Sex Object

Thanks for the rec; but I basically gave up on trying to understand or keep up with television a long time ago. Is it fiction or a documentary about real robots?

Elvis Telecom told me to check out The Silver Metal Lover by Tanith Lee which seems entirely ~relevant to my interests~ right now regarding robot musician sex.

Fiction, 8-part drama about synthetic humans programmed to be house servants / do menial McJobs, some of whom become sentient.

How do we know that robots factor into the song at all?

What do robots even have to do with Kraftwerk at all!

Things that Kraftwerk sang that they were..

1) "We are the Robots"
2) "We Are Show Room Dummies"

...

3) the operators with their pocket calculators

4) sexy data scientists

5) travelling down the motorway

6) in the spaaaaaaaaaaaace laaaaaaaaaaaaaaab

7) Cyclists

8) the voice of energy

9) online-dating user

9a) transmitters
9b) receivers

Sorry - 10a and 10b there

What do robots even have to do with Kraftwerk at all!

How much of Electric Cafe continues that concept? Everything mentioned above was from their earlier works, at least half a decade ago! This one seems to be about the way technology was starting to affect our music, our connections with people, what we do for leisure, no "We are the robots" or "I need a data date" or whatever. Would you claim that "Tour de France" is about robots bicycling? That "Vitamin" is about androids taking their supplements? Is this not in fact what you meant!??

Ralf Hütter, in Stern Magazine: "'In the German language, names are often occupations, like Müller (Miller) and Bauer (Farmer). I don't feel like Mr Hütter any more but rather like Mr Kraftwerk. I feel like a robot."

Florian, earlier: "Machines are neither master nor servant. It's a rather more sophisticated relationship ... As for ourselves, we love our machines. We have an erotic relationship with them."

also cyclists are cyborgs

I don't have a considered opinion on the key questions here but coincidentally I came across this article in Le Parisien magazine today. There I learned of the book Love and Sex with Robots which might be up your alley.

How much of Electric Cafe continues that concept?

it has roborgs on the cover?

It opens w "Boing Boom Tschak" which has the bandmember imitating a drum machine and pretending to be musical robots ("music non-stop").

I am also curious about these "games" she is playing, which are "just parfait". Is he saying that her frozen dessert game is strong, or would he prefer the occasional Pavlova?

Anyway, who would win in a FITE! between Kraftwerk and a dinosaur?

can the robot have specific needs that can be satisfied by one particular human rather than another? can you disappoint the robot by not fulfilling these needs? sex is a mirror. what does the robot need from you, and is it given honestly?

yes, no, maybe, perhaps, all at once, that imperfect feedback loop that depends upon employing agency and surrendering agency at the same time. there's some subterranean negotiation of boundaries. there has to be a wall of sleep, an upwelling of emotion, a memory of what it felt like last night, a sense of i liked how you told me i was beautiful, this can be replicated.

the robot should be able to refuse sex because the checkout person at target was rude to her and he/she's not feeling it right now.

also, kraftwerk would win an actual fight against a dinosaur because all the dinosaurs are dead.

I would take Kraftwerk to Crystal Palace and they can fight the dinosaurs there.

If the robot was an actual robot, the robot would not have noticed that the checkout person at Target was rude to them, because robots do not have feelings to be hurt!

Sorry, I'm thinking about this more and more, now that I'm reading Tanith Lee's Silver Metal Lover and it's really doing my head in, in so many ways. The way that the teenage girl keeps worrying that she's ~offended~ Silver (the robot-musician) by being rude to him, and he replies with a sort of blank, distant expression, and she's all "argh, sorry, have I offended you" and the robot is all "what is this 'offence' you keep accusing me of taking?" I know you're *supposed* to identify with the teenage girl this story (and I do, because the robot is totally hottt with a million metallic T's) but far too often, so far, I find myself relating more to the robot. People say completely outrageous things to him, and his response is just kind of "I do not have programming code for how to deal with this situation, so I'm just going to stare at you blankly while my processors readjust" (but I guess the difference between me and the robot in Silver Metal Lover is that he just stares blankly like "WTF" and I tend to go "WHY. No. Why would you say something like that to a person.") Poor robot lover. Welcome to humanity, they make no sense.

