Joanne Hastie's Market Stroll reminds us of the importance of interactions in real flesh. Much like Impressionists in their time, she takes us back to the rêveries of the urban flâneur – a walk into Bologna's market on a weekday morning.

The artist, known for exploring the human-machine relationship, here employs machine learning (or CycleGANs more specifically) to inform the viewer of this scenery. Joanne Hastie underlines the quality of our bodily presence and the fantasy it carries in an increasingly digital world. Whether in the form of an avatar or real physique, the work shows how the body remains an essential interface for social and sensorial interactions.

Automatic, granular movements that Hastie and, arguably, all artists, make without conscious effort - such as cleaning their paintbrush - fall behind in favour of representation of the subject, experimenting with styles, and creating concepts.

With this, Painting no. 230 represents the symbiotic relationship between human and machine as the artist’s body is enhanced, or extended, into the robot arm. The brush strokes, although painterly, are calculated and consistent, revealing the robot’s obedience to instruction.

Use of the robot arm simultaneously adds to the human body as a physical entity whilst highlighting the unconscious demands of art creation, such as movement, instruction, and decision-making that take place in the moments between idea and execution.

Large orange brushstrokes, cyan blue curves intersecting at sharp angles and areas of dotted curvilinear sky blue lines compose Untitled 2. The work has a rustic, mechanical feel. Joanne Hastie painted the watercolour priming by hand and then built the abstract composition through Python code. A robot arm then plotted the loose acrylic brushstrokes at random positions accordingly. Abstraction reaches new realms in this collaborative vision of the human and machine relationship.