The Silver Swan sits on a stream made of twisted glass rods and within a clear glass box. It preens and stares intently into its fabricated pond before swallowing up a little silver fish. When Mark ...

It’s fitting that the European renaissance of automata, or kinetic sculptures designed to mimic human movement, began with a clockmaker—like their timekeeping counterparts, automata operate on cue, ...

For a moment, suspend your worldview and adopt Descartes’s mechanistic interpretation that living beings are essentially complex machines: a collection of inherently unrelated parts that move and ...

The developers behind “Bitcraft: Age of Automata” want you to build the world from the ground up. Villages, towns, cities, nations and empires are all in players hands. That’s how Clockwork Labs ...

Early modern automata : an abridged history -- Ever more variations on theme at the court of Rudolf II -- The gifts that keep on giving -- A figure of speech -- Hapsburg-Ottoman diplomatic machinery - ...

Simon Schaffer presented Mechanical Marvels: Clockwork Dreams Credit: Photo: BBC BBC Four’s documentary Mechanical Marvels: Clockwork Dreams was, in itself, a marvel. Presented by the pugnacious ...

Flesh and Machines How Robots Will Change Us by Rodney A. Brooks Parthenon, 260 pp., $26 Prey A Novel by Michael Crichton HarperCollins, 384 pp., $26.95 Dumbstruck A Cultural History of Ventriloquism ...