Rob Canning of Zavod Rizoma will lead two experimental instrument building workshops culminating in an informal improvised musical/sound/noise performance. Workshops will combine a sculptural, craft and upcycling element with a technological element, allowing the made objects to become touch sensitive instruments or interfaces.
One workshop will be directed at younger PIFlars and shall involve less coding and place more emphasis on listening, sound recording, simple soldering and creative object construction. The more advanced workshop will look more closely at the technological back-end enabling participants to integrate capacitive touch interfaces into their own creative workflow using the esp32 and the OSC protocol.
konS:: Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art is a project chosen on the public call for the selection of the operations “Network of Investigative Art and Culture Centres”. The investment is co-financed by the Republic of Slovenia and by the European Regional Development Fund of the European Union.
During PIFcamp 2023, Sophia Bulgakova is planning to experiment with food and various augmentation of reality using XR technologies and analogue tools of sensory deprivation while dining.
She wants to conduct testing & tasting sessions together with other participants exploring their relationship with various sensory stimulants with a focus on food and dining as a communal ritual. How can a change in visual perception affect the taste of certain foods? Can physical togetherness be achieved at a distance? How our taste buds be tricked by the stimulation of other senses? These experimentations will be a part of her collaborative, ongoing umbrella project, Metaphysical Tastings, which Sophia is working on together with Leonardo Scarin & Cemre Deniz Kara.
Sophia will also continue her experimentations with the analogue/digital VJ set-up she is developing and work on arranging jam and play sessions with other participants of this year’s program.
Laurent Malys is working on a show that mixes dance and techniques of live music composition. He build a prosthesis to attach each part of a split computer keyboard to his hands, allowing him to type while moving freely and dancing.
The show is intended to be an ironic and impractical transhumanist performance that will show the creativity of algorithmic and electronic music, while bringing all the musical expressiveness through the movement of the body. It is also a questioning of the interfaces between humans and machines/instruments and our relationship to technical languages.
The technical part of the project involves three software components that are in an early stage of development and will continue to be built and tested during PIFcamp: – tui-seq: A terminal user interface for live composition and live coding (using FoxDot and supercollider) – body2ctrl: A set of computer vision tools that can translate movement of the body into musical control – ofxpartloop: An “event-driven” music visualization software (made in Openframeworks)
During the PIFcamp, Laurent will try to engage other participants to experiment ‘body2ctrl’ to control music software or their own software or hardware synthetiser (via midi or osc).
Laurent Malys makes sound and moving images with algorithm and electronics and experiment with various ways to mix music, visuals and performance (with live-coding, digital and analog synthesis, vector synthesis, electronics, mechanics, fabrication.)
Fransisca Tan is an Austrian food experience designer with a diverse background in cognitive sciences, communication, gastronomy, and media technology. With a deep-rooted passion for exploring and curating transformative human experiences, Fransisca uses the multisensory power of food as her canvas. As an artist, creative producer, and international project manager, she endeavors to foster connections among individuals from diverse backgrounds, unveiling the profound significance of community and compassion.
In her project for PIFcamp, all participants are invited to collaborate and embark on a collective exploration. Together, they may delve into the fascinating questions such as: How does food and our environment shape our interactions? What does the future (of food) smell, taste and feel like to our touch – engaging all our senses? The beautiful surroundings of Soča valley will partake in this explorative journey by feeding inspirations on ecosystem thinking.
During the event, participants can look forward to engaging talks challenging concepts such as food waste and nature, hacking rituals & cultural practices surrounding food, and workshops on sensory exploration that venture beyond traditional culinary boundaries.
Join Fransisca and fellow participants at PIFcamp as they unlock the mysteries of our relationship withfood, each other and the natural world, and collectively envision a future that tantalizes not just our taste buds but all our senses.
70% of the bat species use echolocation to hunt and communicate. The ultrasound signals that bats emit are above human hearing, but we can bring them down to our perception with some electronics. Let’s build a couple of Bat-detectors and let’s search for bats at the Soča river when the sun comes down.
No bats? No problem! We can steal the bats superpower and build a small square-wave synth secretly screaming for attention.
Rodolfo Acosta Castro is a Berlin based artist working with electronics, code and nature in theater context. He will try some experiments with ultrasound transmitters and is happy to collaborate with other projects, to improvise or use new materials.
