RAW FEED Sullivan's automatons grind their gears for a captivated audience.

Photo: Michael Sullivan

Michael Sullivan didn’t set out to make robot porn. Like everything else in his five decades in the arts, he just sort of fell into it. He’s been a sculptor, cinematographer, special-effects guru, puppeteer, photographer and actor. His name pops up in the credits for Robert Downey Sr.’s 1972 cult Western Greaser’s Palace (where he plays Lazarus to Allan Arbus’s hippie Jesus), as well as the roach-infested rom-com Joe’s Apartment (he designed the bugs’ armature). Sullivan’s latest project, “The Sex Life of Robots,” is a disturbing animated short that marries the preciousness of the Brothers Quay with the raunchiness of Al Goldstein. Segments of the film—still a work-in-progress according to its director—are now on view inside a miniature robot-porno house at the Museum of Sex. (A making-of documentary produced by Britain’s disinfoTV runs in the main screening room). We spoke with Sullivan by phone from his Flatiron apartment, where he’s spent the past five years perfecting his no-orifice-barred opus.

How did the robot-porn concept come together?I wanted to try my own animation and I figured as a first-timer it’d be easier to animate robots, ’cause they’re clunky anyway. I’d written a script and was testing a few things out when somebody made a joke, like, “What if we have this robot fuck a horse?” So we did. Drilling a hole in the horse’s butt was easy; so was animating the sex. It’s just pumping—seven frames in, nine frames out. It turned into a sex movie in one day.

If it was so easy, why did it take five years to finish a ten-minute short?Well, I’m always adding more footage. And the shots are time-consuming. It can take a month of shooting for one minute of robot sex. You can only get one or two scenes a day.

The robots look like C-3PO figures left out in the rain. Where did you find them?I used steel robots at first, but they’re just not sexy. I wanted something more lifelike, so I got old action figures and dolls at flea markets and reshaped them with a belt sander and Propoxy putty. Then came the details, like plastic-bead eyes and neoprene dicks.

Is there a story line?All these pregnant robots go to the factory to deliver their babies. The defective ones get yanked out of the mothers and tossed into the garbage, but some of them don’t die. So there’s this growing army of bad babies. The film revolves around one of them, who starts surfing the Internet for robot porn. I couldn’t really think of a plot beyond that.

Is this your first foray into the world of adult films?I have art-directed some porn. I did It Happened in Hollywood, this biblical porno from the 1970s that took place on the set of a Samson and Delilah movie—I think Liz Torres was in it. As for robots, I worked on the Transformers cartoon in the 1980s. But they were a pretty staid company, so we toed the line. Transformers don’t really do anything dirty.

Unless Michael Bay is directing, of course. Who make better porn stars: robots or humans?There’s no comparison. Robots are crude bastards—fucking is like a mechanical imperative for them. They look for anything with a hole. If there really was a robot-porn theater, they’d show an hour-and-a-half of a screw going into a bolt—that would do it for them. Robots have been known to fuck a box of doughnuts if there’s one laying around.

Sounds like a great idea for a sequel.Well, the next one’s going to be “Robot Ranch.” Robobestiality is turning into something of a theme for me. I grew up on a ranch in Montana—my little redneck cousins never actually admitted to fucking animals, but they alluded to it. I have one set piece already made: this cow that shoots milk when you crank its tail.

“The Sex Life of Robots” screens at the Museum of Sex through April 2008. See Museums.