Cabaret Mechanical Theatre
Cabaret Mechanical Theatre is a UK based exhibition and virtual museum of automata, or mechanical sculpture.
There are some amazing pieces on this site, some in the form of Quicktime movies, which you can enjoy, as well as wooden kits you can buy. Their designing kit looks particularly cool — it contains a variety of blocks, dowels and cams. It’s the wooden automata equivalent of a bucket of Legos.
The current virtual exhibition features the work of Carlos Zapata, which is fun to watch – I especially like the automaton of a baby dripping ice-cream on his dad.
I found out about CMT by reading Rodney Peppe’s Automata and Mechanical Toys, one of several books on the interrelated subjects of automata, machines, horology and carpentry that I am currently plowing through.
