 So, the next talk you're going to hear is by Jakob Römming on GoTV. The next talk is from Robert Tumic, Jacob Eason, artist, designer, engineer, and community builder from Copenhagen. And Jakob Römming from Copenhagen, who came here from Sweden and calls himself an old media artist with many talents. They won't present their own... Media artist name, Media Kützler, which is centered around automation, creation and loss of control. A sub-excited person who deals with robot music, who deals with loss of control and creativity. Thank you. Thanks for inviting us. Thank you for the introduction. I'm not so sure about the overlord part, but let's see down the road. Yeah, I'm Jakob. And I'm Go280. That's my artist's name. I do a lot of music with old computers. I have a kind of shared passion for old machines. I normally don't do music, I'm not specialized in music. One movie that I've made in the video lounge at one tonight, which is kind of investigating rare earth elements. And I'm happy to be here because it's kind of a new project. Is this something different? Yeah, I mean, we're very happy to be invited here because it's kind of a new project. We've been working on it for about six months and it's a very open field. And we're not sure where exactly we want to go with it. We'll figure it out along the way. So it's important for us to stress that this is artistic research in the sense that it's not a field, but a field in which we're not specialists. And we're really excited to be in a place like this where so many don't know people than us and we're really hoping to somehow start a conversation with you guys in some space for Q&A. But also we have a standing outside and we'll take a little bit of a question and answer and tomorrow we'll take a second robot and a drum machine. We're very welcome to come and have a concert. Yeah. Okay, but so we've worked together for a very long time. Okay, but so we've worked together for about ten years and it's the first project that we did together. It was done on the screen and the main square of the computer. And basically an old hockey game for the computers that we manipulated it. So while you play it for the stories itself and it's getting better and better. But it still works, you can still play it and it's still fun. And when Anders says that we've been working together for ten years, it sounds like we're this kind of... We're working together for ten years. We're not working together for ten years. We've seen each other in the last half a year more often than the whole nine and a half before. We live in different cities. We meet only when we work together. This is a different project that we made from 2013. One of the performances at opening the Transmediale in a exhibition of the Transmediale. We had open fax lines. People could fax in different content to us and we were basically... People could send us dysfunctional orders and that's why we created this dysfunctional work environment to sonify them at the same time. So the faxes that came in, we tried to process them and I tried to... The faxes that came in, we tried to process them. Which was very difficult. But this is another project called Data State. It's kind of the same vein where... This is an old police station that we're sitting in. People fill in forms with what kind of... And then I get something like five minutes to make this song. And what kind of songs they want. And then it's there. I had a few minutes to design this song and give it back as a floppy disk. And that's an example of such a desire for music. So that was quite difficult as well. Which wasn't easy either. Yeah, I guess we like to punish ourselves. Yeah, we like to punish ourselves with our art. And I guess kind of falling in this tradition of scripting ourselves and working within some kind of script. Like some... I don't know if you call it fluxus or whatever. But like kind of... Giving off controls to some other system or... You can roll up on the script or on other systems that have power. So, like most people, I guess we're fascinated about robots. But we're also a little fan of... I don't know... There's a lot of emotion connected with robots. And mostly it's also... I guess at least personally for me it's been a kind of frustration because there's a lot of frustration that's been coming. There's a memory coming. I think the robot that's on the summer movie, you actually got a robot. And we got a possibility of pulling around with a robot basically. And we grabbed that possibility without maybe completely knowing what we were heading towards. So we had ideas. Here are some of these ideas. A small mini-residency at Copenhagen floating hacker space called Ilotron. Yeah, we basically... This robot is called the U-Arms Swift Pro. It's this kind of easily hackable robot and we were just... We have this week... So it's actually a robot arm. We have a week to be able to talk to this robot so basically what you're seeing here is a keyboard controlling this little laptop on the left. That is then controlling the robot arm. We have