DORKBOT : SYDNEY

7pm for 7:30 speak off.

-IMPORTANT NOTES!!!-

This month we are being hosted by CuriousWorks at their new office warehouse space in Surry Hills.
Suite 402, 11 Randle St, Surry Hills. Map

Bring a pillow or something to rest your weary bones.

There will also be some interactive work involving the internet so bring along your laptop to join in!

This month’s speakers are as follows:

: : : ARAS VAICHAS : : :

Aras Vaichas is an artist+engineer who works fulltime as an embedded
software and electronics engineer. He creates simple but snazzy kits so
others can learn about electronics and technology.
The WävRüta is a microcontroller based audio effects units. It was
designed for one of the Dorkshop workshops that will be held during the
Electrofringe 2008 festival in Newcastle.The name is pronounced “Wave Rooter”.
So called because it really fucks
with your audio.”

http://www.youtube.com/user/ArtistEngineer

CURIOUSWORKS



CuriousWorks will present two sets of technologies, still in development. One is an open-source node sequencer array that triggers images, audio and video in real time. Combined with Johnny Lee’s wiimote/infra-red pen touch screen interface, this becomes a touch-based, realtime, media triggering system. We’ll demo this application at the presentation. The other stream of research has been into wearable and/or portable digital media gear. For example - straps that you wrap around your shoes that trigger audio or video as you walk. We are evolving this technology to create a puppeteer’s suit that will interact with real-life electronic objects and virtual online environments at the same time. A video of our research goals and prototypes of the technology will be shown.

http://www.curiousworks.com.au/

NEIL JENKINS



Neil Jenkins is an artist and programmer whose current practice is
heavily engaged with electronic media, language and networked
communication.
He will present two pieces of work, Exquisite Copse, a generative
piece and play on the surrealist game, Exquisite Corpse, that visually
rewrites existing works of literature into a forest of word trees and
Visitors Studio, an online multiuser platform developed with
Furtherfield.org that facilitates real time collaborative audio-visual
mixing over the internet.
everyone is invited to bring their laptops to join the online
visitors studio mix during the presentation (needs web browser with
flash plugin)

http://www.exquisitecopse.net
http://visitorsstudio.org

SHOW & TELL

As usual there will be a Show & Tell at the end for anyone who wants to bring some stuff they feel like showing off. Things like flyers for upcoming events or websites we stumbled on with cool things or unfinished/broken/just jotted down ideas and works in progress are welcome. It is a great time to promote your own or your friend’s stuff or get ideas from others in the audience for problem solving etc.

Bring Drinks & Nibblies and friends and pillows!

NEXT MONTH’S DORKBOT : If you want to talk at Dorkbot please just email dorkbotsyd@dorkbot.org. We would be THRILLED to hear from you!

Come to the Hollywood Hotel this approaching Tuesday the 1st of April for a casual BeerBot.
Bring friends and allies to 2 Foster St, Surry Hills at 7:00pm. We shall be discussing the upcoming year of dorky activities, our private practices of topsecret dorkdum, and your dorky mother. It’s gonna be amazing!

Dudes! This is a robot that serves beer! see here

This month we are proud to have a guest curator Wade Marynowsky who will also be presenting. Details are as follows:

Monday February 25th, 19:00 for a 19:30 start at Sydney (302 Cleveland St)
Featuring: Kate Richards with Mr Snow, Mari Velonaki and Wade Marynowsky.
Bring your own drinks and nibblies. Look forward to catching up!

P R E S E N T A T I O N - D E T A I L S

Kate Richards with Mr Snow

A Wayfarer performer in action, The CarriageWorks, Performance Space, 2007.
http://katerichards.net/art/wayfarer/

Wayfarer is a realtime game and multimedia event for four performers, four audience groups and passersby. Using their voices, each audience group will direct performers to explore and undertake a series of tasks inside the new and largely unknown Carriageworks building, hidden from the audience’s view. The audience will track their performer’s progress via streamed video, audio and locative data on large exterior projection screens.

Wayfarer is a truly hybrid concept, where live and mediated performance, urban choreography, tactical media, parkour, neo-situationist strategies, gameplay and site specificity come together in a volatile mix.

Kate Richards is a Sydney-based media artist working across multimedia, interactivity, visualisation software and time-based media. Recent multimedia exhibitions include Bystander with Ross Gibson, and The Uncertainty Principle, a photographic exhibition at the Australian Centre for Photography in Oct 2007.

