I finally got around to going to Dorkbot, after only a year of meaning to. It was cool.

It was held at State 51, a new media company occupying a disused factory just at the top of Brick Lane, on the fringe of the Shoreditch New Media Mafia Zone. The factory was ace, practically derelict except for signs of workshop-like activities. I was assured that they have proper offices upstairs. If it were me I would be worried that the place was about to collapse.

Apparently they let several artists use the space, hence the workshoppiness. The best bit is that just inside the front door they had a seven-foot black security droid with a single cylon-like red eye. He was only wooden, but I still wanted to escape his gaze pretty sharpish.

I was late so I missed some of the talking, however I saw Ben Woodeson talking about some of his installation pieces, I saw Alex (of Slab and Slub) perform some really nice IDM with nowt but a bunch of console windows with Perl scripts in them and then I saw James Larsson frying things with old monitors and generally giving advice on handy stuff to do. Christ monitors are dangerous.

Afterwards I got talking to Alex about his sound software. I learned that he has a C synth module running underneath sending stuff straight to the DSP (intense) and a Perl server doing timing. He was also playing samples as well, so I guess his C module is pretty handy. It was written by the other guy in Slub, who I didn’t meet. The music he made was excellent and he’d obviously spent a while putting it all together. It started sounding like a bunch of random FM synth tones, but it was obviously much more carefully orchestrated than that. I really enjoyed it. I think it’s a really cool thing to be doing with your computer and it’s yet another thing that I’m jealous of. I’m such a grass-is-always-greener person.

I saw Peter, a guy from the Dorkbot list who I had an interview with a few weeks ago. After the interview I decided I didn’t want the job, but neglected to be polite enough to actually write to him and tell him. Then there he was at the bar, serving beer, so I had no chance of avoiding him. Turns out he didn’t really mind. I think he twigged in the interview that I didn’t really want to give up freelance that much.

Peter introduced me to Paul Makepeace, another coder (I only know that having been to his site though). We chatted for ages about open money, which he’s involved in. Basically open money and similar systems seek to create small community currency systems where the emphasis is much more on using value to encourage co-operation rather than selection in a competitive environment. It’s a fascinating subject and I agreed to do some hacking for the community site at some point. I kind of told him that I didn’t have much free time, which I feel a bit bad about know, because having read his CV I’m quite interested in having a bit more of a chat with him. I may also try and get Charlie involved in some way.

So all in all it was a fascinating and stimulating evening and will definitely, definitely be going again. Next time I will try and take some other people from the gang, particularly Miles.