PIFcamp

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An experimental platform with open ends – a temporary laboratory is to be created

KUbUS bASE is an interdisciplinary and process-oriented platform that invites continuous transformation throughout the week. The open cube can serve, for example, as a workshop area, living room, performance space, sound installation, and projection surface. As a social sculpture, the base invites site-specific participation. For PIFcamp, it seeks to explore new formats and invites people to linger, participate, and exchange ideas.

KUBUS is inspired by the activities and spirit of Setzkasten Wien — a workshop, residency, and performance space in Vienna that has developed its experimental approaches over the past ten years. Initiated by Stefan Voglsinger, the project aims to create space for collective practices and experimentation.

Stefan will bring the following projects to be shared as a collaborative process or workshop:

• Analog 16mm shooting, developing, and projecting film
• Building a reactive network of solar-powered pulsing triggers with solenoids, motors, and relays to resonate the steel surface of the bASE sculpture
• Field Recording Trips using self-built microphones and sharing knowledge about sound recording and experimental music

Michael-Jon Mizra is interested in how cellular automata can be used to aid musical composition and how to perform and control various synthesis processes, such as additive and subtractive synthesis, granular synthesis, and other synthesis processes based on signal modulation. He is inspired by the simple rules that lead to great complexity in systems such as Conway’s Game of Life (GOL). In the GOL, there is a grid of cells, and each cell can either be dead or alive depending on how many other cells surround it. With each step forward in time, the cells update, and a world takes shape. The beauty of this system is that one cannot predict, from the initial conditions, whether the world will enter a stable state or continue to change for eternity. This unpredictability inspires him as a tool for performance and composition.

The traditional medium through which an audience may experience the GOL is sight and visualization. He is challenged by translating this in a meaningful way to sound, considering it a tension between the temporal and spatial dimensions. It is possible to “go up” a dimension, look down upon the grid, and see the whole as an interaction of the parts. But music is a temporal phenomenon. It’s not possible to “go up” a dimension in time and “hear” how there is no beginning and no end. Instead, we must listen and make deductions; what happened before implies what may happen next. We must search for patterns and store information for later retrieval.

Mizra hopes to find answers—answers gleaned not from tackling the problem head-on but from approaching it from an angle, allowing him to uncover something new.

The ionospheric antenna is a large copper coil designed to capture the crackle of solar electromagnetic radiation. We will build three variations of different sizes to test which one best captures the music of the stars, faint electromagnetic events, and inaudible atmospheric very low frequencies. During summer storms, it should also enable the sonification of ‘whistler’ waves, which can interact with radiation belt particles and cause them to precipitate onto the ionosphere.

beepblip (Ida Hiršenfelder) is a sound artist and archivist. She makes immersive bleepy psychogeographical soundscapes and is interested in bioacoustics, experimental music, and sound spatialisation. Since 2021, she has been developing a series of interdisciplinary sound works such as “Empathic Atmospheres“ which addresses the agency of non-organic others, and “Translating Critters” which explores the potentiality of non-human-animal language translation. She completed her Master of Sonology studies at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague (2023). She also runs workshops for inaudible sound detection, such as electromagnetic detectors, hydrophones, ionospherics, and ultrasonics.

Soil, earth, dirt, mud… the stuff we walk on, sit on, sometimes even sleep on. It’s where we grow our food and bury our dead, the foundation that makes our planet livable for everyone – except maybe some water creatures. This mysterious substance is everywhere, yet most of us rarely give it a second thought.

This years’ PIFresident Julian Chollet would like to take you on a journey to explore this underappreciated world beneath our feet. Using Circular Chromatography, it is possible to transform a spoonful of dirt into a vibrant image that reveals the composition of the soil: minerals, organic material, microbial activity, etc.

From sampling to chroma development, the two-day (~4 hours each) hands-on exploration will have plenty of breaks and time for discussions. The workshop is still in an experimental phase, so your feedback and ideas are highly appreciated!

Elektrosluch Mini City is a DIY kit of Elektrosluch, an open-source device for electromagnetic
listening. It allows one to discover sonic worlds of electromagnetic fields, surrounding our every step.
Just plug your headphones & explore. Concept & electronics were developed by Jonáš Gruska.

Elektrosluch Mini kit is easy to assemble; there are very few components to solder. It’s a very good
start to pick up your basic soldering skills and start reading a schematic. Bernhard Rasinger will guide
you through the workshop. Be sure to bring headphones with a TRS connector!

And always remember to let there be a comparator at the input!

In this project, Ingo Randolf is searching for repeating decimal numbers to use the repeating patterns as rhythms. To do so, a pattern-recognition algorithm finds repeating patterns in a brute-force method of dividing prime numbers. These patterns will then be used as input to a rhythm machine.

Rational numbers are numbers that can be written as a ratio of two integers (e.g., 1/3). Some rational numbers are decimal numbers that either end after a certain number of digits (e.g., 1.25) or repeat (e.g., 0.3333…).

