[April 15th 2005]

One of the projects presented at the first Dorkbot Stockholm meeting was the PARCEL project by KRETS www.krets.org.

A Dorkbot Debut
In the beginning of April 2005, a Swedish chapter of the global organizaton Dorkbot was started in Stockholm, Sweden. The initiator of Dorkbot Stockholm Majken Kramer Overgaard sent us an update on the launch and some words about the Dorkbot concept. Majken is a quite mobile and energetic individual on the new media scene, working her way from New York to Stockholm and on to Tokyo this fall.

Dorkbot Stockholm can be contacted at: dorkbot@mail.com

Douglas Repetto started Dorkbot in 2000 in New York with material support of Columbia University and it is basically a meeting for people doing strange things with electricity (the Dorkbot-motto). It is a get-together for people either working with or with an interest in electricity in a broad sense, it could be designers, students, artists, engineers etc. As written on Dorkbotnyc's webpage (also known as the mother page), Dorkbot's purpose is to

. Give artists/programmers/engineers an opportunity for informal peer review

. Establish a forum for the presentation of new art works/technology/software/hardware

. Help establish relationships and foster collaboration between people with various backgrounds and interests

. Give us all a chance to see the cool things that our neighbors are working on

So Dorkbot is about networking, getting inspired by other peoples work and giving people a possibility to introduce their work in a public venue. It is non-commercial, non-political and driven by volunteers. Each meeting usually consists of a couple of informal presentations, followed by open discussions.


The Dorkbot map.

Dorkbot worldwide
Dorkbot exists in many different parts of the world; Mumbai, Barcelona and Melbourne just to name a few. Considering that it started out in 2000 it is a very wide spread in a short amount of time. Each Dorkbot has the same concept as mentioned above, but they perform it in different ways, depending on the presentations being made and the people involved.

Dorkbot-sthlm
On April 6th 2005 at 7 pm we had the first Dorkbot in Stockholm; it was hosted by CRAC (www.crac.org). The background for starting dorkbot in Stockholm was probably the lack of a forum for people working with electricity in different ways. For instance there are forums for musicians working with electricity (Fylkingen), but there is no forum for people with different backgrounds and aims, which is the focus of dorkbot-sthlm.

Swedish Dorkbotters.

We had a presentation from KRETS (www.krets.org), who presented an on-going project PARCEL, which suggests new ways of establishing relations between the material, audiovisual and digital techniques that are increasingly forming the environments around us. The project considers off-the-shelf technologies normally used in the packaging industry and consumer electronics as integral parts of an architectural design.

The second presentation came from Antoine Fressancourt (http://antoine.fressancourt.free.fr/) who talked about the aim of the JXME project, an open source effort to develop a mobile P2P platform, which is to provide people with the tools to interact with one another without being dependant on their technology provider.

The presentations gave way to very interesting discussions on subjects as diverse as authorship, state funded art projects and the relation between art and science. These kinds of discussions are exactly the core of Dorkbot, the exchange of ideas among artists, engineers, students and everyone interested, creating a very special field of cross-cultural thoughts.

The next meeting is May 4th 2005. Everybody is of course welcome! I can hardly wait...

More info: http://www.dorkbot.org/dorkbotsthlm