Art Pulse

In his ongoing robotics art project, Serpentine Robot Arm with Tendon Transmission, Carl Pisaturo is attempting the impossible: "the artful handling of wine glasses." He's gunning for "animal-like grace" but will settle for "robust, reasonable showability." His lamp-sized Orbit Machines already have maximum showability, what with the "rotation on 2 orthogonal axes" that causes colored LED lights to spin faster than 100 m.p.h. Pisaturo, who comes to art with science degrees and a job as an applications engineer at Stanford in his back pocket, makes robotic wonders that have a taste of the carnival funhouse. He's also made some modern strides in stereo photography, that old technology that offered the world's first 3-D views, by creating his own curious looking machines. At YLEM Forum: Area 2881, Art Robotics Studio, he opens the doors to his S.F. workspace for some show-and-tell, giving the details of everything from "electric nervous systems" to "the mysteries of LED pulsing strobe lights."
Wed., May 14, 7 p.m., 2008