Dorkbot, a group of "people doing strange things with electricity" that meets in various cities worldwide, was profiled in this recent New Yorker story:
Dorkbot was founded by a young man named Douglas Repetto, who teaches computer music at Columbia. "The idea of dorkbot was to reach people who had nowhere to talk about these projects," Repetto says. "Some might appear in a gallery, perhaps, but many are too odd, or they're unfinished, or it's not even clear what they are." Dorkbot presentations typically feature novel ways of using electrical devices, especially uses that don't require much money. "Dorkbot is about what you can do on the cheap in a back room somewhere," he says. The name encourages humility.