This dorkbot SF meeting will feature inspiring talks from Mark Pauline, Scott Kildall, and Naut Humon. More details about their talks and the artists are below.

Mark Pauline - Predator Arm Presentation

SRL has been commissioned to make a robotic arm that can interact with people using depth perception technology and machine vision. Survival Research Laboratories was conceived of and founded by Mark Pauline in November 1978. Since its inception SRL has operated as an organization of creative technicians dedicated to re-directing the techniques, tools, and tenets of industry, science, and the military away from their typical manifestations in practicality, product or warfare. Since 1979, SRL has staged over 45 mechanized presentations in the United States and Europe. Each performance consists of a unique set of ritualized interactions between machines, robots, and special effects devices, employed in developing themes of socio-political satire. Humans are present only as audience or operators.

Scott Kildall - Performing Nature: Audio Synth at Dinacon

DinaSynth Quartet is a live audio-synth performance between a plant, the soil, the air and the water in nature. This quadrophonic melange emits a synthetic soundscape that interacts with the buzz of cicadas, the croaks of frogs and the songs of the birds. This project demonstration builds on Scott Kildall's Sonaqua project which he presented at Dorkbot last year.
DinaSynth Quartet was prototyped at Dinacon - an art + science "conference", which took place in June-July 2018 on a small island in Thailand with artists, scientists, thinkers and designers. Kildall will discuss this experience as an effective model of collaboration between artist and scientists. He will end the talk with unveiling Xenoform Labs: a new artist-in-residency program, studio and workshop space, which invites a fluid collaborative space in the Mission District.

Naut Humon - 5 Projects from the Upcoming Recombinant Festival

At the last Dorkbot Naut Humon briefly announced Recombinant's upcoming marathon 7 day festival from November 26th to Dec 2 at Gray Area. The festival theme "Transmissions from the Seismic Stations" touches upon Seismo - Strobic synergistic oscillations between aural optic tremulant vibration and phosphene retina phenomena. Naut will take a look under the festival's hood with cameo clips by some of the artists and further discussions of the past and future projections for RML.

Artists' works from the Recombinant Festival to be examined are:
Project 1: Ulf Langheinrich: who presents NIL - an extraordinary migratory adventure far beyond the ubiquitous & prevailing audio-visual show. The customary proscenium screen is commutated by a window into a phosphorescent bedazzlement , rich in multi-ayered saturated hues and retinal resplendence.

Project 2: Herman Kolgen critically acclaimed multidisciplinary artist and audio kinetic sculptor whose 7 cinematically scaled spectacles as RML Artist in Residence will display a propulsive laboratory of cross sensory experiences. His high tech audiovisual installations render the visible through radiographic detection and data. Though his projects have conceptual concerns, they all remain physically tangible pushing sonic boundaries into body undulating territory and altering visual perceptions playing on notions of physical, cerebral, and emotional tension and re-release.

Project 3: V.Dream is a virtual reality installation by Li Alin in collaboration with Michael Saup and Ulf Langheinrich that uses the technological potential of sound and visual immersion of VR to induce the natural phenomenon of lucid dreaming (a dream where we are conscious we dream).

Project 4: Michael Gendreau has composed and performed based on his studies in physics, his philopophies pertaining to temporal and environmental persistence, and his experiments with small motors and turntable mechanisms. His performances have involved sounds from one-off transcription discs cast by others in the middle of the last century, those cut in his studio using a decrepit lathe. More recently Gendreau has sought to extend these later studies and to use buildings as speakers. He records the infrasonic vibrations of the performance space and in concert, uses the structure's resonances as an additioanl instrument in his site-specific compositions. These practices are based in part on his current work as an acoustician working primarily on low-vibration and noise design for buildings.

Project 5: Craig Dorety's work is inspired by understandings of visual perception, the subconsious and memory. Vision as our main sensory input for the world in which we exist and in general he creates art through the use of abstracted image data which he renders visible blindness occuring in the brain not the eyes. This understanding let him to use mathematics and engineering to create colorful three-dimensional digital sculptures and mimic those occurences. He uses industrially pre-fabricated LED technology and custom electronic hardware and firmware to collapse space and re-map it formulating physical space-time distortions. When treating color as information rather than image, Craig can do anything he wishes to the data electronically. This result is a meditative slightly hypnotic active display of color. By re-displaying information rather than image Craig gives the viewer a glimpse into space-time as seen through the installer's eyes.

View all the projects at: http://recombinantfestival.com/2018/