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updated 2008.11.23
dorkbot pgh 19: Thursday, 20 Nov., 2008
Richard Pell, Institute for Applied Autonomy. Richard is a founding member of the art and engineering
collective, the Institute for Applied Autonomy. His work includes
several robotic, web and biologically based projects that call into question
the imperatives that drive technological development. IAA projects such as the
robotic GraffitiWriter, iSee and TXTmob have been exhibited in art, activist
and engineering contexts andhave been chosen for an Award of
Distinction and two Honorable Mentions at the Prix-Ars Electronica in Linz. Richard's narrative and documentary videos explore the individual's
relationship to authority. His most recent video documentary entitled, Don't
Call Me Crazy On The 4th Of July, has won several awards and has screened in numerous international festivals.
In 2007 he was awarded a prestigious Rockefeller New Media Fellowship for the
establishment of a new museum entitled The Center for PostNatural History.
Podcasts (in production)
dorkbot pgh 18: Thursday, 23 Oct., 2008
Jill Miller, " I Heart Surveillance"
Jill is a recent Pittsburgh transplant; she moved here from California because she heard that the weather was better. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Art Department and HCI Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. She previously taught at the San Francisco Art Institute and the California College of Arts. She is a conceptual artist and will talk about her recent project, Collectors, when she went undercover and conducted surveillance on art collectors in San Francisco.
Podcasts:
Eric Paulos, "I Want to be Unique Like Everyone Else"
Eric is a recent arrival to Pittsburgh coming by way of UC Berkeley, San Francisco, Intel Research, and Survival Research Labs. He has been known to build flying robots, create EMP devices, and construct interactive public trashcans. His recent efforts as an Assistant Professor at CMU's HCI Institute focus on citizen science, activism, sustainability, green design, and environmental awareness. Eric will explore these topics as well as explain what it is like to fulfill a personal fantasy of driving a public street sweeper.
Podcasts:
dorkbot pgh 17: 7:30pm, Thursday, 18 Sep., 2008
Lea Albaugh. Rossum's Universal Robots, written in 1920 by the Czech playwright Karel Capek, introduced the word "robot" to the world. Lea presented work done on a prototype costume for a future theatrical production of R.U.R to be produced in Spring, 2010.
Axel Straschnoy. Axel is a artist and instructor who lives and works in Helsinki and Buenos Aires. He is currently visiting Pittsburgh to work on a project with the Robotics Institute. His presentation included a survey of prior work and a description of his work at the RI.
(podcast unavailable.)
dorkbot pittsburgh 16: 21 August, 2008
dorkbot pittsburgh participated in Robot 250 as part of "Meet the Made" at The Mattress Factory.
Seema Patel: Seema is CEO of Interbots. Interbots creates compelling interactive characters who enable memorable experiences with their guests. They specialize in the design and construction of custom interactive characters (both physical and virtual), control software, and interactive multimedia content.
(podcast under production.)
Golan Levin: Golan develops artifacts and events which explore supple new modes of reactive expression. His current projects, such as Opto-Isolator and Double-Taker (Snout), employ interactive robotics and machine vision to explore the theme of gaze as a primary new mode for human-machine communication. Golan is currently Associate Professor of Electronic Time-Based Art at Carnegie Mellon University.
(podcast unavailable due to equipment failure.)
dorkbot pittsburgh 15: April 24, 2008
Eric Schweikardt: Eric is a deliberate comprehensivist – his
background is in architecture and now he makes modular robotic stuff.
He's convinced that playing with computational toys encourages kids to
develop intuitions about complexity and become better designers. Eric
will demonstrate roBlocks, a
robotic construction kit made up of little magnetized cubes. He's
currently a PhD candidate in Computational Design at Carnegie Mellon
University.
Podcasts:
Marek Michalowski: Marek is a Ph.D. student in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He participates in the Social Robots Project, the Project on People and Robots, Humanoids@CMU, and RoboOrg (the RI student organization). Marek will discuss BeatBots, a project to develop rhythmically intelligent robots for research and entertainment.
Podcasts:
dorkbot pittsburgh 14: March 20, 2008
Jia Ji, Touchtown. Jia is the Director of Product Management for Dancetown, a dance-based digital fitness system developed for seniors. Using a computer and dance pads, people of all ages are able to participate in healthy intergenerational play through the Dancetown system. Jia is a Stanford University alumnus and actively supports grassroots technology efforts in the Pittsburgh area. He currently serves as Technology Director for NAAAP Pittsburgh, volunteers on the local game developers board, and helps organize the Pittsburgh PodCamp conference series. Prior to joining Touchtown, Jia was president and founder of Flying Fish Media. He has also worked for a variety of technology companies and startups such as Guru.com, Pittsburgh.com, Dreamwork Soft, Inecom Entertainment, Interactive Media Systems, Ripple Effects Interactive, and eGenesis.
