juke_bots
The robot as DJ and record player
2001

In the “juke_bots” installation, two industrial robots act as a DJ. The robotic arms are surrounded by records that they can freely select and grab. In front of each arm is a record player. Without putting the records down, the machines thread them under the needle of the record player.
The freely rotating robotic hand allows the machine to play, scratch, distort, speed up, slow down and fragment the music and in this way produce new sounds typical of the robot DJ.
The music preserved on the disks serves as a source of sound samples. These fragments are taken completely out of their musical context, rearranged by the overriding rhythm of the rotational movements and sometimes alienated to such an extent that the record becomes mere material and a means from which the sounds are now created independently. By alternately putting back and selecting again during a session, the robotic arms can create ever new compositions from 22 records and various scratch modes.
Despite their high mechanical precision, the “juke_bots” always have an unpredictable momentum of their own in movement and sound.The actual producers of the music here remain the robots.“juke_bots” spans an arc from industrialization and its consequence of a clocking of the social reality of life to the DJ mass cult of the late 20th century, in whose techno sounds the entire process culminates.
Record selection HfG performance 2001: DJ Acid Maria alias Angelika Lepper
Record selection New Fair performance 2003: DJ kri alias Markus Kritzokat

























