Keepon and Spoon reunite at Wired's NextFest

What do you get when you cross a robot that looks like a marshmallow Peep and an indie rock song with a great beat? An instant pop culture craze, that's what.

Internet video stars Keepon, a dancing robot, and the band Spoon will reunite at a benefit concert for Creative Commons September 10 at the Music Box in Los Angeles. The show is also a kickoff for Wired Magazine's NextFest, which showcases new technologies in design, entertainment, transportation, and sustainable living. Watch the video – here, in The MOLI View player, or at Wired NextFest's MOLI profile -- closely, because you can win VIP tickets to this sold-out concert by answering three questions, creating a MOLI profile, and sending an e-mail with the answers to the NextFest MOLI page.

The story behind the pairing is unique, showing the power of the Internet to bring together completely different worlds. It all began when robotics specialists Marek Michalowski and Hideki Kozima programmed and filmed Keepon dancing to Spoon's "I Keep My Camera On," and put the video on the web.

In April, the film of the infectiously rhythmic robot hit YouTube, and a star was born. The video is just a close-up of Keepon dancing to the Spoon hit from the 2005 album Gimme Fiction. But it's oddly entrancing -- try to watch this and tell me that you don't get a kick out of it.

Behind the fun and games, Keepon actually has a purpose: to adapt and respond to human emotions. Michalowski, a research student at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and Keepon are part of the research project Beatbots, which studies nonverbal play between children and robots.

He often collaborates with Kozima, a research scientist at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), who created Keepon and specializes in human-robot interaction.

Kozima also part-times as a music video star. Check him out in the MOLI player as he walks Keepon around Tokyo in the video for Spoon's "Don't You Evah," off of their latest release Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga.

And if you want to see the whole thing live, Keepon and Spoon in concert together for the first time, enter our ticket contest.