Roböxotica 2009

The world's oldest, best, and only cocktail robot festival

By Holly von Winckel
January 18, 2010

When I first found out that there would be an event near me called Roböxotica, featuring robots with applications in cocktail culture, I was pretty excited. I told friends about this, and they were also excited. It just seemed to contain an intrinsic element of Being A Good Idea. Why? What's so inviting about this concept? I figured the only way to find out for sure would be to go to Vienna, Austria for the 11th Annual Roböxotica. I would see the robots, talk to creators, taste the cocktails, and see if I could grok it. Mmm, cocktails.[1]

When you think of robots, what do you think of? Most people seem to go directly to androids. Androids are anthropomorphic machines designed to look and act a lot like human beings; if you go to the Tyrell Corporation extreme: More Human Than Human. The robots we like best seem to be the robots that do people things.[2] This, incidentally, is the explanation for the ongoing popularity of monkey and ape exhibits in zoos — they do people things. And if you believe Denis Leary, this is why we eat cows and not otters (otters "do cute little people things with their hands"). Those common conceptions of robots are not really what I found at Roböxotica 2009. Some did have human characteristics, up to and including hurling verbal abuse at attendees, but the cocktail robots answer a higher conceptual calling.

In 1998, Magnus Wurzer and Chris Veigl had the idea that cocktail robots were missing from their lives — from the world — and that it would be a better world with cocktail robots. It started off small, underground, just a few enthusiasts in a room with some gadgets and alcohol. It was good to bring robots out of the context of factories, production, and efficiency, and into the context of the purely human: socializing. Humans are social creatures, and robots are, at least in the original concept, meant to be labor saving devices for people, whose time and energy is presumably too precious to waste on trivialities. Talking to Chris and Magnus about the origins of Roböxotica, I was repeatedly tempted to ask if they'd been drinking when they came up with this idea, but never did.

Click to enlarge.

In 1999, this philosophical line of inquiry became a competition and has been growing ever since. Roböxotica 2009 filled five rooms of the former Drinkomat production facility [3], was attended by 500 or more people, and served thousands of drinks. Additionally, the organizers hosted a hands-on, multi-evening workshop in November to help newbies get started on cocktail robotics. [4] At the end of the event weekend, awards were given for various accomplishments, including mixing, serving, interaction, and (my personal favorite) the "special award for a cocktail robot that is actually not a cocktail robot but a goat vagina".

Entry to Roböxotica 2009 was free of charge, which surprised me. Chris told me that the city arts funding contributes to the costs of the event, but it was clear this whole thing is a labor of love. [5] Magnus told me Bacardi chips in on keeping Roböxotica stocked, and Schrott bakery keeps them supplied with baked goods. (That's worth a chuckle if you know Schrott is German for 'scrap', a little serendipitous irony there.)

On Saturday, there was a film crew making a documentary of the event for ProSieben, a German television channel, to air in January. [6] The filming seemed largely focused on a couple of battery operated children's toy robots, rocking back and forth and waving their arms, with the cocktail robot scene as a backdrop. I have not seen the completed segment, but I hope those are ultimately a small part of that documentary, because the event was not about toy robots. At least, not factory—made toy robots that don't do anything cocktail related.

Click to enlarge.

Lest you confuse Roböxotica with the sleek, high tech world of production robots, you need to know this is not about cold efficiency. Most of the robots have names rather than titles. Even accomplishment of the task at hand often took a back seat to form, function and, dare I say, personality? Roböxotica was also a family event — there were couples and children there, creator groups, and a very relaxed, very collegial atmosphere. Perhaps I reveal my prejudices here, but I found all that to stand in defiance of the solitary half-mad geek / genius / hermit stereotype about the kind of person who builds a robot and then attends a long weekend conference about that.

All the way back to the most basic models of wheel and lever, the point of machines has been to reduce the demands on humans. But what happens if machines are created that actually increase the demands on humans? It's well and good to say that a cocktail robot is taking the bartender's work away, but to see one in action suggests that this is not the case.

A cocktail robot may mix and serve drinks, light cigarettes, listen to the heartaches of the customers, and graciously accept tips. So far, this is much like what a human bartender does. But a human bartender is not built in the garage or laboratory. A human bartender does not require the drinkers to go and fetch more bottles. A human bartender generally does not reboot in the middle of a transaction, nor does the magic smoke typically escape the human bartender with or without warning.

Ever hear the expression, "You are a machine!" or "You are like a machine!"? These are compliments. They mean that you are fast, smooth, efficient. To reverse the comparison is generally a slight to the machine: "My granny runs faster than this computer", and the like. How'd that happen? When did machines get to be better than people? Cocktail robots aren't better than us; they are actually much like us. They do people things: They can be unpredictable, require finesse, give us drinks, listen to our BS, and give us something to do on the weekend. These are people-things. And they're good things.

Click to enlarge.

Are the cocktail robots, in fact, socializing? They were the center of attention — the robots at the event were surrounded by people who were talking about them, even robots that were not functional at the time. This is in some ways akin to being at a party with a famous person. The behavior and actions of the famous person are grounds for discussion, speculation, etc. And yet, those famous people would be said to be socializing, just by being in that situation, even if they did not interact at all with those other people. The famous person, much like a cocktail robot, might even be expected to provide drinks to their gawking admirers.

The discussion panels were hosted by Johannes Grenzfurthner, who capably and smoothly generated topics of discussion for the panelists. Johannes is an artist, writer, DIY researcher, and founder of Monochrom. Some of the popular topics included:

What is technotopia?
Where's the future we were promised?
What do we have instead of that?
What do cocktail robots actually do for us?
What do we do for them?
Is it ecologically / socially irresponsible to take advantage of the wide availability of consumer electronics, etc, to make cocktail robots in a world where precious metals still are mined with what amounts to slave labor and cheap chips are made in sweatshops, while we are making use of all those things to create utterly unnecessary machines?
Or, do these machines serve a higher social purpose which may ultimately contribute to improving all those negative things?

