In the film 'The Glass Bottom Boat', the inventor Bruce Templeton (Rod Taylor) tries to impress Jennifer (Doris Day) with his "Automatic floor-cleaning" robot after dropping banana peel on the kitchen floor. It only manages to pop out of its door to arc towards the dropped banana peel and through reversed footage, arc right back …
Read More “1966 – “The Bug” Floor Cleaning Robot from ‘The Glass Bottom Boat’ – (American)”
Computopia, a contraction of the words computer and Utopia, is a Japanese concept from the late 60s. This snippet of a robotic floor cleaner is from a set of great illustrations from the Japanese magazine Shonen Sunday who illustrated an article on the topic. Source and full set of illustrations here. See other early remote-controlled …
Read More “1969 – Robot Vacuum Cleaner Concept from Computopia – (Japanese)”
Anthropomorphicals I and II. 1964. Plexiglass and Aluminum. 65in. x 20in. x 24in. Richard Feigen Gallery, New York. 1965. Source: Beyond Modern Sculpture – Jack Burnham 1968 It would be misleading to classify [Hans] Haacke as an artist primarily devoted to applying cybernetic principles to mechanical artifacts; rather his interests are in those cyclical processes …
Read More “1964-5 – Robot Art – Enrique Castro-Cid (Chilean)”
Trefor Prest creates some of the most amazing and fantastic sculpture I've ever come across. I've been to Gruyeres and seen H.R. Giger's work, seen Hans Bellmer's "Machine-Gunneress in A State of Grace", and to see Trefor's sculptures is something else again. His maritime series has a Vernian feel about them, a world of Nautilus submarine melded with …
Read More “1972 – BioMechanical Sculpture – Trefor Prest (Welsh-Australian)”
The robots that are in this category of my blog are those that look and attempt to behave like human beings according to their creator's abilities and available technologies. Although I'll use the word "humanoid", words such as "humaniform" and "anthropomorphic" tend to be used as well. My focus is also on Robots at the beginning of …
Read More “The Origin of Robots”