« May 2002 | Main | October 2002 »
June 2, 2002
Extreme Computing 2002
So yesterday I went to Extreme Computing 2002 at the Camden Centre - "The NTK/Mute Festival of Inappropriate Technology".
It started at eleven o'clock; I arrived about half an hour after that. Confusingly, there wasn't any outwards sign of something happening on the King's Cross side entrance of the Centre, nor round the side; I started thinking that perhaps I had got the day wrong, until I went round the back where there was, indeed, an entrance open. For three pounds I got a ticket-sticker to wear. Instead of having a space for my name, it had a space for my domain. How geek. You could instantly rate people on their geekiness by the state of their sticker - some people didn't have a domain to put on theirs, or even a foo.org/~user/ type address. Losers. </tongue-in-cheek>
And geeks: the main hall was full of geeks. I mean full. Hundreds of them. Sitting in rows, wandering around clutching computers, squatting on the floor and using their laptops to connect to the internet via consume.net wireless access, looking at many and varied stalls presenting art or software or music or selling things, like Mark Pawson's stall, where I bought some splendid badges with skulls on, as shown at the left. Lee Maguire sold me an XCOM t-shirt at another stall. In other places around the hall you could play antique video games, see computers doing things they weren't indended to, watch videos, see yourself on video, draw your own map of London (I never got around to doing this, which I regret), buy books and magazines of various kinds, play Go and other games... lots and lots and lots of stuff. Huge amounts of really cool stuff. There's no way I could have seen/had a go on everything.
In addition to all the stalls, things were happening on the stage as well, which was why there were rows of seated geeks watching. They ranged from panel discussions, such as one about "the interface between real-world research and popular sci-fi" which featured Freeman "Dyson Sphere" Dyson and was chaired by Pat "Cyberpunk" Cadigan. You can read Cory Doctorow's (one of the panellists') report if you're interested. I thought it was a shame that Mr. Dyson never got to talk about Dyson Spheres, which are surely the thing that most people are familiar with him for, but I guess it's not related to any real-world research. There was also a talk, presented by Yoz Grahame, about ZX Spectrums (Spectra?), which I didn't watch because I post-date their era and never got into that whole scene.
At some point during the afternoon I spent a little while in the Slackers' Lounge tearoom, drinking Moroccan tea with mint in it from a glass and listening to Arabic music. It was very chilled, very calming. I felt like I had been suddenly catapulted into the future - when I'm living in some strange and hot country, where I spend my evenings in small tearooms talking to expatriate European hackers.
Also during the afternoon came the Chatbot++ discussion, which was one of the Take It Outside talks in the pub opposite the Camden Centre. Hosted by Yoz, and featuring Jo Walsh, Celia Romaniuk, Matt Webb of interconnected and Edd Dumbill of xml.com), discussion was had over the course of an hour and a half or so on the subject of chat bots. Much reference was made to dipsy, the foremost of london.pm's IRC channel bots (who, incidentally, can be seen in conversation with space here). There was so much reference to london.pm, and in fact there were so many london.pm'ers there, that you could have been forgiven for thinking that it was some kind of bastard hybrid between a london.pm tech meeting and social meet. Pictures of the discussion can be seen here (last seven images); and Jo made some videos of the session.
At the end of the day (which ended at six, rather than seven o'clock, due to some kind of mix-up), the "Dorkbot London 12V Orchestra" was supposed to be playing. At first we thought we would be on the stage - which would have been exciting - but in the end it happened in a small side-annexe area, which was cosy, but meant that we weren't seen by many people.
In reality, the "orchestra" was Alex McLean, me, Jo, Ian Morrison, Saul Albert, Chris Heathcote, Rain Ashford and a couple of people I didn't know jamming absurdly on random instrumentation, including laptops (Alex and Jo), a keyboard on a strap (Ian - at right with pointy hair), an electronic speaking phrasebook (me), a Speak and Spell (Chris), a vacuum cleaner-powered bagpipes (Saul), a tiny plastic toy DJ scratching device, a watch that made "scratching" noises and said "rap" and "hyper", a rewired keyboard's innards, a pair of electronic toy kittens, an MP3 player... madness. Actually, it was rockin'. It started out really shakily with only a few people and even less equipment, but as people and useful cables arrived it really took off. to give an example of the nature of the occasion, there wasn't a microphone for my translator, so we had to adapt a pair of headphones to the purpose. We were actually having so much fun that we wanted to go on longer, but the Centre started closing down at six o'clock and we got kicked out along with everyone else. (Photos of this landmark in live music can be seen here.)
Overall, it was an awesome day, and I had a seriously good time. I can't wait until the next one.
Posted by Earle Martin at 7:29 PM |