Category: Node Leaders

Workshop : Making biomaterials with fungi

Cris Silva   (he/his) is a Sri Lankan biologist focused on sustainability and building platforms for innovators to innovate in Sri Lanka. Currently he is focusing on making biomaterials with mycelium. He worked in several academic projects on Sc-rna analysis, plant molecular diagnostics and drug discovery with machine learning. He is the guardian of the Bio Lab at DreamSpace Academy  and Founder of Benzyme Ventures. He likes traveling and mountains.

Linkedin – https://www.linkedin.com/in/cris-silva1996/ Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/the_cris_silva/

Workshop:

Microcontrollers for All – learn how to use Arduino, micro:bit, ESP32, ESP8266, and the Raspberry Pi Pico to build, automate, and control things in your world. We will offer a series of workshops that explore each of these different platforms and learn how to prototype using cardboard and other found materials. We can tailor content towards the interests of the attendees.

Bio

Hello! I am a high school physics & engineering teacher from Chicago. I worked as the education engineer for SparkFun Electronics, and I’m the co-founder of HackSchool, a non-profit focused on empowering youth to tinker, hack, and take control of their own communities by leveraging the power of digital fabrication and open-source electronics.

Project: Pom will be working on eco art, a combination of art and environment as concept

Bio: Pom is an eco artist from Thailand who make various kind of works such as sculptures, painting and product design focus mainly in environmental friendly

Here is the Link website to some of her past works
http://remains-of-the-day.com/

While at Dinacon, I’ll be building and testing my new camera-trapping board game, Wild Lives. This game is all about using camera traps to explore the natural world around you and sharing stories about what you find. It’s a combination physical and virtual game, and I’d like to play a couple rounds with the other attendees, get feedback to improve the design and flow of the game.

Alex Hornstein lives at the corner of invention, nature and adventure. A lifelong learner, teacher, hiker and tinkerer, Alex is in a perpetual electron orbit around the planet, oscillating between his lab, classrooms and remote corners of the world. For the past five years, Alex has been building machines to help us tell stories about the natural world, and spends a lot of time thinking about how we can be active participants in our own local environments, rather than passive observers of somebody else’s. When he’s not in the lab or behind a lens, you can find him on the tops of mountains or the bottom of the ocean, but always with his wife and daughter.

Workshop: Critters and Code – Naturalism in Videogames

Bio

Jay is a code artist who likes to make interactive digital worlds with a life of their own, inspired by nature.

Workshop/Project: DIY Hydraulic Press for Scrap Acrylic Upcycling

Bio

Paula (she/her) is an interface designer & technologist focused on the intersection of crafting, learning, and culture. Her work on digital fabrication & interfaces has been featured in Ars Electronica, SIGCHI Interaction Design & Children, & Eyeo Festival. She is a collaborator on 50years.today (connecting with narratives on the Chinese-Indonesian diaspora). She likes owls. 

Workshop: Prototyping an Equitable Community Project: Case Studies and Let’s Figure Some Out Together!

Bio

Ramy is an Oakland-based environmental health scientist-activist and educator who aligns herself with initiatives involving public collaboration and knowledge-sharing, particularly in biohacking and science outreach. Her past projects involve place-based participatory understanding of open civic data, air quality, and lead contamination rooted in citizen science. Currently, she works on a multidisciplinary team in design, real estate, community engagement, and advocacy to address root causes of mass incarceration, through active application of restorative justice principles and abolitionist lens in the built environment. 

workshop: Lagoon Radio Research: Low to No bandwidth audio interaction and beyond

“What does the ocean say to the shore?  Nothing, it just waves.”  Let’s make some radio waves and stories using the ambient impulses, incursions, and random soundings of the lagoon.  To do so, we’ll take walks and sit and listen together.  After some doing that, we’ll think together on ways to modify our mobile recording devices (aka phones) as well as my Mezcal software to interact with the local Sri Lanka ecology for fun and profit interest! 

Project photos: https://august.black/media/mezcal/wavefarm_workshop_mobile.jpg, https://august.black/media/mezcal/wavefarm_workshop_people01.jpg (credit: Alon Koppel)

Bio

August Black is a hybrid practitioner of art, design, and engineering. He makes experimental spatial, telematic, and acoustic situations and spaces, often creating his own software and instruments in hardware and software. He is currently an Assistant Professor at CU Boulder in the department of Critical Media Practices.

Additional links: https://august.black ,  https://august.black/mezcal/

Project: Crafting custom antennas: Long distance low power communication using simple tools

In this workshop we will craft antennas for long distance communication on common unlicensed and cellular radio frequencies, then test out designs using antenna analyzers and real equipment. We will go over how to select antennas and communication hardware for a variety of real world scenarios from concrete jungles to actual jungles as well as common pitfalls and scams. This workshop will be light on theory with a focus on giving you the tools you need to quickly solve real world problems. A subset of the practical portion of this workshop will be kid friendly (making antennas by cutting flexible material with scissors).

Bio

Marc hacks on software, wetware and hardware. He has co-founded hackerspaces and biohackerspaces in Copenhagen (Labitat, BiologiGaragen) and Oakland (sudo room, Counter Culture Labs) and from there several community projects: A project to create vegan cheese using genetically modified microbes (realvegancheese.org), an off-grid low-bandwidth community mesh network (disaster.radio) and a high-bandwidth mostly-on-grid one (peoplesopen.net). He is excited about building decentralized and resilient open alternatives to existing infrastructure and wishes he didn’t have to specify that, no, this does not include cryptocurrencies.