[dorkbotsea-blabber] Dorknotes

[Wim Lewis]

I mentioned the idea last month of posting meeting notes to the list  
after the meeting. I didn't think to actually *take* notes, but  
here's a mental mishmash of what was at the meeting and my thoughts  
on it. (So don't take this as a reliable, impartial record or  
anything: it's very much my subjective record of the meeting.)

Susie Lee and Yoko Ott presented a class+artwork they did with the  
Frye, in which students were encouraged to go on a dérive which was  
recorded in photos, audio, video, and a (mapless) GPS track. Thinking  
about it later, I found myself wishing to know more about how the  
students thought about the activity: what they were expressing in  
each case, even if not in the language of the professional artist.

Stephanie Andrews presented her work in which a whole motion-captured  
human movement (a few seconds of dance) is translated into a (virtual  
or physical) solid object by collapsing the time dimension. Some very  
pretty abstract-looking sculptures resulted, in which you could still  
see the human movement and form. (My friend described them as the  
advanced version of snow angels.) This put me in mind of the SFnal  
notion of a human life as a long four-dimensional worm (stretching  
from birth to death). Also, starch-based sintered-powder-style rapid  
prototyping— neat! (Though EMSL's sugar "candy fab" is hard to beat.  
Or the chocolate-based fused-deposition machines.)

After the break we talked about the emergent communication protocols  
for PDSTWE4. There was concern we might have a problem getting  
critical mass for interesting interactions for any given mode of  
communication, since there are so many possibilities. The most  
popular modes seemed to be audio (eg Chronos) and some sort of IP- 
based text protocol (XML, Twitter, etc.), but some people were very  
interested in Zigbee or haptic communication. There seemed to be  
consensus that there should be some sort of hub/server object which  
speaks many protocols in order to tie things together, and possibly  
allows interaction from outside (eg, a publicly visible web page,  
responses to twitter hashtags, an email gateway). There wasn't much  
consensus on how best to prune the set of protocols in order to get  
more than one entry using each. Some people were specifically  
interested in a particular sort of protocol; some people sounded  
willing to adopt whatever other people were using.

The wiki pages for these were hard to find. I renamed some of them so  
they're obviously related to the EmergentCommunication page, and made  
sure the links were working— hope this helps people find them. A full- 
text search for "emergent" also gets you a nice list of pages.


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