tag: Hacking

On Saturday 2nd February myself and 15 other artists/hackers/tinkerers/people descended upon West Bromwich to hack The Public. A little more about what it actually is:

The Gallery Hack Camp is a new initiative developed by The Public and the first delivered in February 2013. It will bring together artists, producers, creative entrepreneurs and technologists from across the West Midlands and wider United Kingdom.

We aim to develop new ideas at the intersection of art, technology and culture. Setting out to make new work which you would like to see in a gallery of the future. It is also intended to be an active community of peer learning and development.

TROVE, whom I recently did an exhibition with, will be celebrating its third birthday on 12th October 2012 5-9pm. To celebrate this occasion they’ve invited past artists and collaborators to exhibit some work with them

Over the past three years TROVE have worked with 146 local, national and international artists that have created, exhibited and performed as part of TROVE’s programme. TROVE have realised over 36 shows in the wonderful TROVE home, the Old Science Museum, and in offsite projects, with venues including Curzon Street Station, mac birmingham, Edible Eastside, DownStairs Gallery, FarGo, The Burlington Fine Art Club, Coexist and ARC. TROVE is an independent art gallery who have worked with Fierce Festival, Hereford Photography Festival, Hedge Enquiry, Minnie Weisz Studio, Museum of Lost Heritage, Birmingham Architects Association, Birmingham City Council, Clarke Gallery, Birmingham City University and Crowd 6. At Pop! Bang! Wallop! there will be presents, piñatas and pass the parcel! There will be artworks and cards from past TROVE artists! There will be a bouncy castle! And much much more!

TOYBOX at TROVE opened on Friday 15th June. The opening was a great success! Thanks to everyone who braved the rained and came to the opening.

The exhibition featured modified and hacked toys and similar-themed films and performances. Here’s the toys:

The show that I’m curating with TROVE opens to the public on Friday June 15th from 6pm

Artists include: Rosie Curtis & Steph Bryant, Emilie Crewe, Claire Davies, James Gill, David Lee, Maria Mattos, Duncan McKellar, Kate Morrison, Richard Peel, Daniel Salisbury, Kate Spence and Sam Underwood

In June 2012 TROVE, with Antonio Roberts, are hosting an exhibition about toys. This project leads on from the discovery that the Jewellery Quarter, Birmingham, where TROVE is based, used to produce more ‘toys’ than jewellery, guns or pens during the industrial revolution; all things it is now more famously known for producing. When researching what toys were produced in this area of Birmingham it was discovered that the term ‘toys’ was used to describe items such as buttons, cuff-links and belt buckles.

In June 2012 I’ll be co-curating an exhibition about toys at/with TROVE and Daniel Salisbury. More info, including how to get involved, is below:

TROVE is an independent art space in Birmingham, UK, which run a monthly changing programme of contemporary art exhibitions/events.

In June 2012 TROVE are hosting an exhibition about toys. This project leads on from the discovery that the Jewellery Quarter, Birmingham, where TROVE is based, used to produce more ‘toys’ than jewellery, guns or pens; all things it is now more famously known for producing. When researching what toys were produced in this area of Birmingham it was discovered that the term ‘toys’ was used to describe items such as buttons, cuff-links and belt buckles.

This Sunday (i.e. today) I’ll be doing a micro residency (i.e. one day) at Fargo Hack Play Space in Coventry, UK (i.e. not Birmingham)

This Sunday we will be hosting the Fargo Hack Play Space, an informal exhibition and sharing of new work from our residency at the Talking Birds curated Fargo Space.

We love watching people play with the Don’t Touch Screen at Warwick Arts Centre; that little moment of joy people feel as they realise they are in control of the piece, no matter the technology. We were keen to try and create something new that explored that same interaction between analogue and digital.

GLI.TC/H has started and on Saturday November 19th it’ll be making its way to VIVID in Birmingham, UK! The full programme is available here, and as a PDF. Over the week I’ll be providing a bitesized overview of the upcoming events.

Realtime A/V: Jon Satrom

Jon Satrom presents a prepared desktop performance, where he uses the operating system itself as an instrument:

Bio

Satrom spends his days fixing things and making things work. He spends his evenings breaking things and searching for unique blips inherent to the systems he explores and exploits. Satrom teaches a course on Glitch Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, runs a creative web and video studio called Studio Thread, performs real-time audio/video, creates colorful glitch-ware, and is involved in various collective online and offline new-media efforts.    

