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Video of a soup spoon machine on TikTok: A weakness for nonsensical machines
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TikTok
The robot arm rams the plastic bottle into the cardboard box with full force.
The neck of the bottle tears a deep furrow in the face of the cardboard.
The compressor starts.
Compressed air presses the dark liquid into the recorded mouth opening and sprays the remaining beverage all over the room.
Yes, this machine is completely useless.
But also pretty funny.
With their Gaga machines, the artists are primarily interested in entertainment. The inclusion of the "water forced drinking machine" follows a scheme that is currently in vogue with the short clip platform TikTok: absurd robots fail miserably when trying to be useful. This is well received by users. The drinking bottle video has been "Like" more than 800,000 times and has been shared almost 27,000 times.
A hobbyist named hmg… .4 uploaded the clip to TikTok, who was named one of the masters of useless robots by the tech portal “Mashable”. As in the drinking robot clip, the artist often prefers to clamp dolls in his devices instead of trying them out himself. That could also turn out badly. Because in other videos the dummies are sprayed with water on a rapidly rotating grid, knocked to sleep with a brick and mistreated with a syringe by a robot nurse.
When hmg… .4 lets his dolls go first, he usually has a charming excuse ready.
He argues that he is allergic to water, that he is not thirsty and that he is not sick enough for an injection.
The artist also participates in some experiments himself.
He then ventures into the clutches of a hairdressing robot, lets pasta be thrown at him by a spinner, and sits in the beam of a compressed air-operated soup spoon machine.
TikTok tinkerer Jay Vogler has also developed a weakness for nonsensical machines.
The hobbyist calls his inventions art.
One of his creations is a pretty annoying robot.
The mischievously grinning plastic head does nothing but open a flap, extend a hand and stick a forefinger in the tinkerer's ear.
The Canadian's profile features numerous videos of nonsense machines: plastic hands that can be raised again and again using a crank and gear drive, or a launch pad that uses a cordless screwdriver to accelerate a top to 3000 revolutions per minute.
Vogler implemented a lot of handicrafts solely to reduce the "backlog of ideas" in his head, as the Toronto tinkerer wrote in an email to SPIEGEL.
"The more ideas come, the more stressed and nervous I feel about past ideas that I haven't implemented." He also wants to share his ideas with others.
The 30-year-old needs around two weeks for a project.
However, he does not yet earn enough money to earn a living.
He is still dependent on artist grants.
The goal, however, is to expand his social media channels so that he can work full-time as an engineering artist.
"I hope this thing grows so that it works," says Vogler.
Inspired by the "queen of the fucking robots
"
For him, Simone Giertz in particular is a great inspiration.
"She started her videos when I was at the University of Technology," says Vogler.
"I was immediately enthusiastic about what she did and decided to inspire people in a similar way as possible."
Simone Giertz made the trend of idiot machines big on the Internet, to which a separate channel on Reddit has long been dedicated.
The Swedish inventor describes herself as the »queen of shitty robots« and has wowed many fans with her videos.
With around 2.4 million subscribers, Giertz is one of the most famous inventors on the web.
One of the most popular clips of the 30-year-olds is the spoon machine, which pours a soup she has cooked into her face while she is sorting the screws - instead of feeding her.
The make-up machine was so entertainingly bad that a six-second video was viewed around 1.3 million times.