some serial commands to code. The robot arm is basically just kind of replicating the key presses that are under the steering wheel. This is an extended arm somehow. Very elaborate prosthesis. Yeah, elaborate, but then on the other hand it has only one finger. Yeah, so this is Commodore 64 computer that I mentioned before from our 1980s. And the software is called Devmon. It's a new software. It's not old software, so you can really do some really amazing stuff with it. And what you're seeing is basically the robot inserting nodes in a loop that's running. With only one finger. Yeah, I'll push. So with this kind of first video prototype we got a book to do a lot of stuff. And we got invited to this Algomec Festival in Sheffield to come to this Algomec Festival in Sheffield. They make algorithmic, mechanical stuff to play raves. So we had to work a bit on that. But we managed to get the robot to a state where it could load songs and in order to know the lead voices and stuff up and down and basically in the end it actually could play kind of full sets like we played half an hour or so or the robot would play. And I guess because we were still... We were doubting if we could pull it off. We were a bit doubtful if we could do that. You were there too and you played together with the robot. So head to head. You were mostly just kind of filling in little extra things. Yeah, so it was more like Anders trying to keep up with the robot or playing on top. So the robot has a little camera on it. That's why you can sometimes see my face. On the other screen you can see... I'm just going to show what's going on. Just to see what's going on. Yeah, so I mean this experience of... Yeah, I mean this experience of... I mean this experience of... That the robot already... After just a couple of months of moving around was able to basically could reduce ourselves to technicians setting up the robots and then... You know... I don't know, that kind of started some things That was kind of emotional. And we got invited to play at the internet base and I kept doing the lounge music. The chill out area. So we basically took the challenge to let the robot play the check note. So we basically took the challenge to let the robot play the check note. And we got invited to play at the internet base and then we just kind of hanging out in the bot. You see in the video I guess... We have a lot of time to have conversations with people, kind of like the future of the future. Yeah, pick our jobs or whatever and it's like, this kind of, I'm imagining at least there will be a lot of these jobs that kind of hang out in the future. Yeah, and for this one we actually put a lot of effort in making the robot does a little bit more dynamic, like just staying for so long and making it more diverse for its own purpose. So I think now we sort of knew what it was supposed to do, we saw what the robot would do at some point, and we were surprised, it was almost magic, like a robot just worked. It was a very strange feeling. We still do the music, the songs, but the robot forms our songs, so the song just becomes something new. Which is a weird mix of, how it was a bit scary, sort of, a bit of anxiety, a bit of fear, a bit of joy. Yeah, it's a weird stuff. And on top of that I mean we're talking a lot about electronic music and how electronic music makes stuff minimal and off, basically it's kind of shut up and just repeats long enough We both have a tendency to fill in too many notes, maybe for the mainstream techno or something. But the robot is like super cool, you know? We wanted something that is not quite mainstream, but the robot makes really cool music. A little bit longer. Yeah. Okay, let's... And let's listen to it. Play a switch first of all. Yeah, so I guess it's also important for us to say... The Commodore is a good place to start because it has keys and you can press the buttons. And the Chaos Pad is also really good. And the Chaos Pad is also very good with one finger. So right now we're more like thinking about drum machines now. Thinking about drum machines now. One finger. With one finger to operate. The musical... I don't know... It's kind of dependent on kind of one finger push interaction. At the moment it is also important that the one finger presses the different buttons. Take some of all the choices out of... But it still takes a few options. Yeah. So it's not to say that this is only a C64 or a project or something. We can imagine doing things with this robot. Yeah. Yeah. So now we're here. And we brought two robots. And one like we said for playing. And one for hacking. And one for... I mean, we really encourage you guys to come and... I mean, most of the coding we're doing... ...is relatively banal. It's more like kind of... ...generic code based a lot on rats. So as we know that there's all this neural network AI... ...looming rats at making music. So if there's some people out there... ...that kind of want to know how to... ...maybe read what the robot has already done... ...or... ...with the basis of what the robot