 So, the next talk you're going to hear is by Jakob Römming on GoTo80, our next speakers are Jakob Eason, artist, designer, engineer and community builder from Copenhagen and GoTo80, who came here from Sweden and called himself an old media artist with many talents. They both were presented ongoing robotic research, project, robotic music, which is centered around automation, creation and loss of control. I'm so excited for this presentation and let's welcome our new music robot, Overlords, and Jakob and GoTo80. Thank you. Thanks for inviting us, thank you for the introduction. Not so sure about the Overlord part, but let's see, down the road. Yeah, I'm Jakob. And I'm GoTo80, that's my artist name. I do a lot of music with old computers, like this Commodore 64 that we're going to see some more of. I have a kind of shared passion for old machines or just technology in general and I normally don't do music as much, more sound and media arts in general and you can see one movie that I've made in the video lounge at one tonight which is kind of investigating rare earth elements and kind of the materiality of the internet. This is something different. Yeah, I mean, we're very happy to be invited here because it's kind of a new project for us. We've been working on it for about six months, so it's very open still. We're not really sure where we're going with this yet. I mean, we'll figure it out along the way. Yeah, so it's important for us to stress that this is artistic research in the sense that not like scientific research, it's more explorations in a field that we are not specialists in. And also it's important for us to stress that we're really excited to be in a place like CCC with so many, so much more talented people than us present, like really... And we're really hoping to somehow start a conversation with you guys so we're also aiming to leave some space for Q&A but also we have the robots standing outside and we'll make some music on it after the talk. And tomorrow we'll bring a second robot and a drum machine and maybe we can kind of jam and talk and people are very welcome to come and hack on these robots with us. We really... Yeah, we love that. Yeah. Okay, but so we've worked together for about ten years. This was the first project that we did together, it's called HT Gold and it was presented on this huge screen in the main square of Copenhagen and it's basically an old hockey game for the Commodore 64 that we manipulated it so while you play it, it sort of just destroys itself and becomes this beautiful mess. But it's still playable and it's still a lot of fun for people who can take the heat. And when Anders says that we've been working together for ten years it sounds like we're this kind of duo, it's not like... We're actually not working together that often. We've seen each other more during the last half year than we have maybe in the previous nine and a half. So we live in two different cities and so we get together when doing projects but it's not like we're kind of going to work in the same studio, just to clarify. This is a different project we made in 2013, Memoblast. It was one of the performances like opening the Transmediale in 13. We had open fax lines, people could fax in different content to us and we were basically emulating this kind of dysfunctional office environment receiving faxes and copying them and trying to sonify them at the same time. So there are faxes that came in, we tried to process them and I tried to adapt the music from the faxes basically which was very difficult. This is another project called Data Slave in kind of the same vein where this is an old police station that I'm sitting in and people fill in forms with what kind of songs they want and then I get something like five minutes to make the song and then I save it on a floppy disk and give it to them and then it's their song. This is an example of how an order could look like so that was quite difficult as well. I guess we like to punish ourselves a little bit. I guess kind of falling in this tradition of scripting ourselves and working within some kind of scripts like some... I don't know if you call it Fluxus or whatever but kind of giving up control to some other system or... So like most people I guess we're fascinated about robots but we're also a little kind of... I don't know, there's a lot of emotions connected with robots and mostly it's also I guess at least personally for me it's been this kind of frustration about fascination of robots and they're coming, they're coming, they're coming but they're never really coming. I'm never really getting a robot but then suddenly this summer we actually got a robot like we got a possibility of fooling around with a robot basically and we grabbed that possibility without maybe completely knowing what we were heading towards I mean we had ideas and we shared some of these ideas and we set up a small mini residency at Copenhagen floating hackerspace called Ilutron Yeah we were basically... This robot is called the U-Arms Swift Pro it's this kind of open easily hackable robot and we were just using this week to try to gain control of the robot enough that it could kind of be an extension of Anders so basically what you're seeing here is Anders with a keyboard controlling this little laptop it's down on the left that is then controlling the robot arm we have some serial commands, g-code and then the robot arm is basically just kind of replicating the key presses that Anders is doing on the keyboard so it's just an extended arm somehow very elaborate prosthesis Yeah elaborate but then on the other hand it has only one finger Commodore 64 computer that I mentioned before from the early 80s and the software is called Devmon it's a new software it's not old stuff so you can really do some pretty amazing stuff with it and what you're seeing is basically the robot inserting notes changing the notes in a loop that's running with only one finger Yeah I'll push So with this kind of first video prototype we got booked to do a lot of stuff suddenly and we got invited to this Algomec festival in Sheffield this festival of algorithmic and mechanical movement to basically play at a rave 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 insert notes, delete notes, mute voices bring stuff up and down and basically in the end it actually could play kind of a full set like we played half an hour or something or the robot played half an hour and I guess because we were still maybe doubting if we could pull it off you were there playing as well like kind of head to head with the robot but