Workshops and Tutorials
Accepted Workshops
The full ISEA2015 program can be found under the Schedule Page
Number |
Title |
Duration |
When and Where |
|---|---|---|---|
| W00 | International Workshop on Movement and Computing (MOCO15) – Intersecting Art, Meaning, Cognition, Technology | Two Days | August 14-15 2015, 9.30am-5:30pm, Cinema@Woodward’s |
| W01 | transmission+interference | Two Days | August 14-15th 2015, 9:30am-5:30pm, Room 4310 |
| W02 | BIT-Human: Tracking Tidal and Human-Powered Interventions | Two Days | CANCELLED |
| W03 | Performing Identity through Wearable Sensing | Whole Day | CANCELLED |
| W05 | Science Art Hackathon | Whole Day | August 14th 2015, 9:30am-5:30pm, World Art Room |
| W06 | Crafting Computational Percussion with Everyday Materials | Whole Day | August 14 2015, 9:30am-5:30pm, Room 4320 |
| W07 | Making Sonic Instruments with Pure Data & Processing | Whole Day | August 14th 2015, 9:30am-5:30pm, Room 2345 |
| W08 | Hacktivism Seeds for Discourse | Half Day | August 14th 2015, 9:30am-1pm, Room 4390 |
| W09 | Revisiting The Spam Folder: Using 419-fiction For Interactive Storytelling. A Practical Introduction | Half Day | August 14th 2015, 2-5:30pm, Room 4390 |
| W10 | Tweeter the Workshop: Practice in Writing | Half Day | August 14th 2015, 2-5:30pm, Room 4525 |
| W11 | People, Places & Things: A Mobile Cultural Mapping Workshop | Whole Day | August 15th 2015, 9:30am-5:30pm, Room 2340 |
| W12 | Terminus: Archives, Ephemera, and Electronic Art | Whole Day | August 15th 2015, 9:30am-5:30pm, VIVO |
| W13 | Analog x Digital x Analog | Whole Day | August 15th 2015, 9:30am-5:30pm, Room 4525 |
| W15 | MML 2015 – 8th International Workshop on Machine Learning and Music | Half Day | August 15th 2015, 9:30am-1pm, World Art Room |
| W16 | Generating Creative Actions with the Yes Men | Half Day | August 18th 2015, 9:30am-11am, Location 4945 |
| T00 | Hacking the Knitting Machine | Whole Day | August 14th 2015, 9:30am-5:30pm, Room 4945 |
| T01 | Musical Metacreation | Half Day | August 14th 2015, 2pm-5.30pm, Room 3420 |
| T02 | Constructing Microbial Fuel Cells, Mobile Bioenergy Lab | Whole Day | August 15th 2015, 9:30am-5:30pm, Room 4390 |
| T03 | Lab@Lab: Media Lab Networks Disrupting the Politics and Economics of Digital Cultures | Whole Day | August 15th 2015, 9:30am-5:30pm, Room 4945 |
| T04 | Currency Concept Design – Warhols: A Currency Based on Obscurity & Fame | Whole Day | August 15th 2015, 9:30am-5:30pm, Room 4320 |
| T05 | I-CubeX Sensor Integration with M+M and Creative Coding Platforms | Whole Day | August 15th 2015, 9:30am-5:30pm, Room Studio T Rake |
| T06 | Introduction to Live Coding OpenGL Shaders | Half Day | August 15th 2015, 9.30am-1pm, Room 2345 |
| T07 | The SoundWalk as Art Form Tutorial | Half Day | August 15th 2015, 2pm-5:30pm, Room 2345 |
Title: International Workshop on Movement and Computing (MOCO15) – Intersecting Art, Meaning, Cognition, Technology
Duration: Two Days
Time and Location: August 14-15 2015, 9.30am-5.30pm, Cinema@Woodward’s
Organizers:
* Sarah Fdili Alaoui, SIAT, SFU, Vancouver, Canada
* Thecla Schiphorst, SIAT, SFU, Vancouver, Canada
* Philippe Pasquier, SIAT, SFU, Vancouver, Canada
* Frederic Bevilacqua, Ircam, Paris, France
* Jules Françoise, Ircam, Paris, France
Website: moco.iat.sfu.ca
Description: MOCO’15 is the second International Workshop on movement and computing. MOCO aims to gather academics and practitioners interested in the computational study, modeling, representation, segmentation, recognition, classification, or generation of movement information. We welcome research that models movement, technology and computation, and is positioned within emerging interdisciplinary domains between art & science. We invite participants interested in exploring how movement experience can contribute to computational knowledge through movement modeling and representation. The workshop references the challenge of representing embodied movement knowledge within computational models, yet it also celebrates the inherent expression available within movement as a language. While human movement itself focuses on bodily experience, developing computational models for movement requires abstraction and representation of lived embodied cognition. Selecting appropriate models between movement and its rich personal and cultural meanings remains a challenge in movement interaction research. Many fields, including Interaction Design, HCI, Education and Machine Learning have been inspired by recent developments within Neuroscience validating the primacy of movement in cognitive development and human intelligence. This has spawned a growing interest in experiential principles of movement awareness and mindfulness, while simultaneously fueling the need for developing computational models that can describe movement intelligence with greater rigor. This conference seeks to explore an equal and richly nuanced epistemological partnership between movement experience and movement cognition and computational representation.
