GETV action image by Jacob Appelbaum
I have indeed returned from the land of Red Bull — did you know that Austria is where it comes from? For me, this was a discovery. For the Austrians, it is just another thing to mix with booze. No wonder there were like a zillion Red Bull mixed drinks in every bar I went to.
I know, you’re thinking, hey, you were at a cocktail robotics festival and you still had to go to bars? Um, well… the funny thing was, at Roboexotica it was really, really hard to get a drink. It was continually crowded, and except for opening and closing night, the machines seldom ran continually or all at once — except the External Combustion Engine, which was a consistent jet-fuel cocktail, hangover delivery device. It cranked out the shots nonstop — and it really looked like gasoline in the clear little thimble cups. Still, the Roboexotica bar service was painfully slow — they took their mixing slow and serious, so at one point I actually left to get a beer. Of course, it’s Vienna, where they love to drink and you can order a beer and walk out of any cafe for a stroll, no problem. And on the last night, thanks to the Slovenians, I drank Absinthe for the first time.
Roboexotica was a fantastic festival, both for the experience of a novel arts fest and for the playful application of ideas to function. I say that because in reading the Reuters writeup from their opening night visit, it’s clear that they didn’t really get Roboexotica. The ladies from Reuters, like most of the other journalists, seemed to be asking the question ‘why cocktail robots’ (this always got a snarky answer*). When the more interesting and revealing question was, ‘how — cocktail robotics’. Roboexotica takes a concept — the social nature of cocktail culture — and asks artists to reimagine the experience with technology, and apply it to create an experience of human-machine interaction. The results are an astounding mix of technology and creativity — and function. Few machines had buttons to press. Of the drink exhibits, The External Combustion Engine took RFID technology and repurposed it as drink-coasters which told the machine what kind of drink to mix into the cup they were placed under. The WERP-bot used facial recognition software to find your face and target your mouth, then after a vocal command, launched a cigarette (hopefully) into your gaping maw. Two machines by Daniel Fabry and Anika Kronberger were amazing — one used Theremin technology to play back scenes from movies (like The Shining) on a screen, responding to the movement of clinking your glass so you could ‘toast’ the people onscreen; another screen had an upended bottle that ‘drained’ into your waiting glass when you put your glass under the bottle’s mouth (under the monitor, and it would dispense a Campari).
It was outstanding, and exciting. If you get a chance, watch Eddie‘s hilarious and excellent short video clips of different machines being demonstrated (and our Roboexotica 2006 GETV episode). My liver is drying out. And I’m extremely happy to say that I know a couple of the Roboexotica 2006 award winners — and this was their first entry into a festival with a kinetic piece, and I can now chide them with the title ‘award-winning international kinetic artists’. So awesome!
Congratulations to Roboexotica Festival 2006 award winners:
* Category, Cocktail Serving: winner, El Espanol Borracho — Simone Davalos (watch video)
* Category, Cocktail Mixing: winner, External Combustion Engine — Jonathan Moore, David Fine (watch video)
* Category, Cigarette Lighting: winner, WERP Cigarette Thrower — Leo Peschta, Gordan Savicic (watch video)
* Category, Conversation: Awesome Automated Communication Generating Device — Christian Perstl, Michael Wirnsperger
* Category, Other Achievements: DWI (Cyberpipe), Eiswurfelmorder — Rosi Weingrill & Leichtbekommlichvorverdaut (Cocktail-Cherry-Catapult-Manga-Structure)
* Category, Public Choice: Baillet de Sacacorchos (Corkscrew Ballet) — Chris Janka (watch video)
* Snarky, that’s what I’d call the response. I made an in-joke reference to it in a previous post — the response was Jonathan Moore’s, “Because robots are brilliant! And alcohol is brilliant! So they must be even more brilliant together!” The in-joke on this was that it’s actually an SRL reference, out of the mouth of Dan Collard, who once (during our San Jose show load-in) explained his unique, snarky British take on the relationship between beer and motorcycles. It’s, uh, brilliant!
