Community archiving of Tuesday at PIFcamp //PIFlog, Day 3

The third day of PIFcamp started early for some, with a hike to Planina Lamovje, led by Neža. Most of the participants continued working on their projects immediately after breakfast – we will publish a report on their progress in the next few days, but this time we just give you a quick overview of Tuesday’s events. This is a community report, as the schedule of activities is becoming more and more concentrated day by day, following the usual formula.

After breakfast, Theun Karelse presented a prototype of a device that aims to give listeners a physical experience of animal calls. The device, consisting of a modified Bluetooth speaker, acts as an inducer of animal sound into the human body. Theun used the sounds of a bee and a grizzly for the demonstration. Participants were able to test the device on their own bodies and noticed that the most immersive experience is created when the device is pressed against the chest – the chest cavity is large enough for the vibrations to resonate well, and the effect of the sound coming from inside the body is the most intense. As reported by Tjaša.

This was followed by a photogrammetry workshop with Žiga Pavlovič (member of the PIFproject reDigital team), visited by our special reporter Dunia. First, participants downloaded the Polycam app, which is optimized for 3D scanning of objects with a phone. Žiga then presented examples of his scans and explained the basics of 3D scanning and modeling in the open source environment Blender. After a short introduction, the participants tried out photogrammetry in practice. They tested two different ways of scanning objects and learned from mistakes. The first way, where the object is moving and the camera is static, did not work – for example, when scanning a participant, a blurry ghost appeared on Dunia’s screen. The second way, in which we reverse the logic (static object, moving camera) proved to be correct and the scan took the image of Miha. To finish the workshop, participants simply downloaded the files in the desired format to their phones and opened them in the 3D environment of their choice.

After lunch, the live coders were at it again. They were gathered under the tent by Niklas Reppel, one of the members of the Toplap Barcelona community, who presented Mégra, his programming language for live music encoding. We asked Niklas about the peculiarities of Mégra and what drove him to create his own programming language. “Most live music encoding languages are based on repetitive functions, but I prefer randomness. At the same time, after the frustrating experience of failed installations of other environments, such as SuperCollider, I wanted to make a program for which the user only needs one file. Mégra is quite self-contained, as it is not based on an existing language. I also see the advantage of creating my own language in that I can play around with putting fun words into the syntax.”

At 4.20 pm, a colorful group of participants gathered under the pagoda for Maggie Kane‘s Fuck Instagram workshop, where, after the obligatory rant, they listened and joined in the reflections on social networks and websites as archives. “Trying to create the ideal website that serves as an archive of current and past projects you do, can be extremely difficult, you always want it to be better.” The decision to go for analog archiving, therefore, came quite naturally – the participants were able to see different approaches to archiving the processes and origins of artworks/projects through the examples of booklets. In the end, participants were invited to reflect and contribute ideas for community archiving of the projects produced at PIFcamp. Impressions summarised by Rea.

Before dinner, some of the participants moved under the tree canopy for the Becca Rose Potato Workshop. An anonymous field mouse attended the workshop and sent us their report. “We were invited to sit under the canopy of a tree that I had never sat under before because it is hidden behind a large tent. We all sat on the ground there and mixed into five groups to start. We thought about potatoes and computers, about which we then wrote two poems per group, which we then read out in front of the rest of the group. We were very kind to computers in our poems, which may be a rarity in the general public, but yes, we are at PIF and … As a group, we also seem to be big potato lovers, as after reading our poems we exchanged many more stories and anecdotes related to his particular vegetable. The main part of the workshop followed, where we turned the potato into a battery and used it to power the synthesizer and the LED lights.”

All the potatoes made the participants hungry, but fortunately, when they arrived on the terrace, dinner was waiting for them with a very special dessert, a birthday strawberry cake for Maggie – happy birthday!

The evening started with a live coding event – From Scratch, where coders, as well as some complete beginners from Monday’s workshops, tried their hand at coding music and visuals. According to the organizers of such events, the PIF From Scratch lineup was the largest ever! Another PIFsuccess! You will be able to read a report from the event in the next few days when we will premiere a documentary about the live coding community on PIFlog. Don’t miss it!

