Would you play with a pet robot? Could a robot talk to you and share your feelings? Fancy meeting your robot self face to face?
The Robotville Festival will celebrate the most cutting-edge in European robot design and innovation – and explore the cultural significance of robots.
You can meet over 20 unique robots, many of which have just come out of European research labs and will be on show to the British public for the first time. These include domestic robots, expressive robots, swarming robots, swimming robots, exploring robots, humanoid robots, learning robots and more.
Roboticists, from the UK and Europe, will also be on hand to demonstrate their work and talk to visitors.
The festival was originally conceived by EUNIC London (European Union National Institutes for Culture), in partnership with the EU Cognitive Systems and Robotics Programme and the European Commission Representation in the UK.
The Austrian participant are a collective entitled monochrom. Founded in 1993 in Stockerau, Lower Austria, they deal with technology, art, context hacking and philosophy. The group's members are Guenther Friesinger, Johannes Grenzfurthner, Evelyn Fuerlinger, Harald List, Anika Kronberger, Franz Ablinger, Frank Apunkt Schneider, Daniel Fabry and Roland Gratzer. Their contribution is the exot - a communicative-voyeuristic community. The exot is a system-immanent schizophrenic. Uncoordinated commands by a multitude of users mostly ends up in frustration. This open characteristic of the controls of the exot is regulated by the fact that the chat enables users to communicate and coordinate.
A communicative meta-level is created. The external “exot” - users manage to coordinate rapidly in the chat in such a way as to enable the directed movement of the robot through its environment. A new specialized “language” is created. Objects of the exhibition are defined and named. To all parts of the exhibition (corners, catalogs, other robots etc.) names and meanings are assigned. The visitors of the exhibition are defined as “2beins” (two-legs) and tracked constantly. Although in the beginning the chatters/drivers lack a plan they subsequently try to create a model of the room and thus construct new “realities”.
Find out more here!
