From liav.koren at gmail.com Sun Apr 6 14:15:57 2008 From: liav.koren at gmail.com (Liav Koren) Date: Sun Apr 6 14:16:13 2008 Subject: [dorkbottoronto-announce] dbot, this thursday. Message-ID: I'm thrilled to be having Sally McKay and Andrew Hunter coming in this thursday to present. Dbot, as always, will begin at 7. More or less. On taking over dorkbot, Sally McKay was near the top of my list of people I wanted to have present. For me, the charm of dorkbot is the precision with which it manages to be deliberately vague. This is beautifully captured in the phrase "people doing strange things with electricity," and my major agenda with the series has been to try to maintain and then expand that strategic vagueness into new interdisciplinary areas. Sally McKay's work is exemplary of that ability to target the vague. One of her recent major project was The Trouble with Oscillation, an exploration of fundamental physics and the oscillations that they imply for our own world-views. As she writes, "One disorienting aspect of [a] Big Physics Vacation is the tendency for topics to oscillate between A and C without passing through B: from neutrinos to the big bang without even a nod to the normal daily lives of human beings on the planet earth." Moving from the the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, (where radon detectors stare into a sphere of heavy water waiting for a single photon, the trace of a neutino colliding with a neutron), to meditations on the changing relationship of Big Physics to the military-industrial complex. While most current theoretical physics is outside the realm of anything that seems to be currently weaponizable, the spectre of the Bomb remains. Subsequent work by McKay has involved elements of neurobiology and the philosophy of mind, as well as cur rating and participating in a range of shows across Ontario. =-=-=-= Andrew Hunter's interdisciplinary practice is ideally suited for presentation alongside Sally's work. Andrew is the curator and organizer behind Render, based at the university of Waterloo, where he's been collaborating with both the departments of English and Architecture, as well as an impressive range of diverse artists and designers. Some of Andrew's projects include an exploration into the potential for deployable and flexible architecture that resulted in a cubic, scorched, monolithic structure that can be wheeled into spaces and unfolded into an artist's studio/fabrication centre; large scale performance and installation work by David Poolman and Roman Tkaczyk, and collaborations with a range of artists and collectives based within and outside Ontario and Canada, such as Cathy Busby (Halifax), proboscis (London) Dane Watkins (UK), and several others. Andrew will be talking about Render and his own work. I'm really looking forward to both these presenters, and expect it will be a great night. From liav.koren at gmail.com Tue Apr 22 08:43:22 2008 From: liav.koren at gmail.com (Liav Koren) Date: Tue Apr 22 08:43:36 2008 Subject: [dorkbottoronto-announce] reprap Message-ID: Sorry for the late notice, but Michael Bartosik and I will be talking about reprap tonight at Interaccess' Open Studio night. If you're interested in rapid prototyping (3d printing), open-source initiatives, and/or making stuff, it'll be worth checking out. L. From liav.koren at gmail.com Tue Apr 22 12:26:51 2008 From: liav.koren at gmail.com (Liav Koren) Date: Tue Apr 22 12:27:10 2008 Subject: [dorkbottoronto-announce] reprap In-Reply-To: <60937dab0804220557v621d7b87nfa5a211f045addfc@mail.gmail.com> References: <60937dab0804220557v621d7b87nfa5a211f045addfc@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: 7pm. On 4/22/08, Ramy Gorgis wrote: > time?