PIFcamp started and the first day went by in the blink of an eye!

The 8th edition of PIFcamp will take us into the world of live-coding, lasers, prototyping, noise, more or less rhythmic sounds, community projects, and the endless possibilities of exploration.

More than sixty participants have made their way to Soca. The day started with a lot of work, setting up tables, setting up the tent, and arranging the internet connection, cables and other details. The kitchen was quite lively, the cooks and little helpers prepared a delicious leek-chickpea soup, for all the hungry and tired. After a new type of welcoming at the entrance – a quick antigen test, and very fortunately, for once, we were all for sure on the negative side of the scale, the traditional introductory part began.

Potato Computer Club

Over the past year, Becca Rose has been exploring computers with potatoes and found that many wonderful stories emerge in the process. Almost everyone has a potato story and spuds have a wondering way of connecting people and making the seemingly complex or hardness of talking about computation disappear.

As pedagogical apparatus, potatoes bring many modes of being and thinking into spaces of computing through their stupidity, questioning of computing mastery, the activation of collective storytelling, and forgetting of traditional ways of doing computing. Join the Potato Computer Club and learn about different technologies, tools, and practices… Becca is planning on making some logic gates, speakers, and maybe some kind of potato heads,.. do you already know what kind of potato computers can we make atc PIF???

eMotion bubble

Raising emotional awareness and improving emotional intelligence.

In many social situations, it is necessary to hide our emotions – take for example, that you dislike your boss. Just because you don’t like him doesn’t mean you can openly express your feelings, because that would leave you jobless. In this kind of situation, suppressing our emotional expression is beneficial to us. Decreasing our outward expression of felt emotions is called ‘emotion suppression’, and many people are very good at it.

Research has shown that although emotional suppression decreases outward signs of emotion, it does not actually lower emotional experience of the person. Hiding one’s feelings doesn’t actually make them go away. Emotional suppression increases the physical symptoms experienced, such as sweating or increased heart rate. Sadly, it also has negative effects on cognitive functioning. Anything which is suppressed for long goes to the unconscious mind, which eventually gets its release through undesirable behaviors unconsciously. Emotions serve as a useful indicator as well as a warning signal, indicating how we are progressing through life at any given time. When we experience an emotion, it means our brain has identified a change in the environment that is relevant to us- our health, objectives, or concerns. It brings those things to our attention which emphasizes us to express.

Emotions are what gives communication life, so inclusion and display of emotions are considered important to maintain an effective social communication.  We express emotions with our bodies, intentionally or unintentionally, with various face expressions, gestures, vocal tones and bodily movements. But manifestations of our emotional states occur not only with the observable bodily
changes such as trembling hands, burning cheeks etc., but also with unobservable reactions such as
racing hearts, tightness in chest, raised blood pressure etc.

In addition to the hard-to-control physiological responses, people use all sort of controllable elements of appearance, such as garments, jewelry, and accessories to express themselves. Self-built physical appearance helps to express moods and emotions (in a socially acceptable way). The clothes or the accessories people wear, make statements and express something about themselves, they reveal their choices and emphasize their identity and personality through display of clothes. People interpret these visual statements as they want, but we can always redefine our appearance with the way we dress and with the expressive abilities of our bodies.

One way to express ourselves in contemporary, fast pace, networked and wireless society, is via wearable technologies. With capabilities of available technology, customization and user–centered approaches transferred to clothing design, we are able to create interactive systems that allow users to define their final appearance, with better possibilities for self-expression and interfaces involvement in electronic networks.

Nastja Ambrožič will design and construct a wearable prototype where LED are incorporated into fabrics and clothes to display emotions and personality of the wearer. Her starting point will be a DIY heart rate sensor, which will be incorporated on the wearer’s body and connected with wires on a sphere-like structure dress, called ‘eMotion bubble’, which will show changes in the person’s emotional states (changes in heartbeat).