Podcasts:
Jim Jen, AlphaLab. Jim is the Executive in Residence at AlphaLab, a six month program for software startups that provides companies with funding, free office space, services, and access to investors and advisors. Jim works closely with the management teams of startup technology companies to identify and address critical business issues facing those companies. Previously, Jim built and managed software businesses at Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Agile Software (acquired by Oracle), and Instill Corporation (Mayfield-funded, privately held). As a management consultant at Booz Allen & Hamilton, Jim advised executive management of Fortune 500 companies on marketing, strategic planning, and organizational issues. Jim holds a BA and MA in Economics from Stanford University and an MBA from Stanford's Graduate School of Business.
Podcasts:
dorkbot pittsburgh 13: 24 January, 2008
Jennifer Gooch: Jennifer is a multimedia artist interested in our attempt to, and
inability to, connect. Interested in "mediated exchange" – how people use
technology and other means of mediation to interact – Gooch's work often
looks at mediation, the mediated, and the awkward space between. She is currently working on her web and community based project, onecoldhand.com, "a site for the collection and hopeful reunion of Pittsburgh's dropped
gloves." A banjo-toting singer from Dallas, Gooch received her B.F.A. in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Arlington and is currently a M.F.A.
candidate in Studio Art at CMU.
Podcasts:
Richard Tuttle: Richard joined the Plextronics team in July of 2007 and has been working as a Formulator in the Inks & Applications group during that time. He is a 2006 graduate of the University of Akron with a M.S. in Physics. While at Akron, he was part of a research team that studied the processing and applications of electrospun ceramic fibers. This team researched the effect of variables such as humidity, temperature, precursor concentration, collection procedure, voltage, and annealing conditions on the formation of polymer/ceramic composite fibers. He also holds B.S in Physics from Muskingum College.
(podcast unavailble due to equipment failure)
dorkbot pittsburgh 12: 18 October, 2007
Lori Hepner: Lori is an interdisciplinary artist whose work focuses on aspects of coding through spoken and computer language in digital culture. Ambiguous visual representations of binary code are used in the Code Words body of work to create large-scale digital print installations and are performed in the Unworkings of a Binary System body of work. Ms. Hepner has been working through ideas of translation of code through performance, video, and photography since earning her M.F.A in Digital Media at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2005. Ms. Hepner currently lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA where she holds the position of Assistant Professor of Integrative Arts at Penn State Greater Allegheny.
Podcasts:
Gabe Johnson: Gabeis a PhD student in Computational Design at CMU. His
background is in computer science and software engineering, blah blah
blah. He's also a music nerd and can cook marginally well. He misses
Colorado. Gabe will demonstrate FlatCAD, a system that lets you create your own physical
construction kit by coding in the LOGO-like FlatLang language. Construction kits are now something you can design, if you can write a simple FlatLang program, you can design a kit
and "print it out" on a laser cutter.
updated 2007.04.28
dorkbot pittsburgh 11: 19 April, 2007
We have two speakers this month, Michael Philetus Weller and Elizabeth Monian.
Elizabeth Monoian
Elizabeth Monoian will speak on the topic of "Committing to Pittsburgh as Interdisciplinary Art Practice". Elizabeth Monoian is an interdisciplinary artist who uses the Internet, found objects and spaces, electronic noise, video, and performance to tease apart and question cultural relationships to time, history, and memory.
Performatively she becomes Eliza. Willing to live the nightmare of grade-school child standing in front of the classroom naked, she is exposed to the familiar gaze of strangers. Elizabeth becomes the image -- the performance, the character -- that is viewed. Eliza navigates within the noise of contemporary culture -- the cacophony of electronics and wires that bring whales above the ocean surface to sing and nurtures premature infants in the neonatal ward -- the chatter of capitalism that permeates our cellular selves.
Elizabeth founded and co-directs Society for Cultural Exchange with her twin sister Barbara. Society for Cultural Exchange is a unique non-profit arts organization that is developing exchanges nationally and internationally in three distinctive locations. They have an artist in residency program and art space located in a 2500 sq. foot Victorian house in an historical steel neighborhood in Pittsburgh, PA, an artist in residency program on a fishing boat in the Native American Tlingit Village of Hoonah, Alaska, as well as an art space in their rent-stabilized apartment in the East Village, New York City. Currently they are transforming a blighted lot in Pittsburgh into an outdoor/public electronic media center.
Podcasts:
Michael Philetus Weller
Michael Philetus Weller will demonstrate Posey, a computationally enhanced poseable hub and strut construction kit that can be used as an interface to applications running on a host computer. Its optocoupled ball and socket joints transmit local topology information and determine the roll, pitch and yaw of connections. Zigbee transceivers in each hub communicate this data wirelessly back to the host computer. The host computer assembles a representation of the physical model as the user creates and configures it. This representation can then be used by application programs to control models in particular domains. For example, a skeleton of a puppet can be used to control the movement of a more detailed virtual puppet to create an online puppet show. And by connecting posey to a molecule modeling application, information on different molecules can be retrieved just by building the molecule using hubs as atoms and struts as bonds.
