I’ve been re-creating Robert Tinney’s Byte magazine paintings as photographs. My latest work is “Intelligent Reflections”.
Byte’s April, 1985 issue had a focus on artificial intelligence – back when we were only a little bit worried it would destroy the world. Mr. Tinney painted a human hand designing a robot claw, while its reflection shows the claw designing a human hand. As I’ve done with several other Byte covers, I re-created Tinney’s vision as if it were real, and as if a photographer had been standing next to Tinney as he painted. To succeed, I needed to build Tinney’s robot claw and violate the laws of physics.
Re-creating the robot claw was made easier by the graph paper that Tinney included in his painting. I used the graph lines to remove the perspective (as much as possible) from the image of the robot. I traced the oddly shaped “fingers” into a CAD program and built out from there.
I sent the whole design out to a CNC and sheet metal cutting shop. It cost hundreds of dollars for this silly little project, but what’s a hobby for, if not spending money?
Most of the assembly is done with rivets. But if you look between the top and bottom layers of the fingers in the painting, there are small plates that really don’t make sense to the design of the claw. There’s nothing holding them there. But they had to be in my model. I had sheet metal pieces cut in the appropriate shape, and just used double-sided tape to hold them in place. Hidden screws and more double-stick tape hold the rest of the hardware together.
They say that looks aren’t everything, but in this case they are. The final assembly didn’t need to be a functional robot; it just needed to look like the painting.
Which brings us to the laws of physics. My original idea was to photograph my hand drawing the robot, then put the robot in front of the mirror, photograph its reflection, and Photoshop it all together. Maybe I’m stupid, but from 1985, when I first saw this cover, until 2026 when I bought a mirror and set up the shot, I didn’t realize it was physically impossible. The mirror is tilted backwards and the camera is only a little bit above it. There’s no way you could see the reflection of the robot hand in the mirror!
Photoshop to the rescue! If fake reflections are good enough for vampire movies, they’re good enough for me.
I pride myself on not using CGI to create my images. But I made a small exception here, with the hand being painted by the robot. I photographed my hand, used Google Gemini to convert the photo to a “painting”, then used a Photoshop filter to add brush marks. I rationalize my moment of weakness this way: the robot painting the hand is, itself, AI. So it’s OK and even authentic for me to have used AI to (partially) generate it.
With all the money and effort I put into making the robot claw, it would be a shame to just throw it out. Fortunately, Mr. Tinney used the same claw eight months later, for the January 1986 Byte cover. Perhaps it will be my next project.
Until then, here’s the final result of Intelligent Reflections. And please check out my other Byte cover re-creations.
