dorkbot-nyc - David Steinberg, Christina McPhee, and Sam Pluta :: September 3, 2008; 7:00 pm :: Location One, SoHo. The meeting is free and open to the public. Please bring snacks to share.

David Steinberg: mobile music machines - Lots of interesting musical software have been developed more or less recently for portable videogames consoles (Gameboy, PSP, etc.), PDAs or other similar platforms. I’ll present many of these applications (for Nintendo Gameboy, Palm OS, Sony PSP, Nintendo DS, Gamepark consoles, etc.), explain what’s needed to use them, who created them, what are the advantages and disadvantages of developing musical software for each platform and of course show some examples of what can be done with these new instruments.

Sam Pluta: data structures/monoliths ii (for chion) - Video samplers. Software as musical scores. Data structures as musical materials. Copyright laws. Data loops. Why Chewbacca is not in the OS X spell checker. Blocks of sounds. Laptop improvisation. And Michel Chion. All this and more will be discussed as Sam Pluta presents his work, data structures/monoliths ii (for chion).

Christina McPhee: Shake Stations - California-based filmmaker and artist Christina McPhee is ‘outback’ in earthquake country this summer, shooting HD video at Parkfield, California with new media installation artist DV Rogers (New Zealand / Sydney). DV is building and activating a major land art work- a hydraulically activated, remote -sensor activated seismic intervention table. DV’s PIEQF installation reacts to mini-tremors and shakes in realtime.

Following DV and crew as they install the project this summer and fall, Christina’s documentary takes on the gradual installation of the table as an elaborate time-based performance, with ironic and playful resonances to land art and the highly saturated dramatic space of sixties nouvelle vague (new wave) film. Via abstract drawing, experimental video and photomontage, Christina makes performative recordings at generative ‘moment-tensors’ where biological systems clash and meet with technological, and often security-challenged, sublime landscapes at the urban edge.

At places of emergence, at folds or ‘tesserae’ in landscapes of latent energy, her methods involve meditative engagement in remote sites like Parkfield, and also this year at live geothermal plants over the San Andreas Fault, next to the declining aquifer of Salton Sea, near the Mexico / California border. Her work slips past the indexical to trace dynamic loops between biological and technologically emergent states, making connections between human traumatic memory, disturbed terrains, and bare life.