Michael Philetus Weller is a Ph.D. Candidate in the CoDe Lab at Carnegie Mellon University. He is experimenting with ways computation can be embedded in buildings and furniture to reimagine our relationship with the built environment. He holds a B.A. in Philosophy, a B.A. in Architecture and a Master of Architecture from the University of Washington. He believes in Open Source, and believes everyone should read Daniel Dennett.
Podcasts:
dorkbot pittsburgh 10: 22 March,2007
Scott Davidoff and Ian Li, Moodjam.
Scott researches ubiquitous and context-aware systems for families. Scott works with the Project on Family, Control and the Smart Home, part of Carnegie Mellon's Human Computer Interaction Institute. Before graduate school, Scott was principal of Scott Davidoff Design, and much better-rested. Scott holds a Masters in Human Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon, and a BA in Political Theory and English from Duke University.
Ian Li researches technologies that help people make better decisions and find opportunities for positive changes in their lives, using methods from human-computer interaction (HCI), interaction design, and behavioral research. Currently, Ian develops ubiquitous computing systems that improve people's awareness of their behavior to motivate physical activity, to increase mood awareness, and to aid office productivity.
Podcasts:
Carl DiSalvo and Tom Lauwers, CREATE Lab
CREATE -- Community Robotics for Education, Art, & Technology Empowerment -- Lab is committed to broadening public participation in science, technology, engineering through the development of disruptive robotic technologies.
Tom and Carl will present a survey of recent projects undertaken by the CREATE Lab, including TeRK, Robot Diaries, Neighborhood Nets, and Robot 250. These projects range from hardware and software technology development, educational robotics for middle school girls, arts based community robotics, to the development of a large scale city wide robotic art and technology event involving thousands of participants.
Tom Lauwers is a fourth year Ph.D. student at the Robotics Institute. He has a long-standing interest in educational robotics, as both a participant in programs like FIRST and later as a designer of a robotics course and related education technology. He is currently studying curriculum design and evaluation and hopes that his study of the educational sciences will help him create educational technologies that are relevant and responsive to the needs of educators. Tom received a BS in Electrical Engineering and Public Policy from CMU in 2003.
Carl DiSalvo received a PhD in Design the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University in 2006. Carl's work approaches design from a critical and reflective perspective. He uses design to ask questions, provoke debate and facilitate conversations concerning the social aspects of technologies and technological discourses. Carl is currently a Post-Doctoral Fellow in The Studio for Creative Inquiry and the Center for the Arts in Society. Carl also is a founder of the Pittsburgh GIS company DeepLocal.
Podcasts:
dorkbot pittsburgh 09: February 23, 2007
Jason Simmons, Gradient Labs, www.gradientlabs.com. Mr. Simmons is an information and interaction designer; his company, Gradient Labs, makes data-driven engines for interacting with information and media. Past and current projects include thisishappening.com, the Progress Pittsburgh Knowledge Base (a wiki-like map of the regional political landscape), MissingLink.biz (a tool for managing group knowledge work meetings), and the Warhol Timeline (a soon to be launched tool for exploring Andy Warhol's life, work, and the 20th century through time and relationships). Prior to founding Gradient Labs, he worked for a Carnegie Mellon spin-off company developing data visualization techniques for the military and healthcare industries. Simmons' Gradient Labs is currently focused on developing a new tool for visualizing temporal patterns, and a major overhaul of thisishappening.com.
Podcasts:
Grisha Coleman, echo::System, www.echo-system.org. Ms. Coleman has worked with an inter-disciplinary team of collaborators working outside of the field of arts, conducting residencies at the Banff New Media Institute [Canada], the Beall Center for Art and Technology at UC Irvine [CA], Eyebeam Centre for Art and Technology, RPI, and Amherst University among others. Coleman is a graduate of the College of Letters at Wesleyan University, and received her MFA in Composition and Integrated Media from California Institute of the Arts. She is a current research fellow at The Studio For Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University, and interim Course Director for the MA Degree in Contemporary Dance and Performance at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance.
Podcasts:
dorkbot pittsburgh 08: January 25, 2007
Kazuhiro Jo, Ph.D. student researching auditory interaction design at the University of Tokyo. Kazuhiro is a co-founder of dorkbot tokyo and acts as a member of The SINE WAVE ORCHESTRA, a member of Monalisa project, a member of a performance unit "aeo" with eye (e.g. Boredoms) and Taeji Sawai(e.g. portabole[k]ommunity).
