If New York's annual World Science Festival is, say, a giant multi-disciplinary public lab, Innovation Square is its underground home-built supercollider. For eight hours this Saturday, starting at noon, hackers, scientists, artists, inventors, entrepreneurs and other folks who spend their days poking around possible futures will come together at Brooklyn's NYU Poly MetroTech campus to show off their latest work in a series of interactive demos, games, performances and panels, happily co-curated by Motherboard.Out on the quad, a kind of brain-food barbeque from our friends at Terreform One, Matternet, ITP, and elsewhere will offer up demos in do-gooder drones, alternative energy, and computatational and biological architecture.In an outdoor arcade, the biohackers of Brooklyn's own Genspace will explore paramecea using a game they've devised called "Wet Pong"; the neuroscientist Wendy Suzuki will demonstrate the links she's exploring between memory and exercise, using a video game meant to encourage both. That should be be a nice complement to the infectious in-sync dance-off game YaMove, presented by the NYU Game Innovation Lab. Later on, at 7pm, there'll be a lesson in quantum mechanics, by way of modern dance. The soundtrack for the day will be made out of instruments that aren't sold at Guitar Center: The Blue Man Group's PVC organ, William Close's giant Earth Harp, No Carrier's obsolete electronics, the Electic Method's video remix software, among others.Indoors, there will be demos and panels, and I'm excited to be hosting a few of them. One, at 4 pm, will explore the future of digital currency from an economic, legal and philosophical perspective (Yifu Guo, who, until recently was a student at NYU Poly, and who now manufactures machines for making bitcoin, will be there); in another, at 1 pm, I'll be speaking with Dennis Hong, the electric brain behind Virgina Tech's RoMeLa program, about why we might want robots that are really good at soccer. At 2 pm, I'll talk about drones with Paola Santana of Matternet, Sameer Parekh of Falkor Systems, and Jonathan Askin of Brooklyn Law School.The event is free and open to everyone, human and not. Afterwards, if the weather holds, we'll decamp via free shuttles to Brooklyn Bridge Park, for a chilled-out stargazing party. Meanwhile, that same day, ITP hosts a science hackathon. The rest of the World Science Festival runs until Sunday, featuring people like Brian Greene, Sylvia Earle, Alexandra Horowitz, and even Kareem Abdul-Jabaar, who will appear at a kid-friendly science street fair in Manhattan. You can catch a live stream here.
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