"The Gamelatron has conceived of a project - pending funding - to transpose humans playing music to robotic counterparts." So goes the expanding mission of Brooklyn-based A. Taylor Kuffner and his robotic creation: a portmanteau, if you will, of "gamelan" (the traditional Balinese and Javanese ensembles: drums, gongs, xylophones) and "tron" (meaning, you know, robot). Kuffner - also known  as Zemi17 - collaborated with the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots (also based in Brooklyn, go figure) to create the Gamelatron, which has 100-year-old components ... controlled by robots.

Kuffner, er, Zemi, has hauled his Gamelatron and its control center, i.e. his laptop, to various performance venues this summer, including Galapagos in Brooklyn, the Chelsea Art Museum and, tonight, to the World Financial Center (opening for composer/producer Karsh Kale).

I confess my imagination had an instant field day with that quotation from Kuffner - until I read Kuffner's clarification to Reuters, "Some people get excited when they hear robot they think it's going to be R2-D2 or C3-PO behind the Gamelan with 800 arms."

Um... yeah. But Gamelatron evokes more the ghostly (for me) player piano than Wall-E on the bass: robots don't play instruments; the robots are the instruments. The apparitional quality repackages the traditional ritual music into an art exhibit. Gamelatron also replicates playing behaviors of actual Indonesian gamelans, with whom Kuffner performed in Yogyakarta and Bali for two years.

Watch the video of Gamelatron at Galapagos - but before we go I need to recount Kuffner's wacky, mind-bending "legend" of Gamelatron's origins and "societal context": In the future, when we're all cyborgs (natch), humans will discover the relics of gamelan instruments amidst some ruins and actually create Gamelatron to mimic sounds of the past... yet Kuffner has made Gamelatron in the present. ... Know what else is in store for us?

And that's not even the extended version!