Living Mechanicals

A small collection of CMT automata from AutomatomaniA will be shown during the Manipulate Visual Theatre Festival from 2nd Feb to 6th Feb 2010

Living Mechanicals
Travis Theatre
Edinburgh

Heart in Hand

The perfect gift for Valentines, a one-off piece from Carlos Zapata.

This a very stunning but gentle piece with a fantastic action as the hand opens and closes.

43 cm. high (17 Inches)

Price: £700.00 (excl. VAT)

Automata: Contemporary Mechanical Sculpture

A new exhibition has just opened at the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison, WI.

The exhibition features the collection and work of Michael Croft, who will also be giving a lecture “Automata: The Art of Animated Figures” on January 28th at 17.30hrs.

Exhibition continues until 14th March 2010

Image – Man Drinking in the Moon, Dean Lucker, 2009

Click here to download a PDF of the exhibition guide.

Simon Tait’s Mews No.8

Tim’s little shop of chuckles

Ever realised there was a product you absolutely needed but that didn’t exist? The kind of thing that chaps used to send new apprentices off to the stores for, like a jar of elbow grease or a bag of shoulder chips – only seriously? Well, Bedford Borough Council have the solution. They’ve hired an expert on the subject of impossible dreams, a certain Tom Hoskin, and in February, in Bedford’s Harpur Centre, he is opening Seriously Solutions in a council-owned shop in the precinct.

Seriously Solutions will offer you a seemingly endless range of products. God Glasses, for instance, to turn your wimpishness into omnipotence through power-tinted specs.

There will be greetings cards to convey the message you really want to send, like ‘Good luck with your Ikea flat pack assembly’, or ‘With Regret – so sorry to miss the recycling collection’.

Or aging cosmetics for those fed up with being refused strong drink or fags because they don’t look old enough.

Then there are home safety signs which warn you that windows contain glass and should be stood well back from, or the home speed cam to stop people running perilously fast around the house.

And of course there will be special offers, like the wonderful rock paper scissors, which cut through both rock and paper, plus clearance lines such as No More Glue, consisting of non-rubberised fixing agents made of small shafts of steel pointed at one end.

If you can think of it, Seriously Solutions have thought of it first.

To assist him in his enterprise, Hoskin has assembled a very seriously committed team to devise your solutions: Dr Gerald C Bandler, the futurologist who lectures widely on self-navigating footwear; in charge of sales, Bob Runacre, the pie-eating champion and melodeon player for the Stradhoughton Morris; and Maxine Barzini, head of product design, who expects any day soon to have reinvented the wheel.

Well, for those steeped in the ways of the CMT family it isn’t hard to translate Tom Hoskin into our own inimitable Tim Hunkin, the model-maker, cartoonist and indefatigable jokester who has his own little end of the pier world at Southwold in Suffolk.

It was seeing Tim’s automata there that inspired Bedford town planner Phil Nicholson to ask Tim to make something for the shopping mall to fill an empty shop space.

That was three years ago, and the original idea was for one of Tim’s simulator rides to bring this corner of the centre to life, but seeing the space he thought of something better. ‘The ride would have been difficult to maintain from Suffolk, but this could be a low-maintenance installation that might bring a smile to the shopping folk of Bedford’ Tim says.

‘Shopping malls have always incorporated features to make them more attractive and Seriously Solutions, though not conventional, fits this brief. It will be close to the lifts to the multi-store parking, so I hope it will particularly appeal to dads and children who are bored shopping’ he says, ‘and the council have worked hard to get the space ready’.

And the odd title? ‘It was a bit of a sideways compliment to Private Eye’s regular lists of “solutions”, and the grammatical errors people are always making in retail for emphasis – so not just “Serious Solutions” but “Seriously Solutions”’.

It isn’t, of course, a shop, just a shop window, but he hopes Bedfordians will enter into the spirit by suggesting products even he and his high-flying team haven’t yet lighted on. There’s even a Seriously website for you to check out: http://www.seriouslysolutions.com/

Mewsettes
Adam & Eve are back, in all their Eden glory. Yes, the last remaining full diorama of the famous Ride of Life, Ron Fuller’s bar of the Adam & Eve pub in which the landlord pulls pints of Black Shaft English lager and the landlady puffs, sups, waves and winks, is going back on display. Originally made in the 80s for the Meadowhall Shopping Centre, CMT’s rescued scene, in working order, opens at the Oxfordshire Museum at Woodstock on January 9.

