I just finished teaching a two week workshop exploring space using VPT and arduino.
I kept a project blog, romlab2012, which might have a few useful tips for the integration of VPT and arduino. It will be updated with a bit more documentation from the different projects in the near future.
In beginning of April IMAL hosted an openLAB workshop called “Projections on forms and spaces”.
The workshop was led by me and was mainly based on using VPT. We selected 7 projects to be realised during one week development at IMAL, and the documentation is now available from IMAL.
It was an intense and interesting week, and interesting to see VPT explored for new uses in installation and performances. A new development for me was to introduce a simple video and audio trigger setup (available in the xtension section), which allowed for some audience interaction, as well as use of the serial module for controlling lights inside sculptures.
Last week the symposium Oslo Lux took place at the School of Architecture and Design in Oslo, organized by Anthony Rowe and Ståle Stenslie.
It was a one day event with speakers from art, architecture and design discussing uses of light in different projects. I spoke at the seminar, created a snow projection and gave a 2 days VPT workshop so it was a very intense but interesting week.
The keynote speakers were AntiVJ and UVA. The list of speakers also included Timo Arnall who had a very interesting talk on light painting, presenting work of people which I felt I should have know about already (Gjon Mili, Michael Weseley, Eric Staller). His second topic about visualizing the RFID and wifi networks range was also interesting. In fact the mix of speakers and topics made the day go by really fast!
I went to a separate event at Atelier Nord earlier in the week where Joanie and Simon from AntiVJ gave a 2 hour enthusiastic talk about their work. They were very excited about real-time software, and it reminded me a bit of the same energy which I experienced ten years ago with realtime video software like Imagine, nato and jitter.
White on Light video:
I was part of the exhibition and decided to do an outdoor snow projection. Unlike my previous attempts on working with snow I decided to not try to build anything with the snow, but instead cut out a piece of snow and work with the top curvy surfaces and the edges. It seems I am unable to make anything but slow meditative pieces nowadays, but the result wasn´t that bad, really.
More images from the projection at flickr.
The two day VPT workshop at Atelier Nord was fun, a very focused and eager-to-learn group, and several of the participants have already started doing their own projects with the software, which is exciting.
Well, it´s no secret that a shiny new version of VPT is just around the corner.
The first people who get to try this version are the participants of the upcoming VPT workshop in Bergen, hosted by BEK.
The workshop takes place December 6th-9th.
Sign-up information.
As part of the Lux festival in Oslo I will give a workshop hosted by Atelier Nord January 22nd-23rd 2011.
Sign-up information.
In april 2011 IMAL in Brussels will host another workshop. Sign-up information will come later.
Maxwell city day 2-3 8, originally uploaded by hc gilje.
As I promised a year ago in the post about the Maxwell city workshop, I edited together a track using material from all the participants of the workshop into a 20 minutes soundtrack, which was originally made for a radio broadcast for the ctrl_alt_del sound art festival in 2007.
So, finally available, the maxwell city soundtrack.
Last week I was invited to the Medialab Prado in Madrid to give both a short workshop and a presentation as part of the light,space perception sessions. The energy at the medialab was amazing, a lot of projects being worked on in parallell, and it was great to see a medialab focused on producing works, not making festivals or big exhibitions. Check out their interactivos program, a intensive two week period for developing a selected group of works, a collaboration between the artists, the workshop teachers and other collaborators who want to contribute.
I got a chance to continue working on my videoprojection tool, which is a multi-videoplane software for masking video projections and position layers on specific objects and surfaces. You can find all the information,documentation and software (osx and win xp+vista) here.
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.
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!
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: 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.
Conversations with spaces 