Dorkbot at Offlimits

Brian Mackern: Living Stereo, CD-Rom-performance

With his current CD-Rom project Living Stereo, Mackern investigates the potential of new ways of structuring and combining images and sound. He developed interactive interfaces that allow him to create audio-visual compositions in countless variations. Appropriated film footage (from directors such as Andrei Tarkovsky, William Marshall and Alfred Hitchcock) and abstract interfaces are brought together in a playful reflection on the various levels of remix culture.

Douglas Repetto: Chiplotle -- now that's a spicy plotter library!

Pen plotters were some of the first computer-controlled physical output devices. They were used from the 1960s through the early 1990s for rendering architecture and engineering drawings, cheezy business plots, and occasionally "plotter art." High quality, working pen plotters are currently available online for < $100. It's time for a pen plotter renaissance! Chiplotle is an HPGL (Hewlett-Packard Graphics Language) Python API that provides control of grungy old pen plotters with shiny new laptops. The Chiplotle library implements and extends the HPGL plotter control language. It supports all the standard HPGL commands as well as our own more complex "compound HPGL" commands, implemented as Python classes. Chiplotle also provides direct control of your HPGL-aware hardware via a standard usb<->serial port interface. We'll demonstrate how to use Chiplotle, and show some of the art and music being made with pen plotters today.

Alejandro Duque: Metadorkbot

As I will have the opportunity to be with Douglas Irving Repetto and Andrés Burbano at Dorkbot Madrid, I would like to share a bit of one of the possible lines that might tell the “story” (as opposed to the history) of Dorkbot Medellín, also related to my colleagues at Platoniq, who invited me to take part in an event called Media Space Invaders that served to strengthen the weak threads of the fragile web we had laid out a decade ago.

Dorkbot Madrid will then turn out to be a metadorkbot that will serve, at least for me, as a celebration. That is why I will try to connect via streaming with some other remote Dorkbots, ideally with Dorkbotmde, currently hidden behind the un/loquer hackerspace.

Given that each Dorkbot aims to present a gesture of appropriation, and since my interests for the past 10 years are strongly related to long-distance communication (from the tele-visual to the paranormal), I would like to present a civil disobedience project that could provide us with satellite technology free of charge.

We will start from 1976 with the Declaration of Bogota and I will offer a demo of recordings made with a radio scanner, then some Satellite Spotting images, perhaps even covering a project currently in development called Streambox. I want to present some recordings made with that radio and I would like to link this act of listening with that of looking up to identify satellites, all of it based on the subject of the 1976 Declaration of Bogota. Like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it can be considered an unsent love letter, a manifesto blown away in the wind, or a media lie of the second. The Declaration of Bogota is about the atmospheric spectrum or the aerospace sovereignty corresponding to the place where geostationary satellites are placed.

We have the option of building our own communication systems via Open Hardware, as proposed by the O.S.S.I. (Open Source Satellite Initiative). Before that, however, something simpler must be done, as simple as looking up to physically locate those electromagnetic spectrum waves that believe we are receiver antennae, continuously and permanently going through our bodies and minds, in addition to mapping us, tracing us and predicting us like marketing whims."