Assembled (ePub)

Did you know that you can transform a cheese grater, a few bits of old cutlery and a handful of nuts and bolts into a household robot brimming with character in no time? Presented like a recipe book, Assembled will inspire you to make your own bots from random flea market finds and some unwanted junk through 23 quirky "robot recipes".

Each of the 23 robots is shown through the transformation of a group of "found objects" into a finished sculpture with accompanying instructions on inspiration, assemblage methods and bonding techniques. The projects are disassembled to their very core to reveal not just the easily identifiable elements used in their creation, such as a tennis racket, thermos, or bicycle frame, but also every screw, bolt, thread, rope or wire used to assemble them. The text accompanying each piece comes from the artists and offers a unique insight into the creation and character of each individual robot. These charming background stories describe the journey from seemingly random, found objects to a finished, named creation, and are followed with precise instructions on how each piece is put together. A list of individual components and tools used completes the "recipes".

The three-dimensional counterpart of collage, as an art form assemblage art traces its origins back to Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Marcel Duchamp who famously attached a bicycle wheel to a stool and called it a readymade. The term assemblages was first used by Jean Dubuffet in the 1950s to describe a series of collages using butterfly wings while the genre of assemblage art was created in 1961 by Peter Selz and William Seitz who co-curated the exhibition The Art of Assemblage at the MoMA in New York.