Here’s a mystery. A star feature of the Technical and Maritime Museum in Malmo, Sweden is the Robot Jazz Band, but the museum knows very little about it. Have a look at the wesbite, www.malmo.se/museer. They think it was made in England some time in the 1920s, and a Swedish toy expert reckons it was serial made suggesting that there might be others. But the museum’s curator, Jerry Johansson, is doubtful: because of the figures all being life-size and the complexity of the mechanics it was probably to expensive to make to be anything other than a one-off. Can anybody shed any light? Sarah at CMT would love to know, and so would Jerry at jerry_johansson@live.se.

Simon Tait’s Mews No.7

Yule mewscasting

HQ CMT is a secret central London location known only to a few thousand cognoscenti, and they all seemed to be there for the Christmas spell casting. This is where making magic is serious fun, and the CMT Christmas gathering is the summit meeting for devoted funsters. I’m not talking about magic tricks, sleight of hand and now-you-see-now-you-don’t; this is about pure ingenuity, Magic Circle rules do not apply.

First to command our attention was the Circus Maximus, the kind of circus maximus that fits snugly in the corner of a small room rather than the sort where Christians provide the entertainment in their selfless way. This is Michael and Maria Start’s flea circus, with strong-fleas, trapeze-fleas, tug-o-war-fleas and even Ignatius D, the fire-eating flea who, sadly, had the consuming fire process reversed on him and had to be the subject of a flea-funeral; while we sang Candle in the Wind, though, a miracle happened and the valiant, if singed, Ignatius was restored to the company. You don’t have to suspend belief beyond knowing that Michael and Mama Mia, to give her her stage name, also run AutomatomaniA, the country’s only automaton restoration company. He’s a horologist by training, she’s a sculptor, no animal training in either of their CVs.

The greats are all here in the throng, Tim Hunkin, Paul Spooner, Keith Newstead, Carlos Zapata, and new talent in the CMT fold – like Pascale Michalski who brought the most extraordinary gothick house for us to see, a pile as mysterious and fascinating as any Gormenghast – complete with music played in the machine from the kind of paper disc they used for pianolas which Pascale had also made. And Fi Henshall, Rob’s next door neighbour in Penryn in Cornwall, or rather next boat neighbour because they both live afloat. She is a puppetmaker but the arrival of Ella two or three years ago confined her to quayside, where she produces beautifully carved and painted machines in which, for instance, the tables are turned on the magician who saws a lady in half…

And then there was Richard Garriott, computer games millionaire, astronaut, son of an astronaut and collector of automata. Still in his forties, this man – born on the fourth of July – grew up in the Houston household of a Skylab astronaut, Owen Garriott since you ask, and with astronaut families living either side, an ethos where imagination and reality collide. So Richard did the obvious thing: he travelled to the new world of fantasy computer games, made his fortune there, and a couple of years ago took himself home by buying a £30m ride in the International Space Station, where you get four sunrises and four sunsets in a day. What must that do to our personal mechanics? Anyway, before he was allowed to go aloft by Space Adventures (of which he is now a board member, naturally) this Astronaut Garriott was found to have a minor abnormality in his liver and was obliged to undergo major surgery before they would let him go. He showed us the L-shaped scar to prove it. But with him into the cosmos he took the tiniest automaton he could lay his hands, barely an inch high, which is a bush that blossoms and flowers and then releases a pair of butterflies, a little bit of man-made earthliness. For this is also Automotonaut Garriott, who has acquired so many machines, he reckons about 500 or so but can’t be sure, of all sizes (and many made by tonight’s party-goers) that he had to build an extra wing on his mansion in Austin, Texas. Keith presented him with an addition to the collection, a tiny astronaut floating in space around the globe, and waving to us poor earthlings below. It took Keith about an hour to make, a fraction of the time it must have taken to create Richard’s other new acquisition which he brought for us to see, a tiny gold and silver watch in which there are no hands or faces, except those on the lady musician and the young conductor who as they make the music the piece plays. It was made in Paris more than two centuries ago, and Richard bought it at Christie’s the other day.

Blimey, there was enough inspiration buzzing around HQ CMT’s seasonal summit to keep my unandroidal brain spinning in orbit for ever, so a Mechanical Christmas to you all and a Happy Mews Year.