Podcasts:
Roger Dannenberg is an Associate Research Professor in the School of Computer Science and School of Art at CMU. He is internationally known for his research in the field of computer music. His current work includes research on computer accompaniment of live musicians, content-based music retrieval, interactive media, and high-level languages for sound synthesis. Among other projects, Dannenberg and his colleagues created "McBlare", a robotic bagpiper.
Podcasts:
Jacob Ciocci, Paper Rad. Jacob is a founding member of the art group Paper Rad. Paper Rad synthesizes popular material from television, comics, video games, and advertising, allowing these materials to contextualize and cross-reference each other. Within Paper Rad, Jacob's animations, web art, music, and performances address the relationship between belief, transcendence and popular culture.
Podcasts:
posted 2006.12.07
dorkbot pittsburgh 07: November 30, 2006
Kevin C. Smith is a musician and (bedroom) producer who also turns obsolete toys and children's keyboards into unique musical instruments through circuit bending. He will give an overview of circuit bending including what to bend and basic techniques. He will also present and demonstrate such circuit bent instruments as the voice changing megaphone, Speak & Spell, and Casio SK-1. http://panafonic.blogspot.com
Podcasts:
Garth Zeglin is a professional roboticist and a journeyman artist. His day job is developing legged robots at the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute, but his quest is finding his artistic voice in more poetic machinery. His current projects include robots suspended in the air, talking mirrors, and pneumatic percussion instruments. He is fascinated by elegantly simple technology and dynamic behavior, and he seeks to balance his love of gadgetry with the expressive needs of the work. The talk will include a short overview of past projects, then zoom in on current work, presenting both technical and artistic rationales, and culminate in a live demo during the break.
Podcasts:
posted 2006.11.01
dorkbot pittsburgh 06: 26 Oct 2006
Osman Khan, Electronic Artist, www.osmankhan.com
Osman Khan is an artist interested in using technology to construct engines that help create artifacts for social criticism and aesthetic expression. His work explores certain themes to see how technology fabricates as well as subverts our understanding of identity, communication, and public space through interactive installations and site-specific interventions.
Christopher Sperandio, Driving Content / Art and Television, www.kartoonkings.com
Christopher Sperandio's collaborative work explores margins between mass and museum cultures. In 2006, Sperandio created ARTSTAR, an eight hour reality television series based in the New York art world, airing on The Dish Network. He has collaborated on projects for the Museum of Modern Art/PS1, and museums in the US, Scotland, Denmark and England. Sperandio is currently the Jill Kraus Visiting Assistant Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.
posted 2006.09.22
dorkbot pittsburgh 05: 21 Sep 2006
Jonny Farringdon, Director of Science, BodyMedia, Inc. Jonny spoke about wearable body monitors, technology, data, application and design for wearing sensors 24/7. He will discuss practical design and technology issues from woven sensors, clothing that fused Philips & Levi's, and did a live demonstration of a Body Media sensor.
Podcasts:
DJ Soy Sos of Tuff Sound Recording, www.tuffsoundrecording.com. Herman Pearl (aka Soy Sos) has 20 years experience in the music industry, including performance, production and sound design. Herman talked about his clean and dirty aesthetic in music production and sound design and gave a demonsration of the Doepfer analog music system.
Podcasts:
Photos (let us know if you have photos to share):
flickr.com
posted 2006.05.26
dorkbot pittsburgh 04: 29 June 2006
Alexi Morrissey and Damien Miller demonstrated Wake Up Call and discussed the history, development and future of the project.
Podcasts:
Photos (let us know if you have photos to share):
(none as of yet)
posted 2006.05.26
dorkbot pittsburgh 03: 25 May 2006
William von Hagen, the author of several technical books including Hacking the TiVo gave a talk on TiVo hacking and made a pitch for starting a computer museum in Pittsburgh.
Photos (let us know if you have photos to share):
(none as of yet)
posted 2006.04.23
dorkbot pittsburgh 02: 19 April 2006
Our second dorkbot matched the first. Over 50 people showd up at brillobox to hear Dave Mansueto and Tina Blaine talk about their work.
If you couldn't make it, here are podcast-like versions of their talks:
Dave Mansueto gives an energetic introduction to podcasting -- including a live podcasting demo -- and talks about libsyn.com.
video podcast, 192Mb
Tina "Bean" Blaine talks about her interactive art works, life with D'Cuckoo, and shows off some interesting interactive musical work from other artists.
video podcast, 357 Mb
Photos (let us know if you have photos to share):
(none as of yet)
posted 2006.04.20
dorkbot pittsburgh 01: 23 March 2006
Our premier dorkbot was an amazing success. Over 50 people showd up at brillobox for presentations by Nathan Martin and Petter Coppin.
Photos (let us know if you have photos to share):
jet's photoset on flickr
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