And no, I’m not talking about those of you who spend more time in a given day playing Wii than talking to other human beings, or those of you who stood in line for seven hours for the Transformers sneak preview, or even those of you who can recite every minor difference between the original Battlestar Galactica and the new one. I’m talking about honest-to-geekness, reverse-engineering, hardware-hacking DORKS.

Last Sunday, on a promise of witnessing pure, unrivaled dorkness, I went with a couple of friends to Vendetta for the inaugural DorkbotPDX event, which brought together a bunch of dorks—and I use the term lovingly, and with all due respect—to talk about their latest projects.

My first impression was that I hadn’t seen so many bespectacled dudes with ponytails in one room since the last Personal Telco meeting I went to. Lucky for me, two of the featured presenters, Jason Plumb and Jesse Fox, were showing off some crazy-ass hardware projects that centered around experimental music production.

Plumb presented his modification of the Essential Reality P5 glove controller, which has now gone obsolete. He wrote/hacked a whole host of open-source programs to turn the glove into an open-air synthesizer controller, complete with a few sound palates (paired oscillators, a corny percussion patch, etc.). The effect was something like a cross between a theremin and Casio keyboard. Blogger Mike and the Green Lady has a video from the presentation and an interview with Plumb about the project here.

There were some obvious bugs in the software--every time he went "out of range" from the glove's receiver, the program would lock until it was reset, and not all of the programmed commands were quite functioning. But the implications were obvious--if Plumb, or some other geeky entrepreneur with too much spare time, were to put some serious, ongoing effort into perfecting the glove's software, it could become a fairly awesome instrument, and not just for noisy avant-garde productions.

Jesse Fox's presentation consisted largely of a video--of an all-robot symphony orchestra playing an obscure 1924 composition (Ballet Mecanique) by Dada composer George Antheil, which was performed at the National Gallery of Art. Fox helped create some of the robot instruments, including the xylophones. The result was a mind-fuck of a musical piece, as gorgeous and weird as anything I've ever heard--and it was all played by robots.

Ballet Mechanique calls for "three xylophones, four bass drums, tam tam, two pianists, seven (or so) electric bells, a siren, three airplane propellers, and sixteen synchronized player pianos." It's a kind of brutal composition, all hyperactive pre-Looney Toons xylophones and industrial cacophony--hear part of it here--from an era when a composition could actually be considered "revolutionary" and cause riots.

Mike Merrill has video of Fox's presentation here.

I'm not gonna lie to you--every single technical bit of both presentations was lost on me. I might be a geek, but I'll never be smart enough to be a dork. But it was fascinating to see the results of such dorkery, and the $1 pints of Rainier served up by Vendetta didn't hurt either. DorkbotPDX members meet every other week for informal gatherings, plus bigger events less frequently--head over to their website to check out the calendar.