Dorkbot London.

[reddragdiva]

Held at State 51. The remit of Dorkbot is "people doing strange things with electricity." This seems to mean geeky stuff with arty content or arty stuff with geeky content. There are longer talks (demos with a laptop or video) interspersed with short talks on an idea. This evening's selection:

• Kevin Carter: Oral Tradition - video presentation on an art piece where two computers with speech synthesizers and speech recognition sing to each other and the errors build up.

• Adam Hoyle: Flypostercam - a talk on an idea to have a camera set up at various popular flyposting sites, and build a photographic or video record of a year's postering.

• Adrian Ward: the Quack Project.

• Saul Albert: a talk on new directions in cartography, and the Cartographic Congress - how to turn social and economic maps into interesting and horrible works of art.

• Michael Linton: openmoney.org - how to set up thousands of competing currencies in your various overlapping communities. Like Internetworked LETS schemes. This went on a bit because it was politics and economics, so the nutters were set off, and it's harder to killfile them in real time than on Usenet. But it was interesting and seemed passably thought-out.

• Lottie Child: Wireless Video Helium Balloon - just what it says: an X-10 camera on a balloon (on a tether).

• Jeremy Ruston: autojer.exe - assorted demos of cellular automata (these were more or less Conway's Game of Life on crack) - "utterly amazing at three in the morning" - and travesty generators.

• Ashraf Nehru: Frankie The Robot - a real-time animated dancer, DJ and beatmixer. At last, a robot replacement for the superstar DJ! This was spectacularly entertaining and got much applause.

Things for the organisers to learn for next time:

1. If you have a hard concrete floor, selling beer in bottles is a bad idea. Even a bunch of well-behaved geeks will knock stuff over and break it.
2. The heating is switched off for NO PERSON. The speaker can just bloody talk louder. FUCK IT WAS COLD!
3. It really helps to make sure the AV is all set up and working before the event. It's not like this was the first one ...

It was vastly entertaining, and I most highly recommend Dorkbot for severe geek value. Just, er, dress warm.

I was most pleased to discover that the camera does surprisingly well with no flash and crappy indoor lighting, if you set the speed to ISO 400. (The camera has fully automatic, semi-automatic and fully manual modes.) But CCDs can be good for that sort of thing. I just got pnmconvol to do a sharpen that actually works, so expect more pics, er, some time soon. Really. I have the technology! The battery ran out during autojer.exe, but you'll live.

Friday night: Claiming *pint*s from the Purists. Then a quiet weekend.

Update: Pics up now. Grainy, but worked for getting lots of pics - including stuff projected onto the screen - without blinding the subjects. Processed automatically as far as possible. A successful experiment.

Comments

[steer.livejournal.com]

assorted demos of cellular automata

Oooh - I love cellular automata. Conway's life is provably turing machine equivalent. Awesome.

I looked up a travesty generator on google because I'd not heard of it before - are they just those old markov based programs for reconstructing books in the style of X? (Where you feed the input and it produces something with the same words jumbled according to occurrence rates)

[phelyan.livejournal.com]

Damn, it sounds like I've missed some great fun out there. I just have to make the next one. The 'Oral Tradition' sounds quite fascinating, was it as good as the concept promised?

[reddragdiva]

Something like that. This one takes groups of three letters and picks the next letter by probability. It did a good job on Bush's State of the Union speech, particularly when combined with Alice In Wonderland.

[reddragdiva]

It was a video presentation on the performance piece. Obviously, the piece itself would have been a lot more interesting and interactive. But it looked fun. e.g. the artist's deliberate choice to use the Microsoft lexicon in the speech recognition and not add to it in any way.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Excellent - if it can do Bush it can't be long before it can do higher primates. I bet it could do Blairspeak really well. In fact a perl Blairspeak generator is something that I should pursue in my quest to learn perl.

[reddragdiva]

The reason it seemed to do so well on Bush was that it invented non-words just like the ones Bush actually uses. I think we've reverse-engineered his speechwriter.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Looking over this again, how to turn social and economic maps into interesting and horrible works of art. reminds me of this which is very cute indeed. Amongst other things, you say things like "if this random squiggle is this map then what map is this random squiggle" and "what would photo X look like if it were a painting by Lucien Freud" makes me think of your photo collection from various events.