Dreams of Electric Penguins

By: Matthew Battles
May 10, 2010

Festo is a German engineering company specializing in pneumatic and electric actuators. But the company has a research division that takes a unique, biologically-inspired approach to robotics. Festo’s robots include aerial cyborg manta rays, jellyfish — and these mirrored air penguins, which seem born from the fever dreams of the Sphenisciform species.

With a name that evokes the Faust legend and a full kit of comic-book technology, Festo seems like a spawning ground for evil geniuses. I’ll say this much: an invasion force of air penguins makes for a strange and beautiful apocalypse.

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cyborg, Festo, penguins, robots

See All Posts by Matthew Battles

Part of the founding HILOBROW crew, Matthew Battles is a maker and thinker whose work merges literary, scholarly, and artistic forms of inquiry. His writing on the cultural dimensions of science and technology has appeared in such venues as The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, and Orion. His most recent book,Tree, was published in Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series in 2017. After ten years exploring the dark abundance of libraries and museums with metaLAB (at) Harvard, Matthew now edits Arnoldia: the Nature of Trees, the magazine of the Arnold Arboretum.

Dreams of Electric Penguins

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