Tuesday; Alternative social media, memes, tattoo studio and more…

Tuesday morning was busy. The group of music and technology enthusiasts who formed a community project focused on the development of a multi-sensorial synthesizer called (for now) OctoSense continued their work under the guidance of Václav Peloušek (Bastl Instruments). The development of an interface that will enable the simultaneous use of different sensors to synthesize sound and control other devices started already in Ljubljana and continues now at PIFcamp. 

By now, most of the OctoSense prototypes had been built and the group started the testing process. Julijan and Jakob wrote the basic firmware to test the interface elements, the buttons and LEDs, but they still need to test the analog circuits and inputs just to see what of the hardware works and what doesn’t, says Václav. The idea is that this device will be able to do calibration, data extraction and mapping. But how will this device differ from what is already available out there on the “market”? “Normally you write a custom piece of code for all these parts, you connect the sensor to an Arduino, you hardcode a piece of code for the calibration, if you need some data extraction you keep wrestling with that for another day and then you somehow map and hardcode it… so, it is a lengthy process that requires a lot of programming”, explains Václav. But with the Octosense interface, you will be able to do all of this in just a couple of minutes and also make adjustments in the process, during a performance for example. 

However, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done before the Octosense can be released as a working product.  At the end of the week, the calibration part will hopefully be complete and in September, when Vaclav returns to Ljubljana for the second part of his residency with Projekt Atol and Osmo/za, the group will focus on the data extraction and mapping. If everything goes according to plan, the user will be able to easily do all these things with just a few button clicks. What the team thus also needs to develop is the user interface for all these parts. 

In the late morning, Joreg invited everybody to the main tent to talk about alternative social media: despite the tropical heat – caused by the “greenhouse effect” of the tent under midday’s sun – many decided to attend the workshop.

While presenting the existing alternatives to mainstream social media, many important concepts were touched: closed systems vs open ones that allow interoperability, the role of corporations and the dilemma of the active user vs the passive consumer…

The workshop then focused on Mastodon, one of the most successful social media alternatives, and on the ActivityPub protocol and the connected Fediverse, the ensemble of interconnected servers used for web publishing, and gave rise to a long, wide, participated and interesting debate, touching on many important topics, from active usage of technology in general to censorship on the internet.

After lunch Maggie Kane led a workshop focused on memes as part of her on-going DIY meme project where atendees can design functional circuits that look like popular memes & etch their designs onto copper PCB boards.

Meanwhile the pop-up tattoo studio was har at work under the cool shade of a nearby tree. A project by Leoni Voegelini, Rodolfo Costa Castro, Julian Jungel and Hannah Perner-Wilson, offers the PIFcamp participants a moment of rest and relaxation while they temporarily tattoo them with a design that captures each participant’s current project.

During the night, under the incredible starry sky of the Soča valley, three different situations melted together to form a unique experience for the night crowd: the classic bonfire, that reunited those participants seeking a bit of warmth, the amazing laser projections made by Bernhard directly on the trees in the surrounding woods and – once again – a long, enjoyable and participated jam session.

Many persisted until late, not afraid of the early morning mountain walk (and of the consequent morning mountain hangover) that was waiting for them the following day.

Let the brewing start…

On the first working day, PIF’s backyard was buzzing with excitement already at breakfast time. But while everyone else was still getting ready for the activities ahead, the cooks Klemen and Miha proudly presented their first creation.

The beer brewing workshop, held by Rob in Neža’s barn was one of the first events of the day on Monday. By filling, filtering and explaining all possible variables and hacks, Rob showed all the people present how to make their own beer at home, according to each one’s individual taste.

A Pale Ale takes about one month from grain to glass, but the PIFcamp-goers will attempt to create a beer in five days! The smell of the boiling mixture, expanding to the grass field above where Luka’s dome was being built, together with a slight general inebriation due to the beer tasting available for the participants, made this workshop a useful sharing moment, and a typical mitteleuropean summer breakfast experience.

On the other side of the camp, in the tent, a Feminist hack acupuncture workshop was taking place. Led by Stephanie Wuschitz, the participants focused on building a device to sonify your most active acupuncture spots on the surface of your skin and also connect the input from your acupuncture points to Pure Data. 

Stephanie Wuschitz, whose attendance at PIFcamp is supported by Österreichisches Kulturforum Ljubljana (many thanks!), works at the intersection of art, research and technology, with a particular focus on feminism, open source technology and peer production. She is one of the core members of  Mz* Baltazar’s Lab, a collective and feminist hackerspace based in Vienna. 

The workshop used fair trade, self-made and recycled electronic parts and explored the capacitive quality and resistance of our own body.

