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Karl Lautman was born in Los Angeles, California, and studied economics at Stanford University.
Motivated by a fascination with the tension between what one expects a machine to do and what the machine ‘wants’ to do, Lautman designs machines whose actions are inconsistent and seemingly unexpected to human perception.
Whether built to calculate prime numbers on electromechanical counters or to generate organized sequences of clicks on a relay, his machines are at once familiar and surprising.
‘The power and ubiquity of technology has bred complacency among those who use it regularly’ says Lautman. ‘Yet the capacity of machines to misbehave is endless.
His work has been exhibited across California and he has been commissioned by clients including the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Pennsylvania.
