from the ken feingold BBS at www.tech90s.net:

ken goldberg wrote:

On page 12 of Ken Feingold's inspirational MOMA lecture he describes how
the robots in his "where I can see my house from here so we are"
installation began to break down, running in circles and losing their
voices etc.

This reminds a bit of Tinguely's Homage to NY at MOMA, where the entire
construction fell apart and caught fire on opening night.

Alan Rath spoke at Berkeley recently and I asked why all the wires are
always so neat and clean. His answer is that this is the best way to
make sure his machines keep working.

It seems a majority of technology artists share the aesthetic of
exposing loose wires and gears etc. that evokes a Blade-Runner-esque
sense of chaos. And they often treat electromechanical failure as
symbolic of industrial hubris.

One surprising thing to me is how well industrial machines work in the
real world, often 24 hours a day under an incredible range of
conditions. Like Borofsky's hammering men, these machines continue
unfazed for years on end. Perhaps there is an equally interesting
aesthetics of electromechanical reliability.

ken feingold responded:

What I meant to evoke was not "the aesthetic of exposing loose wires and
gears…", but rather, the beautiful pathos of the puppets as they
became "disobedient". With the exception of the umbilical cable and the
video-camera-eye in that particular work, I have always stayed away from
presenting the functional electronics of the work except, as in this
work, they provide specific elements of signicance to communicating my
intended meaning.

It's when "reliabile" comes to mean "no questions asked" that prompts
artists to challenge the fixed values of The Religion of the Reliable,
i.e., global capital & consumer culture.

ken goldberg responded:

Ken, I agree that disobedience offers vital counter rhythms to the blind
obedience of reliable industrial robots. Perhaps the beauty is in the
disobedience, as when a note is slightly off key or a Robert Irwin
pencil line is lightly nonlinear. Paul Haeberli also seeks this
imperfection with in his CAD tools that turn wireframes back into line
drawings…