This year we will go through the documentation of previous PIFcamps, that is through everything related to food. Everything that can be thought of, gathered and connected to, and clustered under the umbrella of PIFood. Ideas, experiments, successes and failures. The goal is to provide future experimenters with information about previous activities, and offer the opportunity to this year’s attendees to recreate some of the material in its edible form, as fermented correspondences and digestible ideas; to reflect, react and engage with it from new perspectives. In so doing we will also attend to (fragmented and not in that order) questions such as:
How can we connect through food and with food; with the environment that provides us with nourishments? How can we think of care through food? How can we think of food as the Other? What can we learn from applying food related concepts to how we collectively imagine the world? What role do science and art have in how we consume, digest and nourish the natural and social world we live in? What kind of sustenance does PIFcamp provide for the hunger of imagination?
We will reminiscence and rearticulate foraging walks, alternative “club mate” fermentations, lime paneers, sourdough scoby breads, coffee corners, DIY incubators for natto and tempeh, open fire workshops, kombucha and foraged syrups cocktails, PIFnicks, beer brew workshops, and more.
The main ingredients were and remain the people. We will also remember these actors, explore their work and what informed their PIFood related activities, while also trying to connect with those physically not present to talk about Diva dinners, durian food festivals, beach BBQs, distillery visits, loose fruit, brick over construction and so on.
We will learn about how PIFood was incepted through correspondences with DiNaCon, and how collaborations with PIFcamp’s kitchen informed its identity. We will also discuss where we can find concepts floating within the degrowth community (conviviality, care, social metabolism, commons, growth, post-normal science, ubuntu etc.) within PIFood, and also broader PIFcamp and DiNaCon activities. And we will debate the introduction of concepts like regrowth, undergrowth and overgrowth.
Participants are invited to help with preparing this documentation, to contribute to it with their own material and memories, new takes on it, reinterpretations, and new ideas, experiments, connections. The space will be open for sharing meals, recipes, ideas, and accompanying questions. Finally, we will launch this documentation on the PIFood.club blog.
If any participant sees themselves in any of the stated, please contact Ahac (ahac@drmr.si) and discuss your input and/or possible requirements for your PIFood related activity.
Commemorating the inspiration for PIFood, its godfather, the late but never forgotten Dario <3
The first idea of Niklas Reppel was to build a DIY binaural dummy head microphone, as commercial ones come at a price that prohibits experimentation in nature (like, lowering the microphone into a crevice or gorge, or putting it out in the rain). On the other hand, decent microphone capsules, are relatively affordable. So that led him to think, “why should the human head always be the reference? What if I make something more modular and build a set of ear-shaped microphones that I can stick to anything? That’d allow me to explore the sound of the world from the perspective of non-human entities, such as teapots, or plants, or bridges, while maintaining a certain binaural quality.“
In fact, looking at the world from the perspective of things, rather than humans, seems to be a recent trend in UX research. See it here: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3411763.3450390
If we can make things talk, we should be able to make things listen, right?
This will be his project this year: building oddly-shaped microphones from decent capsules, and sticking them to anything he can find, to explore the sound of the world from a not-totally-human perspective. With the recorded material, Niklas will create immersive soundscapes, improvised or composed with his own open-source live coding language (Mégra), and implemented on the Blaž Pavlica Sound Dome, to make the sound of the world (according to a teapot) accessible to the interested listener. He’ll also bring a wireless transmitter so that the listening things might even be live contributors to the dome performances.
“Inspired by the convergence of cultures and its consequences, especially as a result of queerness and diaspora, my work is critical of spacetime with an emphasis on performance. This criticality is culminating in something I am calling the non-durational. The non-durational is a lens of critique I am developing that is informed by relativity and existential philosophies. It can be put onto a variety of different subjects, including sexuality, language, and art. It is inspired by notions like assembly theory, eternal recurrence, intersectionality, a number of queer theories, durée, amor fati, and Dasein. It is like the word “queer” at times–adjectival in nature. My current practice aims to make observations and form language and material to explore the non-durational, an endlessness that is contingent upon power.“
A crackle box (or kraakdoos in Dutch) is an electronic-noise-feedback-synth-instrument designed by Michel Waisvisz of STEIM in the seventies. It is played by directly touching selected points in the circuit thereby becoming part of the circuit and completing a feedback loop to generate sounds. In this workshop, we will learn how to make a crackle box from scratch! There will be some breadboarding, diagram-reading, components-matching, soldering, and noising. Hopefully, we will have some homebrew boxes so we can touch, play and perform together!
Martin Mušič, a part of Baobap collective, is planning to design a useful ceramic product with a story connected to Soča Valley. He will use the 3D printer to make a prototype, which will be used as a plaster mold for casting liquid clay in it. He is also planning to build an outdoor furnace out of locally sourced materials and burn the clay products in there. The finished ceramic products will have an extra kick – a story with a local connection.
