Details are sketchy but robots are mixing cocktails. At first, I thought “Great!” because, you know, robots. Upon consideration, I prefer the human touch in matters of mixology, where creative spark and lack of exactitude result in appealing creations.

Also, I recall the brief scene in The Fifth Element in which a bartender from the future serves Ian Holm’s character a drink:

Father Vito Cornelius

[Confiding to an off-screen bartender.] I know she’s made to be strong but she’s also so fragile, so human. Know what I mean? [Pull back. Bartender is revealed to be a robot.]

Bartender

[Shakes head, “No.”]

Let those clinking, clattering cacophonies of caliginous cogs and camshafts stick to what they do best: welding and destroying Skynet.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has sued Frank Gehry for leaks, mold, masonry cracks and drainage problems in the architect’s Stata Center, which opened at the university in 2004 with a price tag of $300 million. Gehry, in his characteristic low-bullshit manner, has told the press that problems in a building as complex as the Center were inevitable. In other words, there will be problems with most any Gehry building.

When Gehry’s Peter B. Lewis Building opened on the campus of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, I recall reports of snow and ice collecting in the roof’s strange nooks, then shooting off to narrowly miss pedestrians below. M.I.T. echoes this quirk with the Stata Center, noting that “sliding ice and snow from the building’s window boxes and other projecting roof areas” have caused structural damage and blocked emergency exits.

And in the classic example that I recalled when watching Sketches of Frank Gehry, Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles had a skin so shiny and angled so perfectly that on sunny days it would temporarily blind passers-by and heat adjacent sidewalks to molten temperatures.

Critics argue Gehry favors form over function. Gehry argues that clients such as M.I.T. are cheap, having rejected building elements that would have prevented design malfunctions. (Although in the case of the Disney Concert Hall, he paid handsomely to have the super-shiny surface sandblasted.) I don’t know which side is right, but when you’re dealing with an architect who has modeled buildings from crumpled wads of paper and has (proudly?) likened the Stata Center to “drunken robots,” you’re bound to get projects with quirks.

Yay! Another robot for the military that resembles those from Short Circuit. The Ranger III from FLIR Systems Inc. can track vehicles from 12 miles away and will be stationed along the southern U.S. border by the Department of Homeland Security.

But does it feel remorse if it accidentally squashes a grasshopper?

I stopped by the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum today for the National Design Triennial 2006, a rambling, bombastic exhibit on three floors that covers the design of just about everything: architecture, media, advertising, software, lighting, fashion, ceramics, furniture, fabrics, tools, maps and packaging. It’s a hit-or-miss jumble and on the second floor at least, there’s a slew of commercial filler: Nike sneakers, Apple’s iPod, an ad campaign for Court TV and more. Next to enlarged screenshots of some Google sites (including the new Google Picasa, which gets no explanation at all), an earnest placard notes that “‘google’ has become a widely accepted verb found in dictionaries.” Wow, really?

A centerpiece of the show was Sgt. John Blackwell, a life-sized digitally animated character that processes questions asked of it and responds verbally. The placard explains the U.S. Army joined forces with Hollywood to develop the serviceman to substitute for a human during training or informational sessions, which is a fine idea in concept.

Dressed in helmet and fatigues, the sergeant hovers directly in front of you behind a glass pane in a semidarkened open-backed booth. His numerous polygons shift slightly as he waits for your input, for which you hold down a red button while speaking your question into a microphone. He replies with a prerecorded response ideally appropriate to your question. When I arrived at the booth, there was a dad there with a very young girl who he got to “speak” into the microphone as he struggled to mash the button while holding her to the mike.

Girl

Gigaablagh.

Blackwell

You wanna know how I’m talking to you right now? Just ask me.

Girl

Hurnablahjk. Dit dit.

Blackwell

You wanna know something about my technology? Why don’t you ask me?

Girl

Palatalata dommmm. Bbb bbb bbb.

Blackwell

[leans forward testily] Why don’t you just Google it?

Girl

[looks confused, taken aback]

So what you’re most likely to hear is one of the sergeant’s pat responses when he doesn’t understand you or have an answer in his library of responses. The avatar “learns” and although that process isn’t explained, I assume it involves recording the keywords and questions the system doesn’t understand, then having a human filter through them to potentially provide software recognition and a response. I’d love to be the peon charged with reviewing those tapes.

To help cut down on unanswered questions, there’s a list of leading questions posted near the sergeant’s microphone, along the lines of “What is your name?” and “How does your technology work?” At its heart, the sergeant is a much more expensive version of the classic text-input psychologist computer program, ELIZA.

Despite his stunted conversational skills, a lot of people wanted to chat with the sergeant so I didn’t have as much face time as I’d have liked. He did tell me that he’s been in the army five years and joined after seeing Saving Private Ryan, a movie I would have guessed deters enlistment. Having warmed him up, I asked him his position on gays in the military. He offered a random canned response, so I asked again in case he was dodging the question or lost in thought about his technology. He responded, “Not to be cocky, but I’m programmed to help my flesh and blood brethren at war and in peacetime.” You heard it here first: no more of this “don’t ask, don’t tell” crosstalk—Sgt. Blackwell and the U.S. Army are gay friendly and not adverse to some cocky shenanigans.

