Electrofringe festival starts soon

Make that android dream of electric sheep. And partying.

The Electrofringe festival is running again in Newcastle this year from the 2nd to the 6th of October.

If you enjoy soldering kits and playing around with electronics in ways they were never made to be played with, this is for you. The place is a total geek party. There are going to be discussions and screenings and workshops and all sorts of strange (and occasionally mechanical) music going on down there.



Yeaaah. That’s what we’re talking about.

The festival is all about the art and fun you can make with electronic and computer hackery skills. If you don’t have many of said skills, don’t worry. There’s a solder girls workshop that teaches basic soldering skills as well as introductions to designing and hacking your way around a logic gate.

Ever thought of meshing your Open GL skills with your inner VJ? Or just learning more about both? There are workshops that will take you through the basics and onto the advanced techniques of Quartz Composer, Apple’s visual programming language so you can hook into data and use it to manipulate media in real time.

There’s a brain controlled musical instrument that’s going to be on display, and talks on the hardware and software that makes it work. And yes, perhaps a demo, if you can keep yourself away from the game design challenges.

I’m directly quoting this from the Friday section of the program: “Keep this appointment with the Bad Doctor Face project: a midi controlled animatronic penis mask. A MIDI CONTROLLED ANIMATRONIC PENIS MASK.”

There’s an array of robots with (what we’re assuming are) entirely different purposes to the mask. Not that we know its purpose, anyway. Auto Electro Quartet are running a chamber recital for robots. And if that’s not your cup of tea, this might be:



There’s an electronic performance by The Hidden Village – they use old school game consoles, circuit bending (miswiring electronics and using the bizarre noises that they make) and software to make their music. And there are other artists flying in from Berlin, Japan and San Francisco to perform.

And there's also a presentation of the projects that the Dorkbot crowd have been working on over the last year. Dorkbot. The name alone should make you feel all warm and fuzzy on the inside. It’s a community of curious engineers, software developers, artists, muicians and other people interested in doing strange things with electricity.

The last time I heard about these guys, somebody was giving away an old Grass Valley vision mixer. It was the old kind that needed the clocks of the equipment (including the cameras you connected to it) genlocked so the images would stay in synch. You've actually seen it before: it's a prop in Star Wars. It's the console with the lever that fires up the green cannon that destroys Alderaan. Stupid peaceniks had it coming anyway.

I wanted to get my hands on it and its masses of outboard gear to learn about early broadcast technology, but it was picked up by somebody else on Dorkbot for circuit bending and experimentation. And I approve of that and the myriad of other cool little projects that the mixer has probably been chopped into.

Atomic is excited, and will sure as hell be there. Will you?