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“..the artworks need you to interact with them to make them function,
so feel free to pedal, touch, wind and even get inside the artworks,
and ask the gallery assistants if you need to know what to do. We
hope you enjoy playing with the exhibition. Have fun!”

Karen Newman, Curator FACT.

The title piece of the exhibition is a new commission designed especially for FACT’s atrium, and is a giant knitting machine. Here’s a short report on the piece by our roving reporter Paul Spooner. There are also four more machines here: http://www.fact.tv/videos/watch/605

The Museum setting is a Victorian school (a beautiful Mackintosh designed building) which closed exactly 30 years ago on the launch of the CMT exhibition. Children (and adults) are welcome to take part in the free workshops to Design Automata, and there are 35 pieces on display.

Click here to see the Facebook album of the exhibition.

He is making a new series for ITV1 called ‘House Gift’ which will be screened in the UK later this summer.

Laurence had been to CMT in Covent Garden years ago, but had then forgotten all about automata until he visited the house of an avid automata collector (whose house will be part of the series), and was so inspired by the collection that he contacted us to find out more.

Fi was inspired by childhood visits to CMT in Covent Garden, and more recently by automata/machine maker Rob Higgs, whose attitude to making things convinced her that anything is possible. So she started to make automata, and was particularly attracted to it by the fact that, once made, they can be brought to life by anybody at the turn of a handle.

Fi enthuses about these new pieces, and says ‘The apparently idiosyncratic ways in which things can be made to move fascinates me. I enjoy the improbability of it all- even when I know something works, I find it hard to believe that the haphazard collection of cams and levers before me will really make something come to life. I work with a combination of materials as this stops me becoming too precious with any one of them, and ensures that I am always learning something new and discovering new things.’

Buy work from Fi Henshall in our online shop now:

Petits Fours £950

Liquorice Drops £295

Jack Daniels 1 £450

Click image to enlarge.

Click image to enlarge.

Click image to enlarge.

The family way

How closely related are mechanical theatre and the latest generation of robots? Is the connection the art, the mechanics, the humour? Is the difference computer technology? Well, if we’re talking about Cabaret and the extraordinary creature called RoboThespian, the differences may be obvious but the relationship is pretty damn close.

The moving, talking, singing, acting, sort-of-dancing RoboThespian, or RT, whose eyelids even close over his moving eyeballs as he speaks, has been developed in Cornwall by Engineered Arts whose director is Will Jackson; Will is the son/sister/uncle of CMT triumvirate of Sue Jackson, Sarah and Max Alexander, and while RT himself may blink dubiously at the notion of consanguinity with, say, Paul Spooner’s classic The Barecats, we humans can’t argue with history.

Will had studied 3D design before finding himself in the film industry making advertising movies – RT’s earliest ancestor, believe it or not, is the furry pink rabbit of the Duracel ad. He went to New York where his textile designer partner Tracy had work, but he found Madison Ave well paid but, well, dull, and they moved on to Australia for a couple of years, working on animation. He began building his own machines, specifically unique slot machines, working with CMT’s own godfather Tim Hunkin, and some of Will’s creations are still part of Tim’s Under the Pier collection at Southwold. Together they worked on the Science Museum’s The Secret Life of the Home – Will has a knack of getting to what children really need to know, and developed the cut-in-half-toilet to show exactly where the poo goes.

Then came Cornwall’s Eden Project, the ‘biomes’ which constitute more than a green theme park for which he and Paul Spooner, another CMT favourite, created figures that would show what the world would be without plants. Apart from anything else, we would have no clothes, and the figures duly lose theirs – much the fury of some, including a devout Methodist who judged the male figure’s penis to be too erect.

At Glasgow’s Science Centre things started to get eerie when he used robotic creations to explain the human body – how Dolly the Sheep was cloned, what happened to Laika, the first spacedog, and how to transplant the heart of a Barbie Doll.

Up to now, though, Will’s figures were strictly mechanical with a bit of film animation thrown in, but four years ago Engineered Arts began a new Eden commission, about genetic modification, and the only way to do it was with a programmable figure: enter RT1. He took a bow at the Kinetica show at Spitalfields where CMT had some of its most spectacular pieces and drew gasps of disbelief as Will’s vaguely human forms (modestly clad in y-fronts) swayed and moved their arms, fingers and heads.

That was pretty crude, as Will says. RT2 is now touring the world in various forms – in Jedda he speaks Arabic – the size of an average man with bones of aluminium, his face and body are made of thermoplastic resin, and his sparklingly intelligent eyes are LCD displays.

In another connection with theatre, Engineered Arts is creating the figures for a 16-minute play for the Copernicus Science Centre in Warsaw, three robots which will perform a dramatisation of a story by Stanislaw Lem (author of Solaris). Will’s RTs are now academic wonders, with RT2 now a resident of the Carnegie Science Center at Pittsburgh. Voices are still, of course, human, fed through the computer programme that controls RT – there are actors specialising in creating robots’ voices - but RT is developing al the time, and playwright David Tushingham is working on a possible script for robot actors.

RT3 is on the way, and in 18 months or so will be the first properly walking RT, and with computer technology combing with chemical developments to create skin and hair, and the mechanical genius of Will Jackson and his Engineered Arts team, there are no limits to the possibilities. ‘There are scientific robots that can do things that look nothing like our image of a robot,’ will says, ‘but what interests me is how we can make RobThespian as human as possible, with smooth movement and facial expression’. And while RTs are on view in exhibitions and conferences around the world now, you can have our own, and for £50,000 Will can make a bespoke one pretty closely related to the customer - an RT-U you might say…

Mewsettes

Milan thrills
Both setts of the family are in Milan this week for a spot of ecsitement – they’re at the annual conference of the European Network of Science Centres and Museums (Ecsite, get it?) where Cabaret has five or six large automata, and Engineered Arts have got a big exhibition area with two robots. Will and Sarah are both speaking though, in accordance with a good up-bringing, hopefully not at the same time…

Cabaret space
Remember the days before it went global when Cabaret was in its little subterranean corner in Covent Garden. Happy, innocent times, but lurking there the other day I noticed the space it used to occupy is empty. They’ve long out-grown it, of course, but wouldn’t it be nice to have a permanent presence in London again? Sue and Sarah would probably grasp their throats in horror at the thought, but I just see a couple of Spooners, the odd Hunkin or two and perhaps a Newstead or two in the Olivier foyer, or the bar of the O2, or even beside the restaurant area at the new King’s Place concert hall at King’s Cross. How about it?