Check out the excellent work by artist Thomas Kuntz, a sculptor who specializes in ornate, macabre automata. The alchemical process begins with the exquisite clay sculpture that is transformed into a shell. This body houses gears, chains, shafts, cams, levers, cylinders and valves. Many materials are used including carefully machined brass, steel, wood and composites […]
Here’s a nice mini-documentary on kinetic sculptor/automata-maker Steve Armstrong. The video goes into a fair amount of detail on his design and building process. Motion: The Automata of Steve Armstrong
All joking aside, this thing may be the most beautiful piece of kinetic art I have ever seen. It has a Cartesian robot to draw 1s or 0s on the tape as needed, a rolling felt-covered drum for erasing symbols, a camera that can recognize what symbols have already been written, a bank of white LEDs to provide illumination for the camera, and a beautiful custom control panel.
From YouTube user MechanicalSculptor comes this awesome gear-pr0n automaton, reminiscent of the work of Arthur Ganson. [via The Automata / Automaton Blog]
With 8 synchronized catapults, 160 plastic balls per minute are launched, caught, and recirculated. Made mostly of wood, the work is ~36 inches in diameter. On permanent display in the lobby of Lower Merion Elementary School, Merion Station, PA.
Ten days and counting until Halloween! This week’s flashback is another tasty morsel from Make: Halloween Special Edition, which hit newsstands back in August 2006. In this project, Dug North shows us how to make a mechanical automata-infused top hat using a bicycle brake lever, cable, and the monster of your choosing. If you’re like […]
This wooden hand crank iPhone dock automata by Murtaza Lakdawala is equal parts form and function. Turn the crank and watch the gears mesh as the automata changes the iPhone’s orientation from portrait to landscape.
