What is the sound of nettles cooking (or growing)?

Edible wild plants expert Dario Cortese presents his “food hacking” node!

Dario (right) is playing some Breton tunes to Good King Henry (not seen, as the plants with this name grow below the dancer).
As edible wild plants are three to four times stronger food (especially mineralwise) than cultivated ones, it will be an interesting point to get them “voice” their power via any possible channel. This is but only one of the possibilities to include wild edibles into hacking activities in Trenta valley, not to mention that collecting and using these foods is hacking business by itself, as it goes straight to the core of food: what did we eat 10.000 years ago? Why shouldn’t we have a direct access to food, otherwise dominated by hipersupemegamarkets, and, yes, also your own garden (most of the weeds are edible and more nutritious than cultivated vegetables).
And also, how do the nettle’s stings look like from a very close distance? Interestingly enough, they also contain serotonine and acetilholine, two powerful neurotransmitters.
Hunger aside, there will also be some very straight presentations of wild edibles in the surroundings of Soča village, that means how to recognize and use them.

By the way, more than 2000 species (out of 3500+) of wild plants in Slovenia can be used as food.

Wild appetite!

What about PIFcamp Reactive Network?

Computer art node holder and ultimate open source & free software geek Luka Frelih presents the 7th project of the summer camp, named PIFcamp Reactive Network.

PIFcamp Reactive Network will take on signals from the real world environment of the PIFcamp and its participants, react to them trough live-coded scripts and feed them back to the camp trough screens and kinetic sculptures. The physical input and output devices speaking the OSC protocol will connect trough Noise Make-up Language (NML), a web livecoding bridge, and form a living, pulsating and growing network inhabiting the camp site, its computers and browsers, not to mention the minds and bodies of campers.

We will invent and make input and output modules based on ideas from kinetic sculpture, DIY and kids robotics, modular synthesizers and the beautiful natural surroundings to combine humble potentiometers, servo motors and microcontrollers, glue and sticks into abstract expression carriers capable of transforming gestures into numbers and back again. We will also bring along and repurpose the huge 19-pad stomp board from Sounds of Ljubljana which will surely add to the fun of finding the pattern that will emerge from connecting these experiments with the noise emanating from other projects at PIFcamp.

PIFcamp is coming!

PIFcamp is a 7-day nomad maker-base set in the Slovenian nature, where art, technology and knowledge meet. During hands-on workshops, presentations, field trips, laboratory research and with the help from experienced local and international guests from different fields, the participants will actively take part in the exploration and representation of climate, economic, ecological, technological, social, political, cultural, artistic and geopolitical changes, and tensions of past, present and future Europe. In DIY, DIWO and DITO manner!