If you're still looking, you ought to check out Dorkbot (tagline: "people doing strange things with electricity"), which is a sort of geekery+artistry organization. It has meetings all over the world, including Seattle; check out dorkbot.org. Performance artist who wants to use robots would be right down their alley.

There's also a long-established robotics club in Seattle, the Seattle Robotics Society, which is more specifically about robotics.

Ive seen some extra-cool internet video of a serial port controlled pair of stepper-motors as winches. The spools were stored around drums at the top of two anchors in the top corners of the Huge Wall. The computer pulled the cables into a triangle that both winches attached to a spray-paint can. The computer could send a signal to the spray can and give you a squirt on the wall, or just drive around filling in low resolution binary information. It was definitely a The*coolest*video*ever candidate.

Raising this technology to the scale of human experience might be a good direction. Good Luck.

Jon

See "www.wiring.org.co" for an interface board with software support designed for artists.