Kinetic sculpture composed of hammers and light bulbs invites the viewer to contemplate this delicate balance of complex fragility.

As 2018 comes to a close, we take a moment to look back at the outstanding work done this year. From spectacular machines, intricate tools and mesmerising performances and installations to the new mediums for artistic enquiry – so many great new projects have been added to the CAN archive! With your help we selected some favourites.

Created by Jessica In, Machinic Doodles is a live, interactive drawing installation that facilitates collaboration between a human and a robot named NORAA – a machine that is learning how to draw. The work explores how we communicate ideas through the strokes of a drawing, and how might a machine also be taught to draw through learning, instead of via explicit instruction

Created bu Jonghong Park  at the University of the Arts Bremen (Digital Media Program), the installation ‘bit’ represents a natural random process based on the principle of a Markov chain. 

Created by Madeline Gannon for the 2018 Annual Meeting of New Champions at the The World Economic Forum, in Tianjin, China, Manus is a set of ten industrial robots that are programmed to behave like a pack of animals.

Created by Random International, Zoological is a flock of autonomous, flying spheres that move collectively. Algorithmically driven, the spheres react to their surroundings and, sometimes, to people within their environment. 

Created by Luiz Zanotello, Habitat of Recognition explores the material dimensions of digital technologies by examining the intra-active tensions between the distinction and convergence of matter.

Created by Matthieu Cherubini, Ethical Autonomous Vehicles project explores the implications of near-future scenario where most vehicles on the road are autonomous.

Created by Joey Lee (US), Benedikt Groß (DE), and Raphael Reimann (DE) from the moovel Lab, in collaboration with MESO Digital Interiors (DE), Who Wants to be a Self-Driving Car? is a data driven trust exercise that uses augmented reality to help people empathise with self-driving vehicle systems. The team built an unconventional driving machine that lets people use real-time, three-dimensional mapping and object recognition displayed in a virtual reality headset to navigate through space.

Hatched at the Human Computer Interaction Lab at the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) in Potsdam, Germany, “Ad Infinitum” is a “parasitical” machine that, quite literally, lives off of human-generated energy.

Created by Juliane Götz and Sebastian Neitsch of Quadrature and currently on view within the Ars Electronica exhibition at the DRIVE Volkswagen Group Forum in Berlin, “Positions of the Unknown” is an installation of 52 custom-made mini machines that, ever so slowly, track unidentified objects (possibly classified satellites) in Earth’s orbit.

“Reflective Sculptures: A Critique of Binary Beliefs” is a pair of kinetic sculptures by the Ontario-based artists St Marie φ Walker. Produced as part of their MFA show, the motorized devices sit halfway between poems and machines.

Created by Berlin based Ralf Baecker, Random Access Memory is a fully functional digital memory. Instead of operating on semi-conducting components to represent either the binary states of 0 (zero) or 1 (one), the memory uses grains of sand as storage material.

Created by Hansje van Halem, an independent graphic designer based in Amsterdam (NL). the following video and images are the latest in the series of experiments that explore tension between a systematic approach, legibility, and (ir)regularity in typography.

Created by Juncheng Chen, Siyuan Jing and Lydia Zhou at the Bartlett School of Architecture (Interactive Architecture Lab), this project explores possibilities in mobile structures by investigating various strategies for locomotion.

Created by Ann-Katrin Krenz, Parasitic / Symbiotic project explores the artificiality of nature, and whether a moderate and thoughtful technical interventions in nature can create something aesthetically valuable and permanent.

Created by Jasna Dimitrovska as a part of her Digital Media – HfK Bremen, Master Theses, Three Machines on Transparency is comprised of three machines that by own demonstration allow the artist to synthesise philosophical concepts of different forms+ideas of transparency into the corporeality.

Created by João Costa, Adeus is a sound installation that explores concepts arising from the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, where the perfectly designed musical system eventually falls out of sync, mirroring the flaws and entropy inherent to human nature.

Created by Danilo Sampaio and William Victor Camilleri at the The Interactive Architecture Lab at UCL/London, Hortum Machina, B is a half garden, half machine, cybernetic lifeform that explores new forms of bio-cooperative interaction between people and nature, within the built environment.

Created and performed by Yingjie Bei, Phantom Power is an exoskeleton analog synthesizer. Built as a man/machine interface instrument, the device is performed with hand gestures / screwdrivers by manipulating the circuit.

Created by Quadrature, Kartograph is a drawing machine that updates old maps by drawing new geographic data over the infrastructure of old times using the internet.

Created by Felix Ros, Stewart is a hypothetical tactile interface designed for a fully autonomous car with objective to accommodate a healthy relation between man and machine.

Created by Martin Hertig at ECAL, Sensible Data is a playful installation consisting of three machines that collect user’s personal data, evaluates mood, age, gender and beauty, to create a ‘passport’ that user can take away but which also randomly sent (without user’s knowledge) to another participant.

Mattia Casalegno (multifaceted Italian artist based in Los Angeles, 1981) takes inspiration from disciplines such as anthropology, biology, ecology, and neurosciences, deploying a vast array of technologies and expressive forms, with a natural inclination for new media languages.

Created by Berlin based studio Quadrature, Satelliten is a custom build machine that brings the invisible movement of passing satellites in lower orbit to a tangible medium and scale.

Created by Oslo based computational design studio Void, Irregular Polyhedron Study #1 is a physical representation of the basic components of computer graphics; the vertex and the edge and explores the perceptual gap between the flat and the spacious, the analogue and the digital.

Created by Francesco Tacchini, SPOOK-I is a hypothetical but operative US National Security Agency inspired machine. It mimics two surveillance techniques available to the NSA Tailored Access Operations unit, in order to expose the technology employed by state surveillance for the ‘weaponization of everyday’.

The Petroglyphomat is a a mobile, computer operated milling machine, that can send messages to a distant future by engraving them into ancient monuments.

Created by David Colombini at ECAL, Attachment is a poetic machine that allows you to send messages, images, or videos into the air using a biodegradable balloon with intention to rediscover expectation, random and the unexpected uncommon with the current forms of communication.

Created by Adam Ben-Dror, The Abovemarine is a vehicle that enables José, or any other fish to roam on the land freely