Lovebytes Festival

This weekend, I’m heading to Sheffield to perform at the Megadork, an electronic cabaret for the city-wide Lovebytes Festival. I’ll be there with fellow Spacedog Jenny Angliss, my theremin and a few of our robot pals. Our set will include a new number featuring The Ventricle, my ox blood red 1960s handbag which pulsates like a human heart.

The Megadork is at the Showroom Cinema, Sheffield, 7pm, on Friday 23 March – see the Lovebytes website for tickets. On Saturday lunchtime, we’ll be performing for free in the Winter Gardens for the Lovebytes headphone festival. On Friday night, we’re sharing the bill with some very fine fellow hackers, including one of my heroes Paul Granjon. If you’ve never seen him in action, here’s an early film of him with his cybernetic parrot sausage…

Curated by brilliant live coder Alex McClean, the Megadork is the latest offering from Dorkbot Sheffield. Dorkbot is a grassroots gathering of ‘people doing strange things with electricity’ – anyone interested in making and modding is welcome, from artists and engineers to programmers, musicians and knitters. I’m hugely looking forward to Friday night’s gig – here’s the full lineup:

Paul Granjon – A strange performance from the world renowned self-styled robot artist.

Patrick Tresset - Talks about his drawing robot Paul (on show as part of the Alan Turing: Intuition and Ingenuity exhibition).

Daniel Jones and James Bulley - talking about generating live music from patterns of weather.

Sergi Jorda - talks about the Reactable tangible tabletop music playground (which you’ll be able to try out at the Central Library Saturday 24 March)

Dan Stowell - Demonstrates his use of the Risset illusion in techno music.

Silicone Bake – Live coded pop songs about love, death and counterfeit watches, where all lyrics are taken from spam emails.

Spacedog – that’s us! Performing eerie tunes with our robot pals.

Dorkbot is a world-wide phenomenon founded by Douglas Repetto in New York which spread to London and has now reached dozens of cities around the world. In the UK there are Dorkbots in Sheffield, Bristol, Anglia, Newcastle, Cardiff and Alba (Scotland).