Just another night at DorkBot. I accepted an invitation from a friend of mine to go to this session of DorkBot and it was super cool. I have to say, if you are a bit of a geek, or a dork and miss those science fair days… dorkbot is for you. I was a little turned off by the presentation by a “tagged” human about implanting and RFID chip in his hand. Right now the benefit does not seem that great: keyless entry to your house, substitution for passowrd and biometrics on your computer…. seems to me that carrying an rfid in a ring, necklace or keyfob or using biometrics would be a better and definitely less invasive option.
The sonic fabric presentation was way cool. This woman is making textiles that are 50% cotton and 50% 1/8″ audio tape. The audio tape is being prerecorded with a sound collage of her creation. The fabric is then used to make stuff, and can be “played” with the dissassebled play head from a walkman. A few people I talked to in the crowd thought it might be better to weave the fabric and then record on it with a big half inch or even 1 inch record head (with the same audio on each track). You could record a scale and then using one or multiple play heads a wearer could actually play music on a garment (imagine a glove of play heads!)
The presenter, Luke Dubois, on time laps phonography was pretty cool. his big thing was condensing sound like time laps photography (not speeding it up so much as condencing it on a spectral level). I think that his might be the hardest to explain, but you can read all about it on his website. He did this thing where he condenced the entire history of the billboard hot 100 number 1 songs into a 37 minute composition. The songs played (were compressed and “Averaged”) 1 second for each week they stayed at the top. The coolest thing about this to me (not having a good ear for tone or pitch) was the way it demonstrated the changes in the record industry. I havenle listened to the whole thing, but Luke pointed out that when Nielsen bought Billboard and changed the way songs were ranked the number of hot 100 #1 hits per year dropped from as many as 40 or 50 to as few as 5 to 10, with some hits staying at the top for as many as 26 weeks!
Find a dorkbot near you and go. it will be fun.
One other thing, aparently this particular event had a huge turnout including no less that 4 or 5 members of the press, no one knew exactly why. It was mentioned in/on Make
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