CeLL

http://www.cell.org.au/

CeLL represents the evolution of mechanical music, a modern industrial strength version of the old time street organ. CeLL is a MIDI controlled pneumatic orchestra, a self playing installation mounted in a 6m shipping container.

Ian Haig

Ian Haig works at the intersection of visual arts and media arts. His work explores the strangeness of everyday reality negotiated through subject matter that is at times perverse and provocative. His practice focuses on the psychopathological relationship to technologies and the human psyche, often exploring the themes of the body, mutation and devolution through the lens of low cultural forms. Over the years the trajectory of Haig’s iconoclastic vision has encompassed everything from site-specific installation projects, super 8 movies, interactive sculpture, noise music, to animations, videos, drawings, web projects, to large-scale gallery installations.

Afternoon delight 03-05; Futurerotica

http://www.ianhaig.net/

Gallery of Automata

Gallery of Automata

This website has a nice collection of 1700’s autonoma pictures

1700’s

Henri Maillardet’s Draughsman-and-Writer
18th century engraving which inspired the Jaquet-Droz family
Cupid and butterfly and a portrait of Louis XV (Draughtsman)
Durand & Decamps – Professor Arcadius writing a sentance
Device of the Duck attributed to Vaucanson: the structure, weights, motor and wheel-work.
Drum with cogs directing the whole mechanism (Duck)
Detail of the Duck
The fourth Writer made by Friedrich von Knaus
The Jaquet-Droz Writer (1774), in the Neuchatel Museum
The Draghtsman by Jaquet-Droz (1774)
Mandolin. Snuff-box by Jaquet-Droz.
Clock with moving Chinese Characters amd waterfall, representing the Scared Mountain
Small musical clock with automata.
English calendar clock, with music and automata, made c.1740.

Little Girl at the Piano

Lambert, c.1890.

gijs van bon

http://www.gijsvanbon.nl/

From my early childhood till today I have been busy with mechanics and machines. First, as a child, demolishing clockworks and old recordplayers. As I had my first bike I took it several times completely apart and put it together again to learn how it worked and how to screw and unscrew the lot.

Arabesk # 24
2006
Five computer controlled rotating surfaces. Partially interactive, partially random.

Sabrina Raaf

http://www.raaf.org/

Sabrina Raaf is a Chicago-based artist who works in both experimental sculptural media and photography. She is a producer of creative machines – machines that independently make art when cross-pollinated with human interaction.

Grower, 2004 (the final remix)

heidi kumao

http://www.heidikumao.net/

Heidi Kumao is an interdisciplinary artist whose work addresses the darker, psychological side of everyday behavior, gestures, and mental states. She works with animation in its broadest sense, including electronic sculptures, intimate installations, “Cinema Machines,” and digital animations.

Untitled (Resist), 2002-03 (Work in Progress)

Girl’s shoes, aluminum, motors, customized electronics, microphone, wood and plexiglass platform.
A machine portrait: audio-activated 6-year-old girl’s legs. As viewers speak to this character, the legs begin a series of random behaviors from imperceptible movement to violent and fast kicking. Video imagery will appear in the torso section.

lemur

http://www.lemurbots.org/

LEMUR is a Brooklyn-based group of artists and technologists developing robotic musical instruments. Founded in 2000 by musician and engineer Eric Singer, LEMUR’s philosophy is to build robotic instruments that “play themselves.” In LEMUR designs, the robots are the instruments.

LEMUR is supported in part by generous grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), the Greenwall Foundation, the Jerome Foundation (in celebration of the Jerome Hill Centennial and in recogntion of the valuable cultural contributions of artists to society) and Arts International. LEMUR is also sponsored by Harvestwork Digital Media Arts Center.

LEMUR is Eric Singer, Jeff Feddersen, Milena Iossifova, Bil Bowen and Luke DuBois.

I had the pleasure of meeting Eric Singer and the LEMUR BOTS as apart of Electrofringe 2004.

http://electrofringe.net/2005_old/index2004.html

Mechanical Sound Orchestra

Mechanical
Sound Orchestra

Matt Heckert
Machine Sound
After working for 8 years building machines for performances and producing soundtracks to accompany them, in 1986 I began to experiment with the idea of using the machines themselves to produce some of the sound, then all of the sound. In 1988, I began work on the Mechanical Sound Orchestra.

Resonator

Zlab

http://www.zprod.org/zLab/robots.html

Z Productions is a company founded by electronic artist Paul Granjon in 1988.

Z Productions’ focus is on the co-evolution of humans and machines.

it was great to meet paul at Lovebytes 98, a great hacker of exsiting toys and disgarded technologies.

Edward Ihnatowicz including his most famous work The Senster

http://www.senster.com/ihnatowicz/index.htm

Edward Ihnatowicz was a Cybernetic Sculptor active in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. His ground-breaking sculptures explored the interaction between his robotic works and the audience, and reached their height with The Senster, a large (15 feet long), hydraulic robot commissioned by the electronics giant, Philips, for their permanent showplace, the Evoluon, in Eindhoven in 1970. The sculpture used sound and movement sensors to react to the behaviour of the visitors. It was one of the first computer controlled interactive robotic works of art.