((That said, specifically the robot in Silver Metal Lover - and I'm sure Lee is going to get into this, as the story develops. Is: the reason it's so hard to *believe* that the robot has no emotions is because he plays music so beautifully. Music is a highly emotional form of music, and all the generative music programs in the world have convinced me that it actually requires feeling to play - or at least *program* - music which provokes specific human emotions. I mean, maybe that's the thing. That humans automatically *project* emotion onto sound, and Silver is programmed to create sounds that humans respond to positively. But it's hard to believe that a robot has no understanding of emotions at all, when he is generating music that is obviously so emotionally evocative to humans. But I'm sure Lee is going to get into that.))

(((And, getting back to the original question, perhaps Robo-Ralf would be unsatisfying as a lover if he did not have the same musical gifts as human-Ralf.)))

yeah, i figure the bottom line of ethics is that the other should be interchangeable with the you. if the robot does not have selfness, or feelings, then ethics is not implicated.

can a robot experience a beautiful destruction; when your mind pierces my heart like a spear of glass, does it shatter in the process? does it close it's eyes and see blood and roses?

the real challenge of AI is to create something as stupid as human intelligence.

Hahaha oh god you might be right.

Now that I have seen this horrific object and been horrified by it, I cannot unsee it, ever, so I am going to put this here and now you have to not-unsee it forever, too.

http://41.media.tumblr.com/26cee8f03cdca78297a3f6039c7ff5ba/tumblr_inline_nswh8ap7A81smthwi_500.png

Where is the brain soap now please dear god. HALP.

Ah! I have finally figured out what the deal is, with human Ralf Hütter and Robo-Ralf! That is, why I fancy one and not the other.

Ralf Hütter has a nose that is ever so slightly retroussé. It's only a few milimetres off straight, but it turns up at the end (I suffer from the same problem) and sticks up and I find this kind of button nose is very ugly!

http://www.kraftwerk.moxo.cz/images/fotogalerie/1978-1979/release-party-03.jpg

See, even when he wears leather trousers and has long, lank greasy hair and looks faintly like he smells of dirty dronerock boy, there is still the problem of his nose!

http://www.kraftwerk.moxo.cz/images/fotogalerie/1970-1974/ralf-live.jpg

This is also why he is more attractive when he wears the big, chunky architects glasses - they distract from his awful button nose and make him look more attractive.

http://www.kraftwerk.moxo.cz/images/fotogalerie/pre-1970/ralf-60s.jpg

The rest of Kraftwerk have very good noses: very long, very straight, very pointed noses that turn down slightly at the tip to be properly aerodynamic, like so:

http://www.kraftwerk.moxo.cz/images/fotogalerie/pre-1970/florian-1.jpg

This is a very perfect, very sexy and attractive nose.

When they made the Robo-Ralf, they made its nose straight. Because a robot is a precision machine, it does not have this slightly retroussé nose that keeps the human from being beautiful, so the machine is more attractive than the human.

http://www.citynews.ca/wp-content/blogs.dir/sites/10/2015/07/04/kraftyoutube2-878x494.jpg

I feel so relieved that I'm not imagining things, and there is a cause for this.

This is probably not the right sort of thread to ask this question, but it will function as a Branwell containment field as well as any other.

Guys, I am not sure I understand what people mean by "sexy" any more?

I have been following this ~Sexy Data Science~ twitter that xxyyzzz kept retweeting into my dash, because, honestly, it is very funny. (Occasionally it's kind of useful for actual database stuff, but mostly it's just endlessly repeating this kind of koan of "DATA SCIENCE IS SEXY!!!!') But his morning it tweeted "Data + Science = SEXY!" with a link to a story about landmine predicting algorithms. And I'm just staring at this thing, like, yes, landmine prediction is very interesting, but there is nothing even *remotely* sexy about this.

What does "sexy" even mean, in the context of "sexy data science" because I know what it means, when someone asks you to "sex up" a report. It means, make it more interesting, often add some human element. (Well, at the surgeons', what they meant was literally "sex" it up - add some data about breast augmentation or penis enhancement or stuff that would get the tabloids interested in giving them free promotion for a special offer on botox.) But in this context, it was just completely absurd. "Sexy" used as synonym for "Interesting", by people who seem to have no idea what sex even involves at times.

