Amorphic robots animated in Doom-like exhibition

But yesterday we visited an event where there were robots unlike any you've probably imagined in a scene that sometimes felt as if you'd been transformed into an out of the world alien culture. No, France isn't that different from London - it's only one hour 40 mins from Waterloo (cough) to Lille via Eurostar. For £59 return.

Aside from some computers used to control some of the exhibits, the clever creations at the Robots! show consisted of "amorphic robots", with the original idea inspired by Chico McMurtrie, who we met at the exhibition yesterday.

Some displays are controlled by computers however, and computers even take their place in Robots!, with Seymour Cray's Control Data 6600 on display in a section called Ancestral Robots.

One section of the exhibition was devoted to robots which responded directly to sounds made by the visitors. Clap your hands loudly, and the weird looking bots would respond in kind, by tapping out the same rhythmn on bongo drums and other instruments.

One big display called the Assembly includes 48 robots, all controlled by two PCs, and which spend half an hour moving in turn, and in time, to some futuristic percussive sounds, accompanied by light effects and the occasional dense cloud of dry ice vapour. At the climax, two robots at either side of the central part of the display zoom down and open their jaws to threaten the audience. This whole display felt as if you were in some weird Doom 3 room.

McMurtrie turns his drawings into
a weird reality

McMurtrie told us that he essentially considered himself to be a sculptor rather than a boffin although he said that making all the robots work involved a great deal of hands on work.

Perhaps the most impressive displays to us were constructions which could roll across the floor, or, powered by wind sails, on sand, and which were bizarrely impressive. A movie showed a whole series of these leggy creatures competing in each other in a race on the sands. The exhibition continues until March the 7th, just next to the Lille Europe Eurostar terminal in France.

The exhibition is being held at the TriPostal centre in Lille as part of a 73 million Euro investment to endorse the city's position as one of two European Capitals of Culture.

* IF YOU are wondering how come I haven't picked up my email yet, it's mostly because the British broadband infrastructure is pollocked.

L'INQ
Lille 2004 Watch out for the boots outside your head