GLI.TC/H has started and on Saturday November 19th it’ll be making its way to VIVID in Birmingham, UK! The full programme is available here, and as a PDF. Over the week I’ll be providing a bitesized overview of the upcoming events.

Realtime A/V: Art of Failure

Nicolas Maigret of Art of Failure will perform 8 Silences, which is a completely audio-only performance:

8 silences offers a sensible representation of Internet by broadcasting audio streams that travel and reverberate trough the web. Initially silents, the streams progressively incorporate an infinity of transformations or “errors” that modify the sound as it circulates on the network. These alterations are comparable to a form of erosion caused by the network space - they are a key to allow different mental representations of this digital topography. Presented as a live performance, 8 silences is a sound immersion in the heart of data flows. 8 silences is a live piece made from mixing together several silent ogg and mp3 stream loops with different quality settings (error corrections are bypassed). Each loop is going to a different location on the globe, and then coming back to the location of the concert venue. Performers stand with a laptop in different parts of the venue (non scenic performance). The audio streamloops are exchanged in wifi around the public.

GLI.TC/H has started and on Saturday November 19th it’ll be making its way to VIVID in Birmingham, UK! The full programme is available here, and as a PDF. Over the week I’ll be providing a bitesized overview of the upcoming events.

Realtime A/V: Minuek and Chromatouch

The second of our Realtime A/V performances comes from UK-based VJs Minuek and Chromatouch. Here they are as a part of the VJ collective Freecode earlier in the year:

GLI.TC/H has started and on Saturday November 19th it’ll be making its way to VIVID in Birmingham, UK! The full programme is available here, and as a PDF. Over the week I’ll be providing a bitesized overview of the upcoming events.

Screening: Andrew Benson - Click on it

Bio

Andrew Benson is a visual artist and performer based in San Francisco. His multi-disciplinary and experimental work is a playful engagement with interconnected systems and feedback, and is the result of complex technological or physical processes. ÊWithin the technical abstract spaces, a clumsy or self-conscious human presence challenges the purely analytical and synthetic nature of digital representation. As an extension to studio work, Andrew Benson has worked as Video Designer/Director for a number of high profile touring musical acts. He has been teaching electronic media courses at San Francisco Art Institute since 2008 and creates online content for Cycling ‘74 Software.

GLI.TC/H has started and on Saturday November 19th it’ll be making its way to VIVID in Birmingham, UK! The full programme is available here, and as a PDF. Over the week I’ll be providing a bitesized overview of the upcoming events.

Screening: Jon Satrom - Too Many Cats

Bio

Satrom spends his days fixing things and making things work. He spends his evenings breaking things and searching for unique blips inherent to the systems he explores and exploits. Satrom teaches a course on Glitch Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, runs a creative web and video studio called Studio Thread, performs real-time audio/video, creates colorful glitch-ware, and is involved in various collective online and offline new-media efforts.    

GLI.TC/H has started and on Saturday November 19th it’ll be making its way to VIVID in Birmingham, UK! The full programme is available here, and as a PDF. Over the week I’ll be providing a bitesized overview of the upcoming events.

Screening: Jeff Donaldson - Pin 1/12 effect

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Bio

Jeff Donaldson is a multimedia artist, guitarist and composer of electronic and acoustic sound. An active member internationally in micromusic as the audio/visual project Notendo, solo work and collaborations as Odea Duo Vii, HD and Wzt Hearts, JeffÕs work encompasses a broad spectrum of audio/visual composition and improvisation. In 2001, with the intent to create animation entirely with his own hardware modifications, Jeff began creatively short-circuiting NES consoles. There is no new code involved, only raw, machine logic. This work has led to international recognition in new media art and has inspired people world-wide to pursue similar expressions.

GLI.TC/H has started and on Saturday November 19th it’ll be making its way to VIVID in Birmingham, UK! The full programme is available here, and as a PDF. Over the week I’ll be providing a bitesized overview of the upcoming events.

Lecture: Blind Optics

Gabriel Menotti presents his paper entitled “Blind Optics:”

In order to investigate the relation between cinema and technology, it seems necessary to escape the medium’s own parameters of analysis. Taking a step in this direction, one might adopt Friedrich Kittler’s notion of “optical media,” a classification based not on the morphological effects of cinema, but on the operational principles of its apparatus. However, while Kittler’s framework discloses the mechanisms of figurative representation, it casts an even darker shadow over the constitution of technique. To analyse the cinematographic apparatus as purely optical is to ignore that its technical underpinnings are also mechanical and chemical, electromagnetic and computational. In order to bring these material aspects to the surface of the medium, one could borrow a strategy that has been largely employed with aesthetic ends: that of blinding or disrupting the camera eye. A vast tradition of video art and experimental cinema, recently joined by practices such as generative programming, presents visuals that are not produced by clear lenses, but that mostly result from celluloid film, electric circuits and digital codification. This paper calls attention to the ways in which this sort of blind optics produces images not by the means of abstracting the world, but through the abstraction of the bare apparatus. Thus, it sheds some light in the processes of inscription and transmission that ultimately constitute audiovisual media, allowing us to grasp some of their particularities.

GLI.TC/H has started and on Saturday November 19th it’ll be making its way to VIVID in Birmingham, UK! The full programme is available here, and as a PDF. Over the week I’ll be providing a bitesized overview of the upcoming events.

Lecture: GLTI.CH Karaoke

Continuing their events at GLI.TC/H in Chicago and Amsterdam GLTI.CH Karaoke will be presenting their work, followed by a live performance!

Our aim is simple: to bring together people & collaborate on Karaoke duets. This desire, of course, is not innovative in itself; karaoke is one of the world’s favorite pastimes. Where GLTI.CH is different is its scope of our ‘bringing together’. So far, we have hooked up London with Kumamoto City, Japan & Seoul, South Korea. As a project that seeks to set up unnecessarily-elaborate portals of amateur singing, GLTI.CH Karaoke posits that there is discernible value & joy in 1) the collective stumbling & frustrations met in the face of tech limits, language barriers & time zone differences 2) oblique experimentation & 3) embracing & folding in “errors” in future iterations versus seeking to “overcome” or eradicate them. GLTI.CH Karaoke is not a solitary affair. At its simplest each event is the manifestation of sophisticated levels of collaboration & coordination between GLTI.CH & the attendees of each event, as well as the development teams of Livestream, Google+ & divX, & the individuals who selflessly hash together & upload karaoke videos to YouTube. Using the universal grammar of karaoke we posit the glitch as a site of artistic autonomy.

GLI.TC/H has started and on Saturday November 19th it’ll be making its way to VIVID in Birmingham, UK! The full programme is available here, and as a PDF. Over the week I’ll be providing a bitesized overview of the upcoming events.

Workshop: Glitch Codec Tutorial

Nick Briz presents a tutorial in creating glitch art by hacking video codecs:

This workshop/lecture is titled the Glitch Codec Tutorial. Here I demonstrate how to create the “glitch codec” a hacked piece of software I use to make intentional glitches. The Glitch Codec Tutorial is one way to experience glitch art. The Glitch Codec Tutorial can be used to make glitch art, but it is not a tool in and of itself. Rather, it is a means to a tool or, more appropriately, a means to a method[ology] of production.

GLI.TC/H has started and on Saturday November 19th it’ll be making its way to VIVID in Birmingham, UK! The full programme is available here, and as a PDF. Over the week I’ll be providing a bitesized overview of the upcoming events.

Workshop: Easy Circuit Bending

Nikki Pugh presents a workshop exploring the basics of circuit bending. Add a light sensor to a desk toy in order to distort the sounds it makes by waving your hand over it. A bit like this:

Awhile back I acquired a Creative ZEN Stone mp3 player. It was a a little scuffed around the edges but otherwise a perfectly functional mp3 player. For some time I was using a pair of regular headphones but then I tried using in a pair of iPhone headphones (and then later HTC headphones). The results are somewhat weird. Take a listen:

Original song: Fade to Daft by Look What I Did (download for free from here.) I had to record this by placing my headphones on my microphone for reasons that I’ll explain later.

Ever since I went down to an Openlab workshop last year I’ve been fascinated by live coding. From Wikipedia:

Live coding (sometimes known as ‘interactive programming’, ‘on-the-fly programming’, ‘just in time programming’) is the name given to the process of writing software in realtime as part of a performance.

I thought about doing live coding for myself ever since, so at fizzPOP’s latest hack session I thought I’d make use of massive screen and try a bit out for myself using a purpose-built program called Fluxus, which uses the Scheme programming language.

