Michael Sullivan delves into his fascination with assembling robots in various sexual formations in his film project The Sex Life of Robots. He happens to build his procreating forms in a studio close by Manhattan’s Museum of Sex, where his risqué robot sculptures are now on temporary display. Aside from his current stop-motion epic, Sullivan also works as an art director of porn films.

More Sex Life of Robot pics

¨¨Q: How did you develop The Sex Life of Robots?
A: It’s actually not a film yet, might be years before it’s a full film. It’s what we call a teaser – a short that was originally made to show at the sex museum. I live right down the block from them and they were interested in me doing a project for them, and it’s sitting there, a robot porno movie theatre. I first imagined it as a sort of robot war movie, WWI and robots, as that was around the era robots became more popular. I don’t actually know the chronology of it. I think there was a play called R.U.R. from the ’20s.

¨¨Q: It’s interesting how your installation focuses on a robot baby. And you have this baby and his mom scanning the computer for robot porn?
¨¨A: Yeah, cause these robots have sex so much, they have lots of babies. That one photograph started a thing that it’s about a robot baby and his mom, but it’s actually about a robot baby alone in his room and on his computer, searching the robot porn web to see the mysteries of porn. It’s been on the Internet, because of that, they had a picture that seemed like a robot in his mother’s arms, which does happen but the stills are actually a little different from the movie – generally I shoot them afterwards. This is the kind of robot movie where there aren’t any star robots, everybody’s just a serial number. The idea about being in a culture of robots, it’s more concerned with serial numbers and circuitry then personality.

¨¨Q: Have you seen any films involving robot or machine sexuality?
¨¨A: I haven’t. Maybe there’s a scene of a robot having sex in a Woody Allen movie. I haven’t seen them all so I’m not sure, but I wonder if in Sleeper they maybe approach that a bit, a future world that has Orgasmatron booths to replace sex.

¨There aren’t many sex films about robots. The way it’s come down to us is there aren’t many female robots. Fritz Lang’s is the big exception to the rule. Robots are usually a kind of dumb bad guy in movies. You know, people often think robots are stiff – a good graphic, which may not necessarily be so.

¨¨Q: I heard you have art-directed some porn films. How has that influenced the robot sex in your film?
¨¨A: The sex in porn films actually isn’t all that sexy and robot sex isn’t all that sexy either. Well, it looks like the graphic of when a male robot fucks a female robot – it’s like seven frames in and 10 frames out is the rhythm of porking a robot.

¨¨Q: It’s interesting you’ve assembled a set that structurally features a sensual goddess-type figure. What do you think of Deborah Harry and the use of her face?¨
¨A: It’s from about 1975 or something, from the very beginnings of Blondie. Actually, I was making a big-headed robot and I was thinking about, “What head?” And I had a head of Debbie that was made for a magazine cover back in the day. It was lying around and it was a glamorous-looking head. So that became the robot head, like 20 or 30 years after it was a moulage casting. Once I did a cover with Debbie as a chocolate Easter Bunny. She was unsure what time she could make it so we thought, “Worst comes to worse, we’ll use the moulage mask.” But then it turned out she could make and we didn’t need it. She used to be my neighbour. She still is actually in Clinton (I think is the official name of this neighbourhood), which has gone way upscale since I moved here. I plan to work it in more. I have that model on my shelf. I’m working on robot railroad stuff with a bunch of old steam engines. And you know, the thing about trains and tunnels is like going to a robot graphic with the train going in and out of the tunnel.

¨¨Q: What sort of doll forms are you using to make your sexual figures?
¨¨A: Anything that, you know – they’re mostly toys, fashion dolls and stuff. There’s a lot of different figures and it depends on the kind you think would animate best, that’s not too floppy. They need to get stiffened up. You can only stiffen up knees and elbows and the waist, hips, uh – the dicey parts of toy dolls. Things that in an animation armature would be much more adjustable. The main thing is that it stays where you put it – dolls are a little floppier than that. It actually doesn’t have a lot of complicated things to do, it sorta doesn’t matter.

¨¨There’s a kind of doll that probably started out as a kind of soldier doll – they use the same armature as an artist’s model, poseable human doll that you can get in an art store for $20. That’s actually the one that’s most articulated and kind of stays where you put it. I don’t know the name of it. I’ve seen them in art stores and I’ve gotten a few of them in flea markets. Now they hardly have any that are appropriate – the moveable good ones are fewer and far between in New York. It turns out, my sister Lisa works at a Goodwill place in Salt Lake City. Part of her job is checking out all the other Goodwill stores for inventory and pricing and stuff like that. In her travels, lots of fashion dolls and G.I. Joes and stuff like that show up as abandoned toys.

¨¨Q: When working with dolls that have set expressions, how have you sculpted them to work in your film?
¨¨A: I have a hand-held belt sander and the first step is carving away the doll, what it is, into more of a robot form where the legs are bent out and the chest detail is gone. They’re all different and they kinda come to a squarish form from the front. But it depends if it’s polystyrene or some kind of rubbery plastic. They’ll get a treatment according to the material they’re made out of. Mostly 99 per cent of it is just me, working on a couple hundred individual robots. I just sit here and do it most of the time. So after a while, you just accumulate a crowd and they’re all different, so each one takes its own figuring out to make it like an armature for animation.

¨¨Q: What was it like creating this group and putting them into a sort of industrial space – the sexual motion?
¨¨A: It developed really slowly. First I thought of them as robot soldiers in a movie where everybody gets blown up. As it turned out, that was rather ambitious – I mean, for me shooting it in my house, so the robot sex thing seemed much simpler and more doable and funnier.