Mr.Snow is an artist and an artists technician. With Zina Kaye, he jointly administers the House of Laudanum, a web venue for artists, writers and musicians, which has been providing application and web-hosting solutions for creative people. Most days he hacks Wordpress and Darwin. On his day off he is head mechanic on a door that reads the newspaper.

Mari Velonaki

Mari Velonaki is a media artist who has worked in the field of interactive installation art since 1995. Her practice engages the spectator/participant with digital and robotic ‘characters’ in interplays stimulated by sensory triggered interfaces (speech 1995, touch 1997, breath 1998, electrostatic charge 2000, vision system 2000, light 2003, robotics 2003-06). Her principal contribution to the field of interactive art occurs through the creation of innovative human-machine interfaces that promote intimate and immersive relationships between participants and interactive artworks. She was awarded a PhD in Media Arts at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales in 2003.

Velonaki’s installations have been exhibited internationally. Exhibitions include: ZENDAI Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai, Wood Street Galleries, Pittsburgh, Millennium Museum - Beijing Biennale of Electronic Arts, Ars Electronica, Austria, Biennale of Electronic Arts, Perth, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Conde Duque Museum, Madrid, European Media Arts Festival, Osnabruck, Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Arco, Madrid, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.

In 2006, with Dr David Rye, she co-founded the Centre for Social Robotics within the Australian Centre for Field Robotics, at the University of Sydney.

*The Australian Centre for Field Robotics (ACFR) is a partner in the ARC Centre of Excellence in Autonomous Systems. Dr David Rye, Dr Steve Scheding, Dr Mari Velonaki and Dr Stefan Williams form the core art/science collaboration at this institution. Areas of research include robotics, distributed and decentralised systems and human/machine interaction.

Wade Marynowsky

Wade Marynowsky is a media artist working across installation, audio-visual performance, music and video. Recent highlights include his installation Autonomous Improvistation v1 at Artspace Sydney, 2007, and the demux (http://demux.org) launch at the Performance space, Sydney 2007. Wade will talk about the inner workings of Autonomous improvisation v1. His recent residency at Hexagram research Institute (Concordia University, Montréal, Canada) where he worked with robotic artist Bill Vorn (http://billvorn.com) and his current project involving autonomous robotics. http://marynowsky.net

There will be a special Dorkbot excursion to the iCinema at the University of New South Wales (Kensington Campus) on the evening of December the 4th. Unfortunately we can only bring 20 people as the cinema has a small capasity! If you would like to come please RSVP to pia A.S.A.P. with your email and telephone contact details. The first 20 people to RSVP will receive a confirmation email to let them know that they are one of our extra special dorks with further details about the meeting.
Hope to hear from you soon. I’m excited!

Tuesday the 23rd October

Usual times and places. See you at 19:00 for a 19:30 speak off at Sydney (302 Cleveland St)

Two super presentations this month! And a show+tell.

1. Stephen Jones will be demonstrating and talking about a number of video synthesizers that he built between 1978 and 1986 (see pictured below for one). Stephen used these synths when performing live with Australian electronic group Severed Heads and in other projects.

2. Nick Wishart will be presenting CeLL, a MIDI controlled pneumatic orchestra he has created in collaboration with Miles van Dorssen. They will be opening up CeLL to new composers via a new software interface that can receive compositions by email, play and record the composition then send that recording to the composer.

www.cell.org.au

3. Show + Tell is open to anyone who has something they wanna bring along. Can be something interesting you have been working on or perhaps an event you wish to share with people. Just as long as it has something to do with electricity!

Also: Taking suggestions and volunteers for presentations for November’s Dorkbot which shall be the last Dorkbot of 2007. Get in while the year lasts!

This month’s Dorkbot will be on the 23rd of October. Usual place, usual times. Stay tuned for full details to be posted v. soon.

Dorkbot Sydney took part in a 4 day festival called Electrofringe over the Labour Day long weekend that just passed. Electrofringe is a festival that has been running for many years in the city of Newcastle on the coast of New South Wales, about 2 hours drive from Sydney. The city hosts a variety of talks, panels, workshops and screenings, performances and parties that represent emerging and established artists from Australia and around the world.

Boris Gordon and I arrived in Newcastle on Friday to partake in our first commitment to the Electrofringe Festival in the early afternoon which was a presentation entitled Dorktalk about Dorkbot-Syd where we discussed organising and producing a Dorkbot in Sydney. There was a nice intimate audience that had plenty of questions and ideas. We were able to network with some people that are considering initiating their own Dorkbot factions for different cities in Australia (watch www.dorkbot.org for updates).

