A nice walk through the East End last night to DorkBot London in Limehouse. The highlights: Peter Cusack’s LF magentic audioscapes of Highbury and Islington underground station (south-bound platform, I think), and The Institute of Applied Autonomy‘s fine collection of DARPA website scrapings and repurposing of military technology and aesthetics for urban activism. Crucial performance requirement for their GraffitiWriter robot: it has to move faster than a cop. Very good stuff. Cheap beer, too.
thought about this a lot. lovely to see a production model.
the trick i was thinking of would be to have timed-opacity paint … or better still something that is pressure sensitive so when people/cars go over it it gets revealed. avoids the speed requirement to a greater extent.
better yet, build the “bots” into Nikes and deploy as usual.
Part of their schtick (?) is to invite members of the public to do the remote controlling of the robot — they have great stills of a group of girl scouts defacing some public space 😉
They seem to have run into the classic hacker problem that people seem to want them to start selling prefab kits for the robots, and to turn iSee into an open source API thing, wheras they (apart from not having the time) aren’t really into that — they want to get on with doing new things (understandably). I’ve always seen there stuff as activist art rather than tech projects. Shame tehre isn’t someone else who wants to do all the hard work of productisation…