NETHERLANDS: Annual Robodock Festival takes place

This year's ROBODOCK was for the first time in its 8-year-history an entirely legal event, taking place on the venue which had not been squatted! Robodock is a unique international summer festival, that merges technology and art. Central theme of this year's festival was Water, hence the subtitle "AQUADOCK" . Robodock's "creatures" swept the audience off their feet, whether they run away from a huge mechanical spider or escape a blazing flame. Once a year for the last eight years, ROBODOCK has been delivering industrial and art experiments based on recycled material and mixed with all forms of performing arts. From "post-apocaliptic-Mad Max-cars" driving around the venue to mechanical sharks swimming in the pool, theatre, lasers and puppet shows, it all took place in a four-day programme of Robodock (21-24 September). This year it was situated in an abandoned warehouse of legally acquitted from the city of Amsterdam. "There's an important subculture in the city, which is always fighting for space, because it's rooted in squat-culture, and we always squat big industrial buildings, live there for five years, make place nice, so then a lot of people come, and then the project developers come and finally, in the end it's gonna be luxurious apartments, which is City Development. We are basically a movement which is helping City Development without getting any certainties for our work," artistic director and squatter Maik ter Veer explained. The biggest star of this year's Robodock was Stelarc, an Australian-based performance artist whose work explores and extends the concept of the body and its relationship with technology through human-machine interfaces incorporating medical imaging, prosthetics and robotics. Stelarc has been widely considered a godfather of creative robotics. "He's done really extreme experiments, putting flesh-hooks, hanging himself up in the air, just provoking reaction. Or getting really deep into machine technology.: now his body is standing on the mechanical spider. If he moves one finger, the robot also does," Maik ter Veer added.

ITN Source | September 30, 2005

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