Entangled perception

»If the word cyborg – cybernetic organism – describes a fusion between a living organism and a piece of technology, then we, like all other life-forms are symborgs, or symbiotic organisms.« Enhancing sym-cy- orgian aspects of existence, Efe Di will be developing a wearable »sensory organ« containing intimate co-habitation between mycelium, electronics and human.

Mycelial growth on petri dish will act as an external visualizer of internal psychophysiological processes, or the anxiety-and-stress age. Electrocardiogram (ECG) signal measurements will be transformed into sound that will be played to mycelial body via microcontroller. Fungi are capable of sound perception and respond to different frequencies with change in growth and metabolism. Therefore, stress related factors of ECG signal can be transformed into both favorable and unfavorable sound frequencies in real time. In short: when you are in a good mood, mycelium is also in a good mood. The result is a mycelial map of mental states.

Modern standard healthcare diagnosis works in strictly rational realm, collecting and analyzing cold objective data. Findings are rarely interpreted in a way accessible to a layman, so the patient is excluded from discussion about his health state and often has no idea what is going on with and within his own body. Efe Di askes: is there another way to provide insight into physically hidden body processes? We know that our brain has evolved for recognizing patterns, but it is weak in processing logic and making calculations. What happens if we visualize these states in the form of a living being that is drawing shapes of emotions? Can these visualizations change the way we perceive harmful behavior towards ourselves? Can we feel it more deeply, emotionally, and mythological?

Project by Eva Debevc

Experimental audio, weaving, textile craft, drawing, and storytelling.

Attending as a family, Laura and August are intending on developing a project in collaboration with their children. The focus will be on relating sound and image/craft in a fun and playful ways accessible to young persons while conceptually interesting for adults as well. They will be making a portable system for making music in nature.

First step is to search and collect natural objects around PIFcamp and capture the sounds of those different objects. The next step is arranging objects (rocks, sticks, leaves) on top of a long handwoven blanket with patterning to support object placement and then running the camera over the blanket, from start to end. That will control the playback and recording. The system will utilize our experience developing interactive camera-based web applications, August’s expertise in real-time audio synthesis, and Laura’s experience weaving. Plan is to create a system that is highly portable, playful, and keeps the majority of the interaction in and with nature.

Car Valves

What to do when a friend gifts you a bunch of outdated vacuum tubes? Apparently, it is possible to build a very nice low voltage tube preamp.

Car Valves is a project based on old outdated vacuum tubes. It is built around the ECH 83 which was originally designed to be used in old car radios. It has one amplifying stage [triode] and a stage that seems to be used within the radio receiving circuit [heptode]. In its original function, it has been powered by 12V car batteries. Compared to conventional high-voltage tubes, this property makes it an ideal and harmless object for experimentation. Join Ludwig Klöckner and build yours.

Features:

  • High Impedance Audio-Input
  • Symmetrical and Line-Output
  • Controls: Gain, Bass, Treble, Volume
  • On-/Off Switch

MonsterCode by Theun Karelse

(Monster = imagination Code = encoding into the environment)

Before we had books knowledge was passed down orally, sometimes it was ‘stored’ directly into the landscape. Using small data-sets we will overlay physical space with a metal landscape during PIFcamp and experience how to build them up so they can hold vast amounts of knowledge in a single space you can walk through. Theun will also bring a first prototype of a device that tries to give a physical experience of animal vocalizations.

We feel our own voices when we speak, but can we physically experience the voices of animals? This prototype is a first step and is ready to be tested for feedback to develop it further.

Machine Alps – sculptural sound installation by Scott Kildall

Scott Kildall will be developing a new installation called “Machine Alps”, which depicts what trees, plants and fungi might sense from human interference. Using sensors connected to the leaves of plants, barks of trees and surfaces of mycelium, several sculptural nodes will drive low level synthesizers based on live data, using recorded samples of machine noise. This will be a performance where bleeps, churns, grinds and other disruptions get orchestrated into a coherent soundscape.