The project investigates mathematics, informatics, statistical analysis and their histories, the history of human engagement with machines, and illustrates some uses of artificial intelligence and robotic technologies as media. It is concerned with, amongst other issues, the sentient and not sentient binaries offered in discourses on machine intelligence. The term intelligence is used to distinguish between human and not human. However, a non-human, the intelligent machine, has become incorporated into the processes by which our culture defines intelligence. Those processes were explored in phases of the project that focused upon various kinds of interactions between people and machines, particularly the ways in which those interactions are mediated by knowledge. The discourses that underpin the field of mechanical intelligence spring from the same sources as the rhetoric that delineates human beings from all other things. We make intelligent machines because we have something to prove regarding our own intelligence. The devices expose attributes considered in our culture to be intelligent. The size and technical sophistication of modern robots result from the expenditure of considerable funds across several disciplines. Such machines signify wealth, power and excess, despite any other significance their makers intend.