Thomas Kuntz is a sculptor, painter, designer, mechanic, animator, and model-maker. Each of those skills plays a role in creating the artist’s automata, or self-operating machines that follow a predetermined set of actions. It’s an art that has ancient roots, but Kuntz’s creations have a sense of timeless theatrics with contemporary flourishes.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V254bLx8TUA&w=600&h=515]
Creatures like the “Prussian Conjuror” appear to have lives of their own, and using YouTube, the artist displays both his clinical and creative approach to making his automata. These thought processes were honed early in the life of Kuntz, the son of a surgeon and a folk artist/doll-maker.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-aF6yx7nBE&w=600&h=515]
At play is the concept of “uncanny valley,” the theory in which a human-like robot tends to garner revulsion and discomfort from onlookers. If you combine this concept with the artist’s love of horror films of early cinema and oddities of other eras. The artist’s website cites other influences: “Dada-surrealism, mechanical engineering, architecture, atom-age kitsch, erotica, exotica, classical renaissance, horology, anthropology, artificial life/androides, and anatomy.”
Predictably, Kuntz’s work is best viewed online via video, rather than stills, to see the scope and skill of the work. Check out some of the artist’s automata below.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drofW-ELc-0&w=600&h=515]
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsrgnAC1-WE&w=600&h=515]
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnN4bi1rp6c&w=600&h=515]
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DAoXJhtE3M&w=600&h=515]
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTFdXStBOaI&w=600&h=515]
Kinetic art is art from any medium that contains movement perceivable by the viewer or depends on motion for its effect. For the 11 international artists in the upcoming exhibit "Perpetual Motion" at Heron Arts in San Francisco, movement is fundamental to storytelling. Their collective kinetic works offer a modern interpretation of this age old art form that redefined sculpture into more than three-dimensional- it transformed our perceptions of line, color and life itself into an extension of the human imagination.
Guillermo del Toro is known as one of the most imaginative filmmakers working today. As the director of some of this generation's most inventive horror and monster genre films, from Hellboy (2004), Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), Pacific Rim (2013), and Crimson Peak (2015), it should come as no surprise that del Toro loves monsters- and he has a creepy art collection to match. His treasured collection has been a work in progress since he was a child in Guadalajara, Mexico, and given its significant impact on del Toro's work and process, is now being brought to the public, courtesy of LACMA.
In the short film “Clockwork Monsters: The Art and Automata of 
It's magical ability to capture our imagination is as miraculous as the device itself. Elaborate wind-up machines called automata, or automatons, are mechanical marvels dating from a time as early as the 13th century.