The Next HOPE is over, but as the closing article in the Android app said now we all go back to wherever we go to do whatever it is we do, but hopefully walk away with the spirit of the gathering. See you next year – I hope. The convention was incredibly impressive, and there are certain attributes to hacker culture that simply can’t be found elsewhere. Notably the approachability, you can just walk up to anyone and start talking about their project, and they’re normally incredibly inclined to talk – usually holed up in their offices, workspaces, in front of their terminals for days on end, then suddenly – finally – human contact. And a culture of trust and openness is pervasive – money was just left on tables for donations or purchase of hardware, laptop rigs were abandoned for hours on end while people went to a talk, and nothing gets stolen, nothing gets pinched. The culture trusts itself.
Highlights included Mitch Altman discussing “do what you love”; Alpha One Labs‘s sunrise party – dubbed “The Party”; the Hackerspaces Forever panel discussion; extensive discussions around IPv6; geotagging and GPS; and of course lockpicking!
a Food For Geeks workshop, this part of the workshop focused on sous vide cooking and using industrial equipment to regulate food temperatures:
the Hackerspace Village where you could set up shop, hack away, solder and do other experiments, and discuss with other hackers your projects:
the Maker Faire team had a booth; that’s Becky attempting to pick a lock and Matt coding up some mad python script:
So the opening film for Sci-Fi July was important to me because it was in my formative teen-adult years, and it was at a time when net lingo was just beginning to gain awareness and usage in popular culture, or so my naive teen-adult memory recalls. But for the second installment of Sci-Fi July, I decided to turn back the dial, to 1971, to a time before time-as-I-knew-it, and screen a film with a much slower pace, virtually no plot, that was pre-Star Wars and thus before space opera – my hope was it was a movie wholly unfamiliar to the crowd (whereas Johnny Mnemonic was “known” from most peoples’ youth, but simply never seen because it was so bad). I was right, and I introduced the film with the following text (btw the screening took place inside the Flux gallery due to a consistent threat of rain – which did happen for about 5-8 minutes during the film, so I thank everyone for putting up with the humidity of the space – thus the fans!):
Welcome to the second installment of Sci-Fi July, an informal rooftop film series of the science fiction genre.
The movie you’re going to watch tonight has consistently returned a mixed bag of emotions and responses for nearly 30 years. Regarded by some as seminal influence, and by others as a complete flop, I would argue for the staying power of tonight’s film, Silent Running, and its pivot point in film history. It’s influences and its influence are far and wide.
It’s no 2001 A Space Odyssey, but it is directed and produced by Douglas Trumbull, whom some would recognize as a special effects supervisor on that 1968 blockbuster, and who would go on to supervise special effects for one of the truly greatest sci-fi films of all time, Blade Runner. However it would seem Trumbull’s trade was best put to use in the special effects department, and less in the director’s chair – nice try though.
Made on a budget nearly 1/10th of Kubrick’s space masterpiece, Trumbull did employ some genius techniques to achieve his desired shots, notably filming aboard a decommissioned NAVY aircraft carrier, the USS Valley Forge, which also happens to be the name of this film’s space freighter turned botany ark.
You heard me right, I said “botany ark”. The earth has been completely defolliated and the last remaining forests and plant life float in space inside geodesic domes while humans apparently debate over whether plant life is necessary or not for the continuation of the species. Domes whose design was influenced in part by the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Climatron, a Bucky Fuller-style facility in St. Louis housed not but a mile from where I grew up.
Oh and there’s robots! Or “drones” rather. Drones that wobble and never fall down, somehow. That’s because housed inside them were multiple amputee actors, again another genius Trumbull technique. Domes and drones which can easily be seen as influence on other sci-fi titles like 2007′s Sunshine or even Mystery Science Theatre 3000.
However the science falls short: are you seriously telling me you didn’t know light was needed to grow plants? and why are geodesic domes in orbit around Saturn anyhow – what’s wrong with an orbit around Earth? And not about science, but why is it called Silent Running anyhow? If someone from the audience figures this one out, please, enlighten us.
But do look out for some incredible sets, including vector waveform monitors, American Airlines freight containers, and a truly remarkable scene with a sort of microscopic integrated circuit soldering machine – wow!
the opening of Sci-Fi July, a weekly month-long rooftop film series for friends and friends of friends, was a resounding success! Around 23 people showed up for an unknown screening of Johnny Mnemonic.
I introduced the series, or the film more-specifically rather, with the following text:
The movie you’re about to watch is based on a short story by William Gibson, regarded by some as the father of cyberpunk, who coined the word “cyberspace”, and sought a “combination of lowlife and high tech” in his often dystopian novels.
This 1995 screenplay of Gibson’s 1981 short story stars Keanu Reeves as Johnny Mnemonic, post-Bill and Ted and pre-The Matrix, whose realization of his role lies somewhere between the “duuuude” and the “whoah” of those respective films.
Set in the year 2021, Johnny is a digital data courier who stores clients’ information in a cybernetic implant in his head. It holds a whopping 80 gigabytes – which is a laugh today given our phones hold nearly this much data, and we’ve easily achieved the multi-terabyte compression level.
Johnny’s “pride in profession” rests in the security of his data-envelope, which is protected by seemingly randomly generated images, yet also reminds one today of fffffound images, delicious gif streams, and image macros: I want room service!
I won’t sugar-coat it, this is an especially bad film! A special movie to a lot of cult sci-fi fans, yet IMDB rate it at 4.9 and I think that’s being generous. Keanu’s acting is horrendous. The editing is choppy. And at 1 hour 40 minutes it can appear to go on forever. But there are some special full-minute VR scenes, some incredibly geeky one-liners, oh and performances by Udo Kier, Takeshi Kitano, and none-other than rapper Ice-T as a tattooed & dreadlocked hacker, Black Flag’s front man Henry Rollins as a saviour doctor, and Dolph Lundgren as a street preaching Jesus freak-cybernaut.
Welcome to Sci-Fi July.
the remarkable crowd shot above was taken by current Flux Factory resident from the Low Countries, Astrid Bussink.
Sci-Fi July is an informal rooftop film series curated by moi, and will happen every Tuesday in July – you will not be told what movie will be screened, but they will all be of the sci-fi genre and they will all reward you in one way or another!
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!
I’m a fan of most-things-map, but this one has me really sad. Final Fantasy XIII has was released in the last weeks of 2009 in Japan, and has already been heavily criticized for its extremely linear playtime and at times lack of actual user-control. Some have described the game like hitting buttons to watch a CG movie. But with regards to the linear comments and critiques, take a look at the following map, which is approximately the first 6 hours of gameplay, and you’ll understand why RPG-fans and non-linear gamers alike are upset, quite upset:
go here, get this, go there, do that, beat that boss, proceed to next room, cross bridge, keep going, don’t turn, just straight. booooooooooooring!
