The organizers of last week's "cocktail robotics" festival in Vienna, Austria, the annual "Roboexotica" event, have posted the audio from the lectures in German and English. I gave a talk there called "A Singular Metaphor" in which I tried to delve into the reason that the idea of uploading our minds is so attractive right now. Sean Bonner had a fun talk on user power on sites like Digg called "The inmates have taken over the asylum...," while Jens Ohlig from the Chaos Computer Club proposed that robots should create all literature, David Fine pondered consciousness, and Make Magazine's Bre Pettis gave a talk called "Machines: If you can't beat them, join them," about the utopia of apocalypse.

Explanator / Misha a Crest - Breathing might be THE future way to ingest herbal/alcoholic beverages

MindReading MartiniMaker / Chris Veigl - way of determining ratio & innovative approach to shaking and stirring

Chapok / David Calkins - the way he inspires drinking is quite authentic

El Espanol Borracho / Simone Davalos - a) for not triggering the fire alarm b) only robot that includes flambéing in the preparation process

Blow Your Fortune / Chris Thomas Palmer - always knows what u should drink

Gesundheit VI / Franz Ablinger - is hardheadedly trying to find a lasting configuration.

Aktionsgruppe LN2.0 / FH Joanneum - good example of why and when humans are still needed in the cocktail environment

The Holy Golden Milk+Wodcow / Roman Maeder - the milking proved to be a favorite human pastime

Perpetual Popper / Jaques Gallant - feeds people using only corn and sunlight

Robomoji / Robert Martin - patiently adds assembling steps year by year

Robofriend 2 / Tom Heike first robot that combines mixing and mobile delivery

Rabbit's Revenge / FH Joanneum

Urinator / FH Joanneum

Explanator / Misha a Crest

The Prisoner's Dilemma / David Fine - installation was a construction site
R.R. Shot-Bot / Bre Pettis - unfinished
Kalkohol: The Provider / monochrom - causing floods is not an achievement
BF Ice Cube Gun / FH Joanneum - Vodka theft and militaristic behaviour
Urinator / FH Joanneum - ghastly impression makes drink undesirable
Bic-o-Mat/ Adrian Dabrowski - no-show despite anticipated added features
Metalab Crew - no-show

I'm headed to Vienna this weekend for the annual Roboexotica "cocktail robotics" festival, a maker show for people who build robots that drink, mix cocktails, light cigarettes, make bar conversation amd perform miscellaneous cocktail-related robotic activities. The event is put on by Monochrom and Shifz, two mad and wonderful net-art collectives based in Vienna's Museumsquartier on Electric Avenue.

I'll be speaking on Friday night at Taugshow, Monochrom's not-a-talkshow, and I'll be around the conference all day on Saturday. Hope to see you!

Program Schedule

Thursday 11/22, 2007
- Museumsquartier Wien, Freiraum
7 P.M.: Roboexotica 2007 and AiR Space opening.
Live - GameJew, Mr. Electric
On the turntables - DJ Borka, VJ Ozo

Friday 11/23, 2007
- Museumsquartier Wien, Freiraum
10 A.M. - 10 P.M.: Exhibition
5 P.M.: DJ Ossi & Kilian
- Museumsquartier Wien, Erste Bank Arena
1 P.M. - 5 P.M.: Symposium (in german language)
Thomas Ballhausen: Geister sehen.
Zur Veränderung der visuellen Kultur und ihrer (Seh)Räume um 1895.
Kerstin Ohler: Generating Ghosts 2.0
Der phantastische (Erzähl)Raum und seine Bewohner als VR-Mechanismus.
Alexander Edelhofer: "Radio, live transmission."
Psychogeographische Industrielandschaften und Subkultur: Joy Divison,
Manchester.
- brut Konzerthaus, Lothringerstraße 20, 1030 Wien
8 P.M.: Recording of taugshow #15.

