Tuesday 2 February 2010

DorkBot at Serial space

Last Sunday when at Serial Space they told us DorkBot was taking place on Tuesday night.
I wasn't quite sure what it was all about. It was going to involve coding, fire and audio. It seemed like it was going to be some kind of performance, dangerously close to be a touch to arty for my liking. It was all free though, so I decided to go and have a look. I'm very glad I did.

An eager crowd thirsting for knowledge and inspiration had gathered to listen to 4 hands on presentations.

The first one was a collaboration between a Poet and a Computer programmer / engineer.
This was a beta testing and an explanation about what their work consist of and how it was made.












A poetry table. Which basically was a big screen where you could place wooden circles. The circles would be detected and attract a random poem to them. As you move the circle around the poem moves along. If you added another circle, another poem would appear. If 2 circles would be close to each other they would both start to react and interact.




























































The same duo had also made this wall piece. If you looked closely you could see a pattern of little dots. By touching sets of dots you would trigger sound clips of words from the poem. Letting you fingers slide over a row of dots would therefore result in hearing it being read out to you. The rows sometimes intersects. And at these points the story in the poem would change, and its up to you how the poem will end.

























The second talk was about a guy who's job is to enhance and modify guitar pedals. It was the same guy who held the workshop last Sunday. He presented some of his work. And some of his stuff sounded amazing.


















































The third presenter was a guy who had modified a bike into a computer interface, and written a game to go with it.












Last but not least a sound engineer demonstrated how you to make sound waves visible using fire. (and Aphex Twin as test material)












3 comments:

Lisen said...

Göta Petter vilka grejer!

Lisen said...

Eller jag menar mackapärer!

lazykate said...

That looked like fun! I'd love to build a fire EQ speaker thing...

Let me know if you go again.

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