Title: transmission+interference
Duration: Two Days
Time and Location: August 14-15th 2015, 9:30am-5.30pm, Room 4310
Organizers:
* David Strang, Plymouth University, UK
Website: http://www.transmit-interfere.com/isea2015/
Description: This ‘transmission+interference’ workshop is a 2-day event where participants will explore the transmission, interference and playful aspects of sound through various uses of light. Participants will build a device that transmits sound within light and explore the various ways to interfere with signal the generate new sound / rhythm. You will also get to explore previously built / hacked / appropriated devices with which to develop new sound and light instruments with the aim of a group performance involving all of the participants of the workshop. This can / may include the use of motors, mirrors, laser pointers, elastic bands etc…
The workshop will include soldering and the use of various bits of electronics (integrated circuits and Arduino) and is open to beginners and skilled users. In addition to these skills we will encourage discourse around the ideas of live performance, improvisation and experimental music.
Title: BIT-human: Tracking Tidal and Human-powered Interventions
CANCELLED
Organizers:
* Rueben George, Tsleil Waututh Nation
* Irwin Oostindie, Tsleil Waututh Nation
Website:
Description: Media artists, academics, and hacktivists join the Tsleil-Waututh Nation, host Indigenous Nation, whose unceded lands the conference takes place on. The Tsleil-Waututh Nation’s reknown in-house GPS Department, is joined in this proposal by the Vancouver Indigenous Media Arts Festival, the lead Indigenous media arts organization at ISEA. This workshop proposal is supported by technologists and academics: Oliver Kuehn, Kate Milberry (PhD), Rueben George, Will Stacey, Andrea Reimer (Vancouver City Councillor), Cease Wyss, and Irwin Oostindie.
A two-day hands-on and theoretical workshop takes place 14-15 August to design a site-specific intervention using a mix of human and tidal-powered GPS-enabled floating devices. The workshop will present innovative ideas through active sharing amongst technologists and theorists as to appropriate tech solutions for impacted Indigenous and coastal communities, emphasizing use of open source hardware and software. With disruptions from rising sea-levels, increasingly adapted environmental strategies and GPS technologies are being applied and used for monitoring, however impacted communities rarely benefit from these advances.
The knowledge and strategies generated during the ISEA workshop will be implemented at a site-specific area of the Vancouver harbour, near the conference site, on 18 August. In real-time conference delegates will follow online and on a Woodward’s screen, a series of layers of data generated through tidal and human power.
Generative data will provide a layer of residue with water movement throughout Vancouver’s harbour created through several tactics: 1) floating GPS devices interacting with tidal movement; 2) animated tidal patterns for normal events; 3) human-powered Indigenous ocean-going canoes charting deliberate courses performed in these waters since time immemorial; 4) hacked anti-theft GPS devices on various watercraft traversing the Salish Sea. A fifth layer of visual data will be generated from crowdsourced geotagged documentation which has been published in real-time to open-source social media, and aggregated on a custom platform for conference delegates to track progress through the day.
Delegates will have a unique opportunity to join host-city and Indigenous participants to consider the democratizing function of applying field research, alongside user-generated or publicly-access data to generate low-cost technology solutions for social and media interventions into public policy discourse.
