Photograph by Jacob Appelbaum/ jacob@appelbaum.net
T HE MOJITO-MIXING ROBOT HAS A it work would be. “It’s about beautiful failure and
long, steel spiral slide through which limes interactivity,” says Johannes Grenzfurthner of
tumble, landing in a machine that squeezes Monochrom, a Viennese tech/arts group that
their juice into a glass. Then, a clanking chain drive co-organizes Roboexotica along with another
moves the glass through a series of stations: a mint tech-creative outfit called Shifz.
dispenser, a muddler that pounds the leaves in with Magnus Wurzner, the ringleader of Shifz, leads
the lime juice, thence to rum, sugar syrup, ice, and me past two 7-year-olds remotely piloting a robot
soda dispensers. The whole thing is festooned with to bump into people and offer them peanuts. Down
blobby welds, snaking cables, and exposed logic. the hall, a roaring slot-car race is controlled by EEG
For three years now, Robert Martin, an ex-CNC contacts — the drunker the drivers get, the faster
technician, has brought his mojito robot to Vienna’s their cars go. At a chrome bar, an animatronic
annual Roboexotica convention ( roboexotica.org), drunkard vomits copiously into a cocktail glass.
where he and other amateur roboticists show off their Behind the bar looms Thunder One, a giant com-
motley, semi-functional “cocktail robots” — droids mercial drink-mixing machine with an LCD interface
that mix and pour drinks, light cigarettes, and above and a snake’s nest of tubes that require regular
all, inspire conversation. Participants come from flushing to clean them. Wurzner points and shouts
all over the world and every level of expertise, from over the din: “Thunder One is what cocktail culture
Silicon Valley professors to a guy who simply exhib- will come to if we don’t intervene. It’s all about
ited a tank of beer with a submersible in the suds. efficiency and not about aesthetics or irony. That’s
The mojito robot never successfully prepares a what cocktail robots and cocktail culture are for.” drink, but it always draws a crowd. It’s so pretty, so impractical, and so teasing in its potential that Cory Doctorow ( craphound.com) wrote “A House Divided” on watching it not work is more fun than watching page 26.
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