actually you know you were mostly just kind of filling in little extra things Yeah Yeah so it was more like Anders trying to keep up with the robot maybe or playing on top show a small clip Filming, that's why you see my face sometimes and sometimes the screen is my screen just to show what's going on in a weird way Yeah, so I mean this experience of that the robot already kind of after after just I don't know a couple of months of fooling around was able to you know we basically could reduce ourselves to technicians setting up the robot and then you know in Sheffield I literally pushed the button and then I went and saw the show I don't know that kind of started some things that was kind of emotional somehow and we got invited to play at the internet days in Stockholm like doing the lounge music for the kind of chill out and beer session after the days so we basically took the challenge to let the robot play dub techno type stuff for five hours unsupervised and then we were just kind of hanging out in the bar and well I mean you'll see in the video I guess we set up two tables basically like we're doing out there so the robot on one table and we're kind of next to it and we have a lot of time to have conversations with people about like kind of the future of robotics and like when they become creative and take on jobs or whatever and it's like this kind of I'm imagining at least there will be a lot of these jobs where you just have to kind of hang out and just once in a while fix the robot up or something yeah and for this one we actually put a lot of effort in making what the robot does a little bit more dynamic like adjusting it for each song and making it more sort of diverse what it's doing so actually now we yeah I mean we sort of knew what it was supposed to do but it was still somehow a surprise and it was just this kind of magic of seeing a robot do something that it was just it's a really strange feeling like I mean it's still like we do the music the songs but the robot performs our songs so the songs actually become something new yeah which is yeah it's like a weird mix of sadness happiness a bit scary sort of or just fun it's a weird stuff definitely and on top of that I mean we're talking a lot about electronic music and how it's hard to make stuff minimal enough basically it's kind of shut up and just repeat long enough like we both have a tendency I think to fill in too many notes maybe for mainstream techno or something but the robot is like super cool like you know it can really you know hold it yeah a little bit longer yeah okay let's play a switch first of all yeah so I guess it's also important for us to say that the Commodore is a good place to start because it's got keys and it's easy to push keys if you just have one finger you know and the Chaos Pad is also really good for just one finger so right now we're more like and we're thinking about drum machines now as well because they're good for one finger so right now the kind of the musical I don't know the gear is kind of dependent on kind of one finger push interaction which is kind of beautiful too it takes some of all the choices out of production I guess so it's not to say that this is only a C64 or project or something like that we can imagine doing all kinds of things with this robot yeah so now we're here and we brought two robots and one like we said for playing and then one for hacking I mean we really encourage you guys to come and play with us and of course I mean most of the coding we're doing is relatively banal it's more like kind of generative code based a lot on randomness and so on but of course we know that there's all this neural network AI stuff that's really booming and it's apparently good at making music so if there's some people out there that kind of are into that or know how to maybe remix what the robot has already done or compose new stuff I mean we'd really like to talk with you and yeah I mean we have really good training data as well I guess you should kind of explain that so I mean I have because I've used these old computers for so long and the files that you save it's all like self-contained source files or whatever so everything is in there and they're really really small these files as well I think yeah I checked my folder earlier today it's like 50 megabytes for 20 years of everything that I made like all the work files and everything so you know and then yeah we just realized wow imagine you know feeding some neural network with this stuff then we can really just fuck off and do nothing maybe I mean we'll see or maybe it doesn't work at all or like you know jam with the robot you know it doesn't have to be that we're just kind of leading I don't think we will but it's it would just be really fun to I mean also for me to have Anders hanging around in Copenhagen and I can jam with him when he's back home come tomorrow there was the 10 minute sign so I'm skipping fast but tomorrow from 11 we're playing there the gig starts at 9 I think the robot will play around two hours so probably starting a bit slow but then ramping it up yeah questions what a cool robot so we have about 10 minutes for questions we have the first one a little bit more why you chose the simple robot of the symbolism or the systematic aspects of it attracted you to using such a simple system as opposed to all the huge and cool software solutions that would be able to automate music and all these things yeah no I guess you know you were making music on a Commodore 64 we're not software guys you mean specifically the robot why we didn't choose a more complex robot or doing it all in 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 get the signals right into the Commodore there's other solutions as opposed to using such a mechanical simple robot now because it's a completely different feeling to have a robot arm doing it just you know something invisible and I guess we need to add also that we're not we don't really know what we're doing right I mean we got together with the robot because we thought the robot was cool you know and then it turned out that it was actually kind of pathetic but that was fun so I guess if we know what we know now maybe we wouldn't have started but it's that's not the way this project works it's very much kind of exploration and again I mean we also really like these old machines so it makes sense that we have a robot interacting with a C64 and I mean the C64 doesn't take meaty or like fancy protocols like that so we have to actually touch the keys yeah thanks microphone too please how much of what the robot does is