Kinetic art

Some really inspiring work was on display at the Kinetica Art Fair in London the past few days, the exhibition comes to a close today. The fair is described as showcasing carnivorous art, man-animal-machine hybrids, mechanical drawing machines, subliminal installations, pole dancing robots, light sculptures and cybernetics. If you’re at all interested in digital art, robotics, AI or sculpture I’d recommend following some of the artists that were exhibiting, all were doing something really interesting within this space. Here are some of the highlights I took away:

Tim Lewis’ Pony — a robotic animal-like sculpture. This ‘bird’ would track and follow movement in front of it, and have a timid response to any quick movement, as it attempted to walk around the exhibition. It’s motion was very fluid you’d almost think it was someone’s hand actually controlling it. Someone has posted a video from the Art Fair to youtube. More information on Tim’s work can be found at re-title.com.

Giles Walker’s robots are built from scrapyard parts and are programmed to dance and move like humans. There’s a video of the performance on youtube.

Holotronica are doing some interesting things with 3D screens and electronic music. As well as adopting some augmented reality ideas with 3D characters as shown in this video, but using them to play music. I could image it’d be possible to play a DJ set using a set of cards with a camera focussed on them that can recognise shapes on the cards instructing the computer on which note to play.

It would be interesting to see where this technology is in 50 years time, and made me wonder whether eventually we’ll be making robots that look, act and behave so human that there’s no obvious difference.