Machine Arts Group at AI+X Summit 2025
E-David, the painting robot by Michael Stroh
Last week, we had the privilege of attending the AI+X Summit 2025 at StageOne in Zurich, which became the epicenter of Switzerland's AI ecosystem. The summit brought together over 2,000 participants, 150+ speakers, and 65+ exhibitors and partners. Organized by ETH AI Center, UZH.ai, and ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences, it has established itself as a cornerstone event since its inception in 2021.
The summit featured an ambitious program spanning multiple domains, including healthcare, finance, legal applications, education, science, and biodiversity. The main and innovator stages hosted keynotes and panels on entrepreneurship, Responsible AI, and Generative AI, with speakers representing world-leading institutions such as ETH Zurich, Meta, MIT, EPFL, Google Switzerland, the University of Helsinki, and TUM München. Meta also participated in the event, presenting Inside Meta, an immersive experience featuring demos with Meta Ray-Bans and Quest devices.
Imaginative drawing machine by Patrick Tresset
The exhibition zone showcased several innovative installations. Artists including Gonçalo Guiomar, Johannes Stelzer, Alexander Loktyushin, and Carlo Angelini presented Submersion, an interactive experience where visitors' images and spoken prompts were reinterpreted in real time by advanced diffusion models, creating surreal visual transformations. Another installation,Training Grounds, curated by AATB, featured a humanoid robot in simulated sleep, with subtle movements paired with screen displays of fragmented visions.
However, the highlight of the event was the Expressive Machines exhibition, curated and presented by the Machine Arts Group—an evolving art-tech space located in Zurich and dedicated to AI-assisted physical art-making by artists and researchers working at the intersection of computer science, robotics, and contemporary art. The group fosters new forms of collaboration between artists and intelligent machines, focusing on the creative potential of embodied AI. Participants included Patrick Tresset (Belgium), known for his autonomous drawing agents; Sofie Mart (Switzerland), who explores new techniques in image processing; and Michael Stroh, who developed the painting robot e-David at the University of Konstanz (Germany).
Multimedia art-making system by Sofie Mart
The exhibition brought together three installations by these artists. Each featured a live robotic system powered by custom AI protocols, offering a rare glimpse into the emerging aesthetics of non-human authorship. Tresset presented autonomous drawing agents, Michael Stroh showcased a painting robot he developed, and Sofie Mart performed with image-interpretation techniques—using artifacts from ETH Zurich’s image archive as subjects and allowing her robotic machine to learn and develop a machine-native visual language in its drawing.
Expressive Machines bridges this gap through robotic systems that not only generate images but perform them—translating perception into gesture and code into brushstroke. It poses the question: is a machine merely an extension of human intent, or could it—by developing a sense of aesthetics, materiality, and spatial awareness—become creative on its own?