Brumcon 9 is coming up this Saturday and I’ve been asked to give a short talk about fizzPOP and hackerspaces.

BrumCon is a regular event organised by Brum2600 regulars, featuring a wide variety of talks, discussion, demos and most importantly, alcohol. Incorrectly but neatly dubbed a ‘blackhat thinktank’ by NTK, The Register - ‘We have your water supply, and printers’, BBC Midlands Today - ‘Spooky’, By you lot as the UK’s biggest underground Hacker con, By hotel staff as ‘scary’ but nice people and I’m scared I’d get my ass so electronically kicked. We welcome all kinds of phreaks, geeks and other technologically interested people from all sides of the fence (as long as hats, badges and warrants are left at the door). The entrance fee this year is 8 UK Pounds per delegate. Corporate packs are available that includes entrance, T-shirt and receipt contact us at brumcon9@brum2600.net to book.

The fizzPOP crew, in particular Nikki, GBulmer and Charlie Pinder, have been hard to bring you the fizzPOP Howduino hack day at VIVID, which is supported by Hello Digital as part of Fringe Events programme.

fizzPOP joins forces with Howduino to host a room full of people sticking together electronics, computer programs, cardboard and discarded junk items to make cool stuff do cool things in ways you never imagined. Join us and be part of the growing hacker and maker scene emerging around the UK.

On Saturday 24th October I was at Space Studios in London to attend the Chiptune Marching Band workshop. I was really excited to go to this as I haven’t had a chance to dedicate my time to a single project with my breadboard and Arduino board.

I mentioned in a previous post how I wanted to get more people doing social things that related to hacking, like going to the Micromouse event last Saturday. I thought it’d be a great opportunity for people to see what else is available to the community and to link different micro communities that would eventually encourage more discussion and collaboration between the groups. Well, it looks like I’m not the only one with that idea. Several members of the group have been rather vocal on making the meetings more than fortnightly. My only concern with a move like that is that there’s a risk of exhaustion and people may feel under too much pressure to come. This is why I liked the suggestion of one member to have social meets in between the hacking sessions. In this way discussion can still continue and it may be a great way for new members to get better acquainted to other members.

Since February I have been running a hackerspace network called fizzPOP. The aim of this is to eventually acquire a permanent space for people to come and share ideas and collaborate on their projects. THe benefits of having a space include actually getting out of the house and, having a space with materials that you may not have .e.g. a lazer-cutter and just generally being in a friendly environment to bounce around ideas with other people.

Whilst Nikki and Pete have been hacking their toys and gadgets to make all manner of noises I’ve gone the soldering-free option by making sweet noise on my laptop in Pure:Data. This originally started in the hack session at the Linux Emporium as an attempt to make a sort of theme tune for the hack space. By the end of the day I’d accomplished making fart-like noises that mess up your head a bit. At the next hack session I’d progressed a little bit further and made my farty noises a little bit more controllable with the use of sliders and buttons.

Courtesy of Ms McQuillan

On Saturday 14th March I was at Kitchen Garden Cafe to take part in WXWM as a panel host. My 5-minute talk was a short introduction to hacking. I wanted to dispell some myths about hackers and hacking, show how fun it can be and also promote the Birmingham Hack Space at the same time. You can download the slides from my presentation for free (available under GNU FDL) and you can listen again to all of the presentations over at Rhubarb Radio

Prompted by the number of Brummies migrating over to Texas soon for SXSW, the lovely Shona McQuillain has organised something similar. In her words:

It may have come to some peeps attention that a number of Brummie bods will be whooshing over to Texas all transatlantic style for SXSW (South by South West) later next week, to mingle and schmooze with web wizards, net honchos and to do some other shizz, like having fun. Not wishing to be outdone by this, a furious flurry of Twitter activity this evening has registered interest in a counter-event to these southern States shennanigans: WXWM. That’ll be West by West Midlands, then.

fizzPOP is a group of people with a wide range of skills and interests, bound by a common interest in tinkering with stuff to make something new. It’s a hackerspace.

For some people hacking means writing computer code, for others it means soldering up some electronics. Others may be working more with cardboard and gaffa tape. What materials you work with and your abilities are less important than the sort of mentality you have. We’re looking for people who want to play with stuff and learn new skills in a social, collaborative environment.