Maker Faire: Live media day

Photo of Chritian Ristow‘s machines and Michael Christian‘s I.T. by Scott Beale/Laughing Squid.

Yesterday I was at Maker Faire all day with Hacker Boy, volunteering to help with Make: Play Day and messing around visiting friends and looking at some truly incredible art. Play Day was so much fun: there’s nothing as cool as watching kids smash keyboards with mallets and hammers, or seeing little girls make elaborate buildings out of circuit boards (or make their own armor and stage combat with weapons made from colorful industrial scrap). I think Play Day needs to be happening somewhere every day.

The list of friends I got to see and hang out with is very, very long: from Extra Action to Annalee, Veronica, Scott, Eddie, and lots of SRL family, to my old friend Christian Ristow and newer friends CTP and Justin Grey. Scott has a great photo set growing here (post); I decided it was a live-media-only day and only did media with the shortest route to publishing, just to see how that would turn out. So I have a small set of instantly-uploaded photos here (all shot and put directly on Flickr with my Helio Ocean). And I have a handful of live video shot with my Nokia N95 and streamed directly to my Qik channel. Extra thanks to Qik and Helio for sponsoring my gadgets and making my live media making possible: the truly great thing about the Qik/Nokia cam was that I accidentally, spontaneously got interviews with two machine makers! (I just need to remember to turn the camera off, duhhrrrr…) I’m really enjoying the possibilities with Qik’s live video: the video quality isn’t as high as I’d like it, but I’m literally using cutting, bleeding edge technology here… The fun videos from the day, below:

Christian Ristow‘s lethal machines; outdoor show, demonstration and combat:

Spontaneous interview: First, squid alert, paging Scott Beale! Then an interview with the maker of the Giant Mechanical Squid, Nemo Gould. Then about 30 seconds of me forgetting to turn off the camera (sadly, nothing scandalous was captured…):

Some of the most beautifully made machines and gearing I’ve seen in a long time — the happy discovery of Twenty Seven Gears, Arthur Ganson inspired pieces. I was totally blown away by the bizarre creations of Benjamin Cowden, aka Twenty Seven Gears. Watch the creepy lollipop-licking hand-crank machine, then my spontaneous interview with the artist: