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The Senster: A Steel Creature That Listened at the Evoluon, 1970

In 1970 Philips unveiled a 4 meter steel creature in Eindhoven that leaned toward quiet voices and shied away from shouts. Edward Ihnatowicz's Senster is considered the first robotic sculpture controlled by a digital computer.

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In September 1970, visitors to the Evoluon, the Philips science and technology museum in Eindhoven, met something that seemed to notice them. The Senster, by the cybernetic sculptor Edward Ihnatowicz, was a welded steel skeleton about 2.5 meters high at the shoulder and some 4 meters long, with a long neck like a giraffe's, moved by hydraulic rams. In its head, 4 microphones and 2 Doppler radar units sensed sound and motion. Gentle sounds drew the head toward a visitor, loud noises made it pull back, and fast movements made it follow. It is considered the first robotic sculpture controlled by a digital computer.

The brain sat in 2 cabinets nearby: the hydraulics, and a Philips P9201, a rebadged Honeywell DDP 416, a 16 bit machine with 8k of core memory and paper tape for storage. Ihnatowicz wrote the program himself in assembler, and Peter Lundahl, the Evoluon's system administrator, kept refining it after the artist left at the end of 1970. The first version reacted to loud sound, which turned every school visit into a cacophony, so at Philips' request it was retuned to respond to quieter noises and gentler movement. The hall's complicated acoustics and an unpredictable public made its behavior look much more sophisticated than the code. People waved, shouted and threw things at it.

Ihnatowicz (1926 to 1988), born in Poland, reached Britain as a war refugee in 1943 and studied at the Ruskin School in Oxford. His earlier Sound Activated Mobile, SAM, had turned toward voices at Cybernetic Serendipity in London in 1968. Eduardo Kac counts the Senster, alongside Nam June Paik and Shuya Abe's 1964 robot and Tom Shannon's Squat, among the landmarks of robotic art.

Philips dismantled it in 1974, and for years Eindhoven assumed it was gone. In fact the firm that had welded it, Verburg Holland, set the skeleton up outside its office in Zeeland, where it stood in the open air for more than 40 years. In April 2017 AGH University of Science and Technology in KrakĂłw acquired it, and its Re:SENSTER project brought it back to life for the opening of the university's 100th academic year. Listed in the Digital Canon of Dutch digital art, it returned to the Netherlands for REBOOT: Pioneering Digital Art at Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, October 7, 2023 to May 12, 2024.

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