PIFcamp

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

To delve deep into nutritional science is to go out into the wild. Barely for two or three millennia, more precisely in a mere century, we are producing, growing and breeding too much of everything, and the trend hasn’t yet reached its peak. If we take a good look at all of the IT possibilities of development… they are so plentiful, they are practically devouring themselves. So, in order not to starve at the table full of goodies, it is wise to step out. Or, as Douglas Adams would have it: Please, step out! This is the invitation with which we shall greet you at the start of this year’s PIFadventure.

Joining Please, step out! means you will be present on food-hacking trips around Soča village, where we will be gathering edible wild vegetables, wild herbs, wild fruits, and preparing them in simple, but for some probably extraordinary ways. These wild food hikes will also represent a gateway to the nutritional, historical, economical and other perspectives in connection with (wild)food, and by the time PIFcamp is over, you will have a pretty good picture of what is food and what is not. And you might as well know now: the majority of what we consider to be food is not.

Please, step out! is held by Dario Cortese, an independent wild food researcher and author of several books on wild food and nutrition.