(Is sex "Sexy" in this way? You know, I don't actually think that it is. The messy mechanics of physical sex are, like, the furthest thing possible from... data science or whatever.)

Are machines sexy? Yes. Are robots sexy? Yes. Is Science sexy? Well, some of it is. But is data sexy? No, honestly, for real, I say this as someone who chucks large amount of telecommunications data every day, and data is about the least sexy thing I can think of. I just find "sexy" as synonym for "Interesting" as used in this way actually kinda gross TBH. But it did strike me as very, very funny, too. Absurd!

Just through "sexy" in with anything and it will instantly spice it up. Can't wait for Sex Object Oriented Programming.

Whatever. Rant over. What is sexy? The way Ralf says "Sex" in this song is very sexy.

Yeah, it seemed to start when people talked about "Sexy Lights" referring to the lights on the dashboard of whatever keyboard it was, i.e. set the whatever internal parameter and R2 light lit up. I did have to ponder "How is that like sexy?"

Maybe it is one of those new-fangled ~Secret Tumblr Sexualities~ that thinkpieces complain about?

Orientation: datasexual

The song appears very straight-forward to me. He does NOT want to be your sex object. He desires, or expects, a more complete relationship. I don't really see any lines where he says he does want to be your sex object.

V. trad lyric, similar to "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow", "What You're Doing", etc and has nothing to do with robots.

When a man, or robot, says 'No' - he means No.

It's their least auspicious album, partly because there's only two songs on the album that are actually "about" anything - the two singles Sex Object and The Telephone Call, and both of those are very traditional topics handled very in a very traditional lyrical way. The others just mess around with words as rhythm (or occasionally melodic) devices. It would be nice if there were deeper meaning behind the lyrics about the band's relationships or whatever but Occam's Razor applied means that the established narrative of the creative well running dry is true.

Oh, I get it now, "I Love everything" Riiiight!

I like Electric Cafe btw. I give it a solid 4.5/10.

I love it when random googlers drop in to my threads and have no idea what's going on.

TBH I don't have much of a clue what's going on in here either.

Would you like to touch my monkey?

Please consider me reckless rather than random.

that's the spirit!

i listened to this song last night. slap bass part is cheezy & goes on for too long, otherwise 10/10 classik

I love Karl's story about the band going to NYC to mix the record, which had just become unwieldy at that point. And after a month, Karl gave up and went home. After 2 months, Florian gave up and went home. After 3 months, Ralf came home with a different record.

I think the whole song is predicated on ambivalence, and this is really reflected in the wonderful push / pull of the "yes / no / maybe / perhaps" bits. I don't think it's simple at all, Ja / Nein. (The problem is I can't hear the word Nein any more without seeing Adorno's face glaring at me. Instead I'm going to see Ralf glaring at me from behind a monocle in a kind of Maximum-Minima-Moralia.)

I've given up trying to get into this album and I'm caning Tour De France Soundtracks which frankly has better production and it turns out that what I want from a Kraftwerk song, really, is Ralf or Florian reciting the Periodic Table over filter sweeps and clanging noises! Next poll is going to be about which element got the best song: Uranium, Titanium or Kalium, Kalzium, Eisen and Magnesium.

The whole song plays with the

Pitchfork's Chris Ott takes No Prisoners

I have no idea what that hanging sentence at the end is for?

I also continue to be amused that Ralf & Florian are the anti-JAMC (the Reid Bros sing in note-perfect American accents, but do interviews in impenetrable Glaswegian, while Ralf and Florian did interviews in absolutely flawless and mostly unaccented English yet sing in exaggerated German accents to slightly comic effect (wonder if any native Francophones could confirm/deny if their French is heavily accented.))

Just got me thinking about speech synthesis and accent; English R's (in all their rhotic and non-rhotic varieties) are so different from German R's. Do German iPhones actually speak with a German accent, or in a bland IPA that sounds like German with an American accent?

Beavis und Butthead.

http://40.media.tumblr.com/c26161b38772c628ce02abae74d92ae9/tumblr_ntci2yZBBH1shxh5xo1_1280.jpg

(p.s. Happy Birthday Ralf)

the Reid Bros sing in note-perfect American accents

They still sound Scottish to me.

What, when singing?

Ha, yes!

(p.s. Happy Birthday Ralf)

And many more!

nice pic