TRIPODS ONE

A live techno performance played entirely by robots.
Part club show, part applied research into how science can be used to make music.

Moritz Simon Geist - Entropy (watch)

In TRIPODS ONE, self-developed robots play all the sound live on stage. Kinetic tone generators, a pneumatic hi-hat, a futuristic kalimba or a drone guitar are struck, plucked and pulsed in real time.

The instruments come out of years of research at the edge of music & science. Moritz Simon Geist an his team design and build all the machine in their german research studio, using 3D printing, CNC milling and laser cutting with a background in electrical engineering.

What kind of music do machines make when they are built to make music, rather than to copy us?

Tripods One is one output of a longer practice that runs from club floors to institutions like Ars Electronica, the Venice Biennale and the MIT Museum, and keeps circling the same territory: automation, artificial intelligence and what we hand to machines. Known for multi-million-view videos like the Popcorn Jazz Robot and the giant drum robot MR-808, Geist brings that research to the dancefloor as techno you can watch being made.

Tone generators, pneumatics, a futuristic kalimba or a drone guitar generate every sound in real time. German artist and researcher Moritz Simon Geist presents Tripods One as a machine orchestra you watch being played.

Geist manages to do something increasingly rare in electronic music. When he plays, he keeps all eyes locked on the stage.

Wired, 2018

These are new machines, manufacturing a new kind of machine music.

Fast Company, 2017

It doesn't get geekier than this.

Jon Pareles, New York Times

Treating important questions of the future — the perception of technology, the robotization of society, artificial intelligence — but in a playful, entertaining way: through electronic music.

ARTE