Pros:
Grand vision to bring bodies, materials, spaces, and face-to-face interaction to dynamic media (computation). No wires or glasses needed.
Cons:
Focused locally for now, so if you can't make it to Oakland, "wait a couple years."
(The con is a frustration for me, but we have to respect their focus on their first space.)
I spent the afternoon at Dynamicland. I've never learned a new language and made something cool, worth building on, in one afternoon, but that's what happened there. So even at this early stage, the platform is very intriguing. I can't stop thinking about it.
Here's my little hack:
#softfab experiment in @Dynamicland1 ... thinking about all kinds of dynamically augmented craft tools... — forresto (@forresto) December 14, 2017
As a child of the Folk School, and also a lifelong media/code artist/hacker, I've tried to make the sides of my interests intersect in different ways. 10 years ago, I helped get bookmaker and weaver friends online with websites and videos to show their work. My thesis project encourages media hacking and playing with materials to make stop-motion gifs, physical animations, and projections.
But Dynamicland puts media into materials. When I saw the first demos start to leak on @Dynamicland1, I had the feeling that my thesis had grown legs and continued evolving without me.
Some thoughts from other people:
A workshop for programmers.... It is also clearly more than that, a project that aims to bring the dynamism of programming to those who cannot not tolerate the environment that programming currently demands.
Programming robs us of our spaces. Dynamicland could give them back. – Sam Gwilym
What if seeing spaces aren't just tools for an individual to see inside, see across time, and see across possibilities? What if seeing spaces are really supposed to be spaces for facilitating everyone seeing those things? All your colleagues, all your friends, all your stakeholders, all in the same space, able to see all the data and all the tools, gaining a shared understanding? Isn't that what a big room is for? Getting a bunch of people in it?
Dynamicland, seeing spaces, and design studio – Vitorio Miliano
If we believe the group’s self-perception, their technologies are, just like hacks, tentative interim solutions for something bigger that might arrive one day. The radical engineers would also be the first to state that the same interim solutions, if stopped in their development and reified too early, are potential sources of hacks in the derogatory sense. The latter is, according to their stories, exactly what happened when, 40 years ago, the prototypes left the labs too soon, and entered the world of Apple, IBM, and Microsoft, producing the accumulation of bad decisions that led to a world where people stare at smartphones.
Utopian Hacks – Götz Bachmann
Bret Victor's 2014 talk, Seeing Spaces, outlining some of the vision: https://vimeo.com/97903574
Big pdf poster outlining the vision: https://twitter.com/twoodwar/status/950476738080989189
Bootleg of 2017 Dynamicland zine.