Dorkbot Vancouver

A little behind on this one due to taking a much needed break after completing my SIGGRAPH paper. Last Wednesday I attended the first meeting of the Vancouver chapter of Dorkbot. For those unfamiliar, Dorkbot is a loose collective of groups worldwide that are exploring the intersection of art, music, and technology. The site tagline sums it up pretty well with "People doing strange things with electricity". The format has 3 presentations of 20 mins in length with 10 mins afterwards for questions, with time at the end for mingling and chatting.

It was quite an interesting gathering. I regret not being able to go for beers with people afterwards to get a better idea of all the backgrounds of the people that attended, but there's always next meeting.

Daniel van Tijn

Daniel is and engineer at co-op radio, teaches audio electronics and electronic music at the Arts Institute of Vancouver, and builds robots for a company called Storefront.com. His interests include minimal techno/ambient music, and building/designing small synths/fx. His presentation covered some different home built devices, and talked about open source electronic music projects and valuable resources.

He discussed some of the basic concepts he went over in his class. The basic project was to build a distortion pedal from scratch. He talked about the logistics of starting with a breadbord design and testing the parts needed, and the process required to build the physical enclosure and produce a final working form.

• http://ucapps.de
• http://musicfromouterspace.com
• http://diyguitarist.com/StompboxStuff.htm
• http://geofex.com
• http://generalguitargadgets.com
• http://kpsec.freeuk.com
• http://ladyada.net/make/x0xb0x
• http://sparkfun.com/commerce/categories.php
• http://library.thinkquest.org/16497/intro/index.html
• http://ca.digikey.com
• http://www.euronet.nl/~rja/Emusic/Synth-diy/

Robin Oppenheimer

Her presentation covered Dorkbot's art and technology roots: A glimpse of the 1966 historic "9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering" Event. The video provided a brief overview, with historic film clips, of the 1966 "9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering" Event in New York City that gives a glimpse of the artists, engineers and their collaborative performances and processes. It was quite interesting and included rare footage of Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Alex Hay, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Whitman, Lucinda Child, and other artists as well as Bell Lab's Billy Kluver who founded Experiments in Art and Technology E.A.T.

Jeremy Thorp

The last presentation was titled Evolutionary Computing Techniques in Art and Music and covered some of the aspects of how artists in various disciplines around the world have recently been exploring the use of evolutionary techniques in artistic media. He gave a short introduction to EC and genetic algorithms, and showed some of his recent work exploring the applications of these techniques.

He presented some of the basics characteristics of genetic algorithms: They are population based and there are lots of solutions at each iteration. There is a competitive environment where a metric is established to know what solutions are better than the others. Often there a genome basis, where the problem is broken down into smaller parts that can evolve separately. Each new generation of solutions is the result of hybridization where the children are a mix and match of the parent generation. And at each stage, there is some optimization and mutations which need to be balanced. With too much mutation, no good solution makes it to the next generation, while with too little mutation, the solution space isn't adequately explored.

He concluded with some examples of evolutionary computing in art and music, such as the work of Chrystyn Magnus, Ollie Bown/Sebastian Lexer, and Karl Sims.

Posted on January 25, 2007
Tags: art, dorkbot, dorkbotvan, music, technology, vancouver

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NewForms Festival

It's September, and the NewForms Festival is upon us again. For those that aren't familiar with the festival and what it's about, here's the lowdown:

New Forms Media Society is a non-profit society and media arts organization founded in 2000 that nurtures and connects local and international arts, science and grassroots communities through the annual New Forms Festival. By promoting Canadian Artists in collaboration with the international arts and technology world, the NFF facilitates multimodal art works and engages in discussion on their role in our cultural environment.

Each year the festival takes on a central theme. Past themes have included Technography and Ecologies.

This year NFF06 looks at the Transformations of culture, art and movement in media arts.

In less lofty terms, it means that the week of September 19-23 there will be an excellent selection of music, art, and gatherings worth attending. In addition to what I'm covering here, there's also a lot af visual art and meetings going on.

Music

Clearly my favorite portion of the festival, there are several performances centered around different genres of electronic music with international names and some of my favorite locals.

• Subtle Formations - Focusing on ambient music and the interplay of visuals and music
• Morphing - Focusing on breaks-oriented music, including hip hop, rock, two-step, and jazz-infused techno
• Timestretch - Focusing on the evolution of techno within electronic music

Additionally, this last weekend contained a prelude to all the activities in the form of Newforms in Dub, featuring performances from a rather wide variety of different forms of electronic music all sharing a dub influnce and bass-heavy sound. Deadbeat headlined with his usual selection of dubby minimal techno, while Maximus + Clearcall had what I could only describe and minimal drum and bass, Kuma + Tusk with dubstep, and Micheal Red and Calamalka played a very enjoyable mix as well. While it sounds like I'm gushing, this was definitely one of the most enjoyable events I've been to this year. I have some photos up Flickr, for those that are interested in that sort of thing.

ArtCamp

New this year, there is a BarCamp-style get-together for artists on Thursday the 21st, conveniently named ArtCamp. Much in the style of BarCamp, it's calling itself an un-conference and is a loosely organized meeting of people interested in technology, art, the convergence between, or just want to hang out with other people regarding the festival at large. Similar to BarCamp, every one in attendance must participate in some manner.

It looks pretty interesting and worth checking out. I'll probably poke my head in for a while. Stop by the wiki to add yourself to the list and get more information.

Posted on September 11, 2006
Tags: music, newforms, vancouver

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