One issue that surfaced repeatedly was the prevalence of men in the hackerspace/ DIY /cocktail robot scene. The cocktail robot events weren't a sausage fest: There were women there. There were lots of women there. In fact, outside of the cadre of creators, which was weighted toward the Y chromosome, the attendees seemed to be mostly women. I didn't do any kind of formal count, but just watching the folks coming in the door, it seemed like there were women attending in higher numbers than men. But they weren't there for the panels and they weren't there to discuss the ins and outs of cocktail robot creation. They were there for the cocktails.

I can't promise you all these questions were answered conclusively during the panel sessions, but the conversations were certainly interesting. You can listen to them online, along with eight lectures and a discussion from Roböxotica 2007. Sometimes the sound quality isn't ideal, but it's all there, and you can get a sense of the atmosphere of Roböxotica 2009. Especially when you get to the part in the third panel where Johannes has to halt proceedings to tweet the phrase "molecular sweatshop" to the Monochrom Twitter feed.

So, to bring this back to the cocktail robots: Maybe the founders and participants of pursuits like these — Roböxotica, Maker Faire, re-discovery of "slow food" and hand-made objects — have found themselves in an environment sorely lacking in ... what? Harmony with the current technology, perhaps with a chaser of future angst? It is said that our ability to create technology far exceeds our ability to assimilate and integrate it into our lives. We are not feeling true solidarity with our technology. The stress generated by mobile telephones is a great example of a useful technology that we are not yet totally copasetic with: the incessant calls (our own and other people's) can really be a mental and emotional burden, and the more applications we find for telephony, the more obvious this becomes.

On the surface of it, it's easy to think that cocktail robots are simply more toys in a world already bursting with toys, but this is about empowerment. Not so much that these people have an actual need for machines to serve them alcoholic beverages, but in that they are looking to be empowered in their own two hands, and the contents of their skulls, and in their ability to realize their ambitions. Perhaps there is also a common need to connect with other people who have this increasingly rare ability to bring ideas out of the head and into the world — the tangible, physical world. [7]

Maybe that is why we need hand-crafted cocktail robots in the world. The Roböxotica project may be an effort to bring machines inside the mind, inside the integrated social sphere of our lives. Maybe there is not a big future for cocktail robots, in a revolutionary sense. Cocktail robots most likely will not solve the world's problems, but this could be a great step in the direction of learning how to live at peace with the machines we have created and will create in the future.

Throughout their relatively short history, robots have generated a lot of angst in people. Particularly the humanoid robots, but also the system-control robots. There are countless science fiction books and films addressing exactly this topic, fear-mongering about the possibility that we will fall victim to our own cleverness. [8] Cocktail robots could be the other side of that coin. Maybe robots that we have fun with, play with, and trust not to enslave humanity when our backs are turned, will be the next step into the future. No matter what happens, we're probably going to welcome our new robot overlords with more enthusiasm if they can make a really good G&T.

This ambiguity about what robots are, and what it means to have cocktail robots, and this wellspring of social topics suggests to me that this event is more about getting people thinking, and doing, and interacting. It's not really about getting the machines to do something. At the end of the day, it's just plain fun to make a thing, to have a drink, to talk to someone about how to fire a shot of alcohol into someone's mouth accurately from three meters away.

My gratitude goes out to Chris Veigl, Magnus Wurzer, Benjamin Cowden, Johannes Grenzfürthner, and all the creators who took a minute to talk to me about their cocktail robots.

Footnotes:

1 — Tasting the cocktails had to come last, or this article would have ended with, "Mmm, cocktails."

2 — Sure, Daleks are robots that don't look like people, but they're malicious as well. They may be favorite villains, but I wouldn't say we LIKE them. Robots that look like us are supposed to be nice to us. That's why Data's evil twin, Lor, is so menacing — he looks like someone we already know and trust, and also why Asimov's I, Robot is such a daunting cautionary tale.

3 — Austrian company Drinkomat designs and produces devices for the automated dispensing of beverages. The Drinkomat building is just a short walk from the Technisches Museum Wien. Symbolic choice of venue, and yet, not cheesy. Brilliant!

4 — This was the first year for the workshop, with only three registrants and just two attendees to work with the three tutors. It was, however, a very productive workshop. They produced a fully functional robot that served either a traditional White Russian, or its vegan cousin, the White Russian Hippie in a short time and at low cost. I predict the next workshop will have more participants, and result in more great robots. I was interested to learn that all three registrants were women.

5 — Labors of love are typically quite costly. I briefly considered how much drinking could have been done for the cost of building, transporting (machines, supplies, and people), repairing, and stocking these cocktail robots, and decided that, in round numbers, it would have been A Lot Of Drinking.

6 — Details will almost certainly turn up on the Roböxotica web site, and possibly on their Facebook page as well. It will, of course, be in German, but if you just want to see some nifty cocktail robots in action, it might be worth checking out. There are also action shots on the Roböxotica site.

7 — Designing and executing designs has become a specialized field. For the longest time pretty much anyone with an idea was as likely to cobble together something as anyone else. Since the Industrial Revolution, this is a job, an area of expertise. Yes, "amateurs" still do this, but the fact that having an idea and making a thing based on it is now considered something with amateur and pro divisions says a lot about the situation.

8 — Even prior to science fiction presaging the broad application and control of automation and robotics, this is not an idea without actual historical precedent. (I'm looking at you, Roman Empire!)