(Although there is some added resonance from knowing that the person behind the camera, the director Max Vitali, was in fact her partner at the time of shooting.) Something about the video-and the song, and to some extent Robyn’s entire freewheeling career-speaks to both the exhilaration and the loneliness inherent in charting new territory. And so a single background dancer in the “Call Your Girlfriend” video would have killed the mood. Robyn’s music sought to strip away the stigma of feeling solitary, to turn loneliness into something triumphant. “Connection” is still a buzzword in our tech-crazed culture, though we talk less often about the motivation to connect often coming from a sense of loneliness. It’s all about connecting to other people, sharing emotion.” “Sure, the internet is the future,” she said in a 2010 interview, “but what we do on the internet is still very primal. Robyn was, constitutionally, not doing it for the likes, which could have felt paradoxical on an album so concerned with the aesthetics of technology. “I came to dance, not to socialize,” she sings on another song from that record, “Dancehall Queen.” It’s a sentiment that might seem prickly and isolationist compared to the communal spirit of mainstream American pop. The album it appeared on was titled, fittingly, Body Talk. The comedian Taran Killam has performed a lovingly observed parody, and YouTube is cluttered with step-by-step homages and tutorials (“Robyn’s ‘Call Your Girlfriend’-Learn the dance!”) which is at once apt and entirely beside the point: The power of the choreography and the one-take video itself comes from how personal, singular, and idiosyncratic these moves feel, like a spontaneous overflowing of Robyn’s strange heart. As she sings, her accompanying movements are at turns aggressive, humorous, and unabashedly sensual-at one point, aided by her moon shoes, she does a fluid backward somersault that ends with her humping the ground and then, in the next moment, rolling across the ground like a playful child. She is dressed, in the video, like the world’s most stylish bird: fluffy cropped sweater, twiggy printed leggings, and platform sneakers that make her seem to hover a few inches above the ground. In the back of the bus, in the desolate corner of the dance floor, and-in “Call Your Girlfriend,” one of the best and most iconic music videos of the century so far-in a cavernous abandoned gymnasium, illuminated by pulsating light that changes colors according to her feelings like a giant mood ring worn on the heart. "She's a strong role model for prospective female engineering students," says Josefsson.Robyn is alone. Robyn is, however, electrifying to these particular young roboticists.
#YOUTUBE ROBYN DANCING ON MY OWN ANDROID#
The 'bot, naturally, works better with heavy beats, and best with Robyn tracks ("Dancing On My Own" became the group's favorite).īut why Robyn? It's not like robot imagery is nowhere else in pop music: R&B singer Janelle Monáe has an android alter ego named Cindi Mayweather, and even Miley Cyrus has a pre- Bangerz track called "Robot" (OK, that was about how she's "not your robot," but whatever).
Then, thanks to a complex algorithm, the beats are broken down into frequency bands and translated into dance moves. Ultimately, that meant installing a microphone on the robot to capture sound and feeding it into a beat-detection program running on a Raspberry Pi. The students needed to find a system that could detect and react to a beat in real time, in order to give the robot what its French programmer called "le rythme dans la peau" (rhythm in the skin). The hardest part for the 11-member team, Josefsson says, was the dancing. "We discussed how the look and feel would be of the robot and she described the moon lander as an example where something is not designed with a fancy cover, but instead the rawness can be beautiful with all necessary parts visible." "We got that book from Robyn after one of our first meetings with her," says Elias Josefsson, one of the engineers who worked on the 'bot. And yes, Robyn gave input on the project she even gave the team a book about the Apollo moon landing to help explain her aesthetic vision. (And yes, "mechatronics" sounds cooler than any other field you could possibly pursue.) The robot, which was is made of an amalgamation of moped motors and 3-D printed parts, listens to music and dances on its own ( as is only right).
The Robot Project is a nearly year-long endeavor by a group of mechatronics students at Sweden's technical university KTH. So far, the only thing that's been missing is a droid of her own-and now, thanks to some creative robotics students in Stockholm, she has one.
"Fembot," "Robotboy," and "The Girl and the Robot" (which she recorded with Röyksopp) are all part of her catalog. Swedish dance-pop star Robyn seems to like robots.