Scruffy hipsters toting six-packs, blinky Web developers arguing the merits of their preferred PDA and an inordinate number of dreadlocked heads packed the gallery beyond capacity to hear three brief, charmingly unpolished lectures.

dorkbot is an informal club of artists, techies and geeks who do "strange things with electricity," according to their motto.

Luke DuBois, a composer and "computational artist," used his application, essentially time-lapse photography for sound, to create a new piece of music out of the 857 songs that have appeared at the top of the Billboard charts since 1958. The result, called "Billboard," is a 37-minute-long drone: each hit song is reduced to its average timbre and key by an algorithm that speeds up the original work without giving it a chipmunk chirpiness.