credit Photo: Jonathan Shekter
AMSTERDAM – At the annual Robodock festival here, artists, musicians, technology freaks and others of similar bent come together to get creative. Much of the artwork constructed at the shipyard consists of recycled scrap metal and other reclaimed materials. Left: At Robodock, even the bars are art. The 5th Element Bar, by Maja Explosiv, Erico Moreira, Wreckage, Babu and Willow, features metal mobiles hanging from the ceiling, tables with built-in kinetic sculpture and, of course, flaming dragons. It also serves beer.
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Robodock 2007 workers maneuver a giant inflatable balloon into place during setup. Eventually, the balloon became the ceiling for the festival merchandise stand, which was built entirely out of inflatable materials. The stand sold T-shirts, mugs and fire-resistant Nomex jumpsuits.
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Robodock participants work to transform NDSM Werf ("wharf") in north Amsterdam into temporary workshops where much of the art for the festival is constructed and tested. Inside the huge former shipyard buildings, where the festival has taken place the last three years, artists this year built or tested such works as http://srl.org/ Survival Research Labs’ homemade V1 rocket engine, Ben Blakebrough’s homemade http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiller_Flying_Platform Hiller flying machine and http://christianristow.com/ Robochrist Industries’ giant mechanical hand.
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The head of the http://serpentmother.com/ Flaming Lotus Girls’ stainless steel and propane fire sculpture, The Serpent Mother, burns against a stormy evening sky just after its inaugural lighting during the opening ceremonies of Robodock 2007.
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German performance group http://antagon.de/ Antagon wears stilts to light the Flaming Lotus Girls’ The Serpent Mother in the rain of opening night.
credit Photo: Jonathan Shekter
The guitar section of France’s human-machine symphonic collaboration http://lamachine.fr/ La Machine consists of rotating instruments played in turn as they pass the machinery in the base of the sculpture. It provides a rhythmic guitar part to the Symphonie Mecanique, a performance piece that employs dozens of musician-machinists operating a diverse orchestra of musical robots.
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Two musicians playing the Robot Horns await their cues during a performance of La Machine’s Symphonie Mecanique. The instruments are played by compressed air, and sound uniquely unlike human musicians.
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A musician-machinist controls La Machine’s drum section during a performance of Symphonie Mecanique. The machine is in fact a giant mechanical sequencer, constructed around an industrial lathe that drives many additional wheels, each of which has cams and pegs to drive drumsticks against various percussion instruments at the appropriate point in the rhythm loop. The resulting sounds are recorded by microphones and mixed electronically, but rusty metal and propane lanterns give the Symphonie a distinctly "low-tech" ambiance.
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The Serpent Mother by the San Francisco-based Flaming Lotus Girls’ burns against the evening sky. The stainless steel and copper sculpture is more than 150 feet long and consumes 100 gallons of liquid propane each hour. It took a crew of more than 100 people five months to build. The head moves hydraulically and the vertebrae contain computer-controlled flamethrowers that fire in complex sequenced patterns, or when an audience member presses one of many buttons on the base. Just in time for Robodock, the Flaming Lotus Girls added the ability to direct the fire with a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii_Remote Wii controller. At the end of each night, the ornate copper egg opens and flame effects inside shoot multicolored streams of liquid-fuel fire into the sky.
credit Photo: Jonathan Shekter
Arabesque by http://www.peter-william-holden.com/ Peter William Holden of Germany is a deceptively simple "real-time animation." Each plastic arm or leg is actuated by a computer-controlled air cylinder and bends at the elbow or knee into one of two different positions. Add classical dance music (waltzes, minuets, ballet) and expert choreography and the machine becomes a mesmerizing work of art. The "dancers" move together with perfect timing to form rippling kaleidoscopic patterns, reminiscent of nothing so much as the elaborate Hollywood dance sequences of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busby_Berkeley Busby Berkeley.
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A http://archive.wired.com/culture/art/news/2007/10/robothand giant robotic hand holds up the remains of a vehicle crushed by a lucky member of the Robodock 2007 audience. Built of scrap materials by a team from http://christianristow.com/ Robochrist Industries in the two weeks preceding the festival, the hand’s hydraulics are strong enough to crush shopping carts, cars or even a small van. The hand is controlled from atop the green tower at left using a custom-built armature that fits around the operator’s arm.
credit Photo: Jonathan Shekter
A wood fire underneath Luca Minotti’s elegant steam-powered pendulum heats the water inside, producing steam and driving a piston that rocks the piece back and forth to the periodic hiss of escaping gas. At night, cold festivalgoers fill the benches around the fire, warming their hands and watching, mesmerized by the motion of the heavy iron sculpture.
credit Photo: Jonathan Shekter
http://www.pyromancer.eu/ Eddie Egal’s sculpture is nothing more than a block of ice with a column of fire burning inside. It’s simple, but beautiful, and no one at Robodock has ever seen anything like it. "What a pointless waste of money," said one woman, but everyone else seemed greatly amused by both the art and the artists. The piece also included a "performance" by Egal and crew, who dressed in tuxedos and sunglasses, sat on a white leather couch facing the sculpture, and got drunk on champagne throughout the night.
