Robocritic decommissioned

It's with a considerable degree of regret that we here at A.I.M have to announce the temporary decommissioning of Robocritic. It appears that the integration of the technology and the human was not quite as complete as we had hoped, and I am sure that you have already heard about the regrettable incident earlier today at Tramway. We believe that it was the result of too much cheap coffee, which flooded Robocritic's system and led to his wild rampage along the corridor that leads to Scottish Ballet.

When we developed Robocritic, we hoped to by-pass the usual problems of populist critique, and discover a scientific approach to the critical process. This unfortunately caused Robocritic's obsession with statistical data. He downloaded his consciousness onto a discussion forum, infected a box office system and began a flame war with a group of conceptual artists. His insistence that audience numbers were the only way to gauge the worth of a performance, and his subsequent refusal to review any art that hadn't been on television, made him functionally worthless.

The "radical subjectivity chip" which we fitted to his critical faculties was supposedly a safeguard against this particular problem - essentially, the chip was supposed to use his relative enjoyment of any individual show as the basis for analysis. Somehow, he got hold of Tower Hamlet's press release about selling off a Henry Moore sculpture to benefit local residents. Faced with the impossibility of resolving the tension between aesthetic and financial worth, the chip exploded and Robocritic drunk more coffee than Robbie Williams managed that time he went into rehab.

Robocritic is currently undergoing rehabilitation. Later tonight, he will be seeing Sven Werner's Tales of Magical Realism. This involves being blindfolded and listening to a story on headphones. The isolation from external stimulation will re-calibrate his sensitivity to art in and of itself, regardless of the broader political or social context. Werner's soundtrack has some rather soothing voices and David Lynch style music. Robocritic will be going on a personal journey into a mythical land - a vision quest, if you will - and will stop bellowing that Michael McIntyre is more important than Robbie Thomson.

The extent of Robocritic's problems became evident when he said he'd rather watch Live at the Apollo than see Ecstatic Arc. Frankly, any standard of judgment clarifies that Ecstatic Arc is more exciting and cooler than watching a hyper-active observational comic bounce around a stage, unless the comic falls over and hurts himself.