He is a performer, musician, writer, director and experience designer in the Bay Area. He has directed and performed in productions and festivals around the world. His new projects fuse circus and comedy improvisation with installation and reactive technology.
DorkbotSF #87
DorkbotSF is back at Gray Area! Come see talks by Mike Harrison, Ray McClure, Jasper Patterson, Dustin Freeman & Jordan Gray!
Mike Harrison - Using Printed Circuit Boards to Make Snowflakes
The construction and programming techniques used to make a huge-scale lighting installation, with 84,000 LEDs, 25,000 PCBs and 14,000 PIC microcontrollers. Printed circuit boards were used as mechanical structure and electrical interconnection to make large but lightweight illuminated snowflake shapes. This installation was built as part of a Christmas lighting feature in a Hong Kong shopping mall in 2015.
Ray McClure - VVVR
VVVR allows participants to create a range of over 700 different objects using their voice. These objects are passed between seated avatars facing each other, encouraging harmonizing or playful voice interaction. Their voices are transformed with effects and shared in each other's headphones. The goal is to encourage vocal experimentation in a potential new form of experience facilitated by the uses of avatars and augmented voices. Participants describe the experience as relaxing and often making comparisons to a psychedelic experience.
Jasper Patterson and Dustin Freeman -RAKTOR: Virtual Interactive Theater in Digital Worlds
Can VR be used to deepen connections between people rather then isolate us? This talk will involve a performance experimenting with how to share group experiences augmented by VR, and debut the latest tech in a fully functional tactile VR theater system
Jordan Gray (aka k9d) - Nonspeciic and Prolific
Delivery wars with drones, fused deposition health toys, moving meditation transmissions, creative consumer electronics, video blindfold bom, virtual selfie indulgence
Speakers
Mike Harrison
Mike Harrison is best known for his youtube channel (mikeselectricstuff), featuring teardowns of expensive equipment, and other electronics topics. His websitecovers vintage technology and other random aspects of electronics. He also works as a freelance electronics consultant ( www.whitewing.co.uk ), specializing in the design of custom electronics for large-scale lighting and art installations.
Ray McClure
Ray McClure founded his interactive studio Dreamboat in 2009 to develop web and installation experiences. Notable creations include PollySynth, a multiplayer polyphonic synthesizer, and 808 Cube which combines a Roland TR-808 drum machine with a Rubik's cube. As a member of the Gray Area Cultural Incubator program he created the mixed reality installation Amazing Grace and Computers. In 2016 he started the virtual reality studio Plus Four with partner Casey McGonagle. Their voice controlled VR project VVVR was developed at the Convergence residency in Banff, Canada and featured at both the 2016 Gray Area Festival and David Lynch's Festival of Disruption.
Dustin Freeman
Dustin Freeman has a background in applied math and theatre. He has spent a considerable amount of time working with the Kinect for performance art, both at Microsoft Research and in academia. Most recently, he was working on an engine for Mixed Reality at Occipital. Now, he works on creating interactive theatre experiences in digital worlds.
Jasper Patterson
Jasper Patterson is a product of the new vaudeville movement. Brought up in and around the circus, he studied directing, physical theater, puppetry and theatrical design and graduated with a degree from Bard College.
Jordan Gray
Jordan Gray (aka starPause the k9d) is Manager of Creative Labs @OrganicInc and co-founder of CODAME, a SF based event celebrating the intersection of ART+TECH. Besides analog video synthesis he loves bicycles, photography, electronic music, dayan qigong & haiku.