A slightly less interactive exhibit that caught my fancy at the Triennial was an installation by Electroland that wraps along the inner wall of the museum’s grand staircase in a long white acrylic lightbox. As you ascend or descend, evenly spaced vertical fluorescent tube lights mounted in the lightbox “follow” you, fading in and out as you move, while the system plays an ascending or descending musical scale. It gets cacophonous when there are a lot of people on the stairs at the same time.

Some other cool stuff that would have been even cooler had it been operational was the transparent kayak that weighs only 26 pounds and folds to fit into a backpack, as well as the underwater robotic lobster that can gauge pollution, locate mines and liberate its crustacean cronies from restaurant holding tanks.¹

Comparing the Triennial to the ITP Winter Show I attended in December, the latter exhibition boasted a scrappy youthful exuberance, many more hands-on or active exhibits and not a whiff of commercialism, making it the larger success.

¹ I may have made up one of these features. [back]

What to get this Christmas for the tycoon or mad scientist in your life who has everything? How about his own private island? Although I do note a suspicious lack of information about the presence of vicious dinosaurs and/or giant evil robots on said islands.

I went after work to a gallery in SoHo, Location One, to check out an arty robot exhibit. It was crowded there but pretty cool. I liked Ill-Tempered Clangier (a self-playing wind chime) and IPO Madness, a slot machine that randomly generates then attempts to connect to an URL each time the lever is pulled. If it’s a valid URL, you win!

Like the U.S., South Korea is a country fretting over a sizeable baby boomer population fast becoming senior citizens. Solution? Why, robots!

According to a UPI article yesterday from The Korea Times, scientists at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology are developing a voice-recognition robot, dubbed H-Robot 1.0, that will care for the elderly. When it’s completed circa 2013, it will be able to monitor heart rate and blood pressure, order takeout food, clean the house and “summon help in an emergency when its owner falls to floor and doesn’t get up,” according to researcher Kim Mun-Sang, just like a LifeCall device on wheels.

Meanwhile, Samsung recently finished developing a robot that can help out the booming Korean population by rubbing some of it out. Known as the Samsung Techwin SGR-A1, it can autonomously track humans and fire an automatic weapon at them. According to Robots.net, the robot sentries will be deployed next year along the DMZ between North and South Korea, replacing 650,000 South Korean troops.

Samsung’s spec page includes the rendering shown above and lists all sorts of juicy features, such as “laser range finder,” “Intruder recognition and identification using xoom-in [sic],” even a “weapon antitheft device,” which I imagine sounds like one of those annoying repeating-pattern car alarms.

Jeez, didn’t mankind learn anything from the ED-209 and the SAINT? The nerds at Samsung apparently at least Nexflixed Short Circuit because they’ve picked up the SAINT’s spindly wickedness as well as the Evil Glowing Red Eye that’s been a hallmark of evil computers and robots for years.

Tonight, I watched I, Robot. I had been avoiding seeing it because I feared it would be bad, but a coworker convinced me to rent it after she compared it favorably to Gattaca, one of her (and my) favorite sci-fi movies.

It wasn’t bad although it wasn’t as bleak in its setting or conclusion as I like my sci-fi. Favorites of that ilk, in addition to Gattaca, include Minority Report, Blade Runner, Brazil and Dark City, which, like I, Robot, was directed by music video director-turned-film director Alex Proyas.

The movie takes place in a futuristic Chicago that seems perpetually aluminum shiny and lit by 1,000 suns. Even the bright new robots in the film look as if they were designed by Apple during its Curved Milky White Plastic and Softly Pulsing Light phase, or merely ripped off from Björk and Chris Cunningham’s video for “All Is Full Of Love.” The amount of detail put into rendering Sonny, the film’s lead robot, is impressive, keeping his movements and facial expressions fluid. (Reportedly, the filmmakers used the same sort of live actor-to-computer generated character-conversion that was used to create the equally effective Gollum for The Lord Of The Rings films.)

I see why the Gattaca comparisons were made, in that, like the Asimov stories that inspired I, Robot, there’s some bandying about of what defines life, the degree to which robots can become self-aware and cease following the biddings of their creators, etc. But when you boil it down, the film’s more a Will Smith action-adventure vehicle than it is a moralistic sci-fi potboiler, which could be good or bad, depending on what you were expecting of the film and how big of a Willie fan you are. It certainly allows for some of his patented self-deprecating humor and “now you’ve done made me mad” style ass-whuppings and action sequences brimming with impressively smooth computer FX.

