Turning Bits into Atoms

Object #1 - 039 Final product [s], originally uploaded by watz.

Marius Watz recently held a two week workshop as part of Club Transmediale this year: Generator 2.0 X Beyond the Screen.

“Digital fabrication (also known as “fabbing”) represents the next step in the digital revolution. After years of virtualization, with machines and atoms being replaced by bits and software, we are coming full circle. Digital technologies like rapid prototyping, laser cutting and CNC milling now produce atoms from bits, eliminating many of the limitations of industrial production processes. Once prohibitively expensive, such technologies are becoming increasingly accessible, pointing to a future where mass customization and manufacturing-on-demand may be real alternatives to mass production.”

The invited artists had some prior experience with fabbing, and from looking at the images from the workshop I wish I could have seen the resulting exhibition at [DAM] Berlin.

..and as usual a more in-depth article at WMMA.

Related:

When I visited f0am in Brussels in october they were busy constructing a reprap, a DIY rapid prototyping printer, and their ultimate goal is to use it to make food.

Connect the dots

mouselab2.jpg, originally uploaded by hc gilje.

I have been very busy preparing and giving a 2 week physical computing workshop at The Academy of Fine Arts in Bergen, “Connect the dots”. It has its own blog, with lots of useful info related to arduino, mice etc. (look for resources category). There are also images available from the workshop.
The aim was to introduce to a mixed group of students the basic concepts of physical computing, and how to to create relations between objects,spaces,actions and people, so it was both a hands on workshop with arduino (analog in/out, digital in/out, serial communication with computer), different sensors, transistors and relays controlling 12 and 220 volt appliances, discussion and presentation of other artists´ work, and the production of a one day exhibition including a listening post, a mouse radio, a paper burning machine, a weather machine and a callstation (where the arduino picks up the phone when you called a specific number ++). Read all about it in the connect the dots blog!

Results of video for stage workshop

khio workshop 09, originally uploaded by hc gilje.

I taught a one week workshop for the director-,choreography-, and scenography students at the National Academy of the Arts in Oslo last week.
My approach was to develop tools in the form of small software applications which made it very easy for the students to immediately start exploring ways of using video in a space.
We also tested out many different projection surfaces, privalite, dmx-controlled shutters, physical masks.

You can see a slideshow of some of the results here.

And even better, you can check out two of the applications I made (built using maxmsp and jitter), for both osX and windows. One is a simple capture program for recording either live stream, animation or recorded footage already on the camera, to your harddrive.
The other is a tool for positioning and scaling 3 planes of video, creating presets of the scenes you create and then make transitions between the scenes.

Maxwell city finished

Maxwell city: sniffer girl, originally uploaded by hc gilje.

Five intensive days with the Maxwell City Workshop at Atelier Nord is over, you can get some impressions here, as well as in Sophia´s blog, and a slideshow of images from my flickr site. There will most likely be a 20 minute radio program based on the recorded sounds later.

We mainly used two types of EM sniffers in the workshop, one antennae based, from this kit, and a coil based one, made by Martin Howse.

I have already jumped into another workshop, exploring video for stage, together with the director-, choreography- and scenography students at the National Academy of the Arts in Oslo.
I look at it as a collaboration: I propose several tools I have constructed,we work with them and I modify them according to the feedback from the workshop. This will be made publicly available later.

Maxwell city

electromagnetic pollution, originally uploaded by schuttmasse.

At the end of May I will be part of the Maxwell city workshop at Atelier Nord, “A workshop proposing an artistic investigation into electromagnetic substance within the city of Oslo and its surroundings.”

Amanda Steggell has created a blog related to the workshop.

Liquid Space workshop at Club Transmediale07 in Berlin

I was participating in the LiquidSpace workshop organised by the artist-architecture group lab[au] from Brussels. They are developing a software for creating 3d environments to experience image and sound in immersive installation or performance setups. In Berlin this meant a cubic setup of 4 screens and 4 speakers with the audience either on the inside or the outside. I was interested in it in relation to my own research in creating and transforming spaces with image and sound, and the workshop clarified a few differences between lab[au]´s approach and mine. Their focus is creating a virtual 3d audiovisual space for the audience to immerse into. I am more interested in using physical sound positions instead of surround sound, and projecting on the structures of the physical space itself instead of having them images floating in simulated 3d space.

The software for creating the environment is still under development, but I was especially impressed by the sound possibilities of the system.

Here is a short excerpt from some of the results from the workshop.

arduino workshop

I had the opportunity to follow an Arduino workshop at the interaction design department at AHO (The Architecture School in Oslo). The workshop was led by Tom Igoe (co-author of Physical Computing), and covered the Arduino microcontroller, the Xbee wireless modules, bluesmirf bluetooth modules, small RFID readers, communication between pc and arduino using processing or max, and much more.