Welcome to Monkeys and Robots!

I’m Eric Gradman. I’m a roboticist and rapid-prototyping engineer at Applied Minds in Glendale, CA. I’m also CTO of Virsix, which is taking a radical new approach to out-of-home interactive entertainment. I’m also a co-founder of Syyn Labs, a Los Angeles group of professional artists and tinkerers.

As a roboticist, my art is strongly influenced by the tools and techniques I use every day in robotics like computer vision and environmental modelling.

As a former web service expert and semantic web evangelist at Yahoo, I’m also influenced by the remarkable way in which networks affect our behavior… this theme of interconnectedness appears in my work.

I make art that encourages people to play and interact together.

Where art, theater, and games intersect the Internet, there lies a vast new entertainment landscape known as transmedia. With Virsix, we’re trying to capture some of this change to revolutionize the way people go out and play. But I’m a technologist who always loves to work with storytellers; if you’re trying to tell an interesting story using a mixed bag of technologies, let me know!

I’ve built robots, virtual reality systems, gestural interfaces, wearable computers, sensors, semantic web databases, scalable communication frameworks, electronic prototypes, rapid-prototyped plastic parts…

Do you have a hard engineering or design problem that needs solving? Need a speaker on augmented reality, interactive art, robotics, or misusing web platforms? Do you have an event that would benefit from one of my art installations? Drop me a line, or find me on Twitter, or Facebook!