Category: Participants

Hannah Perner-Wilson and Mika Satomi from KOBAKANT will be joining PIFcamp this year to design and build “all-natural wearable technology”. Merging natural and technical materials and mechanisms to produce a new style of technological cladding – wearables that will protect us from the future.

We will hunt and gather nature’s treasures from the Soca valley and investigate how we can use these resources to build a new category of wearable technology. Technology inspired by the properties, qualities, textures, colours, rules and smells of the outdoors. These wearables will make us want to run out into the wild, to make noise and take action, to express our concerns through moving our bodies in all kinds of nature.

We will investigate, make, talk, choreograph and perform!

1) INVESTIGATE nature’s ability to make sound – both analog and digital

Explore following concepts with our hunted and gathered materials:
– Resistive and piezoresistive properties of materials
– Piezoelectric properties of materials (solar cell, temperature difference, physical strain….)
– Electromagnetic pickups (generating and amplifying small voltages)

Experiment with different sound circuits:
– Those from Bastl Instruments
– We will order some 555 timers and ATtinys
– Participants please bring stuff too!

Make things loud!
– How can we amplify these sounds so that they are heard? Especially outdoors.

2) MAKE the results of our investigation wearable

– Design wearables so that we can make sound with the movements of our bodies
– Make these designs durable so that they can be worn and performed

3) TALK about nature, human nature, technology and the built environment

We will gather around the fire to share and discuss:
– What is nature, what is natural?
– How are humans and nature intertwined?
– What do we want to make noise about?
– Who are we performing for?

Some proposed texts for reading:
Donna Haraway: Staying with The Trouble
Richard Sennett: Together

4) CHOREOGRAPH a performance (a ritual, a protest, a march, a dance, a game, a movement…)

Any choreographers and performers at PIFcamp? We would love your help and input on this part!

5) PERFORM on the last day of PIFcamp

FAQ:

Q: Who can join this node?
A: You must hunt and gather, learn and share. Then you may join.

Q: What do you mean by “natural”?
A: Good question. Lets discuss.

Q: What do you mean by “make noise and take action”?
A: We will discuss together what we want to make noise and take action on. This discussion will inform what costumes we build and the choreography of our performance.

Q: What materials and tools can I contribute to this project?
A: Bring yourselves, bring your bodies, bring circuits that make sound and materials that conduct. Bring your sewing needles and pocket knives. Your hiking boots and bathing suits.

Current Dictionary Definitions:

wearable – “an item that can be worn”
cladding – “a covering or coating on a structure or material”
technical – “of, involving, or concerned with applied and industrial sciences”
natural – “existing in or caused by nature; not made or caused by humankind”

More about the project.

Here is what Václav Peloušek from BASTL Instruments will be doing at this years PIFcamp!

Václav  will focus on trying to develop a new project / prototype on the spot together with other participants. He would provide already existing tools from the Bastl portfolio which can catalyse certain types of real world interfacing by providing simple translation interfaces from sensoric input into motoric, sound & light outputs. With such tools artificial ecosystems could be easily created and reconfigured. The general goal would be to not get stuck at the technological reality of inventing the tools but fully use the potential of existing modular synth tools which already provide the extreme flexibility. This would be an extension of topics he dealt with in his master thesis.

The general topic is using Control Voltages as an universal representation of anything in the world. Such voltage could be processed in many different ways by using a modular synth. This basically means analog computing.

He will also offer introductory course into analog computing with op-amps (operational amplifiers) and provide same basic insight into reading analog synth schematics.

Further his personal goal will be initiating more musical situations / jam sessions and developing new ways to play music together. 

Don’t forget to bring your instruments!

The Hacktivated 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.

Continuing from last year’s camp, we will be making more input and output modules based on ideas from kinetic sculpture, DIY and kids robotics, modular synthesizers and the beautiful natural surroundings. We will combine humble potentiometers, servo motors and microcontrollers, glue and sticks into abstract expression carriers capable of transforming gestures into numbers and back again. This year we will also try to develop good ways to use other projects sounds as inputs. Perhaps we’ll even manage to give the network a voice and sound. Join in!

Open Source Estrogen explores the various ways that estrogen performs a molecular colonization in our society, bodies, and ecosystems. Estrogen is the most ancient of sex hormones. Therefore the mutagenic effects of environmental (xeno) estrogens disrupt species across all animal taxa, including humans. In response to our collective mutagenesis (becoming alien), the project uses DIY/DIWO estrogen-hacking protocols as a way of detecting & extracting slow violence.

