The Anti-Robot Army is invading the Contemporary Arts Center this April. Helmed by the Robot himself — alias Pablo Wright — the Anti-Robot Army is an ongoing art project contemplating the power of propaganda and programming. The project uses stickers with bite-sized messaging to redirect your attention and snap you out of the haze of robot-like late-stage capitalism. The exhibition, called Program or Be Programmed, is a retrospective of the Anti-Robot’s work.
“A robot supposedly does what it’s told,” said Wright, an artist based in Cincinnati. “So then the anti-robot was the overarching way of fighting propaganda [and] advertising.”
The concept of the robot is derived from what’s known as the illusory truth effect. This phenomenon occurs when any statement, whether true or not, is repeated frequently enough that it feels true. Perception becomes reality. Studies have shown that repetition is the gateway to the belief of validity, even when people know something is not true or valid.
“This sort of came to me during the Bush administration, where they just repeated lies and lies and lies, over and over,” said Wright. “The idea being, if you repeat a lie enough times, does it become fact?”
The project began when Wright, a computer programmer by day, created a bot for his social media pages. These bots would wake up at random times, pull a random quote from a database he created full of quotes and sayings, and post them to Instagram, Facebook and other platforms.
“Another aspect of this whole project is the concept of noise versus signal,” said Wright. “[With] data movement or communication, you have a certain amount of extraneous information and noise that may interfere with the actual message you’re trying to convey. It added some amount of entropy or chaos to the social media it was attached to. When you open your feed, you can choose to either look at, ignore it or move on. And so there’s a piece of your attention that has just been swiped for a fraction of a second.”
Wright made the Anti-Robot tangible when he started making linoleum block prints on postcards. He’d put a political screed on the back of the postcard and send it out at random to a name he’d pick out of the phone book. It was generative work, but sending 70 to 80 postcards at a time meant Wright was only reaching a narrow group of people.
“What really took off is when I started making vinyl stickers,” said Wright. “The largest focus of the last six years of the Anti-Robot project is stickers with political messages.”
The stickers often feature the Robot, which has the body of a Reservoir Dog and the head of a classic robot, like Rosey the Robot from the Jetsons. Aphorisms like “corporations are not people” and “I buy, therefore I am” accompany the mostly black-and-white images. Some stickers feature “fembot,” a robot-headed woman in a business suit with her hand on her hip. Some messaging is more explicit, like “Anti-Fascist Anti-Trump,” which features bombs dropping out of an airplane.
The stickers can be found all over Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky, when they’re not torn down by city cleaning entities, or, what you could call the anti-anti-robot army, and beyond. In sticker parlance, to “slap” is to put a sticker up. Wright’s stickers have been slapped around the world, including cities as far away as Tokyo and London.
“It is a worldwide phenomenon of not only putting stickers everywhere, but trading them,” said Wright. “People started asking me for stickers, so I started sending out stacks and stacks of stickers all over now. People send me the pictures where they put them up in about 180, 190 cities now all over the world.”
When Wright pitched his work to the CAC, the street art factor played a huge part in securing the gig.
“I loved [Wright’s] process and I liked the idea behind creating stickers and creating the posters, and this performance art activity of exchanging stickers and having them move all around the world,” said Shawnee Turner, chief of interpretation and experience at the CAC. “There’s just this amazing conversation happening with people all over the world that we don’t even know anything about and it’s all through this visual language that anyone can understand.”
Among Wright’s inspirations are street artists like Shepard Fairey, whose famous “Obey Giant” work he’s referenced in his stickers. And Fairey, too, has been featured in exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Center, including as part of the Beautiful Losers exhibition along with artists like Swoon back in 2003.
“CAC has a really long history of working with street artists and graffiti artists,” said Turner. “Being one of the first institutions to do that, it’s important for us to continue that tradition. A lot of these artists are paving the way for [others] to become social justice artists, because so many of [them] are out there creating unsanctioned art as a way to draw attention to a cause or a situation in society.”
The Anti-Robot Army is an excellent case in point.
“That’s what I see when I look at Pablo’s work,” said Turner. “It’s just a little poke that says, ‘Are you thinking for yourself?’”
The exhibition is located in the lower-level community gallery. It features about 60 posters showcasing the Anti-Robot’s various sticker campaign images, a slideshow showing Anti-Robot stickers around the world, volumes of stickers from other sticker artists, hundreds of buttons related to the project and a display highlighting how people have interacted with or modified the stickers.
“This is a huge, huge shout-out to the Cincinnati Public Library and their Makerspace [which is where] I make these stickers,” said Wright. “When I first started this project, I was going to an online printer. I used to spend 120 bucks and come out with maybe 100 stickers, [whereas] I spend the day at the library, cutting them out myself and come away with 200 stickers.”
CAC visitors can take home “propaganda packs,” aka compilations of stickers Wright has put together, and proceed to do their own slapping.
“The reason I started reaching out to galleries to do this is because I want to spread my message, the Anti-Robot message,” said Wright. “ So even if out of these 50 or 60 posters [someone] goes home with the one of those five or six-word [messages like], ‘Culture wars are not meant to be won’ or ‘You are beautiful,’ or ‘Love one another,’ any of these messages, if somebody takes one of those home that’s a measure of success.”
Program or Be Programmed opens April 17 and runs until June 1 at the Contemporary Arts Center. More info: contemporaryartscenter.org.
This story is featured in CityBeat’s April 2 print edition.
This article appears in Mar 19 – Apr 2, 2025.