Senster (Edward Ihnatowicz, 1970)

The Senster was a hydraulic sculpture by Edward Ihnatowicz, over four metres long, that stood in the Evoluon in Eindhoven, the permanent showplace of the electronics company Philips, from 1970 to 1974. It turned toward the sounds people made and shied away from sudden movements and loud noises. It was controlled by a computer; the account on senster.com calls it, "as far as I know", the first robotic sculpture that was.¹

The artist

Ihnatowicz was born in Poland in 1926, came to Britain in 1943 and studied at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford. He made furniture and sculpture before he turned to moving machines.² His first, SAM (Sound Activated Mobile), was shown in Cybernetic Serendipity in London in 1968: a column of cast aluminium vertebrae with four microphones on top, which leaned and twisted toward a quiet, steady sound.³ Philips then commissioned something much larger.¹

The machine

The Senster was welded from steel tubing by a technician at University College London, working from Ihnatowicz's rough sketches; there were no proper engineering drawings. It went to Eindhoven in July 1970.^1, 4 Hydraulic pistons moved its joints.

It had two kinds of senses, both on its head:^1, 5

• Microphones, which picked out the direction of the predominant sound. The head turned toward it first; if the sound went on, the rest of the body followed.
• Two Doppler radar units, which detected people moving toward it or away from it.

A Philips P9201 computer, with 8K of core memory and a punched paper tape unit, read the sensors and drove the pistons. Ihnatowicz wrote its program himself.⁶

Behaviour, not looks

The rules were fairly simple: go toward a sound, retreat from a shock. The hall's echoes and the unpredictable public made the movements look far more sophisticated than they were, and the account on senster.com concludes that the effect on visitors came from that behaviour, not from the Senster's appearance.¹ Art in which simple rules, not a fixed form, produce what is seen is the subject of JAEV's Generative Art.

Afterwards

The Senster was dismantled in 1974. Its electronics were given away; the steel structure went to an engineering company, which set it up outdoors beside its building.⁷ In April 2017 the AGH University of Krakow bought it, and from 4 October 2018 the restored sculpture could be seen in Kraków. It now responds only to sound.⁸ Ihnatowicz worked as a research assistant in mechanical engineering at University College London from 1971 and died in 1988.²