Tom Sgouros at Maker’s Faire- San Mateo May 3.

Adam writes:

My good friend and collaborator Tom Sgouros has a fantastic show that he’ll be performing in the Bay Area on Saturday May 3 at the Maker’s Faire. A fun and engaging show that asks the question: What is it like to be a robot? It’s not quite clowning, but Tom is a very good clown, and the show is all about obstacle (and philosophy)

Judy the Robot will return once more to sunny California this coming weekend, at the Make Magazine “Maker Faire” at the San Mateo Event
Center (I think it used to be called the Fairgrounds). This is a very strange, but altogether delightful event that calls together people from
all over the place who like to make stuff, ranging from robot giraffes to bicycle-driven generators to catapults and sweaters that blink. So
Judy will fit right in. Judy will provide the Saturday night entertainment for the festival, 6:30 in the Fiesta Hall, May 3. There’s
more about the festival at http://makerfaire.com .

PRESS RELEASE AT http://sgouros.com/judy/judyrel.pdf

	Judy -or- What Is It Like To Be A Robot? Written and Performed by Tom Sgouros
Since the dawn of the computer age, oceans of ink have been spilt writing about the intelligence of computers. Some researchers say that computers will eventually attain super-human intelligence. Others call these claims… um, poppycock. Oddly, in the search for the truth of the matter, both camps have overlooked an obvious strategy: interviewing a computer and asking its opinion. Intrepid researcher Sgouros has leapt into this lacuna, and presents some preliminary findings in a new not-quite-solo show. (You could call it “My Dinner with Android.”)
	The central question is: if you build a robot smart enough to do the dishes, will it also be smart enough to find them boring?
Judy herself was built in Tom’s basement, over the course of several months, from pieces of some old computers, a couple of bicycles, a copy machine, marine stove, and yes, someone’s kitchen sink. After literally weeks of intensive tutoring in phonics, elocution, and the elements of logic, Judy made her public debut in January, 2000, at Providence’s Perishable Theatre.
The seventh in a series of possibly comic monologues and solo dialogues, Judy is a story of a man and his, um, companion, discussing such topics as imagination, consciousness, stage magic, the uses of eyes, and what it’s really like to wake up in the morning and confront your aluminum-and-steel face in the mirror each day.