Dan Wilcox: robotcowboy

»Is it working?« is an introduction to the eponymous festival, organized by the Ljudmila association between August 24 and 28, 2020 at several locations around Ljubljana, as a part of the European network of educational and art institutions, EASTN-DC. The network discusses new shifts in digital paradigms at the intersection of art, science, and technology, with a particular focus on interactive, haptic, and multimodal principles. The exhibition presents works which use a variety of presentational and interface strategies as well as digital technologies to achieve diverse modalities of interactivity.

robotcowboy is a wearable computing platform to explore new types of man-machine music & artistic performance. Embedded computing, custom software and audio electronics are utilised to build portable, self-contained systems which both embed and embody the computation on the performer. This cyborg approach is both empowering and compromising as new sonic capability and movement are offset by the need for electrical energy: elements of tension between human and system. robotcowboy shows are always live and contain aspects of improvisation, feedback with the audience and an inherent capability of failure, i.e., the live in live performance.

Credits:

Video production: ZKM | Videostudio

Camera: Xenia Leidig, Christina Zartmann
Live Editing, Live Streaming: Peter Müller