Category: People

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.

Project: plants and machine learning

I would like to create a series of art installations in which live plants train the computer that is responsible for caring for them.

Bio

David Bowen is a studio artist and educator whose work has been featured in numerous group and solo exhibitions nationally and internationally. Bowen’s work is concerned with aesthetics that result from interactive, reactive and generative processes as they relate to intersections between natural and mechanical systems. He is currently an Associate Professor of Sculpture and Physical Computing at the University of Minnesota.

https://www.dwbowen.com/

Workshop: Make a hydrophone, listen to underwater sounds!

Record the mysterious Singing Fish that live in the lagoon!  If you made a hydrophone at the workshop, we’ll turn them into an impromptu stereo array to localise the Singing Fish! https://www.theguardian.com/environment/commentisfree/2021/apr/28/a-singing-fish-it-glows-green-during-courtship-and-looks-like-boris-johnsons-hardship-face

Bio

I’m an engineer. In past lives I’ve designed artillery, built Internet gateways for paging, banking, email, and worked on underwater acoustics and underwater robotics. Now I make passive acoustic recorders for wildlife conservation.