pre-programmed and just replaying a pre-composed piece or how much randomness or computational patterns involved in that music well I mean the bass is always a pre-composed song basically yeah what it does is yeah I mean it's pretty random but within some kind of boundaries like we say what notes it should press but we don't say when it should press it for example or we say ok maybe you can change the rhythm a little bit but not just completely 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 based on random but of course within some kind of logic structure right so it's never there's no kind of direct playback of anything it's like that's we haven't figured out how to do that but like a future challenge is to make to compose stuff that will be more useful for the robot basically like we didn't really have time to do that yet but we want it to be more more free and do its own music from scratch more or less yeah so right now it's loading stuff and modifying it but we of course wanted to start saving stuff and then be stable enough that we can kind of leave it for a week and then come back and see what it's been up to I really like this kind of idea of making music for the robot so that I adapt to the robot and it's one finger because then I really really have to you know delete nine fingers and some you know it's just a completely different way so I have to adapt 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 putting on github? it is on github it's a mess but it's there it's there yeah it's called robot music it's there thanks number two please so is your robot very precise or have you ever had the situation where it just made a mistake and you thought well that wasn't planned but sounds okay as well I guess or is it just precise enough that that doesn't happen I mean 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 we it messes up all the time we have a kind of a big headache on calibration and so on because every time it bounces into the key we have to kind of restart and it's I mean so far we survived all gigs but we were just having a lot of trouble right now hopefully it's gonna run but it doesn't have an effect on your creative process well it has some stress yeah some stress adrenaline yeah no but when it when it sort of messes up it just completely messes up and it yeah just presses somewhere else completely so then it's just out of okay so it just gets out of order so it's not it's got no feedback like there's no camera on it or it's just like it has to basically just remember all the coordinates so it's a super fragile system if it messes up things number four please so I'm gonna 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 like to measure how happy the crowd is with the music it produces and then kind of so I don't know facial recognition recognizing how many people are on the dance floor and stuff like that and then giving the peep back 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 maybe in the forest and then just kind of playing music for the animals or even better like this kind of the idea of removing the DJ and like having a wall in front so that nobody knows it's a robot if it's playing in a club that's also an awesome idea because I don't know one thing that's kind of interesting with the robot and all this talk about robot overlords and so on is that I don't know dealing with it it's like it's a thing it's an entity but it's more like maybe an animal or something like that that might grow up to be really powerful but it makes us look differently at the world somehow right now I think it relates very nicely to animals almost so kind of putting it in the forest would really make sense I think happy animals number one please my question is kind of related is the robot using any sort of input from what's happening to trigger those random process or now it's just randomly triggering stuff there's no inputs like that not yet anyway we've been talking about writing our own random we've been talking a lot about random so writing our own random functions of course that are then pseudo random somehow and feeding something into that but I don't think we're very interested in making it like super interactive as such because yeah yeah I don't I don't see the need for all this kind of interaction I think it's actually nice that it has this kind of weird inner life and you have to understand it's not like understanding us but I think this is what I mean is if you eat by itself can trigger its own randomness by whatever is happening around it or whatever is happening in the tracker that's playing I don't know that that's my question well not now but of course it could go that way but yeah I think it doesn't really have to be so complex to make me feel like it's somehow you know a thing in itself it's just like just this tiny movement is like magic to me even though I know it's not magic but it feels like it's enough to just be really a simple system I think that's cool in itself. The result is amazing aesthetically amazing thanks thanks Do you signal angels? Do we have a question from the internet? No, Shakespeare. One last question from Mike Four please I think from a performance perspective it's really interesting your placement just sitting and watching the robot and it also brings a lot of questions and also it reminds me of all of the discourse of how labour is more going towards roles of supervision that you're supervising the robot so my question is even if after some time it wouldn't be doing a lot of errors would you still sit next to it? I'm just wondering about the role of yourself while the robot is performing Yeah, it's a good question because I guess you can we could send the robot off to just do some shows on its own I guess which I think is pretty cool I would like to do that but I would also like to jam with the robot and actually do stuff together I think that's something that interests me more that it actually becomes someone that you can work together with In the video you were showing you were just sitting in the part where you were just sitting and the robot and I was saying that this part is actually very potent, really strong you're just sitting and the robot is doing its thing It has all these connotations about robots stealing our jobs and all of this and we're playing with this idea too but I guess we're not really sure where to go with it For now it's really interesting to sit there as long as the conversations we have with people sitting next to it are interesting 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 to Jakob and go to ATE for this wonderful talk