Jean Tinguely, Fatamorgana Méta-Harmonie IV (1985)
Works of art that use automata or mechanical robots:
- Juanelo Turriano, Mechanical Padre (1562): King Philip II commissioned the famous clockworker Turriano to create this device in thanks to God after his son, the prince Don Carlos, nearly died after falling down the stairs. According to the legend, the ghost of the monk San Diego de Alcalá appeared and the prince thereafter miraculously recovered from his death. The mechanical monk moved to the Smithsonian in 1977 where it is still fully operational, and stands as one of the oldest functional automatons to this day.
- Jean Tinguely, Méta-Matic No. 10 (1959): a machine that automatically draws drawings.
- Roxy Paine, Scumak No. 2 (2001)
- Wim Delvoye, Cloaca (2000)
- Nam June Paik, Robot K-456 (1965)
- Paul McCarthy, The Garden (1992) (youtube video): an installation with fake trees remniscent of campy science & nature museum displays, where a robotic figure of a middle-aged man repetively humps a tree.
- Jan Švankmajer, Conspirators of Pleasure (film still) (1996): a character in the film, Mr. Kula, falls in love with the image of a woman named Beltinska, and constructs a robotic device designed to stroke and masturbate him whenever she appears on television. The robotic prop is displayed in art galleries.
- Ken Feingold, The Animal, Vegetable, Mineralness of Everything (2004) (youtube video): three self-portraits of Feingold's head converse non-sensically in a quasi-philisophical discusion regarding a object (what appears as a pile of cannons) before them. The dialogue is not pre-recorded, and it is different every time a person visits it. The conversations are neither fully scripted, nor completely random. They are each programmed with a preset "personality" that affects their vocabulary and speech habits. Also, where i can see my house from here so we are(1993) an early Internet-based telerobotic work.
- Lynn Hershman Leeson, CybeRoberta (1970-98)
- Max Dean with Rafaello d'Andrea and Matt Donovan, Mechanical Chair (2006)
- Tim Hawkinson, Emoter (2000): also in the PBS art documentary series, Art21.
- Ken Rinaldo, Autopoiesis (2000) (youtube video)
- Mark Pauline and Survival Research Labs, Increasing the Latent Period in a System of Remote Destructibility (1997)
- Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA), Pamphleteer (2000)
- Nancy Paterson, Stock Market Skirt (1998)
- Chico MacMurtrie and Rick W. Sayre, Tumbling Man (1991) (youtube video)
- Simon Penny, Petit Mal (1989-93) (youtube video)
- Alan Rath, Voyeur (1986)
- Thomas Shannon, Squat (1968)
- Edward Ihnatowicz, The Senster (1969-71)
- Nicholas Negroponte, SEEK (1969-70): A project at MIT in which the artist programmed a robotic arm to move crates in an environment inhabited by gerbils who occasionally rearranged the crates. The arm was designed to adapt to the chages the gerbils made
- Philip Beesley, Hylozoic Soil (2007)
- Stelarc, Third Hand (1981)
- Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy, Ballet Mécanique (1924) (youtube video)
- Ralph Steiner, Ballet of Mechanical Movements (1934)
- Kelly Heaton, Reflection Loop (The Pool) (2001)
- Gilles Roussi, La grande inutilité technologique (The Great Technological Futility) (1984)
- Norman White, Facing Out Laying Low (1977)
- Momoyo Torimitsu, Miyata Jiro (performance in NYC, 1996)
- Gilberto Esparza, Nomadic Plants (2010)
- Ivan Henriques, Symbiotic Machine (2014)
Women as robots and/or dolls in literature, art, and popular culture:
- Pygmalion: a Greek myth about a man who falls in love with his own sculpture.
- Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House (1879)
- Joseph Faber, Amazing Talking Machine (circa 1830-40)
- Fritz Lang, Metropolis (1927)
- Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of the Industrial Man (1951)
- Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23)
- Francis Picabia, Girl Born Without A Mother (1914-5)
- Hans Bellmer, La poupee (1936)
- Richard Hamilton, $he (1958-61)
- Edward Kienholz, Jane Doe (1959)
- Cindy Sherman, Untitled 1992 (1992), Untitled #302, (1993)
- Fan Xiaoyan, Physical Attachment no. 4 (2008)
- Jacques Offenbach, Les Contes d'Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann) (1851): a famous opera based on short stories by Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann, about a man that falls in love with a windup mechanical doll named Olympia.
- Brothers Quay, The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (2005): a dark surreal film about a mad scientist-type figure who commissions a "Piano Tuner" or clockworker to repair his strange "automata" (basically just stop-motion animations) on his island, while he plans to transform the opera singer he abducted into a mechanical nightingale.
- Chris Cunningham and Björk, All is Full of Love (music video) (1999)
- Ira Levin, The Stepford Wives (1972): a thriller novel about cybernetic housewives, loosely based off the theories of the housewife achieving optimum efficiency in the kitchen posited by Frederick Winslow Taylor. Bryan Forbes directed the film version in 1975, with a 2004 remake by Frank Oz.
- See also:
- Donna Haraway, Cyborg Manifesto (1985)
- Joanna Russ
- N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (1999)