PIFcamp

The Soča River is certainly good at making noise. But what does it take to make it play some tunes?

Approximately one artist-curator (Jani Pirnat), one designer-artist (Tamara Lašič Jurković), a pile of leftover construction materials, a bunch of bouncing ideas, and a pinch of trial and error. Jani and Tamara aren’t musicians, nor are they particularly skilled in physics or mechanics. But they enjoy brainstorming, building things, and testing whether they work. Their vision is to create a musical instrument that would be played autonomously by the river.

One of the most distinctive characteristics of the upper reaches of the Soča River is its fast, powerful current. The goal is to construct a wind instrument that uses water flow to generate the airflow needed to play flutes. For construction, discarded plumbing pipes and tubes will be used (and afterwards carefully removed from the protected natural site). The newly established river pipes duet will be happy to share their ideas and dilemmas with the PIFcamp community – they will host a workshop on making simple overtone flutes from PVC pipes in return for engineering tips and musical tricks.

Spectrum is a Digital Eurorack module for intuitive microtonal sequencing. It bypasses standard MIDI constraints, enabling real-time EDO (Equal Division of the Octave) modulation through a high-precision trackball and mechanical keyswitch interface. The design facilitates neurodiverse melody through organic, improvisational workflows. It features dynamic EDO scaling and a “thumbing” mode (popularized by Toto’s Steve Porcaro) for freeform, syncopated sequencing, drawing on the tactile ergonomics of Oberheim DSX-style hardware (1981). At PIFcamp, the focus will be on refining control algorithms and optimizing the interface for high-density, real-time melodic manipulation.

Omar Mashaal (Australian Tactile Instruments) develops hardware for experimental performance. With 25+ years in software development, live coding and embedded systems, his work centers on microtonality, physical computing, and non-standard tactile interfaces.

BioCyberdeck is a portable art-science mini laboratory for exploring the electrical properties of living organisms. The project draws its idea from the cybernetic culture of DIY cyberdecks – standalone, purpose-built devices designed to perform specific tasks. While cyberdecks in the classical sense were conceived for accessing digital networks and information systems, BioCyberdeck opens an interface to living processes in the biosphere.

At the heart of the system is oyster mushroom mycelium, which grows through a substrate and functions as a living potentiometer within an analog oscillator. Using electrodes and sensors, the device detects changes in the electrical properties of the living system and translates them into sound. The soundscape emerges as a trace of relationships between the organism, moisture, temperature, substrate, materials, and the sensing system. Other organisms can also be connected to the portable system.

The project investigates how living organisms can be understood as active co-creators of technological systems. Rather than optimizing, controlling, or extracting data, BioCyberdeck proposes a different relationship with technology: listening, observing, and making contact with the usually invisible processes unfolding in the living networks around us.

As an open and repairable device, it brings together biology, electronics, art, and field research. Instead of answers, it offers an experience: tuning in to the processes at work in living networks – and in that listening, reconsidering where technology ends and the organism begins.

BioCyberdeck is a project by Nastja Ambrožič and Ana Jerina.

The Energy Scavenger Lab is a hands-on workshop that invites participants to hunt for electricity hidden in everyday environments. Through a series of practical experiments, attendees explore piezoelectric, solar, thermoelectric (Peltier) and radio-frequency energy harvesting techniques, building simple prototypes and testing how much energy can be captured from movement, heat, light and ambient electromagnetic waves.

While the workshop involves some soldering and working with electrical components, no prior experience is required. Participants are encouraged to bring patience, curiosity, and a careful approach to handling hot tools and electronics.

The workshop is led by Lorena Cocora, an artist and programmer with a formal background in computer science and media arts. Alongside her artistic practice, Cocora works as a cultural worker and technical consultant at Marginal, operating at the intersection of art, science, and technology. Her artistic research engages with themes such as permacomputing, eco-feelings, climate and environmental injustice and the impacts of capitalism. The workshop is part of her research conducted within The Urban Green Blueprint, a project financed by AFCN.

Inspired by the poetics of plants and fungi interacting with electricity, Inner Textures explores the threshold between the tactile and the sonic, the material and the immaterial.

In this workshop, you’ll learn to weave on a laser-cut back-strap loom, combining plant-based and animal yarns with conductive fibers to create textiles that respond to touch. Guided by Zoe Romano‘s research at the intersection of craft and interactive technologies, you’ll weave your own piece and discover how micro-fluctuations in conductance can be translated into sound, using only a digital synth on a mobile phone or an analog synth and a speaker. No computers. No screens. Just hands, fiberss and the emergence of new sounds.

The sonic dimension becomes a powerful medium to engage on a deeper, more visceral level, sound resonates with the inner, often unexplored territories of human experience, evoking emotions and responses that visual stimuli alone cannot reach. Your woven piece becomes an instrument, a conversation between maker, material and sound.

The workshops consists of introduction to OBOT collective’s artistic research, a hands-on weaving session, experimentation with conductive fibers, and the jamming moment when textiles interact with synths.

Inner Textures is a project by Zoe Romano, a craftivist and artist whose practices interweave open design, intersectional technologies and social innovation. She studied philosophy at the University of Milan and balances conceptual thinking with concrete experimentation, exploring the poetic and political aspects of making.

A Freak in the Creek by Aleksander Tendjer is a multisensory installation exploring human connection with water through sound and touch. Set around a living river environment, the work invites participants to experience the river physically — through its movements, textures, rhythms, and vibrations.

Using submerged listening devices and wearable tactile elements, the installation transforms underwater river sounds into gentle sensations on the body. As visitors sit or stand beside the water, subtle pulses across the skin create an experience that feels both meditative and uncanny.

By translating environmental sound into touch, A Freak in the Creek creates an immersive space for deep listening and sensory connection with the natural world.

The Self Defense project by Karolina Żyniewicz is inspired by Noah Whiteman’s book Most Delicious Poison: The Story of Nature’s Toxins—From Spices to Vices (as well as other similar publications), which demonstrates how many organisms develop defensive strategies that can be adapted by humans as a broadly understood form of self-defense.
In the face of contemporary global threats, Karolina sees an urgent need to engage in dialogue about defensive practices—both physical and psychological—grounded in knowledge of nature.
Such knowledge, like any other, entails ethical responsibility. As Paracelsus observed: the dose makes the poison.
She is interested in how plants considered poisonous use toxins within their life cycles and interspecies relationships, and how these toxins may be used—or misused—by humans.
Her interests focus on the thresholds and doses that mark the boundary between therapeutic potential and danger, where a plant substance shifts from a protective agent to a deadly tool.

The Self Defense project develops simultaneously on several levels:
1. Work with source materials and consultations with botanists, phytosociologists, and chemists.
2. Workshop-based activities that symbolically refer to the folk tradition of knowledge transmission in rural communities—knowledge once held by our grandmothers and great-grandmothers about the power of plants and other organisms—incorporating embroidery as a craft of quiet resistance (supported by the recollections of women in shelters during wartime).
3. The creation of a performative installation of resistance. This part is inspired by a multisensory experience in a shelter in the town of Kranj, Slovenia, and by a story heard there about how women, through sewing and embroidery, fought fear and tried to maintain a semblance of normality for their children while remaining in the shelter, experiencing air raids and bombings with their entire bodies. Creating the installation requires the use of sounds from the shelter as well as vibrations. An essential element of the installation is also an alarm instrument based on measuring threshold doses of a given plant-derived substance (dose per kilogram of body weight). The first experiments with solutions intended for use in the installation took place during the AreHolland residency in Enschede.

Project is supported by the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.