Saturday 11/24, 2007
- Museumsquartier Wien, Freiraum
10 A.M. - 10 P.M.: Exhibition
5 P.M.: DJ Funke powered by sonance, DJ phonuel
- Museumsquartier Wien, Erste Bank Arena
1 P.M. - 6 P.M.: Symposium
Sean Bonner: The inmates have taken over the asylum...
but that's OK because as it turns out they are far more
entertaining than all those stuffy doctors.
Jens Ohlig: Monkeys, typewriters, and the Markov chain reaction.
Programming machines to write literature so humans don't have to.
Cory Doctorow: A Singular Metaphor
Why consciousness uploading, post-human existence,
and life after the Singularity are popular today,
and why science fiction is always about the present.
David Fine: The Consciousness Conundrum.
Bre Pettis: Machines: If you can't beat them, join them
The Apocalyptic Utopia.
- brut Künstlerhaus, Karlsplatz 5, 1010 Wien
20 Uhr: Gold Extra
Black Box - Theater for eight remote controlled robots (in german language)
- brut Konzerthaus, Lothringerstraße 20, 1030 Wien
22 Uhr: Paul Granjon
Reflections and Constructions of a Button Pusher

Sunday 11/25, 2007
- Museumsquartier Wien, Freiraum
10 A.M. - 8 P.M.: Exhibition
2 P.M.: Grjasnaya Gallereya
The Inevitable Time Travel (Performance)
3 P.M.: Rainer Tramin
Wir sind wie Roboter? (Lecture in german language)
- Museumsquartier Wien, QDK Veranstaltungsraum
11 A.M.: Filmbrunch
- brut Künstlerhaus, Karlsplatz 5, 1010 Wien
6 P.M.: Gold Extra
Black Box - Theater for eight remote controlled robots (in german language)
- brut Konzerthaus, Lothringerstraße 20, 1030 Wien
8 P.M.: Paul Granjon
Reflections and Constructions of a Button Pusher
- Volkstheater Wien, Rote Bar, Neustiftgasse 1, 1070 Wien
10 P.M.: ACRA V9.0
Gala of the Annual Cocktail Robotics Awards 2007

Link

Close to 150,000 Indian farmers committed suicide in nine years from 1997 to 2005, official data show. While farm suicides have occurred in many Indian states, nearly two thirds of these deaths are concentrated in five states where just a third of the country's population lives. This means that farmers' suicides occurred in those (mainly cash crop) regions with appalling intensity.

On average, one Indian farmer committed suicide every 32 minutes between 1997 and 2005. Since 2002, that has become one suicide every 30 minutes. However, the frequency at which farmers take their lives in any region smaller than the country - say a single State or group of States - has to be lower. Because the number of suicides in any such region would be less than the total for the country as a whole in any year. Yet, the frequency at which farmers are killing themselves in many regions is appalling.

Mad professor Mark Frauenfelder shows us how to make a Curie Effect Magnetic Heat Engine from common household items. Then, Austrian art-pranksters Monochrom sing a song of love for Stanford law prof and famed copyright reform advocate Lawrence Lessig.

November 15, 2007. 7:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. @ Witte de With Center, Rotterdam, Netherlands.

Arse Elektronika. Or: What's pr0nnovation?

Lecture by Johannes Grenzfurthner/monochrom (writer/artist, Vienna).
From the depiction of a vulva in a cave painting to the newest internet porno, technology and sexuality have always been closely linked. History indicates that sex will continue to play an essential role in technological development. The porno effect accompanies every new technological development. Is it going too far to assume that research in nanotechnology and genetic engineering will be influenced by our sexual needs? The surgical modification of sexual organs is no longer very unusual. The question is not whether these technologies alter humanity, but how they do so.
Language: English
Location: WdW Auditorium

Roboexotica gathers a wide variety of cocktail robot makers from around the world and bring them together for robot parties and presentations. I'm in Southern Austria in the city of Graz today visiting the information design college where a group of artists who are putting their cocktail robots together. The group shown above is in the process of putting together a scary evil bunny robot that pours drinks for you at the flip of a switch. There is also a group making a slot machine robot that pumps you a drink when you cash out your coins. I'm doing an internship in Vienna this month and will be reporting on Roboexotica as it happens. Stay tuned!

The Meanderthal, a new species of urban flâneur. No longer merely out for a stroll through the streets, the Meanderthal has become a threat to the efficiencies of urban life and to the flows of pedestrians, vehicles, and capital taken for granted in the urban everyday. Whether he/she is chatting on a cell phone, standing on the wrong side of an escalator, cycling on the sidewalk, or dangerously jaywalking, the Meanderthal obliviously causes that most frustrating of urban traffic jams: the pedlock.

Like a stick in the spokes, the Meanderthal brings urban mobility to a halt and exposes (infra)structural impediments. When confronted by this new urban creature others are compelled to pursue new lines of flight through and around the urban jungle. The new urbanite who would avoid the pedlock produced by the Meanderthal becomes another sort of 21st century flâneur: Flâneur 2.0. The goal of this new flâneur is not to aestheticize urban life as his nineteenth-century precursor was wont to do, but to instrumentalize it in the name of efficiency and speed. [...]

