Felix Thorn makes robotic instruments. By assembling music-making components like chimes and drums, he generates long, mechanical songs that are both beautiful to listen to and mesmerizing to watch.

The ethereal tunes that radiate from these practical objects make for an engaging paradox, inviting the viewer to ponder the connection between the utilitarian and the magical.

Artist Chris Burden completed Metropolis II in 2011 after four years of work on the mechanical sculpture, which features a dizzying array of over a thousand tiny cars zooming around an intricate 18-road track

in perpetual motion. According to Burden, who passed away in 2015, "[T]he noise and level of activity are both mesmerizing and anxiety provoking.... [and] produce in the viewer the stress of living

in a dynamic, active and bustling 21st century city." Until 2021, the machine can be viewed at LACMA in Los Angeles, an appropriate homage to the traffic nightmare that is L.A. After that, it will

return home to live with a private collector, who paid "millions" for the device.

Japanese artist Momoyo Torimitsu created the Crawling Salaryman (Miyata Jiro) way back in the stone age of 1994. At the time, she attended it on the streets, dressed as a nurse, to change its battery

pack and help it stay free of obstacles. Since then, she has traveled all around the world, creating more installations built around Crawling Salaryman in various provocative settings, sometimes with

other robots for friends. Torimitsu remains fascinated with the mechanical and repetitive work ethic alive and well in her home nation, encouraging viewers of her creations to step outside their own

routines and see them more critically.

Artist Jack Pavlik is interested in the contradictions of machine art. Neither fully organic nor fully inert, the machines take on a life from the restrictions of their materials as they

move through space. In Jack's own words: "...I have been combining flexible and rigid materials, materials that merge a biomorphic, surreal pattern of black shapes and lines, with geometric metal frames

and structures that work at the same time to move, and contain the active forms of the piece, creating what I hope is a humorous, surreal form of sculpture." The piece

achieves a kind of wondrous, liquid motion from what we typically regard as simple, static materials. As a result, it also does, at times, seem almost divinely silly.

Pushing the limits of technology all the way to the provocative edge, Theo Jansen claims his sculptures should be considered a new form of life. Moving on their own between the

push of the wind and the pressure of waves, Jansen's machines do, indeed, seem like roving, mysterious creatures. More than just connecting the artistic process with incredibly intricate engineering, Jansen asks

us to engage questions about whether and how a living system might be fundamentally a product of its environment.

This one qualifies as a bonus since at the end of the day it's a commercial for a computer company, not a museum exhibition. Still, one can easily see the promise

of this approach for future artists. Perhaps someday soon, these twinkling, flying lights will spread more widely than their explosive ancestors, illuminating the night sky with designs, and, let's face it, more

commercials, that are limited only by our imagination.