dorkbot anglia one

The inaugural meeting of dorkbot anglia, took place on 1st July 2010 in the Town Hall Galleries, Ipswich - as part of the town's ip-art festival. An audience of over eighty people enjoyed an evening of talks and conversations with "people doing strange things with electricity" in the East Anglian area. The evening was introduced by David Chatting, cofounder of the Curiosity Collective.

Pixelh8 / Matthew C. Applegate created the Super Chip Tune Samba Band allowing a group of children to perform together using the Nintendo DS. He described how children were more comfortable experimenting with music on the DS than with conventional instruments.

Tim Hunkin entertained us enormously with the story of his newest machine for Southwold Pier: My Nuke - a personal nuclear reactor! We even had a sample of the edible nuclear waste!

John Bowers exercised our ears with his 'raw electro-magnetism' and 'the uncanny noise of the world'. The Victorian Synthesiser is an ongoing project of to build a musical instrument boasting the kinds of parts and capabilities traditional synthesizers have (oscillators, filters, amplitude envelopes, modulation) but using techniques known to the Victorians. Download John's slides.
Ohm My God! By John M. Bowers

Our first opendork was from Peter Knight who introduced eTea - an automatic tea timer for "saving the planet with a nice cup of tea"! Code and project files at eTea.googlecode.com.

John Benton wanted to, "harness the power of the wailing and catterwalling masses for the good of mankind" with his busk-o-matic 3000 for karaoke and gave us an opendork all about it - he didn't sing unfortunately!
How is my singing? on 365 Project

Martin Russ opendorked about an environment he'd built for performing his Quartz Composer visualisions. Using some software from Kineme, Martin uses a M-Audio XSession-Pro DJ controller so he can mix between different visualisations and alter parameters in real-time.

 

dorkbot encourages grassroots meetings of artists, engineers, designers, scientists, inventors and anyone else working under the very broad umbrella of electronic art. Started by Douglas Repetto at Columbia University in 2000, dorkbot is now global in almost 100 cities; dorkbot anglia is the newest.

Our intention is for dorkbot anglia to run every two or three months in a different town in the region. If you would like to participate or could offer a venue, please get in touch -

Please join the mailing-lists: the announce list for our monthly announcements and a blabber list for open discussion. Follow our tweets via twitter and find the event on facebook.