Open Source Estrogen is a project by Mary Maggic and Pippo Pruscha.

Hannah Perner-Wilson has been working on A Wearable Studio Practice project since 2015. The project packages the work environment of a typical Electronic Textiles studio into a series of portable items that can be worn or carried on the body. Providing the functionalities normally contained in static furniture and the architectural infrastructure of the studio/lab, these items allow the electrical engineer to become nomadic in her or his practice.

Now is a perfect time for electrical engineers to become mobile with their practice. It’s not just electronic parts that have become smaller and smaller, but also many of the tools used in electrical engineering (power supply, multimeter, oscilloscope, programmers… ) have become more compact and portable. Many practices closely related to hardware such as software/programming and CAD/design have been liberated from static infrastructures because laptop computers – their primary tools – are powerful and lightweight. Co-working spaces and FabLabs offer temporary workspaces all over the world. There is an awareness of the benefits of local production and site-specific development.

More about the project is available here.

Hacking the tuning fork is a project by Alexander Zaklynsky.

At PIFcamp I will be working on a project which will be developed for my current master program in ArtScience at the Royal Academy of Art in Den Haag, NL. I will bring a couple tuning forks which I have made from Aluminum as well as some modular electronics I am currently building at Bastl in Brno. I aim to build some devices for the activation of the tuning forks as well as manipulation of the audio for composing interactive audioscapes. Another part of my work is about natural soundscapes so I will bring various mics and a hydrophone for the river. Along with my current projects I am also excited to learn and absorb as much as possible from the offerings at PIF and see how my ideas evolve as a result.

• Development of devices, that will be able to produce air bubbles of different sizes and shapes (the diameter of the bubble, that is already big enough to make the cells glow is about 0.5 mm). Bubbles can have different shapes,  from simple circles or vortex ring bubbles, we can also make clouds of smaller bubbles. Lots of work and imagination can also be used in preparation of other types of disturbance sources.

• Hacking the remote shutter release cable for camera (dslr). Camera will be set on the tripod, shooting will be triggered trough the wire in order to get a still picture. Shutter signal will come from the electronic circuit that uses photodiodes instead of the ordinary trigger button.

• Preparation of the container in which the algae will live in during the time of the experiment and all the objects that will come in contact with them. It should be dipped into boiling water for 15 min to sterilize the materials and prolong the life of the algae. Maybe also the pure water from Soča river will come handy here.

Dive into bio-hacking and experimental sonification with Paloma Lopez and Leslie Garcia aka INTERSPECIFICS!

“Matter and radiation exist only in and through rhythm.”
(Lúcio Alberto Pinheiro dos Santos)

RHYTHM-ANALYSIS
Rhythm is found where there’s interaction between space, time and expenditure of energy. In this sense to understand rhythm in both the complexity of music and the very nature of sound is also to understand the frequencies that shape human experience in time space and pervade everyday life and space.

THE LAB
In this 5 day long collaborative lab we will explore and work on following things together:
– Collect water and sediment from different shores of the Soča River and plant samples from the forest of Trenta
– Measure our own brain signals while exposed to different environmental stimuli
– Build a microbial fuel cell and a Teensy based signal amplifier
– Culture and track the amazing slime mold Physarum Polycephalum
– Use Processing and Pure Data to monitorize bioelectrical signals, and Open Computer Vision to analyze the movement of microorganisms in a microscope
– Make sound with all and try to understand different patterns within organisms and environmental situations

THE CONCERT
With our tools built we will engage in a collective musical improvisation and try to put together the different sounds and rhythms deriving from the collected micro-organisms. The result will be presented as a live act at the conclusion of the week.

PARTICIPANTS NEED TO BRING
– Personal computer
– Audio Interface (optional)
– Midi or Voltage controlled Synth (optional)

THE WEEK IN ACTIVITIES
DAY 1
– A bit of theory on vibration and sonification
– Human brain signal measurment and sonification | positive/negative/neutral exercise
– Brain & music
– Culture Physarum
DAY 2
– A river adventure collecting water samples
– Microbial fuel cell building and sonification
– A bit of theory on bacteria that produces energy
– Track the growth of physarum
DAY 3
– A forest adventure collecting plant samples and plant transplant
– Pulsum Planta(e) kit building and sonification
– A bit of theory on the amazing secret life of plants
– Keep tracking the growth of physarum
DAY 4
– Physarum sonification
– A bit of theory on the growth and intelligence of slime molds
– Collective improvisation
DAY 5 & 6
Collective improvisation and public concert