Nemo Gould, a mechanical sculptor, assembled the Big Man robot from all kinds junk materials ranging from vacuum cleaner parts to chair legs and he even used floor polisher. The Robot is a respectable 8 feet tall and has a little robot inside that controls him.

The Big Man robot moves it’s hands to and fro and it can also move it’s mouth up and down. The “Little Man” in it’s chest moves levers that control Big Man. It doesn’t get much more awesome then watching a tiny robot control a big robot with antlers on it’s head. Video below.

This strange looking contraption is a battery powered vehicle. It putters around a New York art gallery looking like…art. What’s interesting about it is the driver or drivers. It’s course is directed and steered entirely by flies. The plastic bubble is filled with large houseflies, and the food and water that nourishes them. That’s right, the enslavement of flies has begun.

The lights that you see shining on the flies keep them warm and as the flies do their thing, the reflections that the lights make on the top of the bubble change. Sensors send the changing light data to a controller that activates the motor and steers the machine accordingly. It’s the brainchild of David Bowen, an artist who has also created machines that track flies’ movements and make huge drawings. Pretty cool. I wonder what else they can power.

The Opto-Isolator is a black box prototype that seeks to incorporate robotic technology into artwork to make it more lively and interactive. The idea is that one day soon, there will be some artworks that can exchange eye contact with human beings. The eye mounted in the center of the black box responds to the gaze of whoever is staring at it and stares back.

It has a bunch of psycho-social eye-contact behaviors like looking into the viewer’s eyes directly, studying the viewer’s face, or looking away coyly when it’s been stared at for too long. It could be part of human or animal sculptures. Check out a video after the jump.