(2005-05-05) Dorkbot

I read about the DorkBot group in Make Mag. Last night I went to the NYC meeting.

• Evan Raskob and Guillermo Acevedo talked about their SurroundScapes idea, and desire to find a new kind of venue for their interactive video installations. Waiting Room plasma screens?

• Design issue: what level of Engagement/energy do you want within a certain environment/Context? In a Waiting Room you don't want to create too much excitement/tension/noise....

• related question: is non-interactive dynamic stuff as engaging as interactive stuff? (Think of incremental Fractal renderings, or those giant Rube Goldberg machines with billard balls moving through ramps etc. that I remember seeing at Franklin Institute, Port Authority Bus Terminal, and Queens New York Hall Of Science...)

• they should talk to the Pop Restaurant in the East Village, where there's often videos playing on the walls.

  • or give Bill Gates something to play in his house full of LCD panels

• Jeremy Bailey presented his Video Paint concept, which was really too much into Quote Mark Mode. Sadly, some people didn't even get it.

• Brian House talked about Yellow Arrow, a Real World social/art project using Cell Phone messaging.

  • they have RSS support, but no tag integration!

  • lots of the postings are semi-poetry, not surprising given the limited message-length forced by the medium.

    • someone in the audience said "then why not just write your message on the arrow label?"

  • I wonder how much something like this is driven by the Economics Of Scarcity? Would you want to find yellow arrows everywhere? What if blog postings had GPS coordinates and Technorati gave you an interface? Brian didn't seem to like that idea, but maybe he just wanted to be Captain Kirk...

  • Graf Edia seems like a similar idea...