One of the more diverse and eclectic dorkbot presentations in recent memory (look at what was parked outside versus what you saw inside!), the May 2010 installment – officially labelled the 5g5sth installment – featured homemade satellites, craft vans, computer-assisted composition and live music, and finally anaglyph audio-visual projections. As always Dorkbot NYC is held at the incredible Location One non-profit gallery and performance space; and big-ups to Levi for running the show!
Song Hojun made a special presentation, in town from South Korea. His project, the Open Source Satellite Initiative seeks to plant a homemade satellite in low-orbit, and talk back via blinking (in morse code) super LEDs:
Nick Didkovsky presented some JMSL-language computer composition software that he wrote, which creates unpredictable scores, some of which were performed live by loudbang:
Julia Vallera is a Parsons MFA candidate and converted a Ford Tuscany van into her current social practice art project Color Wheelz:
and finally Daniel Iglesia is a Columbia Computer Music Center graduate candidate who presented some anaglyph audio-visual projections – he passed out glasses to assist in the viewing and the results were pretty spectacular! The video doesn’t seem to have the same effect when embedded across the internet, but the pictures do capture some of the moment (yes I keep a pair of anaglyph glasses at the ready in my studio to check things like this!):
Wednesday January 6 was the first Dorkbot of the second decade of the 21st millennium – it is otherwise abbreviated as the “1g6s-th” Dorkbot. Hosted at the marvelous Location One non-profit space in SoHo.
The man as he is, and the man as he should have been. Douglas Repetto is the founder of Dorkbot and wanted to show me this recent photo of him sporting a ’stache (mid-shower) not too different than the fur on my face right now.
Now for the dorks:
The first presentation was by NYCCNC.com, a milling workshop housed in an Upper East Side apartment! Quite impressive, and the presenter John Saunders had a working sample of this target-practice machine that was fabricated entirely by his milling machine.
Next up Natalie Campbell gave a presentation about SP Weather Station, which is a collaborative project between her and Heidi Neilson; the weather station sits on the rooftop of Flux Factory where I currently maintain long-term Residency. While the weather station’s main medium is digitally-collected data, they then turn that data over to artists who interpret the data visually through printing, book arts, photographs and silkscreens, among other artistic processes.
And the final presentation: co-presented by Victor Adán and Douglas Repetto, they demonstrated an antiquated pen plotter printer and how they’ve managed to continue using these mostly serial-driven devices with modern computers using drivers they compiled at chiplotle.org – now that’s a spicy plotter library! (the ebay screen above was because Douglas was showing his ebay search string to narrow results to find specific pen plotters at bargain basement prices!) The results of their pen plotter printing can be seen on the image at the top. Pretty exciting!
The ‘Bee’ is a mobile communication system developed by the Innovations Unit in UNICEF’s Division of Communication. The Bee will allow communication, connectivity and data access in field conditions where such technologies are often difficult or impossible to use.
Essentially a computer built into a weather-proofed case that can be taken to areas around the world otherwise lacking information access points or which have recently been devestated by natural or man-made disasters. Further into layman’s terms, basically a bunch of dorks being really innovative and inspiring, building computers for purposes and conditions often overlooked or not understood by most Western countries. An example given was compiling a localized version of the English-language Wikipedia – sans images – for deployment into regions of Africa that lack books and other educational tools. I forget the voltage and power consumption of the unit, but I think it was said it could run off of 4 AA batteries (6 volts) for approximately 2 hours. So a kiosk with the computer installed, and an accompanying solar panel could theoretically power the unit indefinitely.
The “ecosystem” refers to not only the operating system – running Ubuntu Linux – but also the physical construction of the unit, which was designed to be able to be constructed from off-the-shelf hardware elements, so that no matter where the “Bee” was located in the world, one should be able to replace or upgrade a physical component without the need to order from a specific proprietary hardware source
The Unicef dorks in action. The Bee is currently powered up, running off of its internal battery, and the Ubuntu desktop (Hardy Heron) can be recognized.
The keyboard layout and mouse interface. (no F-keys, something they were going to hope to upgrade with future prototypes)
someone pretend-typing, to demonstrate a sense of scale.
The Unicef dork about to fold the Bee into a piece of luggage.
All that remains is the lid.
Keep a lookout for this thing making headlines in the coming months, as while it is definitely not a direct competitor to the OLPCXO-1 laptop and its mission, it is capable of overtaking it in other capacities.
