Images
From Karen Marcelo
From Alex Reben (Stochastic Labs co-founder)
Panoramic of the Stochastic turret from Torrey Nommesen
7:30pm
15 October 2014
place:
Stochastic Labs
1536 Oxford St
Berkeley, CA
Map
Donations ($5-$20) to our hosts would be very much appreciated.
BAR 21+
Noms from @GrilledCheezGuy
Stochastic Labs
1536 Oxford
Berkeley, CA
Lynn Hershman and team: Mark Hellar and Josiah Zayner - Infinity Engine
The Infinity Engine has three components, the installation: The replica lab will feature various tests and information designed to expose the vast shift of possibilities of human evolution through 3D bio printing and DNA programming. Various areas will showcase 3D bio printers, microscopes, lab test information, interviews with genetics experts, scheduled re-enactments of tests as well as other live interactions and interventions. Visitors to the lab will have the opportunity to have their DNA tested and the composite information later revealed online will expose an archetype of all the participants.The film: This new film is the third in a trilogy of films begun in 1995. Written and directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson, they all feature Tilda Swinton. The trilogy includes the award- winning films Conceiving Ada and Teknolust. These films all explore the implications -ethical as well as social -of the impact on the human species in an era of genetic manipulation.
The film and installation highlight the fact that now that DNA can be programmed, it presents urgent and controversial implications for all of humanity. The film reveals how the new fields of regenerative medicine, synthetic biology and scientific discoveries related to genetic mutation are impacting our life,globally and culturally.
http://www.theinfinityengine.com/lynn.html
JD Beltran and Scott Minneman - The Cinema Snowglobe
A 21st Century snowglobe marries the traditional snowglobe form with cutting edge technology, by featuring moving imagery and video that can be customized and personalized. When shaken, Cinema Snowglobes create an immersive, virtual, magical experience into a tiny world, like your own crystal ball vastly better than a static figurine/landscape raining white plastic snow. Cinema Snowglobes can take you through a virtual journey across the Golden Gate Bridge, a walk through a rose garden, or a night sky of fireworks on the Fourth of July. Scott and JD began Cinema Snowglobes 2 years ago, in June 2012, and earlier handmade. Versions debuted at the San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art. At Stochastic Labs, they are pushing the project a leap forward, with another spin of engineering and production tuning that will enable us to create a better experience with a larger display, integrate the invention's functions, reduce the production cost, and enable greater mass production for wider distribution.They will also be showing early work on a related project that involves using the combination of ultrasonic misters, pico projectors, and aquarium pumps.
JD Beltran is a conceptual artist, filmmaker, writer, and curator. Her work has been screened and exhibited internationally. She has been commissioned for public art projects worldwide. Beltran is the President of the San Francisco Arts Commission and author/curator for the city¹s downtown Art Master Plan. She is also faculty in the Film, New Genres, Art & Technology, Printmaking, and Urban Studies Programs of the San Francisco Art Institute, where she also directs the school's City Studio arts education program for under-served youth. In addition, she is faculty in Graduate Design at the California College of the Arts.
Scott Minneman is an innovative technologist who invents, designs, engineers, fabricates, and exhibits novel physical interactive devices for public spaces. After earning architecture and engineering degrees from MIT (MS and BS) and Stanford (PhD), he was on the research staff at the think-tank Xerox PARC for 15 years, and then co-founded Onomy Labs, Inc. a make-tank for interactives. Scott is faculty in Graduate Design at California College of the Arts, where he directs the Graduate Interaction Design program and teaches studio courses on ubiquitous physical computing, hands-on interactives, and robotics, as well as shepherding MFA theses. He also is an affiliate researcher in the Tech Horizons program at the Institute for the Future. He has been commissioned to create interactive projects all over the world. The Cinema Snowglobe, his most recent invention (with partner JD Beltran),was recently awarded the international New Technology Art Award, and will be exhibited in Ghent, Belgium this fall.
Graham Plumb and Karen Marcelo - Open Cube
The Open Cube is a volumetric display combining water, projected light and a specially formulated oil to produce apparently three-dimensional objects. This experimental display technology transforms 2D images into extruded objects using light from a video projector, capturing micron-sized particles of oil suspended in the water. Lines become vertical planes, as squares and circles become glowing cubes and cylinders.By connecting the Leap Motion controller to the display, Karen and Graham have made the first steps towards a gestural drawing tool, where users can draw and animate their own creations, using the most transparent interface of all the human body.
