Call it kinetic sculpture or robotic art: Fernando Orellana’s work is truly moving.

What can you do with 11 tons of Play-Doh?

If you are Fernando Orellana, you build a robot that extrudes 429,674 tiny Play-Doh cars, preserve them in resin and, in the process, make a statement about the automobile in America. “That was the number of cars Henry Ford’s company produced the year he died,” he says.

Orellana, 35, works at the intersection of art, technology, engineering and, increasingly, politics. Trained as a painter, he comes from a family of engineers and studied some engineering in college. That background helps to explain his decision to build a drawing machine that could create a perfect circle, which formed the foundation layer of his early paintings.

For years, he built such drawing machines before branching out and building more sophisticated robots. He calls his art “kinetic sculpture with intelligence.”

The rest of the world calls it robotic art, and it is a medium that is exploding. Orellana, whose work travels the world, is helping to light the fuse.
Watch Orellana explain the journey through engineering and art that eventually led him to create kinetic sculptures.Man & Robot

Fernando Orellana, formally trained at the Art Institute of Chicago and Ohio State, is currently based at Union College in upstate New York. In his teaching at Union, he straddles the fields of visual art and computer science, working with students who have never experienced life without computers.

He seeks to unravel what separates sentient intelligence—like that displayed by humans—from behavior that is simply anthropomorphic. Robots don’t have to possess artificial intelligence, he has discovered, in order to behave in ways that humans interpret as intelligent.

“If you see certain movements, you have certain associations,” Orellana says. “For example, the motions a baby makes are really simple, right? And when we see the same things in a really simple system like a biped robot, it’s silly movement, but immediately we associate personality traits with it. I don’t necessarily have to program artificial intelligence. I just have to set up a system that simulates the correct motions, and the human mind will do all of the association.”

In Orellana’s installation Elevator’s Music, four robots with cameras emerge from the ceiling of an elevator at a museum at Skidmore College. Some people were afraid, he says, but others talked to the robots and over time became friendly with them. When one broke, people reacted as though one of their friends had been hurt.

Besides providing a platform for exploring such perceptions, his teaching experiences have directly impacted his artistic output in other ways. “My recent work is definitely leaning toward the political,” he says, probably because he preaches to his students to make art with a message. “I’m starting to notice in my own art that I’m tackling subjects that I would’ve never done before.”

For example, in Carry On, Orellana displays six suitcases with embedded cameras that constantly monitor their surroundings, an idea that stemmed from heightened post-9/11 airport security.

“People have become just completely freaky-deaky about keeping their belongings with them, because it’s being broadcast to them all over the airport,” he explains. “They are told they could go to jail. And it’s just sad that our culture has sort of gone this far. I almost find that I had to make art about that.”
In our rollover feature, find out about the community of artists who are developing and pushing the boundaries of robotic art.Robots Galore

Orellana is increasingly comfortable with his understanding of technology and his ability to build complex systems for his art. He keeps an eye on advances in robotics and in applications from medicine to bionics (he advises his students who are more interested in robotics than art to go into bionics) to everyday life.

The most important thing he has seen is the dramatic increase in cheap, high-volume processors. This will allow more people to experiment with robotics, eventually making robots as common as personal computers.

But for Orellana, art remains the most interesting way to investigate the intersection of man and machine. He is currently focused on painting, exhibiting art from Drawing Machines and working on new machine-based projects.

“I actually get really bored with robots if they’re not for some artistic reason,” he remarks. “If there’s no poetry in it for me, it’s sort of just a gimmick. It really is all about the art.”

Listen as Orellana explains his piece, The Extruder.The Machines

What will a world filled with robots look like?

Don’t expect the stuff of comic books and science fiction movies. The robots of the future will probably not drawl in monotone like Rosie, the Jetson’s clunky maid or rise against humans like the Nestor Class 5 machines in I, Robot.

Orellana has learned that the robots that are the most anthropomorphic are the most likely to be accepted—and even potentially adored. In his vision, there may be robots in hospitals with human-like characteristics that are programmed to take care of patients, but anything too big or “like the stuff of nightmares” would never fit into society.

In his art, he is already experimenting with the animation of various behaviors. As his robots survey, sleep, walk and draw, he tries to understand how viewers react in order to predict what will develop as the technology progresses. He wonders “what a future would look like where everything we encountered was in some way intelligent.” Or at least looked intelligent.

However, one thing is certain: “we’re definitely seeing a revolution in robotics.”

Meet the robots: our interactive page provides videos and artist statements for six of Orellana’s robotic installations.Robot Camp

The historical Nott building at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., nicknamed The Electric City, sits just blocks from the innovative science and technology exhibits at the Exploratorium.

School is out for the summer, and the city that birthed General Electric seems sleepy on a sunny Friday afternoon. But inside an engineering classroom on the Union College campus, ten teenagers aged 13 to 17 are building, engineering, testing and programming robots.   

Known as Robot Camp, this five-day event gives Orellana, who is teaching at the camp for the third time, and three university student counselors the opportunity to guide high schoolers through the scientific and creative processes of building their own robotic bipeds.

Watch our short documentary video of the kids at work and play during Robot Camp.It takes two days for camp participants to construct the basic parts—legs and feet, battery pack, circuitry and chip. “It’s fun to think of an idea and then try to make it work,” Jennifer Buhrmaster, 15, says. “It was my sister’s idea to make my robot dance the Cotton-Eyed Joe.” John and Brian Kowalski, for their part, successfully create their own transformers.

Once the basic robots are constructed, the last three days are reserved for innovation and refinement.

During this time, the kids and their guides troubleshoot their way through programming and testing the creations. They fix the ones that fall over, teaching them how to get back up. They adjust the parts to make them more evenly weight balanced or add wheels for extra functionality.

At the end of the fifth day, a bus takes the kids to the nearby planetarium, where they present their work to their parents and other members of the community. The personality traits of the robots evoke gasps of surprise and bouts of riotous applause.

“These kids grew up with digital technology and electronic media,” Orellana says. “They don’t know a reality without the computer. It’s their world, and they’re comfortable creating in it. We’re definitely going to see more robotics in the next 30 years as a result.”

Six of the kids show off the robots that they built during Robot Camp, under Orellana’s tutelage, in six videos.