[-empyre-] from communities to festivals / printing printers

[Gabriel Menotti]

Dear empyreans:

Thanks again Alexandra for the extreme generosity of sharing your
research material with us! Now that we are now approaching the end of
discussion, our attentions will move back to more literal cases of
prototyping. One of our guest for the week is the previously announced
Marloes de Valk, part of GOTO10 collective, and responsible for the
production of both software systems and art events. She will be joined
by Adrian Bowyer, founder of the RepRap project, a fast prototyping
machine that aims for self-replication. Are there similarities between
the methods of development of these different "products"? Or maybe
crossovers?

Here is Adrian's bio:

Adrian Bowyer (UK)
In the early 1970s Adrian Bowyer read for a first degree in mechanical
engineering at Imperial College, and then researched a PhD in
tribology there.  In 1977 he moved to Bath University's Maths
Department to do research in stochastic computational geometry.  He
then founded the Bath University Microprocessor Unit in 1981 and ran
that for four years.  After that he took up a lectureship in
manufacturing in Bath's Engineering Department, where he is now a
senior lecturer. His current areas of research are geometric modelling
and geometric computing in general (he is one of the authors of the
Bowyer-Watson algorithm for Voronoi diagrams), the application of
computers to manufacturing, and biomimetics.  His main work in
biomimetics is on self-copying machines.

Welcome both of you! =)

Best!
Menotti