| Technicolour Timekeeping
And Ships That Pass In The Night
Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005 at 7.30 pm
Center on
Contemporary Art, Seattle, WA
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John Miles, Equinox:
Subverting the Dominant Paradigm in Consumer Electronic
Design: When John Miles needed a new alarm clock,
he did what any normal person would do: he bought
a well-reviewed Sony model from Amazon.com. Its design
gave voice to a longtime suspicion: people who work
for consumer electronic manufacturers don't actually
use their own products, do they? A lesser dork would
have mastered the Sony's twenty un-illuminated buttons
and gone on with life... but not John. His Tarantino-grade
grudge match with Sony consumed four years of basement
R&D time and several thousand dollars. But in
art, unlike engineering, the end always
justifies the means. |
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| John's new clock radio
boasts a multiuser client-server architecture worthy
of a Kleiner-Perkins IPO. It can pick up everything
from submarine communications to baby monitors, track
Seattle's police and fire departments better than
a 911 supervisor can, and wake John up to the KEXP
Morning Show with the world's first tactile Nixie-tube
alarm clock. On November 2, John will demonstrate
his creation to a skeptical dorkbot audience and try
as hard as he can to rationalize it all. But is it
art? Maybe; maybe not. What would Akio
Morita have said? More about John here
and below.
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Chuck Harrison, A
Smattering of Colo(u)r Science: How do our eyes
respond to color in the environment around us? Electronics/optics
designer and tech-art collaborator Chuck Harrison
will talk about how the spectral composition of light
gives rise to our experience of hue, saturation, and
brightness. |
Secrets of the arcane CIE horseshoe
of color revealed! Bring your favorite luminous
or colored object to face the spectrophotometer!
More about Chuck below. |
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Steve Safarik, Room
Sonar: Steve Safarik is currently studying Control
Systems, which if you don't know is one of the coolest
subject areas (really), and at some point will most
likely become a professional control freak.
Prior dorkbot presenter of the laser-projected computer
game Spacewars,
he's just built a fun little project he calls Room
Sonar - think air-traffic-controller radar, but instead
using a little sonar transducer that measures distance
up to about 30 feet and gives you a display of the
room you're in.
More about Steve at stevesafarik.net
and below. |
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| Mars
Saxman is a veteran of the 2003 People Doing
Strange Things With Electricity exhibition. The RAVE-O-MATIC
is one of his latest projects: a battery-powered sound-and-light
show on wheels: a portable nightclub, a mobile disco.
Designed for the harsh conditions and flat terrain
at the Nevada desert site of the Burning Man festival,
it is battery powered and (just!) light enough to
tow behind a bicycle. It exists to spread a dance
club experience everywhere, and creates a temporary
zone of high-tech multisensory fun, rendered surreal
by the contrast with its wilderness environment.
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and… |
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YOU!!! Yes, if you have a project – any project,
at any stage of completeness, an idea – any
idea, at any stage of bakedness, an artwork –
any kind of artwork at any stage of doneness, please
do bring it along to the dorkbot meeting and claim
your 10 minutes worth of fame after the presenters
and before the Rave-O-Matic starts an impromptu dance
party! |
| John Miles,
37, is an independent software developer and all-around
hardware geek. He is the eponymous creator of the
Miles Sound System by RAD Game Tools, which has delivered
sound-effects and music support for thousands of PC
and console game titles since its first release in
1991. Prior to the development of MSS, John worked
at Dell Computer Corporation in Austin as a systems
software engineer. Going back even farther, he was
the lead programmer on Ultima V at Origin Systems,
Inc., and contributed to the graphics technology behind
Ultima VI and Wing Commander. Although John has achieved
a rating of almost 200 on eBay, his mother still wonders
if he would have been better off staying in school.
Chuck Harrison is an electronics/optics
design engineer whose work has ranged over scientific
instruments, motion picture effects gear, visual displays,
and tech-art collaborations. His current activities
include standards development for color management
in Digital Cinema production and display. |
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