Matr Labs's Ben Tritt on Why Today's Artists Need Robots

Will the artists of the future be cyborgs? Actually, some artists already are—only instead of having AI implants in their brains and robotic arms by their sides, they run AI copilots on their laptops and give orders to state-of-the-art painting machines in a laboratory in Tuxedo Park, New York.​That lab—based in a sleepy village that was once a clandestine meeting place for Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Niels Bohr, and other scientists during World War II—is the sci-fi brainchild of Ben Tritt, a classically trained painter who for years taught students how to painstakingly copy the Old Masters until he realized that technology could offer a better way. Oil painting is a 500-year-old technology, he reasoned. It was time for a systems update.Having founded his company under the original name Artmatr Inc. at MIT in 2017, Tritt has since programmed his robots to make persuasive, impasto-rich paintings for artists ranging from Eric Fischl and Chuck Close to NFT stars like Tyler Hobbs, Beeple, and Erick Calderon to AI innovators like Anicka Yi and Alexander Reben. Now he's setting his sights on radically expanding his operation, using it to enable a new generation of digitally empowered artists to realize their virtual creations in the physical world.​What does this mean for painting as we know it? And how can we ensure that technology remains a tool for artists, instead of artists becoming a tool for technology?​This week, for our third Artwrld conversation, we are excited to sit down with Ben Tritt to talk about his vision for Matr Labs, and what he thinks the art world will look like in 2030. (Hint: very different.)