Dorkbot Hosted at Randle St

Oh, our very first event in our beautiful new workspace! And what could be more relevant than dorkbot, a monthly get-together of people interested in electricity in all its incarnations: microcontrollers, midi signals, robots and all forms of digital art!

Why directly relevant at this point in time? Well, randle street is where we came when we left our residency at the Casula Powerhouse, a three-week period devoted to the development of an open source digital technologies toolkit intended to provide (to everyone!) more accessibility to digital storytelling in all its guises.

And at dorkbot we were granted the opportunity to present some of the fruits of our research to a whole bunch of already digitally-inclined folk. This was very different to demonstrating the uses of our toolkit at the Kinect showing (which occured at the end of our Casula three-weeker) since the showing was really aimed at our funders and partners who may not be aware of the more techy sides of our work. So it was great to have the opportunity to do both.

I myself showed the ArraySequencer/Boss Machine in action (I know, we really need to put up some screen shots. they’re coming…), Peter “Midi” Cossey demo’d his soft-toy video browser, and Shakthi showed a video explaining PuppetBot Wants YOU!, an interactive installation (and performance) involving a robot in the real world, YOU! (yes, YOU!) controlling the robot and also controlling a character in the videogame America’s Army and force-feedback technology to name a few aspects…–

There were more presentations which you can read about on the dorkbot website but let it be said it was a fantastic first event to have here. People were responsive and engaged so once again, the seeds of collaboration have been sown…