Robot Groupies -------------- 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 Đ 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 noštropic-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 $14/year or $4 sample