The Wooden Car

A robotics laboratory of a university in Edinburgh on a May evening, pale blue northern dusk at the window, walls of brown perforated hardboard, a black table with a white edge, hanging above it from an overhead frame of perforated steel angle a triangular aluminium plate with two round motors at its upper corners, smooth and blank, below it two parallelogram arms of flat aluminium strip converging into a two-jawed gripper, the gripper holding a pale wooden axle above a half-assembled wooden toy car, to the left on a boom a plain black camera box with a silver frame, a hand in a grey wool sleeve at the table edge.