Thanks to Cristian, Magy, Bojana and Jure for all the superb meals!
Salud also to the lovely Urša, Petra and Polona for preparing our breakfasts and kudos to Mario for all the herbal delights!
Photos: Katja Goljat
Except for the mandatory walk to the river canals Thursday was all about work. Projects had to be finalized and the finishing touches of course took longest. But everyone was feeling the hype that often happens before the deadline. Everybody is ready for the opened Saturday and all the knowledge searching visitors. Werner’s speakers play music and charge phones, Tilen’s lamp is creating outer space in the neighbour’s garden, synthesisers are plucked the all sorts of devices, Marcs laboratory is waiting to be taken out to nature and to be used for basic analysis. We put together the schedule of Saturday’s presentations, so everyone is invited to take a look at it and join us with the afternoon activities. Melancholy that often accompanies goodbyes is starting to get a hold of the campers. So please come and we’ll make the PIFcamp closure even more grand and amiable.
Photos: Katja Goljat
Till now our evenings were all about work and for some early rest, Thursday night was a welcomed exception. Roused by the camp fire our energies magically connected and formed a wonderful spirit of party. Sounds of electronic music rushed through the Soča valley, lifted our feet and swung our hips. We gladly put our working brain to rest and danced almost till dawn. Even the ones that hiked to Krnska lakes earlier in the day found enough strength to dance and chat.
Projects are slowly coming to its finish and unfortunately so is PIFcamp. But we still have some exciting things in store! On Saturday we will prepare an open presentation for all the curious folk, and we will show our inventions to everyone who will want to see it. We are also planning on building a garden bed for which we will use all the organic waste that we gathered in the past week. What keeps us focused in this high temperatures are a lovely breeze and frequent jumps into the Soča river.
Photos: Katja Goljat
SATURDAY OPENS AT 2PM!
TIMELINE:
2 – 3pm // Robertina Šebjanič and Monika Pocrnjić: Presentations of Oscillatorium hacks
2.30 – 5.30pm // Lavoslava Benčič: Graphic sound Workshop
3.15pm // “Build a pinhole camera” workshop with Georgie Manly
4pm // Herbal Walk with Dario Cortese
5pm // Theremidi Orchestra Workshop
During the whole day:
Marc Dusseiller: Hands-on presentation of chlorophyll extraction. Mobile lab is working, so we will also do some stuff in the wild.
Peter Edwards and the Soča Synthesis group will set up interactive sound installations for a couple of hours. In the evening the synths move to the pendulum.
Come and talk about e-textiles and wearable electronics with Lynne Bruning and test the projects we built.
Luka Frelih will set up the stomp board and two sculptures made out of the material picked up near Soča. We can plug in more things during Saturday.
Test Werner’s super DIY blue-tooth speaker (oh, it is so much more)!
Check out PIFphotos from hacked cameras Michael Page built. They will also be set around the house, triggering randomly.
Check out the PIFweb tree by Tomaž Strgar.
Music:
Live dub performance by Pangani
Cica Mica Live Šlagerica
Jam Session
Visual installations at night:
Tom O’Dea: Drakaea (remote weather installation)
Mick Murray: Interactive audio reactive lighting installation
Tilen Sepič: Light Orbit
On Sunday morning Jure Peternel will educate on one of the most sustainable methods of domestic organic waste use by making them the main ingredient in the building of a raised garden bed. After 10am!
Wednesday was again a working day that ended far into Thursday. Projects are coming together, and soon they will be ready to be shown at open Saturday (welcome everyone!). Although we hadn’t done any hiking today, we did gather some herbs and flowers on the nearby meadows. We used them to garnish our potatoes, which we ate with a healthy mountain air appetite. Some went on a short excursion next door – our neighbouring house is St. Josef’s church famous for its exceptional murals. After the Second World War Tone Kralj has hidden a whole bunch of antifascist and anti-Nazi simbols into them. By a strange coincidence (or maybe god’s will) the church also has a representation of St. Ljudmila, who surely looks after her disciples living next door. Even though an accident has happened on Wednesday as well. One of the girls got stung by a wasp and she got an ugly swelling. Our evening was brightened by people playing some instruments, board games were being played again and we didn’t lack beer and wine. We got a good thing going!
Photos: Katja Goljat
Basics of the breadboard! Lynne is here today for everyone who wants to get into that. Once you understand this part it will make it easier for you to work with Peter and collaborate with other projects.
Tomorrow Dario is taking a group of 10 to Krnsko lake. The trip starts at 7:30, the hike will be two and a half hours in one direction, so the whole thing will take us about six hours. We encourage people that haven’t gone on a trip, to apply. Places are limited! We will take some food with us, but you can also get something to eat at the lake.
Marc:
He is still working on his box, at the end of the week we can make some basic analysis of the surrounding material. We already tested the resistance of plants with an instrument Marc built. We can use chlorophyll that we extracted yesterday. We will also use light today, and step by step we will get a collage of tools that will enable us to look at plants from a different point of view.
Took some recordings of surroundings using headphones. He already has a small prototype board. He still has some work with different cables, but the plan is now to add three more pieces and go further in the process. People are welcomed to join!
The multiplying cameras project is going quite well. We already have some nice photos. Photographing is taking a nice course into different directions.
Tom:
We want to make a LED canape, and note the ownership of natural environment! We’ll try to build a frame that will help us show the environment ownership in this area.
Selfie wearables – three parts – camera with a photo cell, a glove with a trigger and a broche with a led lamp that triggers the glove. We need to improve the light, so it works in the day time. For now it’s a selfie camera for night scene!
We were working till 5 in the morning. Fixed the filter, 9 working synthesizers! Two days of hard work. Today we’re doing the final stage, reviewing the material. We want to integrate with other projects. We plan to have journeys into the woods and connect gathered footage with synths.
We have been working together on different nodes, and we want to connect them together.
Boštjan:
Finished drum sets! Today working on synthesizer. We need a midi interface synthesizers!
Looking for material and pictures from the camp. The web page is already coming together!
He’s finishing his synthesizer. It’s almost working already! Today he’s starting to work on his bluetooth speakers and connecting it with synthesizer.
Luka:
Today he’ll be starting putting up the web server, people can come and learn about it. He also started setting up the 3D printer so we can slowly start printing. If we can have some concerts and jam sessions! Nothing depressing please.
Katja:
People should bring photos to her so we can put it in an archive and also use it! We want to have as much material as possible by the end of the week.
The 1st Gif below were generated with a camera modified to take photos at arbitary intervals using a tilt switch in place of the trigger button. The camera was carried around hung over various peoples necks throughout the first day. The 2nd Gif is from the second day as the heavens opened and hackers continued building and debugging until 5am!
For a group of PIFcamp participants the day started early. At seven in the morning brave hikers left the camp for a nine hour hike to a nearby mountain called Travnik. The ones that left behind also had a futile day! Some of the achievements were: close to finished synthesizers that are being made as a part of Peter Edwards’s node Soča Synthesis, chlorophyll has been extracted in Mark Dusseiller’s node and a kite was let loose. We also had a bitter incident – a laptop was dropped on the ground. This was fortunately passed with hard work and good spirit, so the day ended with hanging out, more soldering, sewing and creating. We were joined by even more electronics enthusiasts and together we are looking forward to tomorrow!
Photos: Katja Goljat