After lunch, a well-attended introduction into designing PCBs (printed circuit boards) with open-source software KiCad led by Klemens Kohlweis kicked off the workshop that will continue during the week. On Monday, the group talked about challenges and possibilities of the design and manufacturing process, but in the days to come they will focus on drawing their own functional and/or beautiful circuit boards – and hopefully even get them manufactured by the end of the PIFcamp week.

Just before dinner a group of fungi friends gathered for the first story-telling and speculation session of the Internet of Fungi project by Rosi Grillmair. Rosi proposed this speculative storytelling project to imagine an alternative internet network, based on fungal systems. The main question is how we could benefit from and nurture these systems to send messages via these already existing paths. Maybe, we could invite the networks to grow close to human communities and create a data highway of nutrients and information? Which communication protocols are used in fungi networks? What does the fungal network need to flourish?

After dinner, multiple activities were happening around the camp. At the basketball field behind the school, a Catwalk dance class led by Janne Kummer offered some quality and fun evening exercise. Luka the firestarter took care of the first bonfire of this year’s PIFcamp, while in the tent Polona led the by now traditional “Losing at Tarok with Polona” workshop session. 

PIFcamp crowd is back and ready to create DIYstractiON!

After last year’s Covid-resilient pocket edition PIFcamp is back in its full glory! A crowd of sixty familiar and new faces of artists, hackers, musicians, engineers, memsters and their inhuman friends gathered at the now traditional location in the Soča Valley to launch the seventh edition of PIFcamp, a one-week production lab that combines art, technology, creativity and open-source knowledge.

After everybody settled in at the camp’s backyard Tina and Uroš explained the do’s and don’ts. What followed were participants’ introductions which promised a varied week full of practical workshops, presentations, field trips, laboratory research, jam sessions and – which is never lacking at PIF – fun.

We are looking forward to projects and workshops searching for “mechanical nature”, collecting “micro stories” about fungi, using open source technologies for beer brewing, developing interfaces for simultaneous use of different sensors to synthesise sound and control other devices, exploring new 360 video filming techniques, speculating about “fungi internet”, developing experimental low cost motion “glove” controller and DIY microbial fuel cells,… if we mention only some of them. 

It seems that the keywords of this year’s PIFcamp edition are #mud and #funghi. We have yet to witness what will grow out of this combination, but one thing is certain – if nothing else it might provide fertile ground for quality pifmeme content. The Soča Memelords are already hard at work. Expect more reports in the future PIFlogs. 

After dinner, Bernhard took out an MB’s Vectrex, a vintage gaming console, built in 1983. Once the console was switched on, people started gathering around it, attracted to it like a cat to a laser point, or like mice to the sound of a flute. Many of the participants played at least one game with the Asteroid-inspired Mine Storm video game, and for the whole evening, the console was never left unattended.

Soon, the vintage space sound effects coming from the game got mixed with the sounds and the notes coming from Mitja and Vaclav’s synths.

After a while, the Vectrex was added to the jam session, functioning as an oscilloscope to render the sound waves coming from the synths.

This added a dreamy hypnotic visual tone to the chilly melodic style of the jam, making it continue well into the night, for the amusement of the few night owls that were still awake, bringing the first day of PIFcamp to a conclusion.

Fungi Internet – Mycorrhizal Communication Infrastructure

Wouldn’t it be amazing if we did not have to build a cable network for The Internet but could just dock onto existing naturally grown ones?

There are dense mycorrhizal (fungi) networks in the forests that live in symbiosis with plants, receiving carbohydrates from photosynthesis and therefor providing the plants with nutrients from the soil.
But more importantly for this project: They provide a nutrient exchange system between the plants and communication channels that function by chemical and electric signalling.

Let´s compare systems on different scales and built on different matter that work with electrical and/or chemical signalling:
The first that come to mind are brains, thunderstorms, electricity networks like computers or world wide communication infrastructure.

While the weather with its electrical charge and discharge as well as brains and mycorrhizal networks exist naturally, we build our digital communication system from glass fibres and cooled server farms.

I want to propose the idea to benefit from and nurture existing fungal systems and try to send messages via these already existing paths, maybe invite the networks to grow close to human communities and create a data highway of nutrients and information.

This is a speculative storytelling project – very welcome to lead to scientific research and connect already existing studies to it, but most importantly I want to spin ideas.

Some questions to start with:

– which communication protocols are used in fungi networks and what is their message transfer speed?
– how does the symbiosis between fungi and plants work, how can it be abused?
– what does the fungal network need to flourish?
– simple (theoretical) experiments of sending a signal through a fungal network
– looking for benefits for the environment and the human need for a functioning communication infrastructure

The first story-telling and speculation session at PIFcamp will be on Monday, August 9th at 6pm.