Graham Plumb crafts digitally mediated experiences, pairing interactive technologies with the narratives of peoples' lives shaping the qualities of 'the voice' experienced in the interactive moment. He works to engage and energize peoples' imaginations and emotions using technology to tell stories that inform and inspire. In fifteen years creating interactive experiences for museums, entertainment venues, retail and healthcare environments, he has helped to produce more than 250 interactive exhibits, installed in over 100 venues. As Creative Director of Snibbe Interactive, his largest installation was a 60'x10' interactive Wall for the Nemour's Children's Hospital - in which children develop their own plant species via a playful game of genetic manipulation. Graham is also a Senior Lecturer at the California College of Arts in San Francisco where he teaches Interaction Design.
Karen Marcelo is a software engineer/creative coder writing/designing systems for artists such as Stelarc's Prosthetic Head an animated, automated 3D model of Stelarc's head that people can converse with, the first civilian written internet telerobotics system for lethal machines for Survival Research Labs, coding a baseball bat wielding robot-decapitatiing robot arm, deskstop hand stabbing robot shown at Maker Faire, and machine operator at several SRL shows, sound reactive generative visuals, etc. Day jobs vary from ubiquitous computing and distributed systems at Xerox PARC, sensor data analysis at Intel Research, games, 3D authoring tools and interactive immersive 3D worlds, procedural modelling at Intervista, Frog Design, and various other companies. She also started dorkbotSF in 2002 and curates meetings in between dipping in to her other life in the Philippines.
Reactive Cube from Graham Plumb on Vimeo.
Greg Leppert - Boomerang
Boomerang is a small camera drone for everyday people.Greg Leppert is running the marathon. He's pumping his arms, thinking about sustainable media properties on the Internet, breathing to the rhythm of robotic user interfaces. Greg is coding and designing and running.
Svpply.com is taking a water break, the social retail site he cofounded and coded now relaxing under the eBay umbrella. Reading.am is keeping pace, pushing ephemeral link sharing and rejecting curation designed and built by Greg to quietly and diligently go the distance to where there is no news cycle, only a line of content reaching toward infinity.
At the horizon, coming into focus through beads of sweat, is a new way of interacting with aerial robots, one that is as familiar and useful to the common person as running. Greg is gaining ground. His determination is building, his legs are burning, his arms are pumping. Greg is thinking and breathing and pumping.
Josiah Zayner - I Can See Your Genome - Part of The Infinity Engine
Being able to decipher someone's genes from a picture is a future we will soon live in or maybe we live in it now? Using computer vision, physical traits are identified and probabilistically associated with the genes underlying these traits, building a unique genome.Josiah Zayner holds a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics from the University of Chicago. He is current a Research Fellow in Bioengineering at NASA Ames Research Center.
http://doityourselfscience.blogspot.com
Lucia Jacobs and team - Cirque d'Squirrel
The Art of Animal Behavior: Lucia and team are attempting to create a project that is both science, art and entertainment - both for humans and squirrels. They are designing kinetic visual designs that should both be fascinating to watch as well as being a SAT (Squirrel Aptitude Test) for a wild squirrel. Just as other teams combine different functions in their projects, their goal is to make things that both 'do science' (animal behavior and biomechanics) and 'make art' as kinetic sculptures. It's early days for Lucia and team but stop by to hear about their diverse research projects and to see the first prototype for the squirrel sculpture/data collection rig.
Lucia Jacobs, Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley thinks about cognitive evolution and studies spatial navigation in animals (including humans) and how squirrels think and orient in space.
Judy Jinn (Graduate Student, UC Berkeley, Psychology) studies how geckos run on water and how squirrels learn routes through trees; her goal is to integrate animal cognition and biomechanics research to study motor learning and model learning algorithms in wild fox squirrels. She and Nate Hunt will use the Stochastics squirrel platform to study squirrel locomotion while educating the public about squirrels.
Mikel Delgado (Graduate Student, UC Berkeley, Psychology) studies how squirrels make decisions - where to hide their nuts and who to steal from; Mikel also blogs about science and animal behavior, is a cat behavior consultant at Feline Minds, and disc jockeys for East Bay station KALX.
Tom Libby (Graduate Student, UC Berkeley, Mechanical Engineering and Polypedal Lab)
Nate Hunt (Graduate Student, UC Berkeley, Integrative Biology, Polypedal Lab).
Dr. Jennifer Arter (2012 PhD, UC Berkeley, Psychology) studies human spatial orientation and social bonds from an evolutionary perspective and also performs partner acrobatics and aerial silks as a circus artists and finally UC Berkeley undergraduate (Class of 2014).
Aaron Texeira is a research assistant on several of the above projects and is interested in the influence of individual personality and emotions on mammalian cooperative social structures.
http://psychology.berkeley.edu/people/lucia-f-jacobs
http://polypedal.berkeley.edu
If you would like to give a presentation in the future or host a dorkbotSF meeting, please contact Karen Marcelo at dorkbotsf [at] dorkbot [dot] org