dorkbot-sea
people doing strange things with electricity

Meeting 12

Robobot!
Wednesday, October 6th, 2004 at 7.30 pm
Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle, WA

Speakers:


Pablos and Eric Johanson, “Wi-Fi Hackerbot (Putting the ‘bot’ Back in ‘dorkbot’)”: Notorious internet men of mystery Pablos and Eric Johanson work on crypto, security and privacy-related projects with The Shmoo Group (http://shmoocon.org), and have built the first hacker robot (http://hackerbot.com). They will bring the the hackerbot and talk about how hacking and robotics go together. Please be sure to leave all laptop computers, cellphones and other portable electronic devices at home (just kidding!). Regulars at dorkbot-sea and occasionals at dorkbot-sf, they spend most of their time implementing science fiction.



James Coupe, “Exploring the Boundaries of Robotic Art”: James Coupe arrived at the UW’s Department of Digital Arts and Experimental Media a fortnight ago (http://www.washington.edu/dxarts/coupe) to begin a new post as artist and research associate. Previously Senior Lecturer in Digital Art at Thames Valley University (London, England), his work uses cybernetics, computer networks and artificial intelligence to explore and expose the systems behind the robot, considering the point at which an entity stops being a corporeal robot in the industrial sense of the word, but artistically, creatively, conceptually and socially still functions as a robot – not as a physical object, but as an environment or an autonomous, distributed, viral creation. http://www.ctrl.me.uk tells you more.



Michael J. Laine, “Space Elevators Need Robots Too”: Michael Laine, President of LiftPort Group (http://www.liftport.com), will be presenting imagery and hardware developed by his Bremerton-based firm. LiftPort is dedicated to constructing a Space Elevator, a revolutionary space access device. An essential piece of the infrastructure will be autonomous climbing robots, called "Lifters." In addition to showing a working Lifter prototype, LiftPort-commissioned Space Elevator-themed art will be on display.


Larry Barello,
"That Balancing Robot”: Seattle Robotics Society (http://www.seattlerobotics.org) contributor Larry Barello has devoted much of the last six years to hobby robotics and programming the Atmel AVR® series of micro controllers, returning to his roots as a designer of embedded processors for industrial, medical and communications industries. He has developed a small real time operating system called AvrX (short for AVR Executive) which he uses as the foundation for all his non-trivial AVR projects, one of which, his balancing robot, he’ll be demonstrating and discussing on the 6th. http://www.barello.net/ gives more info.



Open Dork:

Robot Show And Tell: Have robot? Here microphone! Bring your robotics projects or your robotics-relevant technologies, take the floor and tell us all about them. Hate public speaking? Find me before the meeting and we’ll find you table space so you can set up and talk with fellow dorks while the DJ spins. Best of all: let me know if you’re interested in an open dork spot by email, dorkbotsea [@] dorkbot [.] org and I’ll add you to the roster, the website and all that jazz.


Performance:

Josh Herrala: Josh Herrala is the artist and DJ behind Deluxe Curl Records (www.deluxecurl.com), a minimal techno/micro-house label based in Seattle. Coming up in the Detroit area, he began DJing in the early 1990s during the 'Third Wave' of the Techno revolution. By day he is a mild mannered network engineer who works for a local training company. Building OOPic based robots is his primary hobby.