Relevant Background

“Automata give the artist the extra dimension of time to tell its story or perform its intended function.” – Frank Nelson (Automata and Mechanical Toys, by Rodney Peppé, The Crowood Press, 2002)

“At best a simple image will expand into a story, or stories. People will often remember a successful piece as having a lot more complicated movements than it really has. Once the illusion of animation takes hold, the gaps get filled in, the stories grow.” – Robert Race (Automata and Mechanical Toys, by Rodney Peppé, The Crowood Press, 2002)

Contemporary automaton is a unique art form for creating narratives with physical objects. Of the artists currently working in this vein I have been inspired most by the automaton artist Paul Spooner and his work Barecats (created in collaboration with Matt Smith). This work is humorous and deceptively simple, but the mechanisms are exquisitely designed and its workings are exposed so that the user can see them in operation.

Influenced by Spooner’s work, as well as other contemporary automata, I have built a mechanical wooden face that utilizes physical mechanisms to tell a story. This work consists of two parts: a wooden face (with seven moving parts) and a conveyor-belt type of mechanism made of 15 wooden panels and a series of ridges of various sizes that control the movements of the wooden face. The eyes, eyebrows, cheeks, and jaw of the face are all connected to wooden shafts that move up and down when the conveyor belt is turned and the ridges push the shafts up and release them back down. Thus the simple action of turning the conveyor belt can change the expression of the wooden face completely. (This is similar in principle to the way a music box works.) There is also a series of speech bubbles (also attached to moving wooden parts) that are triggered by the movement of the conveyor belt. As the user turns the belt, a conversation begins. There are a series of phrases printed on the wooden panels of the conveyor belt that the user can say out loud as he or she is turning the belt. A speech bubble is timed to pop up when the belt is turned to a certain point past the phrase, so that the illusion of a dialogue is created. For example, the user would read the phrase “Hi there! How are you?”, as she turns the belt, and as she keeps turning, the wooden face’s expression changes to one of surprise, and a speech bubble pops up with the phrase “Stranger! Stranger!”.

The user-operated conveyor-belt mechanism in this wooden face project seems to be unique in the field of contemporary automata and is applicable to other automata systems. I would like to keep working with this type of mechanism and develop it further to allow for more dynamic interactivity.