time:
7:30pm Wednesday
21 June 2006
place:
rxGallery
132 Eddy
San Francisco, CA
FREE ADMISSION but donations most welcome to help out our generous hosts!
Feel free to bring food to share
CASH BAR | 21 + only
rxGallery
Jeremy Fitzhardinge - Constellation
Constellation gives participants the ability to create, move and destroy stars, and be a part of a network of constellations. It operates interactively in real time, from a live video feed.Constellation is one application of the Bokchoi interactive video manipulation system. Visual effects can be easily constructed by writing programs in the Lua scripting language.
Jeremy Fitzhardinge is a multi-disciplinary hacker, creating software, images
and art installations. He lives in San Francisco's Bay Area with his wife and
two daughters they are raising to be geeks.
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http://www.goop.org/constellation/
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 Discuss Jeremy Fitzhardinge - Constellation |
Shannon Wright - Animating Principle
Shannon will show videos of her mechanical sculptures and explain their relationship to the notion of "agency". She imagines some of her projects as having been put forth by an unidentified administrative authority intent on replacing imperfect representatives of the natural world with hyper-efficient surrogates. Other devices serve to de-animate people in order to clumsily re-animate them, or at least impose unwanted order on their movements. In her most recent work she attempts to question what constitutes a living thing, what properties must be present for it to qualify as that thing: a given substance, in temporary conjunction with an elusive animating principle? Shannon's attempts at simulating, reprogramming and repairing living things are intentionally crude, and the technology in her pieces is mostly obsolete.
Shannon Wright is an artist who works predominantly in sculpture. Her work utilizes "old-school" technology like levers, pulleys and articulated connection systems, and only occasionally electricity. Shannon is an Assistant Professor of Spatial Art and the Coordinator of Three Dimensional Foundations at San Jose State University. She lives and works in Oakland.
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http://shannonwright.org
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Discuss Shannon Wright - Animating Principle |
Michael Laine - Liftport: Opening Space to Everyone - A Space Elevator Presentation
Michael will discuss Space Elevator technology. A revolutionary way to send cargo into space, the LiftPort Space Elevator will consist of a carbon nanotube composite ribbon eventually stretching some 62,000 miles from earth to space. The LiftPort Space Elevator will be anchored to an offshore sea platform near the equator in the Pacific Ocean, and to a small man-made counterweight in space. Mechanical lifters are expected to move up and down the ribbon, carrying such items as people, satellites and solar power systems into space.LiftPort successfully launched an observation and communication platform a full mile in the air and maintained it in a stationary position for more than six hours while robotic lifters climbed up and down a ribbon attached to the platform (HALE - secured in place by an arrangement of high altitude balloons which were also used to launch it). The robotic lifters measured five feet, six inches and climbed to a height of more than 1500 feet, surpassing its last test record by more than 500 feet. On April 12 2018 the descendents of these functional robots will build the first space elevator. They will lift payloads into orbit and beyond.
Michael Laine founded Liftport with a simple vision: to build the first commercial elevator to space. Since its inception, Liftport has been the leading pioneer in private industry in the movement to develop a space elevator. As a direct result of Laine's efforts, the space elevator is now part of the curriculum at many leading academic institutions in the country including the US Air Force Academy with Liftport providing assistance on the research.
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http://www.liftport.com/
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Discuss Michael Laine - Liftport: Opening Space to Everyone Space Elevator Presentation |
open dork
Kal Spelletich and Anu Vikram - AI and the weirdness of making computers more human as they relate to the idea of Frankenstein made monster by the monstrosity of human society
http://seemen.org
Leila Hasan - Gigapan (CMU and NASA's electromechanical device enabling gigapixel panoramic imaging)
http://lbot.org and http://gigapan.org
Mail Karen Marcelo if you want to dork openly (5-10 min)
Many thanks to rxGallery for hosting this month's dorkbot.