I had the pleasure of attending Dorkbot Socal 13 this weekend. Zoe accompanied me, and we went straigh from lunch - I wanted to stop at home to grab some tools, but we didn't want to be late. We arrived, and between 10 and 20 people were milling about. After a couple minutes, a tall gentleman with (in my opinion) excellent style (Tom Jennings I believe) hauled out some old gear to take apart, including an oscilloscope and some radiation-detecting devices of 50s vintage. After about 20 minutes of discovering what the insides of old kit looked like (and snagging a great art piece - i mean vacuum tube from the oscilloscope), the demos began.
In my work I employ the infrastructure of technological rationalism (concepts, tools, methods, and apparatus) in order to explore personal, intuitive realities. Thus technology is not used/developed within the traditional framework of man as Creator, but man as "experiencer": a subjective being, a soul.
Anyway, his work can be found at his site, linked above. He went on at length, but one thing he said stuck - he didn't quite get the technical implementation right for a project that involved sending someone else's experienced sound to your ears to surreal effect. He wasn't disappointed, though, because he created some great photos that "got the message across". Good for him as an artist, not so good for me as someone interested in seeing "cool things done with electricity."
Last person to speak was a gentleman whose name was Ross (I believe) talking a bit about his implementation of an Archos PMA portable video recorder as a wearable system for 'cyborg logging' (recording pov video logs) among other uses. He unfortunately didn't have much time to talk as time had been taken up by others on the agenda, but I grabbed some video - forgive the low quality, I'm working on a better audio solution for videoblogging from my phone.
Administrator commented, on December 5, 2007 at 6:23 a.m.:
Left him out? I wrote 2 paras and linked to his site. Brad Pittssss.
zO commented, on December 5, 2007 at 6:23 a.m.:
too amused by my amazing ability to just block things out. how do i do it?!?!!?
garnet commented, on December 5, 2007 at 6:23 a.m.:
thanks for coming out and for writing this summary!
zO commented, on December 5, 2007 at 6:23 a.m.:
this is such a concise entry that i am not sure i need to really write about it. i may just link here from mine or something. i'm amused at the leaving out of the 2nd speaker.