Title: Performing Identity through Wearable Sensing
CANCELLED
Organizers:
* Camille Baker, University for the Creative Arts, UK
* Kate Sicchio, Parsons, New School, New York, USA
Website:
Description: The current corporate technology fervour over wearable technology that collects everyone’s intimate body data, under the pretence of medical or fitness monitoring, highlights that it is time to ask critical questions and raise concerns around the ethics of corporate ownership of this data for a consumerism and surveillance agenda.
As part of a larger collaboration by the authors, this workshop aims to draw the performance community into the development, evolution of, and conversation around wearable technology, data collection ethics. It is meant to bring performers and researchers together to develop methods of using both commercial and handmade wearable sensing and smart textiles-based devices that transmit physiological data, to create unique interactive performances. It also aims to engage performers actively in exploring ways in which wearable technologies might enhance performance, while making playful, challenging and thought-provoking performance works.
This workshop is an all day workshop with a focus on the performance making process, while incorporating physiological data into the final performance, as a way to express identity. It will feature exercises with performers, and have them work with pre-created DIY soft circuit sensors, as well as a selection of commercial devices, in order to move or control an output, such as sound, visuals or video. The day will be organised around introductions to wearable technology, improvisation activities, and exercises to enable performers to create interactivity with devices and sensors, and a short devising activity to allow participants to perform their own ideas.
Title: Science Art Hackathon
Duration: Whole Day
Time and Location: August 14th 2015, 9:30am-5.30pm, World Art Room
Organizers:
* David Harris, University of California, Santa Cruz
Website: http://sciencearthackday.org
Description: Make and plan collaborative science art! This hack day will apply the hackathon methodology to science art. Participants will collaborate with others to design and make science art projects with a view to continued development beyond the ISEA2015 conference. To participate all you need is an interest in science art and a willingness to think creatively and collaboratively. Participants will work individually or in small teams to propose science art works that can be pursued following the conference. If participants have materials available on hand, they will create works during the hackathon. Participants will have the opportunity to present their proposals or works to the gathering at the end of the day.
Title: Crafting Computational Percussion with Everyday Materials
Duration: Whole Day
Time and Location: August 14th 2015, 9:30am-5.30pm, Room 4320
Organizers:
* Hyunjoo Oh, University of Colorado, Boulder
* Jiffer Harriman, University of Colorado, Boulder
* Abhishek Narula, University of Colorado, Boulder
* Mark Gross, University of Colorado, Boulder
Website: https://craftingpercussion.wordpress.com/
Description: This studio-type hands-on workshop invites participants to create percussion instruments with everyday materials such as paper, cardboards, bottles, and foam using the Rhythm Board (a custom designed controller that can interface with sensors, servos, and solenoids). Our goal is to use the ISEA workshop to design and improve a creative platform and activity that motivates artists to understand basic electronic and computing concepts along with creating a new forms of engaging musical expression. We encourage participants to bring everyday materials they want to explore, and we will provide sensors, actuators, and a controller as well as additional materials participants can use together. The workshop is in multiple phases. Participants start by exploring unique sounds of diverse materials. Then they integrate mechanical movements (rack and pinion, crank, and Geneva drive) using servos and solenoids, and analog sensors (light sensor, IR sensor, pressure sensor, and potentiometer) with the Rhythm Board to control the speed of the servo movements, generating scratching, shaking, and tapping motions. Finally, participants will share their prototypes and discuss the potential and challenges of this playful medium.
Title: Making Sonic Instruments with Pure Data & Processing
Duration: Whole Day
Time and Location: August 14th 2015, 9:30am-5.30pm, Room 2345
Organizers:
* Agoston Nagy, Binaura
Website: http://www.binaura.net/stc/ws/isea/
Description: The aim of the workshop is to introduce simple and easy learnable ways to create interactive sounds and music. The workshop is based on two popular, open source languages and the combination of these. Using these free tools it is easy to create user interactions that are targeting the web or mobile devices. By the end of the workshop, each participant will have a general knowledge about (musical, artistic) interfaces and their cognitive extensions, basics of digital sound & interface design.