While critics of the economic horrors of globalisation argue, a new and even more brutal form of capitalism is in action. The new vultures are private equity companies, predatory investment funds with vast amounts of capital at their disposal and an enormous appetite for more.

Their names, among them the Carlyle Group, KKR, the Blackstone Group, Colony Capital, Apollo Management, Cerberus Partners, Starwood Capital, Texas Pacific Group, Wendel, Euraze, are still not widely known. And while still a secret they are getting their hands on the global economy. Between 2002 and 2006 the capital raised by these funds from banks, insurance companies, pension funds and the assets of the super-rich rose from $135bn to $515bn. Their financial power is phenomenal, more than $1,600bn, and they cannot be stopped. In the United States, the principal private equity firms invested some $417bn in takeovers last year and more than $317bn in the first quarter of 2007, acquiring control of 8,000 companies. One American in four and almost one Frenchman or woman in every 12 now works for them.

One of the memorable scenes in David Lynch's moving film The Straight Story (1999) is when the aging protagonist, Alvin Straight, is invited to spend the night at the camp of a group of young cyclists who are moved to see a senior citizen traveling across the country in such an unusual way—that is, on a tractor. When asked by a well-meaning youth: "What's the worst thing about being old?" Alvin responds: "Remembering when you were young." [...]

Roboexotica 2007, the annual festival for Cocktail Robots, takes place November 22nd through 25th in the Museumsquartier district of Vienna, Austria. Roboexotica is produced by SHIFZ, monochrom & Bureau of Philosophy.

Speaking of monochrom, our good friends David Fine and Bre Pettis are their current artists in residence at monochrom.

On a recent trip to Budapest, I documented proof of paranormal activity at St. Stephen's Basilica. In this video, we see a ghostbuster cleaning up what appears be some sort of ectoplasm spill. Watch it only if you are a brave soul with an open mind.

The establishment of an Islamic state in Iran and the imposition of a system of ideological discrimination have turned secularism into a magical concept. For its defenders, it signifies a sacred cure for all the ills of Iranian society; for the Islamic state, it is a kind of sacrilege. In Iran, the concept of secularism is wholly determined by these two great forces; its political function is thus problematic. It is as if religion and the state have filled the space of history, leaving no room for politics.

Secularism is no less ambiguous in Western societies. It comprises many different, even divergent, moments, from the expropriation of the Church to Republican anti-clericalism and a Weberian disenchantment of the world. This ambiguity, intensified through decontextualization, means that any analysis of secularism in Iran has to be selective. What follows is an attempt to analyse the relationship of secularism to the possibility of democratic politics – or politics as democracy – in Iran. This analysis is based on belief in the political potential of the 1979 revolution, which to this day has remained inexhaustible. Unable to tolerate the void of this potentiality, the official jargon of the state tries to fill it in with the word ‘Islamic’, understood in an adjectival sense, rather than as part of the proper name ‘the Islamic Revolution’, given to the event by the event itself. The question is: can the word ‘secular’ act as a gatekeeper that keeps open the strait-gates of politics, or is it just another adjective that fills the gap between the state and the community, but cannot be internalized by them? [...]

For many people, ghosts, vampires, zombies, and the like are no more than Hollywood fantasy. However, these movies have increasingly come to reflect popularly held pseudoscientific beliefs. For instance, the 2005 movie White Noise is based on the new trend among paranormalists—Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP). The occult underground in both America and Europe is witnessing a trendy rise in vampirism, and belief in voodoo zombiefication is widespread in many parts of South America and Africa. Furthermore, paranormal depictions in the media, especially television and Hollywood, have a definite influence on the way people think about paranormal claims(see, for example, Sparks 1998 and Sparks 2006).

In this article, we point out inconsistencies associated with the ghost, vampire, and zombie mythologies as portrayed in popular films and folklore and give practical explanations to some of their features. Of course, the paranormalist or occultist could claim that the Hollywood portrayal is a rather unsophisticated and inaccurate representation of their beliefs and thus the discussion we present is moot. However, if they are to change their definition each time we raise an issue, then all that they are really arguing is that there exists something out there that may be given the name "ghost," for instance. Surely, no skeptic could argue with this.

Bre Pettis produces the show "Weekend Projects," which is released weekly as a video podcast for Make: Magazine. For his show, Bre makes something every week, and then makes a video teaching viewers how to make it too. In his recent past, he's been a schoolteacher, a multi-artist, and a puppeteer. Bre is passionate about invention, innovation, and all things DIY.