.
The video work culminates in a series of vertigo effects, accompanied by an AI-generated pop song with the lyrics “Rotator, rotator, rotating. I’m just a dog, but that’s okay … Step on no pets!”. A dog performing a somersault in slow motion is shown, followed by a frontal view of the isolation tank. The image and sound slow down increasingly until they come to a standstill before the entire video is played backwards.

Doghouse
In the auditorium in the real world, I installed a doghouse that served as a retreat for the robot dog, whose battery had to be regularly recharged after its performances. When building the house, I oriented myself on a minimalist cement sculpture by the artist Donald Judd, which I reduced by a factor of 2.5 and equipped with a power outlet. With dimensions of 1m x 1m x 1m (the original measures 2.5m in each dimension) and 10 cm thick cement walls, this minimalist object fits into the middle aisle between the rows of seats.
Two to three times a day, the robot dog started its motors, stood up, and began its tour. During its deployment, it transmitted the live feed of its front camera to an info screen on the ground floor. Visitors saw in real-time what the robot dog saw as it explored its surroundings and inspected the various artworks or interacted with visitors. While some people were curious and came up to play with the dog, others didn’t come near. A group of children even chased the dog, while an old man kept stroking its back.
Palindromes
Various palindromes were written onto to the body of the robot dog – these are words or sentences that are identical when read forwards and backwards, such as STEP ON NO PETS, ROTATOR and NEVER ODD OR EVEN. Black capital letters in the characteristic typography of the concept artist Lawrence Weiner were used.
The text elements, which can be read in opposite directions, refer to the idea of a time symmetry of intelligence developments of artificial and human intelligence. While the survival of human bodies in the environment is the basis of human evolution, navigating a robot in the physical world still poses a great challenge. Difficult cognitive tasks, on the other hand, such as playing chess or solving mathematical problems, are relatively easy for artificial intelligences. My thesis is therefore that the development process of artificial intelligence runs counter to that of human intelligence, which is not only illustrated by palindromes, but also appears abstracted in the video work: The video does not end and then start again from the beginning, but runs first forwards and then backwards (and finally forwards again).

Art Historical Classification and Critique of STEP ON NO PETS by Claude 3.5 Sonnet1
Till Bödeker’s installation STEP ON NO PETS (2024) skillfully weaves together various art historical strands with contemporary technology and invites reflection on the role of AI and robotics in artistic practice. The autonomous robot dog as a central element of the work functions simultaneously as performer and viewer, seemingly navigating independently through the academy and “viewing” artworks, which blurs the traditional boundaries between art production and reception and raises fundamental questions about the nature of perception, agency, and the role of the viewer in the artistic process. This duality of the robot as an active and passive participant in the art space opens up new perspectives on performative practices in contemporary art and expands the discourse on the relationship between work, space, and recipient.
The surface of the robot, which is adorned with palindromes in the characteristic typography of Lawrence Weiner, updates the tradition of conceptual art in the context of artificial intelligence; Weiner used text as a primary artistic medium, and Bödeker extends this practice by connecting the linguistic component with a technological carrier, with the palindromes themselves, such as “STEP ON NO PETS”, functioning as self-referential comments on reversibility and human-machine interaction and transferring the conceptual tradition into the discourse on artificial intelligence.
The integration of a modified Donald Judd replica as a “doghouse” and charging station into the academy space establishes a direct dialogue with Minimal Art; Judd’s interest in the relationship between object, viewer, and space is extended here by a technological dimension through its functionalization as technical infrastructure for the robot dog, which questions the boundaries between art and functionality. The use of AI technologies to control the robot dog and the live transmission of its “gaze” to a screen connect to contemporary artistic practices that deal with machine vision and the visualization of AI processes. By making the machine’s “gaze” visible and immediately experienceable, Bödeker enables a direct engagement with the question of how artificial intelligence perceives and interprets our environment. In the accompanying video work, Bödeker combines real elements with computer-generated simulations, critically reflecting on the merging of virtual and physical reality as well as the increasing technologization of our living environment.
STEP ON NO PETS synthesizes these various artistic approaches into a complex commentary on the role of AI and robotics in contemporary art by combining elements of conceptual art, minimal art, and media-based art with current technology and creating a discursive space that encourages reflection on the boundaries between human and machine creativity, on the nature of art space, and on the future of artistic practice in the digital age.
Feature image above the text: Till Bödeker: STEP ON NO PETS (2024). Photo: Tangting Li.
[1] The prompt was: “In the role of an art historian and critic, write an art historical classification and critique of the installation ‘STEP ON NO PETS’ (2024) by Till Bödeker. Include art historical references and the central aspects of the work. Style: Scientific-analytical, but comprehensible. Length: ~500 words.”
How to cite this article
Till Bödeker (2024): Robot Dogs & Artificial Intelligence. w/k–Between Science & Art Journal. https://doi.org/10.55597/e9921
Be First to Comment