The One Love Machine band is the brainchild of German artist Kolja Kugler, whose work focuses largely on moving sculptures. As he explained to CNN:
When I build a band member I start obviously with the music-making parts. The fingers, plugging or playing, and then I build the character behind it.
The special thing about my robots is that they do actually play the music themselves. My robots play the bass guitar, the drum kit and they play the flute. They've got an affinity for punk rock.
My robots perform all around the world. Tech events, festivals, university lectures or TED Talks.
That's fucking metal. And also punk.
There's a punk band made completely of robots [Briony Edwards / Louder Sound]
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My friend Richard Gould introduced me to Bichopalo, a musical instrument sculptor from Valenciana, Spain.
One word: Enchanting. Two words: Pico and Verdi, his two pet birds who star in his creations. I needed this today. Read the rest
An annual parade of kinetic sculptures and other artworks and performances in a Dutch canal to celebrate the work of hometown hero Hieronymus Bosch? More of this in the world, please! Read the rest
David Cerny (previously) created this wonderful kinetic sculpture of Prague's own Franz Kafka. Read the rest
2015 gave us the wonderful kinetic LEGO sculpture of the tragic Greek mythological character Sisyphus perpetually pushing a boulder.
When creator Jason Allemann of JKBrickworks saw fellow LEGO artist Josh David's lawn mower kinetic sculpture, he knew he had to make one of his own &mdashl; but with a twist.
Building on his original idea, Allemann swapped out Sisyphus for his modern-day counterpart -- a suburban man in shorts and knee socks -- and replaced the fate of eternally pushing a boulder with mowing an ever-growing lawn.
(Sploid) Read the rest
A new film about artist Chris Burden comes out this year, which is the perfect reason to revisit one of his coolest later works: Metropolis II, filmed here by Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman.
The sculpture took four years to build. Quoth the filmmakers:
We had the honor of spending three days in Chris Burden's studio filming this sculpture before it was moved to the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art (LACMA) where it is being reinstalled.
The documentary, titled Burden, is being released in 2017:
• Metropolis II by Chris Burden (the movie) (YuTube / HENRYandREL Supermarché) Read the rest
SWISH is a lovely portable stool created by feeding inputs into design software and seeing what the software generated. Carlo Ratti Associati debuted this prototype at Milan Design Week 2017. Read the rest
Bruce Shapiro makes mesmerizing and impermanent sculptures with commercial motion-control gear, as used in robotics to less artistic ends. He's been doing it for 25 years, he writes, creating kinetic sculptures that embody his love of technology.
Above is a time-lapse video of Sisyphus, which slowly draws intricate patterns in sand. More videos are at his Vimeo page, demonstrating the zenlike movements of the device in much-accellerated fashion.
The name evokes the classical fable of a man doomed to perform the same task over and over again for eternity. Shapiro told Metro's Oliver Wheaton that he's working on a consumer-size version.
Cory wrote about Bruce's earlier work in 2012. Read the rest
