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Academy-Award-winning animator (and political cartoonist) Bruce Petty takes a satirical look at the 'contraptions' that shape our lives. Education, sex, finance, globalism, art, media, medicine, law, government and even the brain are all transformed into evolving machines in this incisive and frequently hilarious series of films. Combining high-energy, free-form illustrations with photographs, paintings and other snippets of the 'real' world, Petty takes us on an anarchic journey through history as each apparatus builds to its complex contemporary form. We are encouraged to question and laugh at the haphazard and often faulty mechanisms that drive these machines and, in turn, our lives. Witty, provocative and entertaining, the series reveals these contraptions to be constructions of a very human kind— imperfect, unpredictable and always subject to change.