Fungi Internet is a project by Rosi Grillmair.

Wavey Wind, The Modul-air Mitt

Using an ESP32 microcontroller with wifi and bluetooth capability, a gyroscope/accelerometer module and keyboards switches, Jurij Podgoršek will be building an experimental low cost motion “glove” controller with a button for each finger.

The idea stems from an earlier abstract visualisation project which was intended to visualise music. After building the initial prototype and hooking it up with a touch user interface of sliders that modulate the visuals, the author asked himself – why should I make the program interpret music? We already do that when we listen and (can) react by dancing; using a motion sensor, the dancing can be “amplified” by turning bodily motions into shapes and colours projected on a surface.

Using the motion mitt, the operator of visuals doesn’t have to get locked into a clumsy little touchscreen but can immerse in the experience of sound and video while co-creating it. A workshop will be held to build a number of gloves that can connect in an ad-hoc network, so that group of people could collaborate with them.

The glove(s) will send events via the open sound control protocol, opening the possibility to using using them for audio synthesis/modulation, or maybe even as a general interface.

“What Can a Body Do?”

Open hardware with open software – an introduction into designing PCBs with KiCad

Electronic devices are all around us. Whether it’s your washing machine or the device you’re reading this text on – they all have one thing in common: they contain printed circuit boards. PCBs are usually a tasty sandwich of an insulating material and one or multiple layers of thin copper used to connect electronic components and keep them mechanically fixed.

Whether you want to etch them yourself with some acid in your bathroom or you have them professionally made in a factory – learning how to design them is a super useful skill to have for anybody interested in building electronics (and potentially even for other, more unorthodox uses…).

At this years PIFcamp Klemens Kohlweis will hold a workshop on how to design your own PCBs using the (awesome!) open source software KiCad. Starting early in the week we will talk about challenges and possibilities of the design and manufacturing process, then go on to drawing our own functional and/or beautiful circuit-boards – and hopefully even get them manufactured in the same week!

PIFcamp Community Harvest

During this PIFcamp Community Harvest, media art historian Heather Contant solicits, records, digitizes, collects, and redistributes past and present memories and materials related to PIFcamp: its participants and its organizers Ljudmila, Projekt Atol, and Kersnikova’s Rampa Lab and BioTehna. The aim of this Community Harvest is to simultaneously illuminate the significance, vibrancy, and unique perspectives of the creators, collectives and practices emerging from this region and to keep the community flourishing, by providing virtual and physical forums, in which community members can share their memories and artefacts, reconnect with one another, and discuss their current and future work.

The metaphorical ‘fruit’ of this harvest will be made accessible to all via the PIFcamp website, providing a database for future community members and historians. Heather will also use this material—these signals of the past in the present—to create an improvisational performance, inspired by Signal-Sever!Scatter!, the Wardenclyffe Situations (collective performances by Marko Peljhan and Projekt Atol from the 1990s and 2000s). During this performance, individuals will be free to reconfigure the raw ingredients collected during the harvest to produce a multi-media feast to inspire and hopefully feed the community for future generations. 

IF YOU OR ANY OF YOUR LOVED ONES HAVE MEMORIES OR MATERIALS RELATED TO PIFCAMP OR ITS ORGANIZING BODIES: LJUDMILA, PROJEKT ATOL, OR KERSNIKOVA – RAMPA LAB & BIOTEHNA, WE ARE STANDING BY! CONTACT HEATHER AT this.is.editor@gmail.com TO PARTICIPATE IN HARVEST FESTIVITIES NOW! 

OctoSens

The OctoSens is a community project formed by a group of music and technology enthusiasts who, under the guidance of Vaclav Peloušek (Bastl Instruments), are combining different perspectives while developing an interface that will enable the simultaneous use of different sensors to synthesise sound and control other devices.

OctoSens

Development of a multi-sensorial synthesizer is a part of Projekt Atol and konS platform AIR programme.

Sensors and music

Musicians are always searching for new ways of creating and modifying sound. The development of new technologies and their accessibility have propelled and enabled use of sensors in sound design. However, the great variety of different sensors and lack of practical interfaces often requires a grasp on advanced technological knowledge or compels the artists to buy expensive specialised equipment; both requirements can hinder the creative process.

We decided to find solutions to this problem which would allow artists to use a great number of different sensors in an easy and intuitive way in order to modify sound. Under the guidance of Vaclav Peloušek (Bastl instruments) we have collectively designed a device and named it OctoSens.

What is OctoSens?

