Roboexotica started in 1999 when Magnus Wurzer and Chris Veigl (forming the group Shifz) started to present cocktail robots at a small Viennese punk venue. In 2002 the group monochrom (Johannes Grenzfurthner, Franky Ablinger et al.) and in 2003 the Bureau für Philosophie (headed by Günther Friesinger) teamed up with them and the small event developed into a big international festival presented at the Viennese Museumsquartier.
Sentimentally, Roboexotica was looking back at futures long gone, dreaming of imaginative man-machine interfaces reminding us of the great futures to come when we were young or yet unborn.
As robots were the keen yet humble servants of these futures, Roboexotica thought it would be great to introduce them to one of the most difficult cultural techniques wo/man ever came up with. Besides having sex (which back at the time when Roboexotica was conceived was already a matter of cybersex-hype) this would be mixing cocktails and performing all the social and fine motor skills that go with well-groomed style-drinking habits.
The neologism “cocktailrobotics” coined by the Roboexotica festival refers to the idea that robots could be taught to mix and serve drinks and all the other operations that go with it, like having bar-conversations or lighting cigarettes.
Yet, this was not merely about the (self)fulfilling prophecies of postmodernist gurus flying the flag of what can be done must be done to get on thirdclass infotainment TV-shows. And it wasn’t just about exploring and improving the fine motor skills of robots through some highly complex demands either.
Roboexotica never intended to be just another festival to cook up astonishing technology. The aim was to reintroduce a symbol of the long lost future of bourgeois society. To at last bring together the technological promise and the socio-cultural promise in a test arrangement as bizarre as the idea of capitalism disestablishing itself into a paradisiacal form of communism (without even expounding the problems of a class society). And thus we wanted to model and remodel the much neglected sphere of man-machine-interaction in social environments from which nowadays robots and AI units are hidden into machine-like cases that never get to communicate or light cigarettes with a gentle (wo)manly smile.
monochroms gala medley, starring at Touch me festival, is a tour-de-farce diversion intended to hold the attention of the audience. A joyful bucket full of good clean fanaticism, crisis, language, culture, self-content, identity, utopia, mania and despair, condensed into the well known cultural technique of a gala show. Powernapping highly welcome.
