Category: PIFproject

The project aims to engage with water scarcity and real-time visual storytelling to speculate on climate futures of the Soča River in Slovenia. The bed of the glacial river has been shaped by its waters in remarkable geological formations for millennia. Recently the river’s water level has been low due to summer drought, a consequence of anthropogenic factors. The project looks at the interplay and relationship between humans and the river’s geological processes. It reflects on changing ecologies and raises awareness for the conservation of this important water ecology through speculation. The project aims to use 3D scanning and photogrammetry to create a digital extension of the Soča landscape with particular attention to the dry riverbed and glacial rocks. The digital landscape will be linked to sensors placed in the landscape recording various parameters in real-time (landscape sound, water level, pollution, rainfall) which will create distortions and deformations within the digital landscape.

Swamp_Matter is a duo consisting of Eva Garibaldi (designer & researcher) and Ana Laura Richter (artist & dramaturg) motivated by a shared passion for exploring the complexities and mysteries of amphibious landscapes. Their work is driven by a deep curiosity about the relationship between humans and nature, and the ways in which this relationship is constantly evolving. Through their projects, Swamp_Matter seeks to challenge the perception of unstable landscapes as stagnant and lifeless places, and instead, highlight the rich biodiversity and ecological significance of these often-overlooked environments.

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???

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).

“As audio lovers, we enjoy developing sound-making tools, and we feel very lucky to have amazing community-driven tools at our disposal, that enable us to easily learn about creative design,” explain Lina and Manu. “To give back to the community we are constantly learning from, we focus on making our own designs available during workshops to help others build their own sound machines.”

During PIFcamp the pair from Familiar DIY will be working on a new workshop-oriented device: Fantasía!

Fantasía is a device based on Teensyduino audio platform, with stereo audio inputs and outputs, potentiometers, buttons, Gate and CV control, SD card, etc. It can work as a synthesizer, multi-effect, or utility tool with endless possibilities… while being a portable DIY-friendly device. “During PIFcamp we’re going to create some sketches/programs for the Fantasía, test hardware boundaries and make some noise, and we encourage others to create their own too!“

For those who want to contribute to the Fantasía library during PIFcamp, Lina and Manu have prepared some DIY kits with which you can build your own devices, and take them home as a thank you for your contribution. Fantastic!

Sound synthesis is awesome!

Data is awesome, too. It presents the way we store our observations of the world we live in. Wavetable is a sound synthesis technique used to create periodic waveforms by using data.

Today, our portable machines are way more powerful than the first machines used for the wavetable synthesis, and they allow us to change the sound synthesis programs as they run. This activity is known as live coding and has been around for 20 years.

The workshop explores data-driven wavetable synthesis within a live coding context, and is a collaboration between Iván Paz and Julia Múgica, members of the lively Barcelona’s live coding community.

Join Iván and Julia at their sonification workshop where the data collected from natural processes will be translated into wavetables to make sound. The results will be used within a live coding context, so whether you’re interested in sound synthesis or live coding, this workshop is right up your alley!

About the mentors

Julia Múgica is a mexican scientist currently incurring in the artistic exploration of nature complex processes. With an interdisciplinary background that encompasses biology and computational physics, she is deeply interested in understanding how collectives make decisions that result in a behavioral synchrony. Recently, her curiosity extended to the artistic sphere, where the process of creation magnifies and prioritizes different aspects of the same phenomena. Her work includes animated particles design in processing language, noise design from random walks algorithms for modular synthesizers, and collaborations with the artist Lina Bautista in rhythm and collective patterns with interactive robots.

Iván Paz has backgrounds in physics, music and computer science. Iván’s work is framed in critical approaches to technology centered around from-scratch construction as an exploratory technique. Since 2010, he has been part of the live coding community and has presented workshops, conferences and concerts around America and Europe. He is currently working with machine learning techniques within live coding performance.

Alicia Champlin is working on a hybrid digital-acoustic instrument using a handmade OpenBCI EEG headset along with her own MaxMSP live/realtime data sonification application for EEG data, as a partial input to a modified bow chime (somewhat styled after the Robert Rutman projects). The outcome is drone music from mechanically amplified bowed cymbals in a live feedback loop with brainwaves and the player. The bow chime amplifies both the brain synth and the player’s physical interactions, sounding out the intersection between the resonant frequencies of the brain and those of the instrument itself.

You can listen to a performance with the prototype here:

Starting with a host of existing MaxMSP patches which Alicia built for a previous sound project, she will be reviving and reworking the synth components to optimize/tune the output for best effect with the bow chime, and at the same time will be exploring whether she can replicate these synths with Pure Data in order to free the product from MaxMSP and create a truly open-source version.

Anyone interested in how the brain can be expressed in sound, those who know and use PD, and other brain synth makers are more than welcome to join Alicia on her quest and on the stage!