If you would like to browse the websites I brought up in the talk I have posted them all on our delicious page, go to: http://del.icio.us/dorkbotsyd/dorktalk-electrofringe2007

In the later afternoon Nick Wishart and Aras Vaichas, John August and Boris and I sat in the Festival Bar and teamed up for the ElectroPopQuiz hosted by Daniel Green. Neither team won first place, which was rather disappointing, as you can imagine. We definitely can’t name ten Merzbow albums and were not given points for creativity when we submitted “The Merzbow Box Set”. However, John August walked away with a Nintendo console vibrator for his correct guesses in a heads/tails round.

THE NIBBLER

The following day we got up early to begin the first day of Dorkshop at the Newcastle TAFE Worksheds. A four-hour intensive project based electronics workshop lead and designed by Engineer/Artist Aras Vaichas. The project for the day was The Nibbler.

The Nibbler is an audio pattern generator and noisemaker.

videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rUOAk6AFi4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nDHnscIrF8

The turn out was great and almost every Nibbler left the building nibbling, working to it’s fullest, ready to play with. It was a pleasure to introduce people to the world of electronics and see other enthusiasts create this beautiful circuit.

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Here is the handout from the workshop that includes the schematics and pictures with an in depth explanation of all the parts and recommendations for suppliers with hints for assembly.

NIBBLER HANDOUT PDF

Tim sent us a picture of his Nibbler that he finished housing at home.

THE BRAINLET

With sore heads and bellies aching for coffee we dragged ourselves back to the workshops for another exciting day of soldering; this time a more advanced microcontroller project called The Brainlet also designed by Aras Vaichas.

The Brainlet is a networkable cellular automata based electro-organism.

videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgpKjoQSNj4<
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOainCij_UU

The challenge of a smaller board with tiny parts and a microcontroller proved a little daunting for some at first but with time and practice everyone was tinning with ease. Before we knew it the singing sound of flax was whistling through the air and microcontrollers were attached. As we plugged Brainlets together we created a community of playful chaos and crazy bleeps and singing rings. The Brainlets were communicating!

This was definitely an advanced electronics project. There were many who had experience with making electronics. There were people who came for this second workshop that had experienced electronics for the first time with us the previous day. We were impressed and excited to see that most everyone got their’s working before they left in the afternoon.

For those who missed out on partaking in this workshop due to lack of space and boards and if you are interested in obtaining the handout we used for the day that includes the schematics, pictures, detailed description of parts and assembly hints please download this PDF:

BRAINLET HANDOUT PDF

All in all Dorkbot’s contribution to Electrofringe this year has been a great success. I would like to thank the directors for their support and Boris Gordon for helping out with the presentation on Friday and Nick Wishart for his help and assistance with the workshop both during the festival and throughout the workshop’s development and for his loan of an enormous pile of soldering power. Thankyou to the people who participated in the workshops!

Of course, most importantly, I would like to thank Aras Vaichas for his amazing designs and his brilliant expertise. His guidance and vision produced some brilliant machines! Dorkbot and Electrofringe are truly fortunate to have someone with so much experience, knowledge and enthusiasm We are already dreaming up what we might make together next year! Please feel free to contact us if you have any ideas or questions about the Nibbler and the Brainlet.

For more photos go to our flickr. And if you have some pics of your nibbler and brainlets please send them to us and we will add them!

This Tuesday September 25th is the annual Dorkbot Social!
Bring some drinks and we’ll provide the nibbles and don’t forget those bow ties.
There will be some short screenings and show&tells (please feel
free to contribute some material) and some priceless anecdotal chit chat.
Come to Sydney at 19:00 for a 19:30 speak off mixed with good music and
scintillating ideas.

Our very special guest…
Nick Wishart will give an informal talk about
Toydeath’s recent tour of Japan and their encounters with Japanese
circuit benders.
below is a photo of a member of Sonton, who played with Toydeath
at Bullets Bar in Tokyo

Toydeath
Sonton

Be there or be square!

Dorks,

Just so people know… what ever is happening for dorkbot (sept) aint happening next week. It’ll be Sept 25th. May be a social so dig out those boe ties.

Pia.
(Your faithful overlord)

DORKBOT-SYD : AUGUST

THIS TUESDAY 21st! From 19:00 till Late
at Sydney: 302 Cleveland St Chippendale

This month as we are having a screening of an extraordinary collection of fascinating footage!
Dorkbot will be filled with moving pictures with words and music using advanced projection
technology and a stereo speaker system!

Bring along munchies and drinks and if there is something you would like to show bring that too!