Walking to work this morning, I passed a flatbed tow truck loading up a white Lamborghini Countach on the corner of W. 58th St. and 11th Ave., which is the middle of nowhere, Manhattan-wise, but a good place for hotroddin’, considering the unusually smooth roads, relative lack of traffic and favorable stoplights. I hadn’t realized how small those cars are, nor was I aware anyone still drove them. But I was pleased to see, judging by the leather-jacketed man scowling at the tow truck from the sidewalk, that the drivers of Lamborghinis still seem to be insufferable jerks.

Anyway, the car reminded me of one of my favorite toys as a lad: Sideswipe, which was one of the good-guy Transformers. It was a fire-engine red Lamborghini Countach that transformed into a good guy Autobot robot. As a “warrior class” ‘bot, he came with a trusty clip-on rocket-launcher accessory that fired a missile with the push of a tiny button, good for both robot mode (smacking down evil Deceptacons) and car mode (rush-hour road rage). That whole line of toys was awesome, not just because they transformed from motor vehicles and other objects into robots, but they were very well made. (The Transformers TV cartoon, which served nicely as a half-hour ad for the toys, was a whole other story.)

Sideswipe was mostly plastic (like the real Lamborghini), but had real rubber tires that you could remove from the rims. You could roll and race these toys on flat surfaces, just like Matchbox cars, only with better traction. Another Transformer I owned around the same time, Hound, which was a military-grade Jeep, was made mostly of die-cast metal. Sturdy stuff, except after repeated “transformings,” at which point they would develop poor posture in robot form. Good attention to detail, too. You could fold the tiny little seats in the Jeep up and down, and open and close the doors.

It’s also interesting, at least according to several internet fan sites, that these toys were never reissued in the U.S. Sideswipe and Hound in particular were only made during 1984 and 1985 and never again. I suppose these toys are my generation’s baseball cards, except instead of horror stories involving Mickey Mantle rookie cards whisked into the garbage by an unwitting parent, our stories involve a grab bag of extra-loose Transformers, a jumble of He-Men and G.I. Joe guys, 101 mismatched “action accessories,” and, for good measure, a Rubik’s cube, some random Happy Meal toys and a few stray Lego bricks that someone spilled orange Faygo on, all bagged up and sold at a garage sale for $5 (or best offer).

This evening, Tina, a friend from Cleveland who now owns her own design studio in New York, invited me to her sister’s husband’s art exhibit, The Smile Project, at the Green Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The project involves two squat, bulbous robots, Neil and Iona, that interact with each other and the audience, by moving their heads, swiveling their bodies around, cycling an animation of a mouth on the TV screens that serve as their heads, and occasionally speaking. They were wired to a computer off to the side and naturally I was interested in how they worked from a technical standpoint, but the artist was in demand, conversation-wise, and I never got to speak with him.

It seemed timely to see a robot exhibit since I had just read about the MIT engineers who developed a prototype robot that walks on water, much like a water spider. I mentioned this to several people in the gallery, but no one seemed as excited about it as I was. I did get to speak a lot with Tina’s friends, most of whose names I’ve forgotten, but it was a funny coincidence that her friend Ben was a web designer, so we could talk about shopping cart systems and CSS.

We hung out for awhile, drinking Bud from cans and wine from those red plastic cups. I briefly met Tillamook Cheddar, Brooklyn’s most famous dog-artist, outside her new store, which is right next door Green Gallery. She had her own photographer, who was crouching on the sidewalk talking sassy fashion shots, but was a bit standoffish to anyone else who wanted to pet her. I think the fame has gone to her head.

Afterwards, we went to Sea, an Asian restaurant designed to resemble equal parts ’60s bachelor pad and Buddhist temple. It was just about too hip for me, but I was impressed by the reasonable prices (at least when compared with Manhattan)—bottled imported beer was $4 and my sautéed eggplant and tofu dish, seasoned with garlic and sweet basil, was $7.

I was initially alarmed that one of Tina’s friends who joined the dinner party was wearing a watch that appeared more expensive than the entire contents of my closet and also had a sweater tied around his neck like he was Gatsby or something. But it turned out he’s a real estate lawyer, so I unexpectedly had a lot to talk to him about. He was funny too; after we’d been seated for dinner, the first thing I made sure I asked him was what his favorite lawyer joke was. An oldie but a goodie: “What do you call 1,000 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? A good start.”

I hardly had a chance to speak with Tina, so I agreed to make the long haul up Long Island to visit her next weekend and catch up. Our group split early, but I had a voicemail on my cell from Andie to hang out with her and her posse back on the island. Waiting for the subway, a frizzy haired gentleman was bobbing his head, tapping the time and vigorously slapping out a sweet version of the T. Rex power ballad “20th Century Boy” on his acoustic guitar, for which I dropped a dollar in his case, the first time I’ve appreciated subway music enough to tip.

After receiving further instructions on the night’s festivities via my cell at Union Square, I went up to Brother Jimmy’s where Andie, Katie, Erika, Sam and Carolann were enjoying post-BBQ beverages at a sidewalk table. Eric joined us a bit later and we all partook of a fishbowl filled with a potent, pineapple-based alcoholic concoction, as well as a small, rubber alligator.