String Ball Collector

Ellen Lake and Chris Green

http://www.ellenlake.com

Chris Green (scientist) and Ellen Lake (artist) join forces to make mechanical sculptures. Working with metal, motors, and electronics they make machines inspired from observations in everyday life - from playing with tinker toys to watching oil rigs work away off the California Coast. Chris and Ellen live in Oakland, California with their two children, Sam and Josephine, and their hamster Captain Tree. Ellen is also working on a series of experimental short videos about collecting and Chris is an environmental scientist at the United States Geological Survey.

Neil and Iona - Mixed Feelings

Jason Van Anden

http://www.smileproject.com

Jason Van Anden loves robots. He lives in Brooklyn, NY with Neil and Iona, his best robotic friends. Ever since he was a kid, Jason has wondered what makes people tick. Being both an artist and computer programmer, he decided to combine both interests and created a pair of human size robots who interact with one another and you, their audience. Neil and Iona express themselves by moving their big bodies, making weird sounds and changing their facial expressions. Come by and say hello, it will make them happy.

Retrospectrum

Yoav Bergner and LoVid (Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus)

http://www.ignivomous.org/projects/lovid

Tali Hinkis came to New York from Israel via France. Kyle Lapidus was born in New York and hasn't strayed as far. The two met at a puppet show in Williamsburg, under the watchful "eye" of a surveillance camera. Since then they've been working together as LoVid, investigating memory and decay, converting electrical, biological, environmental signals into media and objects. They also have two children, aged 4.5 and 2.5. Yoav Bergner also has been a puppeteer. He uses high energy physics and electronic concepts to design hand-crafted furniture. Recently Yoav moved his home and studio to Long Island City, where he's made his neighbors happy by fixing their water pressure. Retrospectrum, their collaboration, finds inspiration in the world just like a human artist, by looking at itself, the work of others around it, and its own work.

Wildflower Meadow Glacier

James Powderly

http://robotclothes.com

James Powderly is always making something. As a Research Fellow in the Eyebeam R&D; OpenLab, James develops open source creative-technologies and media to enrich the public domain. Prior to coming to Eyebeam, he was an engineer at a NASA c ontractor called Honeybee Robotics. There James worked on the development of the Mars Exploration Rover's Rock Abrasion Tool and other experimental robots designed to explore Venus, Europa, asteroids and comets. James has collaborated with artists like Miranda July in her Whitney Biennial exhibition and built a wall drilling robot for the architects Diller + Scofidio. He has been fortunate to receive numerous grants, fellowship and awards, including an Award of Distinction in 2006 from Ars Electronica for his work with the Graffiti Research Lab. His work has been covered in the NY Times, Time Magazine and NPR. You can find his mark on the surface of Mars and other people's walls throughout the U.S. and Europe. James teaches at Parsons New School for Design and lives with his family in Brooklyn.

Misericordiam

Ranjit Bhatnagar

http://www.moonmilk.com

Photo by Lia Bulaong

Ranjit started banging on pans and strumming rubber bands as a kid in California, and is still making noisy things to this very day in Brooklyn. He makes video games for a living but is terrible at playing them, and makes musical instruments for fun, ditto. Some of his photos of his adopted hometown are on display in one of Brooklyn's busiest subway stations.

Drawing Machine 3.1415926 v.2

Fernando Orellana

http://www.fernandoorellana.com

Fernando Orellana was born in El Salvador, a very small country located in Central America. When he was six years old, his family moved to the United States. During his youth, Fernando spent hours and hours drawing and painting from his imagination. Limited only by what he could daydream, he discovered an infinite visual universe. He liked drawing and painting so much that as a teenager he decided to pursue the career of being an artist. Later, in college, he learned that he could make art using technology. This allowed him to experiment and tinker with a variety of subjects, including physics, mechanics, computers, electronics, programming, and other technology-related disciplines. Through this investigation, he developed his first drawing machine, which worked similarly to the one you see now. The drawing machines combined both his love of making pictures and learning about technology. He currently lives in Troy, NY where he is a professor of electronic art at Union College. He continues to make paintings and electronic art based mostly from exploring his imagination and experimenting in his studio.

RAVI-bot

Kristin Condello, Micael Dugan, Will Jelliffee

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCPlewIJsL8

Kristin Condello, Michael Dugan, Will Jelliffe, Peter Brueckner are a group four undergraduate mechanical engineering students at the University of Pennsylvania. The four became good friends while always sitting together in the back row of all their engineering classes. They began working together as a team in a robotics course in 2005. They had a great team dynamic that allowed us to be productive, always have fun, and foster creative ideas, and decided to continue working together for their senior design project. They knew that they wanted to do a fun and creative (albeit not so practical) project, and since they all love music, they decided to pursue something related to this. Peter took two semesters of sitar class here at school and learned a lot about the instrument and the playing style. He presented the idea of RAVI-Bot, and together they designed, built, programmed everything from scratch.