With body-armored riot police poised like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in front of a corporate city called Niketown, the uprising late last year against the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle seemed science-fictional at times. If the Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA) has its way, the future of civil disobedience will be even stranger. This team of artists has already engineered a new form of resistance: robot protesters.

Three disruptive automatons have now been manufactured by the IAA, an anonymous group of artists founded in 1998. The group's Web site declares that it develops technologies for the "emerging market of cultural insurrection." While other researchers fashion robots to work in environments that are physically hazardous to humans, the IAA is building robots to speak out in areas where free speech has been regulated out of existence. The IAA takes technologies that have been developed to serve corporate, institutional and military interests and uses them to challenge and subvert those interests.