A Robot

         I’ll keep it brief today, but I wanted to share a funny color woodcut of a robot by Werner Drewes (Germany/USA, 1899-1985).  I introduced the wood block prints of Drewes previously in two posts, one featuring abstract pieces, and the other featuring figurative pieces.  Drewes is a rare artist who seems equally comfortable with both abstraction and figurative work, but this robot seems to be about halfway in between.  From an art perspective it’s all about shapes and planes of color, but it’s interesting to add in a science fiction perspective.  How many of Drewes’s choices have to do with pure aesthetics, and how many have to do with his imagination about what this robot might be like, how it might function, or what role it might play?  Do those little grey rectangles at the bottom indicate that it walks around on legs, or does the large, low mass of it indicate that it glides around more like R2-D2 or a Dalek?  It certainly has an arm with a hand on one side, and there’s some suggestion of a hand on the other side, as well, but it is not perfectly symmetrical - and why should a robot be symmetrical, anyway?

        Is this robot sentient and intelligent?  Does it speak perfect English in a metallic monotone as so many robots imagined in the mid-20th-century do?  How about all the antennae of various sorts on its head - is it being remotely controlled, or are those sensors by which it navigates its own world, or are they receivers and transmitters by which it communicates?  It doesn’t bother with a humanoid face, so we don’t really know whether it can function as a sentient among humans, or whether it is the sort of robot that deals only with other machines and computers.

        I have not made a block print of a classic robot myself (although I’ve gotten close with a faux block print of cyborg aliens for Periodic Table of Alien Species by Miguel O. Mitchell, and the steampunk creatures in my own book On the Virtues of Beasts of the Realms of Imagination) but this funny piece has me mulling how much fun it might be to design a robot myself.  What kind of robots spark your imagination?  Jetsons-style or Blade Runner-style or Toyota factory-style?  (And you can see a couple more posts with just a little more about SFF robots here and here.)

[Picture: The Robot, color woodcut by Werner Drewes, before 1971 (Image from Smithsonian American Art Museum);

Starbase Sector's End (Gallium), faux woodblock by AEGN, 2021.]