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1994-02-27
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225 lines
Robot Groupies
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Stumbling into a local Texas supermarket (Herbert E. Butt, Inc.) I
look like someone who's about ready to skip parole. My target is the
only place in town with a lot of cash on a Saturday afternoon. Long
hair falls on the service counter and a mean security guard begins to
scowl. "Okay, I need all this in small bills – really quick..." A
service teller stares at the wad of $50's in my sweaty palms. "Look,"
she sez, glaring at the truly subversive Liquid Mice T-shirt, "I
wouldn't do this, but it's for the kids..."
Mission nearly complete, I scurry back across Austin, passing lots of
upscale retail shops, the kinds where proto-Yuppies, pseudo-Yuppies,
wannabe-Yuppies, etc., scramble over themselves in a weird vain effort
to become cyber-Yuppies. Sharper Image droids locked into overdrive.
Socially programmed masses eagerly consuming the latest in glossy
mags, feature films and high-dollar shopping mall demos just to bath
in the newest techno-meme to infect neural systems of the boomer
bourgeois: Virtual Reality.
Hey, Look Over Here!
Back over on the low-rent side of town, income may not flow as
disposably, but there's more than a few smiles on the street corners
today. The weirdos have come to AusTex's Eastside, hauling beat-up
trucks full of surplus electronics and hardware recovered from the
dump. Nevermind what you've read in slick, four-color journals, these
homespun engineers and artists DEFINE virtual reality out on the
Bleeding Edge, deforming its tectonic collisions of technology and
art. Low-rent, anarchic, culturally counter to everything clean, safe
and liberal: The Robot Group.
Returning back to mission control, breathless, I fork over huge rolls
of $1 bills to a Robot Groupie who's been selling tix at the door all
morning and had run out of change. She trades me a chocolate glazed
donut for the effort. Meanwhile a women desperately wrestles her
wide-eyed kids from shooting straight through the doors. "But the
paper didn't say it would cost anything and I left my wallet!" she
laments amidst youthful scrambles. "Oh well, don't worry about the
money, you all just go in."
Maybe you've read about The Robot Group, or seen 'em on TV. But if
you really wanna catch a clue, drop in to Austin some Thursday night
around 7p and swing by Ted's G(r)eek Corner on Congress Ave. Robot
Groupies will hold you down in the chair, interrogate you for
info/expertise, volunteer you for the latest project, or maybe even
elect you as their president... Look, nobody else there wants the
insane job of trying to run things; they're too busy building strange
toyz. Ignore rampant sociology professors espousing planned
"colonizations of cyberspace", just get involved. Oh yeah, if your
transporter field activates too late and you find the G(r)eek Corner
empty, buzz across the street to Austin's local smart bar, High Time
Brain Gym, the apres-meeting hang. Say hi to the noötropic-mongers
Phil & Cindy.
Fringe Benefits
Back on Austin's eastside, our sensors focus on Kealing Jr High where
today the Robot Group has taken over the gym for its quasiannual
RoboFest. And like the HEB service teller mentioned, the effort is
for the kids.
Open your CyberBetty Crocker manuals to page 23, the recipes is as
follows: mix one part starving artists (literally) who embrace
technology, with one part corporate engineers who really wanted to be
artists instead, with one part city/state/fed grant funds and business
donations. Go scavenge thru junkyards and surplus electronix
catalogs. Pour several hundred cases of Shiner Boch beer into the
cauldron and shake vigorously. Then open the doors to cameras, kids
and bewildered parents.
Looking around the Jr High gym, you see just that: dozens of kids
having a blast, scattered clumps of parents, hoards of camcorder
junkies and more than a few weirdos. The fun part about being in
AusTex is that the fringe and the parents intertwingle... On one side
of the gym we spy Bruce Sterling smiling proudly at a cute little
brown-haired girl in a fractal shirt who's chasing the Robot Blimps.
In a far corner cybernetic jeweler Vernon Reed has a little
mouseketeer named Clark clinging desperately to his daddy's chest to
avoid the noise/music of the Shrinking Robot Head Band.
Public Neural Jacks
Inside RoboFest-3 kids rule. Pushing buttons, remotely piloting
telepresence R/C model cars, watching fractal animation, screaming
away from a mean looking hydraulic robot dog, chasing robot blimps,
racing magnetic hovercraft, dancing through virtual worlds of
image/music in front of the Amiga-based Mandala VR system's cameras...
Like I said, you want the scoop? Transport to High Time Brain Gym and
Ted's G(r)eek Corner. Too remote? Call the Robot Group newsletter
editor and Pixelvision-telepresence hacker Glenn Currie for
subscriptions to The Robot Group Pulse. Get involved. Otherwise, go
back to the mall.
Hey, yups may have money to blow on "VR products", buying their way
out of planned obsolescence. But really, youth will overcome. When
you see a bunch of rich boring people spend money in vain to get what
kids and freaks can find in junk piles, well there you have it.
Arigato gazimasu, gomi no sensei.
You know, I get fun calls and letters and email all the time from
students asking "Where can I go to major in Cyberspace?" and from
adults demanding "Where can I go to buy Virtual Reality?" The answer
is found on the cover of the X/XX playbill: "Improvisation,
Electronics, Computers, Robots."
