[Sourced from: Mechanical Toys: How Old Toys Work, by Athelstan and Kathleen Spilhaus (New York: Crown Publishers Inc., 1989)] The principle of the Bourdon tube, a flattened, flexible tube that straightens out under pressure, was used in pneumatic toys such as the rubber monkey that plays a drum when a…
Sound Sculpture - David Jacobs 1975
Peter Holland's Air-powered "Bubble Pulser"
Plot Summary for Rikky and Pete (1988) Follow the lives of Rikky, a talanted geologist, and her brother Pete, an off-the-wall mechanical genius. To find peace of mind they travel to the outbacks of Australia and meet up with a desert mining town full of zany individualists. In the movie, Pete…
Danger in the Everglades. Author: Frederick W Keith Publisher: New York, Abelard-Schuman [1957] [Thanks to Michael Rekoff who informed me about this book.] Authors: Frederick W Keith OCLC Number: 1420226 Description: 1 v. illus. 22 cm. Responsibility: Illustrated by Kurt Werth. A diagram of Packy's interior from page 17.…
The Womaniser, now owned by the Tate Gallery, which was inspired by 'wondering what it would be like to be a hermaphrodite and make love to myself. It had six breasts and rubber gloves that inflated every 30 seconds'. A life-sized figure, assembled out of inflatables and prosthetics, has been…
MEART: THE SEMI-LIVING ARTIST '2001-4' SymbioticA Research Group in collaboration with The Potter Group SymbioticA Research Group were established in 2000 as one of the core research groups in SymbloticA, the Art & Science Collaborative Research Laboratory, School of Anatomy & Human Biology, University of Western Australia. The Potter Group…
Friday, February 10, 2006 Inflatable Body sculptures premiere in Australia ARW will workshop and premiere 16 new Inflatable Body sculptures in Adelaide Australia, March 3 - April 8, 2006, in a series presented by the Experimental Art Foundation. These new Bird sculptures represent a continuation of Amorphic Robot Works' research…
Shadow Biped Walker by David Buckley - 1988 Information sourced from my friend David Buckley's own website here http://davidbuckley.net/DB/ShadBiped.htm. Shadow Walker - Retired in 2002 A two legged human sized pneumatic powered walking robot. Design and building started 1988. Size - 5ft 6inches high, weight about 80lb Operational area:- safety supporting frame…
Slim Slime Robot The Slim Slime robot is a robot made up of linearly connecting multiple modules that pneumatically bend and elongate. Inside a module (below), three metal bellows are arranged in parallel at regular intervals with an identical circumference. Both ends of each bellows are fixed with two disks,…