¨¨Q: Do you think it’s funny?
¨¨A: Well, it’s just kind of droll, not like we have structured jokes. There’s no story, except it’s a baby robot surfing the web, which is kind of here and there – way weird variety of stuff.

¨¨Q: Stuff that includes bodies and machines. How do see that?
¨¨A: It’s just my way. And hopefully I get a feature and more silly robot movies in the future. I want to do an all-robot western. And as part of this one, I want to do the inmates of the bad robot asylum theatrical club. So the robots and the robot nuthouse are putting on a show. And the robot engineers in the basement are blacksmithing together a robot stud horse, and they have a parade up to robot Catherine the Great’s bedroom. Mechanical mayhem.

¨¨Q: So what do you think of the sex in the film?
¨¨A: Because it actually isn’t all that glamorous, I almost imagine it in the vein of Eraserhead, where sex isn’t warm, soft and squishy sex – cause it’s all steel and alloys and stuff. Like Eraserhead, it’s mechanization and it’s an unappealing vision of sex. There’s very few anti-sex movies (Eraserhead being one of them) about people attracted to each other and they have a baby and it’s a horrible thing that plagues their life for the whole movie.

¨¨Q: Do you think if we ever have a sex life of robots, it’ll look pretty dark?
¨¨A: Well, yeah, probably will. But they already have sex dolls and it’s not a grand leap to animate them a little bit, you know, mechanically. So eventually that will happen if it hasn’t already. Some people seem really happy with inflatable dolls and stuff. It’s like it’ll be like another kind of inflatable doll with some built-in movement, that’ll probably be what happens first. Making life-size robots is really expensive. The guys with the inflatable dolls could go find their hookers for cheaper money.

¨¨Q: You said you wanted to create more around the robot film.
¨¨A: Right now I’m making another robot locomotive. The first one was so much fun I thought I’d make another one. And I’ll make tracks. So big robot steam vehicles. The bells and whistles and headlights, all the little decor. It’s 1/6th scale so it’ll fit the regular sex robots.

¨¨Q: You seem to be very interested in dolls and what they can do.
¨¨A: It’s like a very elaborate version of what kids do. Only they maybe don’t have the model-making skills yet to take it to a bizarre place. They’re thinking about it, cause dolls elicit all those thoughts.

¨¨Q: You said you’ve art-directed porn films. What can that involve?
¨¨A: Well, day-to-day, just model-making. Just like any other film set. A porn film that I worked on in Hollywood was a movie about a girl becoming a porn star in a biblical epic. The fun part of that was art-directing biblical-like Philistines and Jews. And I got to make a lot of metal helmets with dicks on them and stuff like that. Peter Brantley did big giant paintings of pagan temples.

¨¨I did another one called Gums. I made a swimming pool full of big giant dicks, looking like the flora and fauna of some mermaid. I also played a part of some kind of party kid in a yeoman outfit captured and brought to Brother Theodore, the Reich’s Marshal of the Seine. We had an argument on a boat in Florida and he threw me overboard. And I had to get back and work on penises for the pool. I was in Florida one day, only to get thrown off a boat. I didn’t get to see the place. They were out at sea the whole time. It was dark by the time they hauled us back in and I got on a plane again.

¨¨Q: So porn can involve the making the making of things beyond the bodies?
¨¨A: Occasionally I’ve made some dead bodies or something. We did an autopsy scene once in a movie called Original Thirteen. And it’s a combination between a mannequin – and they picked an actor to be the corpse, and his head happened to fit the mannequin, so it wasn’t a full-body casting.
¨¨Last year I worked on a movie, I think it’s called Prevention Ink. Sam Elliot, I think, was editing it. It’s a suicide-hotline sort of droll comedy. An art-deco nuclear-powered suicide hotline, which looks like some complex, like the foyer of the Chrysler building. Below the walkway of floors, there’s a machine room, like a factory of Edwardian steam engines, boilers and pumps. So my model-making job was to make the old machines that go in to the basement.

¨¨Q: When people think of porn, they don’t often think of the other work that goes into its design.
¨¨A: Usually, it’s mostly the basics and it’s whatever you can do at the time. I haven’t seen any porn movies in a while. People tell me about the fancy ones. It’s usually a thing that you can shoot in a couple of days with x amount of money and done on video, not on film and with overall soft lighting. Some of the people that shoot these must be like kinda girlie photographers – they have that Playboy, Penthouse look. But a lot of people are just, you know, the lighting is minimal. It’s kinda like wedding-cake art direction.

¨¨Q: Do you see The Sex Life of Robots as a kind of porn film?
¨¨A: I don’t see it fitting into that genre. It’s sort of a movie without a genre. It’d be one of the few of its kind. It’s not the kind of thing – it’s bound to be notorious way down the line. Do they even have porno theatres anymore?

¨¨Q: Oh, very few.
¨¨A: And they actually watch film projected or probably video projected.

¨¨Q: Toronto only has one.
¨¨A: Most people would want to take a video home over going to a theatre. But there’s still the Pee-wee Herman types that want to go to the theatre.
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Louise Bak is a poet, with books including Tulpa and Gingko Kitchen. She co-hosts Sex City, Toronto’s only radio show focused on relations between sexuality and culture (CIUT 89.5 FM). Her performance work has appeared in numerous spaces and in video collaborations such as Partial Selves and Crimes of the Heart.¨¨¨¨¨¨