Without a Traceroute

Aside from the main robot exhibition in the museumquartier, there were also several seminar-style discussions on different topics related to robots and technology.

There were three different panel discussions:

1. Smartass reloaded? AI and the Future Role of Cybernetics
2. Rest in Pieces? Cyberpunks, Cyborgs and the Complexities of Discourses
3. The Policy of the Artificial: Strategies, Tendencies and Perspectives

The discussions were pretty interesting. However the participants in each panel were randomly assigned, not by area of expertise, so the conversations had a tendency to drift off topic. The second panel, in particular devolved into a love-fest for Twitter. One girl even said, “You’re no one if you’re not on twitter,” which was apparently intended to be a clever song reference, but just came off sounding pretentious since nobody knew the song. At this, I chortled audibly, and Johannes dragged me up to the front (“Who’s laughing back there?”) to discuss my distaste for Twitter.

This I did, reluctantly at first, but with gradually increasing vehemence. I believe I said, and still believe, that Twitter takes the worst elements of blogging and exaggerates them. It promotes self-absorbed navel-gazing, instantaneous, knee-jerk posting-without-thinking and obsession with irrelevant minutia. The one-hundred-and-forty character post limit virtually assures an absence of serious reflection. I’m not saying people who use Twitter are necessarily shallow people, but it is a tool that promotes shallow thinking.

In any case, I give the Twitter-loving audience credit for not immediately burning me at the stake. My aversion to Twitter did become my most well-known personality trait for the rest of the festival, though. Sample Tweet: “Roboexotica panel: finished. Having dinner with @melochka and the guy who hates twitter”

There was a talk-show, hosted by Johannes Grenzfurthner and one of his Monochrom colleagues, Roland Gratzer. They introduced themselves as members of AANRBGEA, the Association of Atheist, Nanotechnology Researchers and Board Game Enthusiasts of Alabama. Which is, if I do say so myself, the greatest organization that never existed. They did an admirable job of staying in character for the entire talk show, but Johannes does a really terrible Alabama accent.

AANRBGEA members

They had several guests on the “talk show”, mostly Americans, as it happened. Mitch Altman, perhaps best known as the inventor of the TV-B-GONE that wreaked havoc (can you ever wreak anything except havoc?) at CES last January.

Eddie Codel, a SF-based video producer who makes Geek Entertainment TV, and talked about his current project: a documentary about California wildfires and the creation of a sort of survivalist wiki. I have to admit, the idea of combining the Bay Area “lets make a wiki!” culture with the “government’s trying to take my guns” survivalist culture sounds like it would produce interesting results. On the other hand, if I don’t trust wikipedia to tell me when Grover Cleveland was born, I’m sure not going to rely on a wiki site for information crucial to my continuing to live.

A very ill and moderately hungover linguist, Evelyn Fürlinger, gave a brief talk about frequency analysis. There was a musical interlude provided by Krach Der Robot (“Da Music Extraordinaire”):

The last guest was Bre Pettis, a New York-based hardware hacker and one of the founders of NYCResistor. He spoke about the DIY movement.

I got a chance to hang out with Bre some more over the next few days, and I was pretty impressed. He’s a guy who really knows things, and is good at just whipping up little projects. At Metalab, I watched him hack together a KAP rig in the span of about 30 minutes. He even made his own bolt because the metric bolts available didn’t fit his American camera.

Perhaps most surprisingly, for somebody who posts a daily videoblog and whose financial livelihood depends on getting attention and building himself as a brand, he is not at all a self-promoting blogwhore. He comes off as very much a normal, interesting person.

Shaping molten plastic for the kite rig