Prime numbers are integers only divisible by one or themselves. Every non-prime integer can be composed of prime numbers. Prime numbers are the building blocks of the realm of integers.

He will explore what kinds of rhythms come out of this experiment.

What does molecular gastronomy and biofabrication have in common and what do these techniques have to do with the fabrication of soft robots? 

Through this project Marisa Satsia would like to continue her research of bringing molecular gastronomy and biofabrication techniques into the making of soft robots and inflatables. She will be exploring and working with natural polymers, cooking up and inflating biomaterials and experimenting with different fusing and sealing techniques.

During PIFcamp, she is eager to collaborate with others and potentially integrate her research with someone else’s work – she is especially interested in teaming up with individuals who have electronics skills or share similar interests. If you are interested, please feel free to join in!

It is an open secret that the hardware in our smart devices contains not only plastics but also conflict minerals such as tungsten, tin, tantalum, silver, and gold. Hence, technology is not neutral. In this workshop, we investigate alternative hardware made from locally sourced materials, known as ethical hardware, to develop and speculate upon renewable practices for the benefit of both nature and humans.

During the workshop, we will make printed circuit boards with wild local clay, using recycled silver as the main electrical conductor. We will model the boards, paint the circuits, and fire them in an open bonfire at PIFcamp. Participants will solder all electronic components and test the circuit for an interactive microcontroller board that can control digital and analogue sensors as inputs and speakers, LEDs, and motors as outputs (similar to Arduino). The workshop will be hosted by Patrícia J. Reis (Mz*Baltazar’s Lab).

Image by Janine Schranz ©

Tamara Lašič Jurković is an interdisciplinary designer, researcher and teaching assistant specializing in design theory, who plans to host a workshop PIFcamp to create a local version of the collaborative game Left With a Memory, present her project Hacked Meditation and refine her PhD topic proposal. All three endeavours—the PhD topic and the two projects—are rooted in posthumanist theory in terms of moving beyond human-centered design approaches, challenging anthropocentric beliefs, recognizing the interconnectedness of the “web of life” and comprehending human dependence on natural ecosystems and other biotic organisms. Hacked Meditation is a guided audio meditation that questions the exclusivity and definition of the human being by exploring the microbial life within and outside our bodies. Left With a Memory is a collaborative, educational memory game that highlights the surprising number of red-listed endangered species resulting from the destructiveness of human activity. Lastly, for her PhD, Tamara aims to explore how strategic board game development methods can be implemented in the posthumanist design process and whether board games can be an effective teaching tool for introducing the posthumanist perspective in design.

Have you ever held onto a piece of technology long after its prime? A phone that is too old to even connect to the internet, a cassette player lost in the digital age, a gadget gathering dust in a forgotten drawer, or a film camera received from a friend which just doesn’t function anymore? These relics whisper stories of our ever-evolving relationship with the digital world.

This summer at PIFcamp, Marginal via visual artist Sabina Suru and curator Andrei Tudose, invite you
to Places of Care, to explore these quiet narratives and craft a gentle farewell for our ageing
technologies. The project challenges traditional perceptions of technology and fosters a deeper appreciation for the complex ecosystem it creates, highlighting the importance of care for technology and a shift towards a more responsible approach to resource management in the technological sector and beyond, opening up conversations about the ecological footprint of technology and the need for sustainable practices in its production and disposal.

Oh, speaking of disposal – how do you feel about waste? Not e-waste (well, not just yet), but bio-waste, growing in front of our eyes. Now, imagine transforming this everyday waste into bioplastic, instead of the ever present plastic made of fossil fuel-based chemicals, today’s biggest frown-upon villain.

What is bioplastic, you ask? It’s a material derived from renewable sources like plant starches or vegetable fats, offering a more sustainable alternative to its petroleum-based counterpart. During collaborative working sessions, we’ll get our hands dirty (in a good way!) experimenting with these innovative materials. We’ll make bioplastics from scratch, using everyday materials like agar agar, flour, kitchen scraps and whatever biowaste we’ll stumble upon around the camp.

These materials will become gentle shrouds for your abandoned technologies (please bring some with you!), eco-friendly burial garments which will not only commemorate our cast-off gadgets, but also become the building blocks for a larger installation Sabina is working on. Yap, your e-waste will find its resting place at the Bucharest Technical Museum in October, for the Places of Care exhibition, a testament to our techno-ecology and our possibilities for responsible consumption.

Join us if you wish to:
● Reimagine the afterlife of technology: Give your tech a gentle send-off and explore themes
related to ecology of technology, obsolescence and responsible consumption.
● Embrace new materials: Learn to make bioplastics from sustainable and readily available
ingredients.
● Be part of a collaborative artwork: Contribute to a wider installation displayed at a really cool
museum!