can do... ...we'd really like to talk with you... ...and contact you. Yeah, I mean, we have really good training data as well. We have really good training data. So I mean, I have... ...because I used these old computers for so long... ...and the files they saved... ...it's all like self-contained source files... ...or whatever... ...and they're really, really small. I think... ...yeah, I checked my folder earlier today. It's like this... ...for 20 years of... ...everything... ...and I have all the work files and everything. So... ...and then, yeah, we just realized... ...I found out in... ...you know, feeding some neural network. Wow, if we could just pack a neural network... ...yeah, fuck off... ...and do something... ...maybe. Yeah. I mean, we'll see. Or maybe it doesn't work. Yeah. You know, jam with the robots. You know, it's just a good word. I don't think we will, but it's... ...it would just be really fun to... I mean, all of us are hanging around in Copenhagen. Yeah. Back home. Yeah. Come tomorrow. There was a 10-minute sign, so I'm skipping a fast... ...but tomorrow from 11... ...we're coming back. The gig starts at 9, I think. Yeah, and we'll play around. The robot will play around for two hours. So probably starting a bit slow, but then... Yeah, yeah. Yeah. There are questions. Thank you very much, both of you. What kind of cool robot are you? Okay, there are about 10 minutes for questions. There's the first one. Could you follow a bit more why you chose... ...a simple robot because like the symbolism... ...or the systematic aspects of it... ...and contracted you to using such a simple system... ...as opposed to all the huge and cool software solutions... ...that would be able to automate... ...the music and all these things? Yeah. No, I guess... You already made music on a Commodore 64. Yeah. And we're not that soft, guys. You mean specifically the robot? Why wouldn't you choose a robot? You're talking about software, right? That's what you're talking about. Yeah, both that and why don't you just build a software interface... ...where you just like... ...the signals ride to the Commodore like they do? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Why would you just like get the signals ride to the Commodore... ...like there's software solution... ...that would be used in such a mechanical... ...simple... Now, because it's a completely different feeling... ...from a robot arm... ...you know... ...something invisible... I guess to add also that we're not... ...we don't really know what you're doing, right? I mean... ...the robot because we thought the robot was cool... ...the robot because we thought the robot was cool... ...the robot because we thought the robot was cool... ...the robot because we thought the robot was cool. And then it turned out that it was actually kind of... ...pathetic, but then it was... That's what she says. So I guess if we... ...known what we know now, we wouldn't have found... ... empleats like this, this project works. So it doesn't want to explore. And again... ...I mean we also really like these old machines, so we acceptable. And again I mean we also really like these old machines, so we acceptable. We really like these old machines and we like to work with the Commodore 64 together. So we really want to press the buttons. Thank you. Micro number two. Okay, hi. How much of what the robot does is pre-programmed and just pre-played, composed piece or how much randomness or computational patterns involved in it? Well, I mean, the bass is always a pre-composed song. And then it's, yeah, what it does is it's, yeah, I mean, it's pretty random, but within some kind of always, we say what notes it should press, but we don't say when, for example, or we say, okay, we can change the rhythm a little bit. We can destroy everything. So, I mean, everything that happens is at least a little bit random. I guess you can say, yeah, more or less everything is actually kind of based on random, but within some kind of logic structure. Yeah, so it's never, it's, there's no kind of direct playback. Yeah, we haven't figured out how to do that. All right, thank you. But like a future challenge is to make the future more useful for the robot, basically, like we didn't really have time to do that. We wanted to be more open and do its own music, more or less. Yeah, so right now it's loading stuff and modifying it. And then we say enough that we can kind of leave it for a week and then come back and see what it's been up to. And I really like this kind of idea of making music for the robot, so that I have the robot and it's one finger because I really have to delete nine fingers and completely different ways. So I have to go to the robot, which I think is cool. Thanks, microphone one, please. Since there is a source code, is it available on GitHub or are you planning to do it? It is on GitHub. It's there, it's there. Yeah, it's there, it's there, it's there, it's there. Thanks, one more tube, please. So is your robot very precise or have you ever had the situation where you just