Title: Hacktivism Seeds for Discourse
Duration: Half Day
Time and Location: August 14th 2015, 9:30am-1pm, Room 4390
Organizers:
* Carmin Karasic, Baltan Laboratories
Website:
Description: The Hacktivism Seeds for Discourse workshop increases awareness and understanding for the many issues associated with hacktivism. For the purposes of this workshop, hacktivism can be defined as a modification or creation that addresses a political or social issue. The hacktivist goal is not necessarily an act of opposition. A topical issue in the local news will serve as a catalyst for dynamic discussion. Using role play, we will co-create and respond to a conceptual action created by ‘our group of hacktivists’. The goal is to use civil debate and informed opinions to proactively take ownership of issues and identify local solutions. There are no specific requirements, as the workshop stresses the various perspectives concerning the hacktivism, rather than technical expertise.
Title: Revisiting The Spam Folder: Using 419-fiction For Interactive Storytelling. A Practical Introduction
Duration: Half Day
Time and Location: August 14th 2015, 2-5.30pm, Room 4390
Organizers:
* Linda Kronman, Danube University Krems, Austria
* Andreas Zingerle, University of Art and Industrial Design, Linz, Austria
Description: This workshop will be offering the participants both a theoretical and practical introduction to interactive narratives in ‘419-fictional environments’ created by scammers and scambaiters. We seek to understand different sides of online fraud and through creative storytelling reflect on issues like online privacy, virtual representation and trust within networks. We also draw parallels to other practices and cultures like: gaming, transmedia storytelling or creative activism. Through a participants take the first steps of creating their fictional characters and infiltrating a scammers storyworld to observe and interrupt their workflow. We explore how persuasive narratives are setup, how characters are designed and how dialog is exchanged to build trust between the acting parties. We will use social media and various content generators and other tools to orchestrate internet fiction, creating entrance points to a story world and spreading traces of information online. By reflecting on scam bait experiences we enter a discussion around the topic of interactive narration connecting to the participants’ and their general work in this field.
Title: Tweeter the Workshop: Practice in Writing
Duration: Half Day
Time and Location: August 14th 2015, 2-5.30pm, Room 4525
Organizers:
* Anastasios Maragiannis, University of Greenwich
* Janis Jefferies, Goldsmiths University
Website: http://teraslab.co.uk/?page_id=185
Description: We are currently at a transition between being completely overwhelmed by mass production of technological innovations and trying to understand the “concealed” value or our role in this process. Will explore the use of typographic elements and text through interdisciplinary screen based design practices. It is based on the user experience captured through a series of experimental workshops driven by key design principles: readability, usability, and interaction; and focusing on an in-depth analysis of the screen in relation to type, and its use not only for reading purposes, but also on our role through this interaction process: “the human screen relationship”. A tweeter approach that will allow the participants to explore new ways of reading and writing.
Title: People, Places & Things: A Mobile Cultural Mapping Workshop
Duration: Whole Day
Time and Location: August 15th 2015, 9:30am-5.30pm, Room 2340
Organizers:
* Martha Ladly, OCAD University
* Bryn Ludlow, York University
* Ana Jofre, OCAD University
* Laura Wright, OCAD University
*Glen Farrelly, University of Toronto
Website: https://peopleplacesthingsworkshop.wordpress.com/
Description: This practical hands-on workshop will instruct participants in current narrative practices that use locative mobile media and Google Earth mapping tools. Cultural production is about people (both contemporary and historical); places (existing situations, and their connections with the past); and things (artifacts and archives). In this workshop participants will learn how to explore people, places, and things through the creation of personal narratives, in small collaborative groups. They will visit and locate their stories in public spaces at nearby places of cultural significance in the historic Woodward’s mixed-use redevelopment in the old Gastown neighbourhood of Vancouver, participating in the creation of new media works that connect with potential audiences both local and remote, through mobile storytelling, and interactive GPS mapping within the Google Earth dataset.
