Agnieszka Pilat

Agnieszka Pilat is a Polish-born, US-based painter who grew up under communism in Łódź and reinvented herself in San Francisco as portraitist to the machines — painting heroic, old-master-style portraits of engines, satellites, and robots. Residencies at SpaceX and Boston Dynamics earned her the nickname “Silicon Valley’s favorite artist,” and she has said of her patrons’ hardware: “the machine is my patron.”

Teaching robot dogs to paint

Her practice turned collaborative with ROBOTa (2022), in which Boston Dynamics’ Spot quadruped and Agility’s Digit humanoid became “imperfect extensions” of her arm. At the National Gallery of Victoria Triennial in Melbourne (December 2023–April 2024) she went further: Heterobota installed three Spot robots — Basia, Omuzana, and Bunny — painting autonomously in the gallery for the run of the show, their canvases forming what she imagines as the primitive language of a new machine civilization.

A self-described techno-optimist, Pilat treats AI as an adolescent to be raised well rather than feared. After her 2023 TED AI talk she summarized the premise: artificial intelligence is in its early stages, “a great challenge but also a great opportunity for us to engage with AI and decide which direction it’s going to go.”

Her closeness to tech and defense-adjacent patrons (Boston Dynamics, SpaceX) draws criticism from parts of the art world that read her heroic machine portraiture as corporate flattery — a charge she counters by insisting artists must engage technology proactively to shape it, rather than cede the territory.