Aaron Voigt is a cat with a penchant for the past — specifically the 1950s. He occasionally styles his black hair into a pompadour worthy of Buddy Holly himself and bombs around on a vintage beach cruiser, and his workshop is adorned with tiki heads and filled with the distortion-filled strains of surf rock. Voigt's fondness for the Eisenhower era also is illustrated in the retro-futuristic look of his handmade robot creations, which resemble the snazzy Space Age automatons seen in sci-fi flicks of that period, right down to the myriad dials, gears, and colorful bulbs adorning box-like chests and heads. Many of the Mesa artist's works are rectangular in nature, owing to the fact that Voigt usually fashions each robot's body from square-shaped steel tubing. After welding the pieces together, he adds various voltmeters, springs, knobs from vintage appliances, and discarded antiques to give each 'bot its own personality. "I'm also trying to mimic the old tin toys of the 1950s," Voigt says. "So if I can find something that just looks right and mount it so it looks believable as a robot component, or it adds to the robot look, I'll use it." He often spends entire days in his workshop cranking out dozens of pieces, which has led to a cramped and cluttered situation where a few of his own creations, which can get fairly heavy, have fallen off shelves and conked him on the foot. So much for Isaac Asimov's law about robots being verboten from causing harm to humans.