Dorkbot meeting

Last night, Bethany and Silas went to dinner before the Dorkbot PGH meeting with Maya, Ryder, and me. It's pretty obnoxious, but I love the Patagonia full body fleece Silas is wearing.

The Dorkbot meetings are sort of a salon where presenters come and speak about their work or projects that loosely relate to electronics and generally art, but not always. They are held all over the world. It's a nice federation of geeks. In Pittsburgh, it's held at the Brillobox, which is a bar/restaurant that serves vegetarian food and great beers (see above photo). Their second floor has a small bar and is a good space for group meetings like this or for bands to play. For instance, I'm hoping to go see Tapes 'n Tapes there in February.

In any case, the speaker this month was Chico MacMurtie, director of and vision guy behind Amorphic Robotic Works, which is a collective of engineers and artists that dream up and build mechatronic sculptural pieces. His lecture was interesting, but being the vision guy and not the engineer, he spoke mostly from the perspective of intent and process and physical solutions and not very much about the electronics nor controls. Below is a picture of him presenting a piece he was commissioned by Citroen to do in Paris. It was a transformer type of piece where a Citroen-looking vehicle changed form into a large totem type of structure that filled the gallery space to something like 60 feet tall. It was called Totemobile.

The second half of his talk focused on his more recent efforts at inflatable robots and structures. He has some interesting projects in the works. He and the crew still have some work to get things to where he wants them to be, but it's interesting so far.