What I enjoy best about the Robot Group is the lesson implied by both
their philosophy and their history. Something that Alex & Bill
mumbled as we were getting blasted together a couple of years ago at
my bachelor party... Get with some friends, have a couple brews or
whatever it takes to loosen the knob atop your shoulders, wire
together some weird junk, and make it play.
Herstorical Sidebars
Apr 89. Alex Iles and Bill Craig drag me off the terminal to grab
some caffeine during a break at Motorola's microprocessor design
center. Alex & Bill are ecstatic about a new project. Get this: a
bunch of artists and engineers gather over beers each Thursday night
to make robots, courtesy of their ingenuity and City of Austin grants.
Later, it's going swell. Lots-o weird robots under way. The same
three of us cruise out for lunch at Bill's innocent 3BD in the burbs.
Fortunately, the local neighborhood assoc doesn't grok what's really
happening in the garage... Alex holds a reversed vacuum to inflate a
mylar/kevlar blimp while Bill downloads a homebrewed HC11 operating
system to drive the sonar sensors. An ultralight undercarriage built
by Craig Sainsott gives berth to John Lovgren's neural network
autopilot. It's a robotic blimp called "the Mark III enhanced
cybernetic airship, a platform for artificial intelligence."
Corporate execs catch word and vie for licensing rights, while the
Feds drop by to ask a few pointed questions about all the mail-orders
placed for super high-tech materials. "You have no plans of leaving
the country with these items, do you?"
Nov 89. Back on the other side a town, a guy named Brooks Coleman is
literally homeless, too busy wiring guitar pickups into old discarded
washing machines in pursuit of robot band members to get a place to
live. His band Liquid Mice has been pursuing the cybernetic fringe
with its own brand of acid jazz for a decade, but the enlistment of
new Robot Groupies lends critical mass.
Craig & Charlene Sainsott teach/weld their Shrinking Robot Heads into
an array of formidable musicians. Karen Pittman and John Witham build
their Sonic Silhouette VR dance studio out of Amigas, Mandala, vidcams
and light tables. David Santos launches the Bipedal Ornithopter,
another robot blimp, but with radio controlled dragonfly wings and
chicken legs/feet included.
May 90. Projects have gone well and the first two major shows are
spreading the word like wildfire. Austin's flurry of street tech
draws attention/participation of cyber aficionados like Mark Pauline's
Survival Research Labs and Eric Gullichsen's Sense8... Allen Varney
is writing a play with the blimps as actors. Some zine called Mondo
has a reporter busy among the shows. The Smithsonian asks for an
exposition. An award-winning video comes out titled "Mice, Men and
Machines" with John Witham scrying on the closing trailer, "These
machines are gonna learn to play music with each other. And what do
we gonna do then? Either we set back and enjoy it or get up and jam
with them."
Feb 91. RoboFest II, the coming of age. Over 4500 visitors attend to
witness the explosive growth. Wirewrap gives way to custom printed
circuit boards. Robots now orchestrate on MIDI signals instead of ad
hoc cables. Kids are going nuts. Robot Group members look exhausted
but happy. They're really proved the point of street tech, succeeding
with homespun robotics where megabucks poured into think-tanks has
previously faltered.
Dec 91. By now the chaos shows. A promise of commerce has deflected
most successful robot projects into the busy-ness of Grant Proposal
Writing. Allen Varney sits next to me at Ted's, engaging his habit of
being a truly dead-on critic... "This thing is waning... nobody builds
much lately, we concentrate on getting grant money to keep the
organization going." True, the latest Newsweek has a nice spread on
Brooks and Dave Letterman has inquired about having the group on his
show. But contracts, interviews, marketing literature, grant chasing,
etc. all belie the real reason for the Robot Group. Privately, some
of the founders admit thoughts of leaving. Even so, Varney lauds the
"mythology" behind Robot Group, the important role it serves in
"rallying the minds of the young" to believe in their own dreams and
potential.
Apr 92. Each year Austin throws a music party called South By
Southwest (SXSW). You pay $25 to get a Disneyland-styled omniclub
pass, then dozens of nightclubs pull four evenings of 8p-2a shows - 1
hr/band. Robot Groupies, who are mostly musicians anyway, throw an
alternative three day fest for alternative music called X/XX,
organized by liquid mouse and Power-Glove/MAX/MIDI musician James
McCartney. Nevermind the grant proposals, it's time to play. By this
time, their colleagues The Robots have evolved to a point of truly
interesting, captivating performance. And what do the
biohazard-suited members of RG do? They get up and jam with them,
just like they'd always promised.
The Robot Group
PO Box 164334
Austin, Texas 78716
512 462 3887
Ted's Greek Corner
417 Congress Ave
Austin, Texas 78701
512 472 4494
High Time Brain Gym
314 Congress Ave
Austin, Texas 78701
512 479 0307
------
Copyright (c)1992, Paco Xander Nathan. All rights reserved.
First appeared in _bOING-bOING_ magazine, issue #9:
bOING-bOING
11288 Ventura Blvd #818
Studio City, CA 91604
818 980 2009
818 980 0902 fax
Internet: mark@well.sf.ca.us
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