ARTE

Arte, the autonomous robot technology experience, was purchased last year by the Art Residency.   The robot pulled weeds, and the robot’s arms picked up empty glasses and the piano played from the house, in dark and deep ensembles, dooming, low tones, faster and faster, then high then low, and the robot ran to and fro.

      Arty cleaned the kitchen, the bathroom, the dining areas and then cooked dinner and lunch and cleaned up the mess.  In the afternoon he plucked fruit from the trees and tilled the garden soil.  In the evening he cleared shrubs and set the dinner table.

      The dark haired girl with a nose ring played the piano and rain fell on Arty outside but he was rust resistant.  Capital 3000’s latest model, indestructible and totally reliable.  He even petted the cats who’d grown too lazy to catch mice.  Arty did that too.

      The other artists spent their days in the studios upstairs.  Painting, composing, drafting, assembling, sculpting, sketching, typing, scribbling, beating out, bleeding, digging, crying, howling and postulating.  Only coming down for meals and meetings.  Meetings where they discussed the fate of the community and tasks to add to Arty’s programming.

      In one of these meetings, when the time came to open his circuits and input the new orders, they noticed he was nowhere to be found.  They searched the house and then the compound.  It was Scarlett, a blond sculptress from Florida, who found him in the bodega.  He had an easel in three of his six hands and paintbrushes in the rest.  A canvass lay before him, blue and crisp, with an Olympian landscape deep in the horizon.  Overlaid against it were abstract figurines, dancing and spiraling, mouths wide in song and sorrow, screams of joy and longing, while a wind swept past with tumbleweeds that fell from the painting’s drying floor, onto the cold cement, a few feet below the canvass.

      The house artists gathered around it in a half-moon, gazing into the perspective. It was as if they could have walked into it, for miles and days, to reach the snow capped peaks in the far beyond, while at the same time, the near hills and shrubs and pine trees, reached for their audience.  Lay before them in a three-dimensional stretch, a hologram of light and dust that surrounded and encapsulated the onlookers.  Several of the artists turned away, lest they never escape it, afraid of not being able to return.

      It was these creatives that directed their gaze to Arty, who was now rolling away from the canvas toward the door of the bodega, to the courtyard outside, in a serene squeal of his wheels, that in the stillness squeaked an eerie whine.

      Minutes that felt like hours later the community gathered outside for another meeting.  Scarlett insisted Arty was touching up the canvass when she’d found him.  There hadn’t been anything on it less than an hour earlier.  It was a blank empty white set up by one of the painters.  The paints hadn’t been mixed.  Arty must have painted it while the house was in its weekly meeting.

      “Impossible,” stammered a short-haired brunette with pinprick blue eyes.  This was some mean spirited practical joke being played by a disgruntled resident.      “Arty can’t paint.  Arty can’t create.  Arty isn’t original.  He’s an artificial being.  He’s a robot.  Nothing more.”  She would call Capital 3000 tomorrow to complain.  As soon as she found the 1-800 number.  It was written underneath Arty’s wheel carriage.

      “The painting wasn’t that good after all,” insisted a slender young man from northern Europe with gaunt cheeks, glasses, and a beard that pointed toward the ground as if to shoot radio signals to Lenin’s grave.

      Others agreed with doubtful nods.  It was merely imitating what was already there.  Juxtaposing landscape with abstract in a contradictory impressionist fabrication of humanity’s false spirit.  But of course it wasn’t.  That itself was impossible.  It was a plastic case with wheels and spider arms for serving dinner.  It couldn’t possibly have done the painting.

      “Yet the painting wasn’t that good.”  Merely a reproduction, like setting the dinner table.  Taking a photo with a digital camera.

      “Nonsense,” said a burly-shouldered woman with a camera strung around her neck.  “Photography is about the eye.  This painting has no eye.  It’s blind to the soul.”

      Most definitely agreed several more doubtful nods.  “There’s no soul here!”  Two of them chimed in unison.              “We feel nothing!”  yelled Scarlett at the top of her lungs, now standing on the table.

      “How dare it!” The piano girl pounded a clenched fist on the table.

      “Let’s kill it,” said Lenin’s beard.  “Take it out into the forest first to set it at ease.  Then, when it’s not looking, we’ll break its processor with a large stone.”

      The others agreed.

      The rain picked up and they decided that storm of night would provide perfect cover.  They found Arty building a flood wall by the brook.  They walked out the door and led him into the forest minutes later.

      The piano played, faster and faster and faster than before.  The low and high tones at the same time, this time, and the tune fluttered and strung together with an endless series of chorus’s and twirling spins that promised to end the piece, but kept it going with six arms and thirty mechanical fingers, until the house shook from more than the storm’s thunder.

      Hours earlier the last mounds of dirt had been piled near the garden to cover the resting residents.  Their next creation to be the vegetables that would grow later that year.  Perhaps to feed a new cadre of creatives scheduled to arrive in a few days.