made a mistake and thought, well, it wasn't planned, but it sounds okay as well, I guess, or is it just precise enough that it doesn't happen? In theory, it's really precise. People put print heads on it and use it as a 3D printer and so on, but I mean, this is all the time, we have a kind of a big headache on calibration and so on. Yeah, it bounces into the key we have to kind of restart. I mean, we should start all the time, but we were just having a lot of trouble right now and hopefully it's going to run. But it doesn't have an effect on your creative process. Well, it has some stress. Yeah, I know, but when it sort of messes up, it really messes up and it, yeah, just presses somewhere else, it doesn't work at all and it presses wrong all the time. It has got no feedback, like there's no camera on it or it has to basically just remember all the coordinates. So it's a super fragile system if it messes up. So I'm going to creep out like more than half of the people here, so my question is, have you ever thought about putting the robot in a club and then trying to measure how happy the crowd is with the music it produces and then kind of, so by, I don't know, facial recognition, recognizing how many people are on the dance floor and stuff like that and giving the dance break to the robot again. So making kind of smart music for the masses. I guess the short answer is no, but we have been thinking a lot about putting the robot in the forest and then just kind of releasing it with animals. Or even better, like this kind of the idea of removing the DJ and like having a wall, so that nobody knows it's a robot. Because, I don't know, one thing that's kind of interesting with the robot is that, I don't know, dealing with it, it's like it's a thing, it's an entity, but it's like a animal or something like that that might grow up to a animal that it makes us differently at the world some how and it's, I don't think it relates to animals almost. So kind of bringing the robot into the forest would really make sense, I think. Happy animals. My question is kind of related. Is the robot using any sort of input from what's happening to trigger those random process or for now just randomly triggering stuff? Yeah, there's no input like that. No, I mean we've been talking about writing our own random... We've been talking a lot about random, right? So writing our own random functions, of course, and then sort of feeding something into that but I don't think we're very interested in making it like super interesting. Huh? Yeah, well... Yeah, I mean I don't see the need for all this... I don't see the need for interaction, I think it's actually nicer to have this kind of weird email life and you have to understand it, it's not like understanding us. But I think that if it's by itself, it can trigger it's own randomness by whatever is happening around it or whatever is happening in a tractor that's playing. I don't know that that might happen. Well, not now, but of course it could... But yeah, I think it doesn't really have to be so complex to make me feel like it's somehow a thing in itself. It's just tiny movements, it's like magic to me, even though I don't know much. But it feels like it's enough to just be really a simple system. So the result is amazing. Aesthetically, it's amazing. Thank you. The signal angels, do we have a question from the internet? No. No, that's not the last question from the internet. I think from a performance perspective it's really interesting, your placement, you know, just reading and watching the robot and it also brings a lot of questions and also reminds me of how all the discourse of how the labor is more going towards like the roles of supervision that you're supervising the robot. So my question is, after some time it wouldn't be doing a lot of errors. Would you just sit there like that just wondering about the role of like yourself performing the robot as performing? Yeah, I mean it's a good question because I think you can... Yeah, I mean we could send the robot off to just do shows honestly. Which I think is pretty cool. I would like to do that. But I would also like to jam with the robot. I think that's something that interests me more. I'd actually become someone that you can work together. I think we're showing you were just sitting there was a part where you were just sitting there. And I was saying that this part is actually very like potent. Yeah, because I mean it has all these connotations about robots seeing our jobs and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, I think two. But I guess we're not really sure. I mean for now it's really interesting to sit there. And as long as the conversations we have with people sitting next to it are interesting. Thank you. Thank you. Speaking of sitting, people are sitting here for a while now. Thanks to all of you for the wonderful questions and thanks again. Thank you for this wonderful talk. And yeah, thank you for the wonderful presentation. And with that I would like to say goodbye to the crew of the crew of Crystal.