Those geek-chic tinkerers at the MIT Media Lab are working overtime.
Ever since roboticist Rodney Brooks and his photogenic supporting cast
of lumbering metal arachnids were profiled by Errol Morris in his
documentary "Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control," Artificial Intelligence
has become the It-meme of the month. A Frankensteinian hybrid of a
child's erector set and "Starship Trooper"'s alien spawn, Brooks's
creepy brood of Pentium powered critters–bouncing off walls like remote
control dune buggies, or rubbing up against the legs of lab-coated
technicians–satisfy our subconscious gadget lust, while leaving us a
bit starved for existential drama. Sure, Spielberg has bought the rights
to Kubrick's unfinished masterpiece "AI" (ensuring us some New Age
uplift keyed to a cosmic John Williams score), but to judge from Battle-
Bots, Robot Wars, and the cutesy charms of Sony's canine Aibo, we're
miles away from conversing in the loaded, Beckettian dialogue of
Kubrick's acknowledged masterpiece, "2001."

Miles away from this kind of emotionally fraught interaction, because we
are inches away from daily niche-marketed spectacles of pay-per-view
demolition derbies and glossy ads for plasma screen home entertainment
systems in "Wired" magazine. Hi-resolution, it would appear, trumps the
fuzzy contingencies of real life exchange. When Dave said, "Open the pod
doors Hal," way back in 1968, we expected a monotone, if vaguely human
response. Now it's the year 2001, and the Promethean logic that drives
the consumer electronics industry has simply amounted to vacuum-sealed,
high-security obedience schools for anthropomorphic machines with an
identity crisis. It's a crisis that Mark Tilden, a researcher at Los
Alamos Lab, is trying to solve by applying evolutionary biology to
develop robots with a simple animal intelligence. His branch of research
goes by the acronym BEAM, which stands for Biology, Electronics,
Aesthetics, and Mechanics. But Tilden would do well to follow the
example of the New York based sculptor John Kalymnios and focus his
energies solely on aesthetics.

Kalymnios makes meditative machines out of photographs, mirrors, colored
lucite, simple armatures, and decidedly lo-fi motors. Rather than
fulfill Tomorrowland's Jetsonian promise of robotic maids and cooks,
whipping up three course meals so that we, as time-starved (and
efficiency crazed) humans, can pursue the grail of endless leisure,
Kalymnios teaches us how to optimize the little leisure we have.
Optimize, analyze, reflect, succumb, and finally let ourselves drift in
the spatial wormholes and trippy optical effects he creates through a
minimum of moving parts. Why allocate one's talents to fashioning empty
human replicants, Kalymnios seems to say, when you can fill that
lingering sense of day-to-day emptiness with the blueprints for a quiet
reverie. Instead of machines constructed in our own narcissistic self-
image designed to maximize free time, Kalymnios cuts to the free time
itself, and shows how the most basic images, from photos of a rolling
blue sea to a snapshot of the artist's own face, when altered slightly
and syncopated to his own languid, metronomic rhythym, can deliver a
kind of renewed centering within one's own schizophrenic body. It's as
if basic perception needs to be warped, vibrated, and toggled before
Kalymnios squelches the tuning fork in our inner ear, bringing us to a
jarring, yet newly acclimated halt.

Screen life has its own minor hallucinations and fleeting mirages, but
they're not all the result of fatigue and blurred vision. Spending hours
in front of a computer is no different than being bombarded by the
rotating billboards of Times Square or the shimmering green plexi-coated
fa