This Robot 3D-Prints the Apocalypse While You Watch from a Hot Tub

On the most literal level, Jonathan Schipper's Salt Machine is a 3D-printer that automatically and continuously builds tiny structures out of a few tons of salt in a Brooklyn art gallery. In the abstract, it's a lot weirder than that. First off, spectators watch the salty act of robotic creation from "the comfort of a hot water tub." And as they observe those tiny saline structures go up, skin pruning in the hot moisture, they're also watching other ones come down. Call it a perpetual apocalypse machine.

"Things we make are not permanent and forces beyond our control are constantly making simple the complex objects we devote ourselves to," the artist writes of his work. "This piece will be a reflection of that process abstracted and combined with processes of geology. Things will appear that look like things we recognize but due to the fragility of the salt crystals used to make the piece things will be deteriorating at the same rate they are built."

The resultant landscape certainly looks post-apocalyptic; the robot arm moves over the shawdowy fallout desert with WALL-E-like fatalism. But instead of compacting the trash, this robot (call him the anti-WALL-E) is creating it. All while you're sitting in a hot tub on site, I guess. Here's how it will work, according to Schipper:

"There will be a mechanism that will be suspended by four cables. By varying the length of the four cables the mechanism will be able to move to most locations within the room. The mechanism will have the ability to extrude crude representations of average objects from salt," he explains. "These objects will be things like old chairs, toilets, tires, washing machines and many other human specific objects we take for granted as part of our world."

So let me put on my ten gallon liberal arts hat here for a second: This 3D-printing robot is god of this small world, then, just as cruel and tireless as those of myth, or maybe machines are our gods now, our machines, and we frantically use them to build up the world around them, looking on from skin-tingling comfort if we're lucky, as the inevitable decay consumes work not long ago finished.

It is, as Schipper describes, the ultimate depiction of an "artificial continuously changing environment based on trash, salt, human will and hot water bathing."