Title: Terminus: Archives, Ephemera, and Electronic Art
Duration: Whole Day
Time and Location: August 15th 2015, 9:30am-5.30pm, VIVO
Organizers:
* Kate Hennessy, Simon Fraser University School of Interactive Arts and Technology
* Trudi Lynn Smith, University of Victoria
* Craig Campbell, University of Texas, Austin
* Fiona P. McDonald, New Knowledge Organization
* Thomas Ross Miller, Berkeley College
* Stephanie Takaragawa, Chapman University
* Glenn Alteen, grunt gallery
* Tarah Hogue, grunt gallery
Website: http://ethnographicterminalia.org/
Description: Since 2009, the Ethnographic Terminalia Curatorial Collective has staged annual exhibitions in major North American cities (Washington D.C., Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Montreal, New Orleans, Philadelphia) that explore the intersections of art and anthropology. Archives, ephemera, and Indigenous articulations of new media, identity, culture, language, and resistance have emerged as central themes in contemporary art-ethnographic practice and as a central interest to the curatorial work of the collective. New technologies, both materially and conceptually, present opportunities to push theoretical, disciplinary, and aesthetic boundaries. However, the implications of digitization and circulation of archival information present particularly interesting challenges for artists and scholars who seek to both represent and exploit the potential of digital archives. Building on the collective’s recent exhibitions, and in conjunction with an exhibition of new media artist Geronimo Inutiq’s Arctic Noise project, co-curated for ISEA 2015 at the grunt gallery in Vancouver (Terminal City), Ethnographic Terminalia invites workshop participants to demonstrate and discuss electronic art works and theoretical frameworks that disrupt material, figurative, discursive, cultural, and political manifestations of the archive, broadly conceived.
Title: Analog x Digital x Analog
Duration: Whole Day
Time and Location: August 15th 2015, 9:30am-5.30pm, Room 4525
Organizers:
* John D. Mitchell, Arizona State University
* Chris Ziegler, Arizona State University
* Joe Willie Smith, Independent Artist
* Julie Akerly, JA Movement
* Tony Obr, Paradise Valley Community College
Website: http://datura-phx.org
Description: DATURA is offering an interdisciplinary workshop on improvisation and performance at ISEA 2015. The workshop is perfect for sound artists, real time media artists and movement artists seeking to expand their skills in real-time interdisciplinary performance practices. Members of the interdisciplinary performance ensemble DATURA will lead the session, with guest artist Julie Akerly from JAMovement.
Analog x Digital x Analog is a full day workshop based on interdisciplinary collaboration and improvisation used to create public performance works. This workshop is modeled on the Stramonium collaboration, the result of a multidisciplinary performance project consisting of dance, analog image processing, computers, sonic sculptures, and woodwinds.
The first phase of the workshop will focus on instrument building, including analog and digital musical instruments, analog media processing instruments, and improvisatory movement development. The second phase will deal with interdisciplinary group improvisation. We will explore the intersection of the physical, the analog and the digital spheres of experience. Our own bodies form lenses of experience, perception, cognition and disruption. In this workshop we will explore the essential role the body plays in negotiating physical habit, cultural experience and embodied sounds and images within the context of improvised performance.
FOR ATTENDEES – PLEASE VISIT http://datura-phx.org/datura-summer-workshop-addendum-analog-x-digital-x-analog/ . The link contains information on the things you need to bring with you to the workshop.
Title: MML 2015 – 8th International Workshop on Machine Learning and Music
Duration: Half Day
Time and Location: August 15th 2015, 9:30am-1 pm, World Art Room
Organizers:
* Rafael Ramirez, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
* Darrell Conklin, Universidad del País Vasco
* Jose Manuel Iñesta, Alicante University
Website: https://sites.google.com/site/musicmachinelearning15/
Description: With the current explosion and quick expansion of music in digital formats, and the computational power of modern systems, the research on machine learning and music has gained increasing popularity. As complexity of the problems investigated by researchers on machine learning and music increases, there is a need to develop new algorithms and methods to solve these problems. Machine learning has proved to provide efficient solutions to many music-related problems both of academic and commercial interest. An example of the later is the application of machine learning techniques to the key challenge in the area of automatic generation of music material. The workshop provides a forum for theoretical discussions on machine learning for music generation, and also encourages performances of generated creative outputs as part of workshop participation.
