From douglas at music.columbia.edu Tue Sep 4 18:45:23 2007 From: douglas at music.columbia.edu (douglas repetto) Date: Tue Sep 4 18:43:19 2007 Subject: [dorkbotnyc-announce] dork-con-flux-bot! Message-ID: <46DDE003.7050605@music.columbia.edu> The new dorkbot season is upon us! Rejoice! The 1493.456 ? 10^23rd dorkbot-nyc meeting will take place on Wednesday, September 5th, 2007, at 7pm at Location One in SoHo. Please bring snacks to share. Wear something you made! Info, directions, etc at: http://dorkbot.org +++++ It's a special pre-Conflux Festival preview! Members of the Conflux 2007 curatorial team will introduce this year's Conflux, highlighting several key projects and covering the schedule of events. Featuring the sun-kissed and downy: Christian Croft & Kate Hartman: Energy Harvesting D?rive The Energy Harvesting D?rive combines new modes of pedestrian movement with alternative energy research goals. The project hacks the recently popular Heelys roller sneaker to transform it into a platform for generating electricity from human motion. Electricity harvested from rolling powers electronics on the shoes that deliver random directions for pedestrians to follow. http://xncroft.com/projects/energyshoes.html Mouna Andraos: Sustainable practices in electronic art and design A few case studies and lots of questions. I will present a series of electronic objects/projects i have recently been working on, from electronic crafts to alternative power sources. http://www.missmoun.com http://www.electroniccrafts.org Michael J. Dory: Concrete Crickets Graffiti is one of the most powerful and most personal displays in the urban experience, and can be used to make statements, tag territory, spread messages ? urban markup language in practice. However, the output is nearly always visual in nature, making this experience one-dimensional. Furthermore, rarely does the work have a brain of its own, and is usually incapable of reacting to anybody observing it. Concrete Crickets was created to address this deficit, creating small devices that will be aware of passers-by as well as other units of their kind. Each unit consists of a sound generator, amp, speaker and sensory system, and is housed in camouflage appropriate to the streets of the city ? soda cans, cigarette packs, and the like. http://www.confluxfestival.org/conflux2007/concrete-crickets-2 From douglas at music.columbia.edu Thu Sep 6 12:18:52 2007 From: douglas at music.columbia.edu (douglas repetto) Date: Thu Sep 6 12:16:47 2007 Subject: [dorkbotnyc-announce] thanks! + NEWS Message-ID: <46E0286C.9050208@music.columbia.edu> Thanks again to Christian Croft & Kate Hartman, Mouna Andraos, and Michael Dory for their presentations last night. The Conflux Festival looks like it's going to be terrific! Some pics and links from the meeting at: http://dorkbot.org/dorkbotnyc/05.sept.2007/ +++++ In other news: Thanks to Bre Pettis for starting the "open dork" tradition here in NYC. At some of the other dorkbots around the world they have very short, spur of the moment presentations called "open dorks". We're going to start doing that in NYC. So if you come to a meeting and you've got something you'd like to show & tell for about 1.5-3 minutes, let me know! You can tell me beforehand, or just come up before we get started. In other other news: Next month we'll finally have dorkbot t-shirts! They'll be sold by Location One as a fund raiser. dorkbot presenters will get one for free...so schedule your presentation now! The design is here if you want to make your own: http://dorkbot.org/tshirt/ In other other other news: I like making clothes, but rarely find the time. So I've set a challenge for myself -- I'm going to make something new to wear (mostly by recycling old clothes) to each dorkbot meeting this season. Last night I wore a simple Franken-t made from pieces of three retired t-shirts. Want to play? Just wear your latest creation to each meeting! Happy Fall, douglas -- ............................................... http://artbots.org .....douglas.....irving........................ http://dorkbot.org .......................... http://music.columbia.edu/cmc/music-dsp .......... repetto....... http://works.music.columbia.edu/organism ............................... http://music.columbia.edu/~douglas From douglas at music.columbia.edu Wed Sep 26 04:44:31 2007 From: douglas at music.columbia.edu (douglas repetto) Date: Wed Sep 26 04:42:36 2007 Subject: [dorkbotnyc-announce] The 5, 16 or 600, 8, 24 or 120th dorkbot-nyc meeting! Message-ID: <46FA1BEF.3090905@music.columbia.edu> dorkbot-nyc Wednesday, Oct 3rd, 2007, 7-9pm Location One: 26 Greene St (Canal/Grand) $$$FREE$$$ +++++ The 5, 16 or 600, 8, 24 or 120th dorkbot-nyc meeting will take place 7pm on Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007 at Location One in SoHo. The meeting is free and open to the public. Please bring snacks to share. And wear something you made! Featuring the convex and polytopic: John Huntington: The Gravesend Inn--An Interactive Haunted Hotel City Tech's Gravesend Inn is a high-tech, audience-driven haunted attraction. 2007 marks the show's eight annual edition. The show control system Medialon Manager gives control over the entire attraction to the audience, which (unknowingly) triggers the effects as they move through the maze. A variety of industrial sensors are currently used to sense the position and location of audience members, and an infrastructure has been created for more sophisticated sensing in the future. John, author of the just released third edition of the book Control Systems for Live Entertainment, will describe and demonstrate the show control systems he designed for this attraction. http://www.gravesendinn.org Spencer Russell: SensorBib Spencer will be presenting his most recent project, the SensorBib. SensorBib is a set of capacitive distance sensors embedded in a fabric covering for an upright bass. A chopped-up Arduino board sends the data to a laptop running PD which uses the player's body position to process the bass sound in real time. The sensors themselves (called "MouseTrap") are of Spencer's own design, and all the schematics and PCB layout files are available on his website. http://www.columbia.edu/~sfr2105 Eric Singer: robots on fire Eric Singer is a musician, artist, engineer and programmer and the Founder and Director of LEMUR: League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots, a group of artists and technologists who create robotic musical instruments and installations. Eric will talk about robots, fire and anything else that's on his mind. http://lemurbots.org