Current activities at the Labs:
ALL Power Labs GEK (Gasifier Experimentors Kit):
The GEK offers beginners through experts an easy way build, compare and customize a wide variety of gasifier reactor types and configurations. Whether you’re a DIY enthusiast or a university researcher, the GEK will get you over the starting hurdles of biomass gasification, and on to the more rewarding work of refining specific architectures, testing fuels, and making power.
Escape from Berkeley (by any non-petroleum means necessary):
October 10-13-08 the first alternative fuel race of its kind concluded at the Sahara in Vegas. The course for next year is Berkeley to Baja. Start at the Shipyard Labs. End at Hussongs cantina in Ensenada- the traditional start point of the Baja 500 and 1000. Overnights on the way at San Luis Obispo, El Mirage dry lake, and Salton Sea. For up dates http://www.escapefromberkeley.com/
The Shipyard version 2.0 is now Open
Bigger, Better, Faster, Stronger
The Basics:
May 8th 2007: City of Berkeley shuts down The Shipyard
March 1st 2008: The Shipyard v2.0 re-opens
You are invited to participate:
Escape from Berkeley (by any non-petroleum means necessary) alt powered race, from Berkeley to Vegas.
And now the lengthy, wordy and indulgent version from Jim:
Here’s more specifics on the recasting plan for the reopening of The Shipyard. This is the first draft plan. Details are to be refined as we figure them out and they figure us out. You are invited to participate. Shop use and project space is available once again.
In the meantime, here’s the general idea of where we’re going with this. . .
It seems to me that the Geek-Fabricators-Make-Massive-Scale-Mechanical-Electronic-and-Kinetic-Art-in-a-Container-Camp model is well explored. Though there is certainly more good stuff ahead on this road. The mash up of art and tech, as it has propagated in both directions across the fabricating and digital arts, is mature and well known. From the DIY grassroots to the carillions of academia, the art/tech cross-fertilization is fully accepted, well institutionalized, and pretty much a given at this point. I’m wondering if there might be new recombinatory mojo out across junctures as of yet uncombined.
It seems possible to me that the next “art/tech like” cross-fertilization is going to happen between art and energy. I think energy is going to become, or at least has the potential to become, a creative idiom of pleasurable hacking, creativity and self-expression. I think it is going to follow a similar transformation from raw technical/commodity problem to an idiom for social and creative expression- the same progress we have witnessed in computing, cars, organic farming, food/cuisine, and many other technical idioms ultimately rerolled into more anthropological idioms.
We don’t yet know what the desktop pc and internet is for current mainframe energy economy, but it seems very plausible, and quite likely, that there are similar dynamics ahead for energy. Energy, like so much else, seems destined to move away from a centralized, top down, commodity economy, towards a more distributed, bottom up, participatory and expressive economy. Intentionally adding art to this process, understood in the broadest sense as “creative self-expression”, is likely to accelerate and better identify the opportunities and good ahead.
Thus for the Shipyard V2.0, we are going to add to the current creative endeavors and formalize the creative power hacking by recasting the yard as a “Center for Art and Energy”. A facility, information resource and gathering of people engaged broadly in the endeavor of creative power hacking. A place to experiment with power generation and conversion as an idiom and medium of art- in all its social, sensual, conceptual and existential dimensions.
What would power look like if it was art?
The organizational particulars to do this are still rough and forming. But to start, we are creating a new formal entity on the Folger side (south side) of the yard called “ALL Power Labs”. This will be an incubator and enabler for individual scale, DIY, power hacking. It will have both virtual and physical forms. The virtual form will be, in time, the ALL Power Network online database, social network and peer to peer marketplace- the proposal I circulated so some last year. The physical form will be a engineering and fabrication shop for projects and products in this space. Some of the work will have commercial intents. Some will have public engagement and conversational intents. Some will be simply providing space for others interested in power engineering and art to find ready space, tools, knowledge and people with which to work on their projects. All of it will be directed at supporting and encouraging open source, participatory power work.
The Shipyard will continue as the “purely” art leg of this dipole. The existing focus on large scale mechanical, kinetic and electronic art will continue and elaborate going forward. This work will stay loosely on the Murray side (north side) of the lot. But of course, the art work will mix messily with the power work, as it has in fact already been mixing here since nearly the beginning. In many ways this new organization is really just formalizing and naming what emerged here organically. The Shipyard became by default a combined endeavor of art and energy when Berkeley shut off our power 3 months into the original gig, way back in 2001. Maybe I should send them a thank you letter.
For city permitting purposes the Murray side will continue to be named “The Shipyard” and the Folger side will be named the “ALL Power Labs”. This dipole together we might name “Tsapl”. The Shipyard / ALL Power Labs. Or something else. I’m not really sure how to represent the combined thing. Something will emerge that is correct.
Irrespective of what the combined juggernaut is called, its first event will be the as of yet quietly discussed “Escape from Berkeley (by any non-petroleum means necessary)” alt powered vehicles race, from Berkeley to Vegas.
Thoughts, reactions, and ideas encouraged. This is all still forming. And you’re all invited to come form it with us.
jim
