I'm overloaded on other stuff at the moment, so no fancy write-up this time. Once again, it was cool to sit in on. I ran away pretty quickly at the end because I was so hungry.
Posted on March 13, 2007
Tags:
art,
dorkbot,
dorkbotvan,
music,
technology,
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.
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.