Exhalation of steam and music.

A steam powered piano playing robot and its transport that allows a crow to make music by pecking holes in punch cards to feed into the device that the robot then plays. Pencil then digital in Gimp.

Idea inspired by Ted Chiang’s Exhalation short story about sentient beings in an enclosed world who are given life by compressed air moving delicate mechanisms and the pressure is slowly equalising whence their lives will end. One of them (ethically) dismantles himself carefully to understand how he works and has to accept that they are doomed.