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The designers of this mural work next door at the National Robotics Engineering Center of Carnegie Mellon University. Ben Grocholsky and Elise Gatti came up with the idea of a mural depicting Doughboy Square as it would be seen by a robot.
Doughboy Square marks the entrance to Lawrenceville as you drive northeast on Penn Ave (where Butler Street splits off). It gets it’s name from the WWI memorial statue located in the wedge between those roads. The fact that it’s more triangular in shape than square is apparently irrelevant.
We stopped by several times as this mural was going up to watch the progress. Artist Richard Washek showed us the design that he was working from.
Each time we returned we could see more of the design taking shape, but in the end we were disappointed to find out that they would not be removing the boat rack positioned directly in front of the mural. Although the rack has shown no signs of actually being used in years, it will remain where it is, effectively blocking the main part of the mural.
Update: 11 Aug 2013
First of all, the boat rack is actually in use again. A good sign that people in the area are using the rivers more and more for recreational boating. In this case, there are at least three canoes now being stored on this rack.
The bad news is that this is the first mural that we’ve seen significantly vandalized. Only one year old and there is graffiti marring the well thought out design. We wonder if this is because of the location – underneath a bridge, well back from the roads? There is artwork under another bridge, but it’s positioned much higher up, out of reach. Up to this point it had seemed that the street artists respected the professional artwork. Perhaps whomever vandalized this mural were not artists
by anyone’s definition. We have opted to not show any photographs here that include the vandalism.
Update:
3 Feb 2014
We received the following information from Elise Gatti, providing some great background on how this mural was designed. This was their mural proposal:
DIFFERENT EYES was inspired by the activities taking place along the Allegheny Riverfront Trail in Lawrenceville. Specifically the new Bernard Dog Run and the National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC).
The Bernard Dog Run is a community initiative to provide a safe recreational space for dogs and their owners in Lawrenceville. The dog park is named in honor of Jay Bernard, a Lawrenceville resident, business owner, artist and abandoned dog advocate. BigDog LS3 is a dynamic all-terrain robot designed to assist military personnel on the ground by carrying up to 400 lbs of gear. BigDog's visioning sensors were developed in Lawrenceville, by research scientists at NREC. A combination of camera, laser and radar sensors provides different information to perception algorithms that help the robot sense its location, decipher the terrain and identify objects in the immediate surroundings.
DIFFERENT EYES proposes a technological-artistic approach to creating art in public spaces. The multi-disciplinary process employs two distinct media actions to sequentially produce the mural. One uses a classical artistic medium; the other uses augmented reality.
The journey to creation involves "seeing through different eyes", beginning with the selection of a viewpoint along the Allegheny River in Lawrenceville that will provide the basis for the mural. NREC scientists will then scan the scene using sensors, and algorithms will be used to generate a virtual representation of the scene. The final viewpoint is the muralist's interpretation of the virtual image as applied to the mural site under the 40th Street Bridge.
About the designers:
Dr. Ben Grochoisky is a research scientist at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics institute. He was part of the team that developed BigDog's visioning sensors. Elise Gatti is an urban planner and former researcher at Carnegie Mellon's School of Architecture. She was coordinator of the Bernard Dog Run initiative from 2008-2011.
We found information on the BigDog LS3 here.
Photo found on Google image search.
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