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Christian Gjørret is the leader of Danish robot promotion and event company Vive Les Robots! and main organizer of the robot performance festival Café Neu Romance in Prague.

He grew up in the countryside of Denmark in a heather filled region, where the nature ruled until for 125 - 150 years ago, when settlers at that time started to develop the infertile soil into a fertile farmland. The concept of being a pioneer who can make things grow under difficult conditions is strongly connected to the spirit or identity of the area.

To fulfill their visions on the future they needed technology and a good infrastructure, so it was the establishment of the railway system that pushed the development, because it created a lot of small new villages along the railway.

In this area a strong headwind is a natural part of people's everyday life and they take nothing for granted, and many entrepreneurs are connected to this Wild West part of Denmark, maybe also because they are not so inflected by history, culture, and how to do things.

As a kid Christian Gjørret was attracted by the Japanese super mecha robot Mazinger Z and he played with small metal robots made in Japan. Later on it were music groups like Kraftwerk and the Danish band Kliché who inspired him, like Andy Warhol's repeating serigraphs and his concept of a factory also did it. Other big inspirations came from the German architecture, art and design school Bauhaus, Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, and the Fluxus-movement. And he watched movies on the man-machine like "A Clockwork Orange" and "Metropolis" again and again.

But it was first when LEGO released their LEGO MINDSTORMS in 1998 he really became interested in robots. As a person who always hated to program in school, basic AI was suddenly something kids and grown-up kids could learn in an intuitive way quite easy, and after has been reading a lot of books on the pedagogy behind MINDSTORMS and done a lot of research on the cultural-historical part of robots, he decided to create Vive Les Robots! in 2006, because why not follow your interests, and because robots are something we'll interact more and more with in the Future.

The main purposes with Vive Les Robots! has always been to make more people in the general public interested in robots, robotics, and robot-related areas, and it has been done in various ways through the years. In 2013-14 the main focus is to promote Prague as the European cultural-historical capital for robots, through Café Neu Romance, because it is there, the automata of the Astronomical Clock has entertained everyday people for several 100 years, the word robot was created, and the strongest myth on Golem is connected to.

In his presentation on LEGO MINDSTORMS at Café Neu Romance 2013 he will introduce to the story of LEGO MINDSTORMS told through facts and personal stories from LEGO personalities.

Link:
Vive Les Robots!

[image source: Open Robotics Club]
[source: Vive Les Robots!]