mp3 of dorkbotSF #20 from Assaf Arkin (55.4mb)
podcast of dorkbotSF #20 from Assaf Arkin
time:
7:30pm Wednesday
17 August 2005
place:
Onomy Labs
851 Hamilton Ave
Menlo Park, CA
Driving Directions
FREE ADMISSION but donations to our hosts very much appreciated!
open dork
Onomy Labs
Jill Miller - How to Hunt for Bigfoot: Satellites, Solar Power, and Triangles
San Francisco-based artist Jill Miller is participating in Norwich Gallery's EAST 05 international exhibition, July 2 - August 20, 2005, which was curated by Gustav Metzger. Miller's durational performance-installation, "Waiting for Bigfoot," is located in a remote Northern California forest where Bigfoot has been spotted hundreds of times. A live camera feed will be delivered to the internet via satellite uplink, 24 hours a day. The entire campsite is powered by solar energy. She will live at the campsite, situated in the epicenter of Bigfoot sightings, for the duration of EAST 05. She will be in San Francisco for a brief break from Bigfoot hunting to speak at dorkbot.
Jill Miller received her MFA from UCLA in 2004. She is currently
Visiting Faculty in New Genres at the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work
has been exhibited and collected internationally. She is the recipient of
numerous grants, most recently an Arts Council England Award. In 2006, a
video installation based on her experiences waiting for Bigfoot will appear
in the touring exhibition "Cryptozoology: Out of Time Place Scale," curated
by Mark Bessire.
|
http://waitingforbigfoot.com
http://www.jillmiller.net |
 Discuss Jill Miller - How to Hunt for Bigfoot |
Scott Minneman and Dale MacDonald (Onomy Labs) - Make-Tanks: a New Paradigm for Innovation
The past century saw the emergence of corporate and military "think-tank" laboratories as a dominant site for technological innovation. The "Make-Tank" is a more grounded alternative to this model, firmly rooted in the belief that tinkering and hands-on experimentation is pivotal in discovering the potentials of emerging technologies and scientific discoveries. Make-Tanks existed before this period (in another Menlo Park, for instance), lurked in garages during, and are again on the rise, even as corporate research funding is on the wane.
Onomy Labs, this month's dorkbotSF host, is one such Make-Tank. Working with text, graphics, images, computing, sensors, actuators, and mechanicals, the Onomy crew makes novel interactive storytelling devices for use in hands-on learning settings, trade shows, showrooms, and back into corporate laboratories. They will talk a little bit about the make-tank paradigm shift, what technologies and tools are fueling that re-emergence, tell war stories about projects and the technological developments they embody, and do tours and demos of the various devices they have at the lab, including the Tilty and Twisty Tables, an Interactive Wall, hopefully a supercharged 1959 Philco Predicta.
Scott Minneman is fascinated by the practice of interdisciplinary design and the physicality of innovation. This manifests itself in his own background of architectural and engineering design (BA, BS, and MS from MIT; PhD from Stanford), embedded systems, interactive video, installation art, and rock climbing. At Xerox PARC from 1987 until 2001, Scott explored the nature of collaborative design and the potential for video/audio/computing systems to support design processes, focusing on design communications and shared drawing. Scott has also worked on interactive robotics for the physically challenged, and communication aids for non-vocal and deaf individuals. As a scientist-collaborator in the PARC Artist-In-Residence (PAIR) program, Scott did installations at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, The Friends of Photography, a Sony JumboTron on the facade of a nightclub on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, SIGGRAPH, and a single-wide mobile home in Goleta, CA. He has coached a FIRST robotics team in Palo Alto for 8 years, and helped Singapore launch their FIRST robotics contest. He co-founded Onomy Labs in 2002, a company of folks who imagine and construct novel interactive devices for collaborative sensemaking settings (like museums), and who shepherd technologies out of laboratories into the hands of everyday people. He is Onomy's CTO, and does the mechanical engineering and art direction on most projects.
Dale MacDonald is breathless from an adult life navigating a complex ecology
of art/science/design/engineering, semiconductor process development,
pioneering work in large area electronics, electronic music and performance
art, lighting design for dance and opera, technology infused explorations of
light, space and image, connecting unusual devices (car alarm key fobs,
accelerometers, file cabinets, crystal
balls) to multimedia to enable content-specific-form storytelling machines.
He is Onomy's CFO, and does the core of the programming and systems design
on most projects.
| http://www.onomy.com/ |
Discuss Scott Minneman & Dale MacDonald - Make-Tanks: A New Paradigm for Innovation |
open dork
Jonathan Foote - VideoBots - http://www.fxpal.com/?p=foote
Bruce Damer - Cyberwearz - http://damer.com/
Scott Minneman - Liberty Science Center mobile - http://www.onomy.com
Many thanks to Onomy Labs for hosting this month's dorkbot and Assaf Arkin for podcasting!