INCOMPREHENSIBLE.(The Talk of the Town)(dorkbot, a group that holds meeting that feature odd and artistic ways of using electrical devices, is the brainchild of Douglas Repetto, who teaches computer music at Columbia)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 07-JUN-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

The motto of dorkbot, a group that holds meetings once a month in Manhattan, except in the summer, and in fourteen other cities, including Sofia, Bulgaria, and Mumbai, India, is "People doing strange things with electricity." At a dorkbot meeting in San Francisco, a speaker presented a design for two twelve-story towers. By means of a generator called a Tesla coil, the towers would produce lightning bolts as long as three hundred feet, which, a colleague said, was desirable, because "real lightning, which is very rarely seen up close, has the ability to focus and clear the mind." At another meeting, a talk titled "Fire-Spewing Vacuum Cleaners" described a project involving vacuum cleaners fuelled with propane....

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