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People doing strange things with electricity

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Images
From Karen Marcelo
From Jade Kwan

Videos of Scott's Cinema Snowglobes

Video 1
Video 2
Video 3
Video 4

time:
7:30pm WEDNESDAY
18 December 2013

place:
Location announced to first 100 People to RSVP
San Francisco, CA

Donations ($5-$20) to our hosts would be very much appreciated.

CASH BAR 21+

Snacks from @grilledcheezguy


Location to be announced to first 100 People to RSVP
SF, CA

Jill Miller - Unleash the Girls

From 2011-2012, conceptual artist Jill Miller operated The Milk Truck - a mobile breastfeeding unit located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Inspired by stories of Pittsburgh-area mothers shamed for feeding their babies in public places, she purchased an ice cream truck and outfitted it with a 5 foot fiberglass boob with flashing "nipple" light. Staffed by a crew of volunteer mothers, the truck hosted breastfeeding parties in front of offending establishments who harassed or discriminated against mothers and nursing babies.

Jill Miller is a Bay Area artist whose work addresses motherhood, feminism and performance strategies. She is a faculty member at the San Francisco Art Institute

http://www.jillmiller.net

Eric Paulos - Hybrid Assemblages, Environments, and Happenings

Flying pixels, liquid interfaces, smart rings for makers, postal sensing, negative functionality, bio-sensing, data as 3D design material, satellite interfaces, adventure watches, playground crowdsourced toys, and energy parasites. This talk will present and critique a new body of evolving collaborative work at the intersection of art, computer science, and design research. It will present an argument for hybrid materials, methods, and artifacts as strategic tools for insight and innovation within computing culture. It will explore and demonstrate the value citizen science and maker culture as opportunistic landscapes for intervention, micro-volunteerism, and a new expert amateur. Finally, it will present and question emerging materials and strategies from the perspective of engineering, design, and new media.

Eric Paulos (www.paulos.net) is an Assistant Professor in Electrical Engineering Computer Science Department at UC Berkeley where he is faculty within the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM). Previously, Eric held the Cooper-Siegel Associate Professor Chair in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University where he was faculty within the Human-Computer Interaction Institute. Eric is also the founder and director of the Experimental Interaction Unit. Eric received his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley but his real apprenticeship was earned through over two decades of explosive, excruciatingly loud, and quasi-legal activities with a band of misfits at Survival Research Laboratories.

http://www.paulos.net

Scott Minneman - Cinema Snowglobes: How Hard Can This Possibly Be?

The idea: bring the traditional snowglobe into the 21st century by replacing the cheesy plastic diorama with a tiny virtual world of embedded video. Stay true to the original interactive form so that the snowglobe, when shaken, wakes up and plays as the snow/glitter settles. Prototyping was deceptively easy - after sourcing some key components, an initial proof-of-concept prototype was working just days into the short Workshop Residence stint where Scott and partner JD Beltran had proposed the project. Perfecting the technology, however, and winning myriad behind-the-scenes battles with physics and materials science has been a trying quest involving testing dozens of adhesives, fluids, and snows, debugging maddeningly subtle issues with our circuitry (in collaboration with regular dorkbotSF MC Jonathan Foote), locating odd components, and deciphering reams of data sheets and application notes. Months later, most every detail has been conquered, sources have been pinned down, and necessary procedures perfected...and we've brought our vision to fruition (and we've been somewhat overwhelmed by the positive response). After building hundreds of the labor-intensive first generation globes for early-adopters and initial commissions, were gearing up for the next spin. Working Cinema Snowglobes will be on hand, so you can see if you're delighted by how we've melded these compelling little films with the classic tourist tchotchke.

Scott Minneman is a technological generalist who designs (and occasionally invents), engineers, fabricates, and exhibits novel physical interactive devices for public spaces. He was on the research staff at the think-tank Xerox PARC for 15 years, and then co-founded Onomy Labs, Inc. -a design consultancy and make-tank for hands-on interactive exhibitry. Scott is faculty in Graduate Design at California College of the Arts, where he coordinates the Interaction Design focus, teaches studios on ubiquitous physical computing and public interactives, and shepherds MFA theses. He is also an affiliate researcher at the Institute for the Future, a non-profit futures-forecasting organization that helps corporations, governments, and NGOs keep their heads out of the sand about where the world is headed. He has interactive exhibits all over, including Mexico City, Singapore, Tijuana, Denver, San Francisco, Nashville, Jersey City, Irving (TX), as well as public interactive art commissions in St. Petersburg (RU), Cleveland, LA, Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan), Hollywood, San Jose, San Francisco and Goleta. Blending art with technology, he creates innovative forms of immersive, interactive storytelling.

http://www.slminneman.com/
http://www.jdbeltran.com/portfolio/things/things.html
http://www.cinemasnowglobes.com/

Mark Stephen Meadows - 7 Years On A Sailboat in Central America: Working at Anchor

In 2008 Mark Stephen Meadows closed his software company, got his captain's license, and mailed a backup of his hard drive to his buddy in Colorado. Then he sailed down the coast of Mexico.

For the next seven years he and his wife lived aboard their 38' sloop, Blue Goose. Along the way they fought pirates, caught tuna, dove for pearls, bought Bitcoins, had a kid in Nicaragua, learned how to sail, learned how to speak spanish, and Meadows, meanwhile, rebuilt his software company. The dream became an increasingly complicated reality framed by solar panels and thin 3G connections. Then, one day in March of 2013, the Meadows family pulled sail and headed back north to the cold latitudes of the San Francisco bay.

This is the story of why they turned around, what they found at the limits of the voyage, and how you, with only $6000 and 4 months, can set sail, yourself.

Mark is an American author, inventor, and designer. Since 1993, when he helped develop the third dot-com (well.com), he has founded three companies, worked at some of the world's top research labs (including Xerox-PARC, SRI, The Waag), and has given hundreds of lectures on his work around the globe. He has published several books that examine technology and their social consequences, including the award-winning books "I, Avatar" and "We, Robot." Mark is the founder and CEO of Geppetto Labs (geppettolabs.com), a San Francisco-based company that builds conversational systems for autonomous avatars and robots

http://markmeadows.com/

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