Having 4 analog and two digital inputs for external sensors, as well as two touchpads, the OctoSens offers 8 different ways of altering the desired parameters of sound. A built-in microphone, two tactile sensors and a digital synthesizer integrated in the microcontroller enable us to use OctoSens individually without external sensors and other instruments. We can simply connect the OctoSens to a speaker and start creating. We can use the information detected by the sensors to control volume, pitch, filter frequency and other parameters of the integrated digital synthesizer. Artists who already have other instruments, synthesizers and effects could use the OctoSens to connect to their existing gear and multiply its functionality: OctoSens can output different Cv/gate signals and create MIDI information, which can be used to control multiple external devices simultaneously. OctoSens will conform to Eurorack format so that synth-enthusiasts could incorporate it into their Eurorack setup, however, an individual enclosure for those who prefer to use it as a stand-alone device, will be available as well. It will be compatible with the popular microcontrollers Arduino micro and Teensy 3.2 which means that it will be accessible to a wide circle of DIY enthusiasts to further increase its functionality with their own code.

Practical example of the use of OctoSens

So, would you like to adjust the tempo of the song to fit your heartbeat, adapt the volume according to light and control the pitch with the movement of your body? All you have to do, is connect a heart-beat sensor and a light sensor to the analog inputs of the OctoSens and a gyroscope to one of the digital inputs. By pressing the multifunction buttons, we can map the connected sensors to the desired parameters of the integrated synth and use the rotary knobs to calibrate the sensors to a level, ideal for modulating the sound in a musical way.

The objective of the OctoSens project

OctoSens will be an innovative and a competitive product on the quickly evolving market of electronic instruments. At the same time, it will exist in the form of a DIY workshop that will enable its participants to learn exactly how the sensors work and become more knowledgeable on sound synthesis as well as the basics of electronics.

The goal of this project is not solely the process of product development and sale, but it is foremost an effort of creating a community that brings together different generations, providing an interdisciplinary environment that offers an invaluable exchange of knowledge between professional engineers, artists, students of different fields and audio-electronics enthusiasts.

Mechanical Nature

Anna Carreras, Marta Verde and Mónica Rikić want to develop an artistic intervention or interactive device, mixing code, electronics, visuals and nature. In their own separate artistic practice they mainly work with randomness, complexity and robotics. They are planning on putting all their expertise together and have fun creating a new artistic collaboration from scratch on site.

Conceptually, their proposal seeks the nature of machines from speculative fiction. Through the prototyping of autonomous micro systems, they want to talk about the freedom of machines and the search for their own essence far from human projection, technological development and its obsession on imposing an artificial intelligence to it, understanding AI as the search of an improved human copy.

To search for this “Mechanical Nature”, they want to use their personal research on different non-human complex systems: how they are generated, organised, regulated, and hierarchised. Also, experiment with the different possibilities of the simple movements of the micro robots made by motors and other small electronic components, individually and as a group. They will try to create behaviour patterns for these self-sufficient mechanical organisms inspired by insects, plants, wind, clouds, water, any non-human data we can get inspired from, and let them flow. They also intend to use different materials found in nature to combine them with the small electronic components and microcontrollers and generate these ecosystems.

The process of creating them would be as follows:
– Selection and observation of a specific aspect of nature
– Experimentation of the patterns regarding the mechanical application of them
– Experimentation with natural materials in conjunction with technological ones
– Flow of matter and energy within the ecosystem: how some beings depend on each other within that world, how they relate and communicate with each other and with the environment.

The elements and materials they will use to create ecosystems will be: low voltage micro motors, small sensors and actuators (such as LEDs, mp3 players, photoresistors, electromagnets), organic materials (like woods, leaves, moss, stones, water – in different forms- , flowers, seeds).

Micro – Stories

Micro – Stories is an Art & Fungi Project by Irina Antonets.

How do mushrooms speak through/interact/play with us?
Since my childhood, I’ve been fascinated by bizarre and beautiful world of fungi. The more I learn about them, the more obsessed I get! I’m collecting and analysing mushroom stories from all around the world, and then planning to create series of artworks based on those micro-stories AND microscopic research that I’m going to be conducting while in the camp.
Each story is unique and individual, each of us perceives fungi through our own personal perspective. At the same time, the more stories I receive the more I see how all of them are creating one sophisticated and fascinating structure which reminds me of mycelium connections under the ground.
Feel free to join me, collect, and take a closer look at fungi. Or maybe you would like to share your fungi story with me? You’re pretty free to say what you want or what comes to your mind about mushrooms but in case you need a little guidance here are the questions you might want to answer:

  • Why do you love fungi? How did they influence you?
  • How mushrooms are perceived in your country/culture?
  • What was your first encounter with fungi?
  • What can we learn from mushrooms?
  • What’s the most fascinating thing about fungi?