This mechanical elephant is stunning, from tail to trunk. It was built over the course of three and a half months by Andrew Chase. The whole deal weighs 85-pounds and the elephant automaton is made out of “transmission parts, electrical conduits, plumbing pipes and 20-gauge cold rolled steel.”

The elephant is part of a book he is writing, called the Robot Trionic Morphatractable Engineer. It’s just stunning. Like something out of a Techno-Fantasy novel.

[Book Of Joe]

We told you about Eric Joyner awhile back. If you liked what you saw then check out his new book Robots & Donuts. Awesome stuff.

[Amazon]

Some dude likes Gundam a whole lot. So much, that he created this Styrofoam monstrosity. Pretty awesome.

[Dinosaurs and Robots]

It takes a truly great artist to harness the power of the fly. What if you could trace a housefly’s path as it flies about your home with a trail of ink? That’s pretty much what this art installation does. It’s a robot arm connected to a sensor chamber that has some kind of fly-luring power. When a fly is inside the chamber, the arm jerks in time to the fly’s movements, and traces a chaotic drawing on a huge reel of paper. When the fly leaves, the paper scrolls, so the artwork is constantly evolving. It’s by artist David Bowen and it’s pretty fascinating stuff. Hit the link for a video.
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Dyson makes a mean vacuum, but it turns out that the vacuum actually makes a pretty awesome robot as well. Artists contributing to Worth1000.com’s “Rejected Transformers 6″ contest created some Transformer-like bots out of unlikely things, including shopping carts, pots and pans, hi-fi sound equipment, wood and more. Good stuff. Hit the link for more.

[Worth1000] VIA [Dvice]

Robots and monsters don’t usually get along, but when they get together they can make things happen. RobotsAndMonsters.org is a “charitable menagerie” of original robot and monster art. That means that for the price of $50, you can get a 6″ by 6″ piece of original robot or monster artwork, done by several artists. Most of the money goes to charity. It will be a beast or bot defined by three words of your choice. The one above is called “Roughrider” and was born from the words cowboy, eyeballs, and jaunty. Pretty wacky and wild.

The charity for this quarter is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, defenders of your rights to make legal backups of DVDs…that you have legally purchased. Last time they raised $11,890 for the SF AIDS Foundation.

[Robotsandmonsters]

Sonny Liew, editor of LIQUID CITY, is in love with robots almost as much as you. And he’s asking artists of deviantART to show him their robot drawings. That’s right, you can finally pore your dozens of notebooks and un-filed mounds of looseleaf covered in thousands and thousands of robot sketches in search of your most bestest robo depiction and show it to Sonny.
Submit your art by November 2nd to get in the contest, but no fan art — you can keep your Bender drawings for other uses. Three winners will get signed copies of the anthology, and one grand prize winner will get a page of original art from “Faces”, the story by Liew and Mike Carey. Check out the deets here. Art and robots are two spheres of interest that everyone loves to see colliding, and now there is a chance for you to participate in the almond-shaped middle part of that glorious Venn diagram.

[Comic Book Resources]

What can be said about such a fabulous painting? There’s a whole Flickr gallery of art depicting Robocop riding Unicorns…For some reason.

[Topless Robot]

Check out the work of Swiss/French artist Guillaume Reymond. His new art installation: a “real life” Transformer robot made using a dozen or so cars and trucks. Why didn’t we think of that? Quick! To the parking lot!

[Neatorama]

Junk yards and scrap yards all tend to look alike. And it’s got to suck working there among the wreckage of humanity. So you have to admire those places who build monuments to robots and the like. One Chinese entrepreneur from the Zhejiang province had an idea for promoting his pile of junk as something special. He buillt full scale Autobot sculptures. See, now he has your attention. The one above is from his converted BMW 7-Series. Sadly they won’t transform back into vehicles. Maybe he should concentrate on getting a color camera.

[Jalopnik]