 Well, we ran into Mark Satracian at the Engadget Live event here, and he's talking about here the art of robotics, and he's got some really awesome looking scary sort of robots holding up globes in front of us. How are you doing tonight, Mark? I'm good, Allison. Thanks. Thanks. Yeah, it is a little scary. It kind of looks like James Bond villain lobby art is what people sometimes say about it. Oh, there you go. So you said you started out at UCLA, so woohoo, go Bruins, but you ended up working for ILM and then converted? I did. My career began as a monster maker making creatures for the film industry, and that was quite a long time ago. And in that time, I've basically started to do more and more robotics. And now I've come all the way around, and now I'm making robotic art pieces. These are things that I've made really for fun. Oh, oh, okay. So no actual practical use, it's just mesmerizing. That's right. They are mesmerizing. And I think there's actually a practical use to having something soothing in your home. The story with this robot in particular is that a few years ago, a friend of mine that I worked with in the film industry named Chet Tsar, who's an artist also, started curating a show, an art show in Santa Monica that is the art of the artists and technicians that work in film. So we all do art. We create things for the movie industry, but we also have our own artistic outlets. And Chet brought a huge group of people together. And he invited me to make an art piece. And in my case, that means a robot of some kind. Okay, so now I get in big arguments with people about whether there should be an A in STEM, you know, the science, technology, engineering, and math. You're not saying it right. No, no, no. You can't convince me. No art. No art. It's all math and science. Really? Yeah, there's art in there. Look, without science and technology, without art, science and technology is... Boring. Well, here's the thing about these machines. Well, let's talk about this one in particular. Let me describe it real quick, because this is audio and video. So we're looking at a... Well, in this case, it's a hand. It's very specifically, it's a hand. It's got four fingers and a thumb. And it is holding a globe of the earth. But the four fingers are, and the thumb are spiked like scary monster fingers. Yeah, that's just something I can make. It looks like carbon fiber. Actually it's all 3D printed. Oh, 3D printed. Oh, wow. Okay. And the fingers are holding a globe of the earth, and they're actually turning the sphere. Oh, I didn't even notice that. They are. And so the globe is rotating. So the thing that I did not know when I started this project was I did not know how to do the inverse kinematics to basically manipulate a spherical object. I'd never done that before. But I thought that I could figure it out. So... It's just math, right? Well, it's right. It's just math. But the thing about this is that I'm building an art piece, but I've given myself a really good reason to learn some new math, well, new for me anyway. But in the context of art. That is really, really cool. So if people wanted to see this, where would be the right place to go? Well, the next time it's going to appear is going to be at an art show in Santa Monica called Conjoined. Yeah. It gets up to Conjoined 6 now. And these pieces are going to be on display at that event, and they'll actually be for sale. Oh, wow. So if you... And there's only one of each of these in existence in the world. I think of them still, at the moment, still as works in progress. I'm working on the software. I'm working on really giving them a lot of nuance, a lot of personality. You know, I'm not actually a big art person because I only have a left brain, because I'm an engineer. But these are absolutely mesmerizing, but these are absolutely mesmerizing. Do you have a website? I don't, but I have a YouTube channel. So just youtube.com, user M-Satrachian, and you'll find my videos. If you search my name, Mark Satrachian, you'll find a whole lot of weird stuff that you can look at. This sounds like our kind of stuff. I will spell it for the audience in the show notes. Thank you very much, Mark. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you too, Allison.