Maker

TELEPRESENT: Maker Marque Cornblatt lounges at home with Sparky 2, his autonomous telepresence robot, while his cat One ignores them both.

Sparky 2: No Sellout

My robotic alter ego steps out — open source. By Marque Cornblatt

I spent much of my childhood dismantling toys and gadgets and cobbling them back together in interesting ways. One proud example combined a slot car, a one-function wireless remote, a 9-volt battery, and a few fabricated gears and bits to create (in my mind, in the early 80s) the world’s smallest remote control car.

The 2-inch vehicle was top-heavy and had too much torque, but it accelerated violently to the right every time I pressed the remote button — it worked! — until it finally tore itself apart, like a tiny top-fuel dragster. In my mind it was a success, and it sparked my lifelong interest in interactive, kinetic projects.

In the early 90s, I began building a wireless, rolling, remote control robot with a two-way video chat setup positioned at eye level, which enabled real-time, face-to-face communication. I found

50 Make: Volume 16

most of the materials dumpster diving or at garage sales: a motorized wheelchair, a few old video cameras, a wireless baby monitor, and some R/C toys. Separately these were junk, but combined they became an interactive sculpture that allowed me to see, hear, chat, and move through a remote location with complete autonomy.

I could “become” my creation, temporarily merging my own identity into that of this machine/ human hybrid. I named the robot SPARC-I, a rough acronym for Self-Portrait Artifact — Roving Chassis, or Sparky for short.

Sparky Works the Room I originally made Sparky to explore the boundaries of the body and how our identities change when filtered through technology, topics that have recently become hot in our age of online profiles and avatars.

Photography by Cody Pickens