The third meeting of dorkbot anglia, took place on Thursday 25th November 2010, and we were the guests of the CSV Media Clubhouse in Ipswich. An audience of over forty 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 John Bowers of the Curiosity Collective and Cad Taylor of Ipswich Community Radio.
Ross Scrivener described how the 365 Project had grown from idea four years ago, to today having 25,000 registered users. Each of whom documenting and sharing their lives with a photograph everyday for a year. He described some of the challenges of building and nurturing a large online community.
David Chatting retraced an adventure with the Curiosity Collective in which they walked from Ipswich to Newcastle, following directions from Google Maps - via Holland! Part arts project recording and documenting the route, part commentary our deference to Google, mostly folly! They were aided by curious methods of wayfinding, navigation and psycho-geographic poetry.
Ryan Jordan (website has strobing) presented a DIY approach to self induced electro-hallucinations, in a vain search for things that don't exist. In an attempted to summon the ancient ones, we gave an incantation to call the Hippocamp.
Craig McCahill showed us Hunted! a simple pervasive game for the iPhone. The game is played by moving around, using GPS to locate the player, as they are chased by virtual assailants. Craig was inspired by the 1965 film The 10th Victim and games such as StreetWars.
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 one of 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. You can also follow our tweets via twitter and find the event on Facebook.