Mark Haig of Gizmobots brought along a smashing collection of mini robot sculptures for sale at Salvo 2017 made from scrap and found metal objects. They had an amusing ironic quality - non threatening and child-friendly.
 
Ukrainian artist Alexander Milov built one of the largest robot sculptures in the world on the shoreline of Odessa, converting a huge machine into a transformer with chunks of trucks as hands and head and a Ukrainian national flag mounted on a 39m spear. Last year Milov went on to create a large sculpture of a moving family group for Burning Man in Nevada.
 
Mark Haig's father was a clock repairer, and young Mark used to make robots and spaceships out of cogs, wheels and bits of wood that his dad bought back from his job. Now he runs workshops to teach kids about upcycling and gizmobot-making.
 
'My robot themed workshops fit well with Key Stages 1,2 and 3 National Curriculum specifications on waste, recycling and design. By helping groups generate and develop their own original ideas, explore materials and develop processes I help them design and make products with expressive outcomes. I can take the educational aspects of a junkbot build further by making it interactive or animated. Using recycled screens within the robot can also allow videos or animations created by the pupils to be displayed,' writes Mark.
 
Do not miss viewing Mark's Gizmobots in exhibition at the Red House Museum, Christchurch, Hampshire until 2nd September. See the link below to the Hampshire Cultural Trust website for more information.
 
This week Elon Musk (whose electric autopiloted Tesla saloon appeared at the Salvo fair) warned that, "Until people see robots going down the street killing people, they cannot know how to react because it seems so ethereal." He was discussing the tech sector's furious pursuit of artificial intelligence. "Normally the way regulations are set up when a bunch of bad things happen and there's a public outcry. It takes forever. That, in the past, has been bad but not something which represented a fundamental risk to the existence of civilisation. AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilisation. Once there is awareness, people will be extremely afraid, as they should be," Musk said.
 
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