The Robotics class at The Ohio State University begins with a crash course in electrical engineering and culminates with a single large, complicated, usually expensive project. My project was a plastic hand, the likes of which you find at toy stores, connected to a steel framework with a hand pad in the center. Pressing your fingers into the springy fabric of the hand pad would cause the hand to react.

The hand pad concealed five flex sensors harvested from an old, rotten Power Glove. I got the glove for $15 on eBay. Buying the sensors new would have cost about $10 a piece. The sensors were sandwiched between two layers of extremely elastic fabric. When active, these sensors would collect data on how many fingers were being pressed into them. The pseudo-robotic hand would then express the same number using a binary method of finger counting I learned from some KGB (Keeping Geeks Busy) members at Carnegie Melon University. My goal was to depict how even simple concepts like one-digit numbers are understood differently by a machine.

Initially the Art faculty at OSU wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about the project. After visiting artist Stellarc expressed interest in my project, however, there was a sudden spike in my esteem within the Art & Technology program.

Whenever I want to draw but don’t know what to draw, I come back to this guy. I call him Byck, after a tire salesman who entertained notions of assassinating Dick Nixon. This guy’s a janitor with dreams of aliens, space travel, fighting evil, all that good stuff.

I drew this particular sketch under a street light while waiting for a campus bus at Ohio State. Nothing much to say about it, save that it was one of my earliest sketches that I thought had some actual life to them.