Philadelphia Weekly

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Behind every robot is a human programmer and builder. Some builders--like Illah Nourbakhsh and his team at the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute in Pittsburgh--have been doing their best to demystify robotics in a year-long project. "Robot 250" pushes robots out of the lab so people can experience the fun, friendly and arty side of machines.

"Robot 250" is an old-fashioned art and community project with a techno twist presented as part of Pittsburgh's 250th birthday celebration. I went to Pittsburgh to check out the artist-made BigBots, eleven monumental art works commissioned for "Robot 250" that use robotic parts, and to talk with students who built robots in their schools or used the Mars Exploration Rover technology (called the gigapan) to document and explore their communities. Everyone was high on the project. The artists, in spite of difficulties with their electronically controlled pieces in outdoor environments, were uniformly enthusiastic.

With its strong programs in both engineering and the arts, CMU has a history of connecting technology with art. The BigBot projects--a robotic sheep that mows the lawn; a miniature roller coaster that takes plants on a ride; a chorus of noise-making robo-crickets--are the eruption of fun in this serious community education project. The art projects also show that robots don't have to have bodies and mimic human behavior but can take many different shapes and sizes and do surprising things.

Several BigBots remain displayed through August, although most came down recently. One of the best is still up--make sure to see Extreme Animals: The Video Game by Matt Barton and Jacob Ciocci at the Carnegie Museums if you go to the Carnegie International. The piece is a scrapwood hut containing a robo-taxidermy wonderland of forest creatures living in pizza-fueled and video-game- obsessed nirvana. Peace on.

The collaboration between Barton, a Pittsburgh artist and CMU grad, and Ciocci, one of the founders of the art collective Paper Rad, has nodding deer, a game-playing fox and an empty pizza box which opens to reveal a fat and happy squirrel. It's a trippy secret life of animals reflecting today's electronics-driven counterculture. And why wouldn't Bambi and Thumper keep up with the times?

Another BigBot that imagines secret lives is Green Roof Roller Coaster by Gregory Witt and Joey Hays at the Children's Museum, which took a group of shaggy looking plants for a roller coaster ride and monitored their happiness quotient before and after. At the opening, the artists reasoned that our plants give us a lot and maybe we owe them a little fun.

I spoke with artist Ian Ingram who curated the BigBots show and is co-founder of Rossum's (www.rossums.org), a working group for robotic artists and engineers. Ingram made the BigBot piece You're Number 1! on top of the Andy Warhol Museum, but it was no match for the wind storm that recently shredded it. The piece, a 12-foot-tall foam rubber hand with an index finger pointing (like the ones fans wear at sporting events) was connected by circuitry to other spots around town, and when someone activated the piece at the remote site, the big hand on the museum would find the person and point back in a mutual "You're No. 1!" love fest.

Ingram decided against rebuilding the work and instead created a new machine that's up there now making clouds. He calls the work Making Peace With the Sky and says he's happy to go with the flow. The primary goal of "Robot 250" was to reach people who don't often think about technology and get them to wonder how things work, says Ingram. On that level, the BigBots was a BigSuccess.

"Robot 250" will continue this summer and into the fall with museum exhibits, make-and-take workshops and even theaterevents by Squonk Opera and Quantum Theatre.