Pumping Station: One

Photo by Anne Petersen

Last month we had our inaugural 300 Seconds of Fame, featuring a wild and wooly tour through Peoplehacking (Four Formulae For The Reduction Of Operational Mass or The Engineers’ Guide to Weight Loss), Maker Faire, photographers rights, a RepRap update, and the NEW and IMPROVED solution for HACKERSPACE maintenance: BRAWNDO! (which evidently makes you good at yelling).

Tomorrow we have more great (but short!) performances to enjoy, including some EXTREMELY AWESOME facts about neuroanatomy, fiddling around, an anonymous committee, some digeridooing, arduino radio, and how to renounce your legal rights to your creations.

Read the full monty about 300 Seconds of Fame and what else the night is about via our wiki.

But to really experience the night you have to be there! Or, if you can’t, you get demoted to watching the ustream. SO BE THERE!

I should really lay off the BRAWNDO.

It’s that time of the month again: time to gather together all of the loud things that you have and bring them to Pumping Station: One for an evening of fun!

This Friday, March 12, at 7pm, Pumping Station: One is hosting its monthly Unusual Musical Instrument Jam! We’ll be running it synchronously with i3Detroit again this month. As always, we welcome anything that makes noise…bring your electronics, your toys, your common household items, even your musical instruments if that’s your bag. If it’s loud, we’d love to see and hear it!

The event is open to the public, and free.

[Image by buhny on Flickr, licensed Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.]

My friend Mary and I are (very) amateur animators who won a competition for the ChicagoOperaTheater last year with this  summary of their 2009 season.

This year, the Chicago Opera Theater gave us the opportunity to do longer-form summaries of their 2010 season.

Here is our summary of Moses in Egypt:

Read the rest of this entry →

The official Pumping Station: One twitter account, @pumpingstation1, now aggregates and re-tweets information that our members tweet with the #psone hashtag. This way, instead of having to rely on a tiny group of people to make “official” tweets to the account, the account will automatically disseminate information about projects, events, and impromptu PS:One-related excitement from members. It does so via a twitter bot script that i wrote in Python.

So, follow us on Twitter, and stay up-to-the-minute with all of the news, events, and information from our space!

This is a formal call for Pumping Station: One T-Shirt Designs! As some of you may be aware, we have a 4-color screen printing machine at the space and we’re looking to use it to make some sweet schwag for our members and soon to be members!  Deadline is Midnight March, 18th 2010 which is one month from now. The selected winner(s) will be chosen by the current Board of Directors and will be produced into a run of t-shirts that will be sold by Pumping Station:One. Prize is a free t-shirt of your design! Details after the break: Read the rest of this entry →

As if we didn’t have enough excitement going on at Pumping Station: One this weekend, with the didgeridoo class and the Come On, Feel The Noise Hackathon, this weekend we will have visitors. A group of people from i3Detroit, the hackerspace in Detroit, will be visiting Pumping Station: One this weekend! They will be arriving Saturday afternoon and heading home on Sunday, so they’ll have plenty of time to explore our space and enjoy our Hackathon.

Remember, the Hackathon is open to the public. So, if you want to not only work on your projects but also enjoy the chance to meet your fellow hackers from the Motor City, make sure to come by the space this weekend!

Coutesy of Ray Kurzweil and Kurzweil Technologies, Inc

I’m pleased to present our first PS:One Guided Tour on this Tuesday February 23.  Our guest is Joel Kuennen, who will lead a discussion about the technological singularity.

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The End of Modernity, the Birth of the Singularity: Cultural Implications of the Technological Singularity

Modernity is defined by philosophers and historians as a stage in human culture which is referential in nature; a state of being which collapses time through its signification of past, present, future. It is fundamentally paradoxical. A contemporary, modern moment consists of a spectrum and gains meaning through the relations of the points on this spectrum. How we think, act, and feel are all bound to this conception of being in time. We are born into a cultural unit with a specific history, a specific ontology that defines our social roles and positions based on recordings of past occurrences. The present is congruent with the past and history assures us of this. We live and someday will die. We surround ourselves with momento mori as to not forget the meaning that can be associated with every breath. Life is short. It is transient, a blip. We will die someday. This is what we in our culture believe.

This view is what determines meaning in our lives but what happens once the threshold of the singularity has been crossed? Once death is no longer a promise but merely a possibility? Once the present is so different from the past as to detach itself from the reflexivity which has so far defined modernity and the meaning of everyday life?

Joel Kuennen is a graduate student in the Masters of Arts Visual and Critical Studies program at The School of the Art Instiute of Chicago. He is a contributing writer for Chicago Art Magazine and FNews Magazine as well as a practicing artist who works primarily with digital video and multimedia installation. His theoretical writings concern cinema studies, new media studies and contemporary subjectivity as inflected by spatial relationships.

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This sounds like an exciting topic, I hope you’re all looking forward to it as much as I am!

With great pride and humility I present my Cylon! This is my very first dabble into electronics so I am pretty sure that the whole thing will burst into flames at any moment. The eye(s) are soldered onto a generic board I bought and are hooked up to a freeduino that I made during a transistor thursdays class awhile back. In a future model I hope to hook up a range sensor that will only turn on the Cylon when someone steps in front of it. For now, however, enjoy the simple pleasure of sentient robots!

Photo by Rubin Starset

We’ve updated our weekly meeting schedule and the third Tuesday of the month is going to be our monthly Open House.  While there’s no official business being conducted anyone should feel free to stop by.  New members and old members alike are encouraged to get certified on all our wonderful tools, talk about projects and build.  If you’ve never visited and you’re interested in seeing the space Tuesdays are the perfect day!  Meet your fellow hackers, discuss projects and join our growing community.  We hope to see you there!

The doors will be open from 7pm until the last member has left.  As usual the space is located at 3354 N Elston, just come through the big red door!

Saturday, February 20th from 2pm-4pm:

Learn to make and play the didgeridoo! There will be a demonstration of how to make a simple didgeridoo from PVC pipe, followed by a lesson in achieving the basic drone. Circular breathing will be discussed, and all attendants will receive their own PVC didgeridoo with which to practice.

Sign up here: http://didgeridoo.eventbrite.com