The Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and Charles University in Prague, together with the Czech Technical University in Prague and the Jewish Museum in Prague, jointly with the University of Buenos Aires and its Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences, the Argentine Secretariat for Science, Technology and Productive Innovation, the National Council for Scientific and Technological Research and the International Foundation Jorge Luis Borges, as well as scientists and intellectuals from both countries, in meetings held in 2002 and 2003 in Prague and Buenos Aires, developed the conceptual framework for a bi-lateral Argentine – Czech Biennale addressed to the scientific and technological developments in the field of computer science and technologies, their impact on the individual, social and cultural environment.

The 2005 Biennale is also supported, within their respective fields of competence, by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic and the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic as well as by the Secretary for Culture and the Ministry of Education of the Argentine.

The inspiration for such a Biennale framework was drawn from the poem on the Golem and Rabbi Loew by Jorge Luis Borges. The present day metaphorical value of the Golem as a robotic creature, exploring results of artificial intelligence, cybernetics, virtual reality, artificial life, nano-technologies and the Internet, proved instrumental to such a framework. In the case of robotics, it links with the homunculus conceived by the Czech writer Karel Čapek in his play “R.U.R.” (1921) in which he coined the noun “robot”. The name “e-Golems” of the Biennale stands for “electronic versions of the Golem”.

During the preparations, it was thought appropriate to implement the Biennale’s conceptual framework progressively, profiting from the hosting of the 16th World IFAC – International Federation for Automatic Control - Congress (July 4th to 8th 2005) in Prague, by convening the first international “e-Golems” Biennale Workshop from July 3rd to 5th with the official opening and conclusion being held on July the 2nd and the 5th, respectively.

The content of this First Argentine – Czech Biennale Workshop is aimed at ideas reflecting a certain parallel between the ancient vision of the Golem as an anthropomorphic artificial being and today’s visions of information science and artificial intelligence. The intent is to widely discuss this issue on the level of philosophical considerations, biologically inspired models of behavior and learning, man-machine cooperation including its psychological aspects, visions of information networks as “living” organisms with the learning capabilities, self-reflection and self-organization, distributed methods of perception, decision making and actions, perspectives and progress carried out in the field of non-traditional computing systems, principles of adaptation as well as of the artificial life, etc.

In certain respect the workshop displays the state-of-the-art in research in the field of intelligent robotics with stress to machine perception, collective behavior of robots, and social behavior of highly distributed components of software systems or physical machines. Speculations concerning machines, their interactions with humans and their capabilities to overtake the power over the human beings are in the focus of attention, too. The topics aimed at a direct physical linkage of the human tissue and electronic components as well as discussions concerning these solutions and their consequences do represent another specific target of the workshop.

This “e-Golems” international workshop includes many interesting topics tightly or loosely coupled with the Golem vision, Capek’s R.U.R. motives and today’s cultural, social and economic environment influenced by the impact of informatics, cybernetics and related technologies on the society. These aspects are strongly reflected in art since its kinetic origins.

The topic of the Workshop did attract not only scientists from Argentina and the Czech Republic, but from 7 more countries and, thus, the Workshop became truly an international event. We are very thankful to 11 invited speakers who accepted the invitation to give special talks at the Workshop:

Max A. Dickman (France & Argentina)
Ivan M. Havel (Czech Republic)
Jozef Kelemen (Czech Republic)
Roger Malina (USA)
Herbert A. Mang (Austria)
George Paun (Rumania)
Juan Pablo Paz (Argentina)
Gerfried Stocker (Austria)
Wolfgang von Rueden (Switzerland)
Kevin Warwick (U.K.)
Peter Weibel (Germany)


Their contributions provide a complex picture of the treated area.