[rohrpost] Roboexotica 2006 / Vienna (5 December - 10 December):

[das ende der nahrungskette]

Roboexotica 2006 / Vienna (5 December - 10 December)

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Roboexotica is the first and inevitably leading festival concerned 
with cocktail robotics.

Until recently, no attempts had been made to publically discuss the 
role of cocktail robotics as an index for the integration of 
technological innovations into the human Lebenswelt, or to document 
the increasing occurrence of radical hedonism in man-machine 
communication. Roboexotica is an attempt to fill this vacuum. It is 
the first and, inevitably, the leading festival concerned with 
cocktail robotics world-wide. A micro mechanical change of paradigm 
in the age of borderless capital. Alan Turing would doubtless test this out.
Scientists, researchers, computer geeks and artists from all over the 
world participate to build cocktail robots and discuss about 
technological innovation, futurology and science fiction.

Roboexotica is a cooperation between Shifz ( http://shifz.org ), 
monochrom ( http://www.monochrom.at/english ) and Bureau fuer 
Philosophie ( http://bureau.philo.at ), Vienna.

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Opening: Dec 5, 7 PM, Freiraum, Museumsquartier, Vienna.

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Dreams of Regulation:

The topic of this year's event is Dreams of Regulation:

The dream of a universal or an interdisciplinary science is an old 
idea that is continually arising anew. Despite, or precisely because 
of, the increasing specialization of the sciences, the twentieth and 
twenty-first centuries have brought forth numerous visions of a new 
interdisciplinary science transcending the limitations of traditional 
sciences mechanistic and analytic thinking. Cybernetics, the theory 
of dynamic systems, artificial life research and robotics are (or 
have been) among the hopeful candidates for such a new science. It 
has been repeatedly attested that these new disciplines could develop 
a (more) comprehensive language able to bridge the gap between the 
so-called "two cultures" of the natural and the human sciences. One 
might cite the example provided by the famous Macy Conferences, in 
which mathematicians, physicists, biologists and anthropologists cooperated.

Interestingly, the development of new techno sciences like 
cybernetics, AL research and robotics has had a wide-ranging 
influence on the most diverse fields of knowledge from natural and 
technological sciences to human, social and cultural sciences. They 
have either nested themselves under their own "label" in a great 
variety of disciplines, established themselves as new and independent 
interdisciplinary areas of research, or integrated themselves (or 
been integrated) into other fields. In the latter case, techno 
sciences like cybernetics, chaos theory and artificial life research 
gave up their individual "identity" as independent fields of 
knowledge. Cybernetics, for instance, was influential during the 
1960s in a wide variety of areas from medicine, (molecular) biology, 
pedagogy, political science, sociology and philosophy to traffic 
planning and artificial intelligence. Today almost no one speaks of 
cybernetics, but its theorems and products remain present in many 
fields. In robotics, for example, cybernetic ideas like feedback, 
regulation and the black box model are booming.

Against this background, what are the perspectives of efforts toward 
establishing a new interdisciplinary approach and a different techno 
rationality in robotics, with its cybernetic heritage and its 
(biocybernetic) future? To what degree are new working approaches or 
even new forms of rationality to be found in robotics?

New forms of knowledge and knowledge production and new ways of 
creating artifacts are made possible by cybernetics and robotics. 
Today many robotics specialists fall back on cybernetics as a 
resource for ideas in realizing new technological developments. Our 
symposium will focus on epistemological and ontological affinities 
and differences as well as those found in the production of artifacts 
and will put special emphasis on interdisciplinarity and notions of a 
universal science.

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http://www.roboexotica.org