Title: Generating Creative Actions with the Yes Men
Duration: Half Day
Time and Location: August 18th 2015, 9.30-11 am, Room 4945
Organizers:
*Mike Bonanno
*Andy Bichlbaum
Website: eviltwinbooking.org/presentations/the-yes-lab
Description: In this workshop, we will explain our methods for creating guerrilla media actions in the service of activist campaigns. The workshop begins with a very brief overview and history of creative activism, followed by a few examples of our own contributions to the field. Then, we begin the process of generating ideas for new actions, and we form breakout groups to brainstorm ideas. Afterwards, we come together again and we focus on one or two of the project ideas generated by the groups, to create a recipe needed to bring that project to completion. We will also walk the groups through posting the project ideas on our new online platform for creative action, www.actionswitchboard.net. In this workshop for ISEA, we pay special attention to the benefits and pitfalls of collaborating with activist organizations; a process that can make actions far more effective at achieving activist goals.
Title: Hacking the Knitting Machine
Duration: Whole Day
Time and Location: August 14th 2015, 9:30am-5:30pm, Room 4945
Organizers:
*Taylor Hokanson, Columbia College Chicago, USA
*Dieter Kirkwood, Columbia College Chicago, USA
Website: http://taylorhokanson.com/2015/05/03/isea-2015/
Description: Textiles are the original digital medium. After all, the Luddites were named for artisans that protested against the mechanization of textile production in 17th century England. Unlike their predecessors, today’s Luddites are associated with a distaste for the virtuality of modern devices. However, with the arrival of the Internet of Things, ushered in by affordable 3D printing, it’s becoming clear that the technologist need not choose between digital and actual. Machine knitting is a great example of this overlap.
Taylor Hokanson and Dieter Kirkwood will demonstrate a useful modification, originally exploited by Davi Post and Becky Stern, to the Brother KH-930e knitting machine. These devices were originally released in the 1980s, so they are available relatively inexpensively on sites like eBay. The KH-930e features an early digital input capability, meaning that users could purchase patterns to communicate to the device via floppy disk. Hokanson and Kirkwood will demonstrate how to spoof this connection, upload custom patterns, and “print” them into actual knit shapes.
Title: Constructing Microbial Fuel Cells, Mobile Bioenergy Lab
Duration: Whole Day
Time and Location: August 15th 2015, 9:30am-5:30pm, 4390
Organizers:
* Tyler Fox, Simon Fraser University/University of Washington
* Carlos Castellanos, Kansas State University
* Steven Barnes, University of British Columbia
Website: http://dprime.org/projects/mbl/isea2015/
Description: Mobile Bioenergy Lab (MBL) consists of a trailer-mounted mobile community research laboratory that invites citizens to explore the creative use of bioenergy technologies. MBL will be exhibited in ISEA 2015. This hands-on tutorial will introduce participants to the construction of Microbial Fuel Cells (MFC) with easily attainable materials and organic matter, such as kitchen waste.
As we create MFCs, we will also lead participants through different forms of techno-microbial interactions. Through a combination of facilitation and open-ended studio, we will explore diverse topics such as microscopy, chemical sensation and sonification as means of establishing interactive projects involving microbial life. The tutorial outcomes will be used as a starting point for subsequent community-based tutorials and demonstrations at the MBL site on False Creek during ISEA2015.
Title: Musical Metacreation
Duration: Half Day
Time and Location: August 14th 2015, 2pm-5:30pm, Room 3420
Organizers:
* Arne Eigenfeldt, Simon Fraser University, Canada
* Oliver Bown, University of Sydney, Australia
Website: http://metacreation.net/mume-tutorial/
Description: As regular music software adopts generative, autonomous and interactive capabilities, and an increasing number of practitioners involve metacreative processes in their work, musical metacreation has matured from an exploratory field to a more focused and applied one in which usability is a core issue. This tutorial will develop the core themes of musical metacreation in light of contemporary issues of system design from the perspective of creative practitioner, commercial developer and interacting musician. A particular focus will be on emerging applications of MuMe technology.
We propose to run an introductory tutorial on a range of MuMe topics that will introduce electronic art researchers and students to current issues in the field, and lead on to a structured discussion of current MuMe research questions, particularly those that exhibit a strong overlap with ISEA themes.
We also propose a series of three curated concerts featuring MuMe systems. We will make available a collection of video and audio documentation of additional MuMe systems. The creators of some of these works will then contribute to the MuMe presentations during the tutorial.
Title: Constructing Microbial Fuel Cells, Mobile Bioenergy Lab
Duration: Whole Day
Time and Location: August 15th 2015, 9:30am-5:30pm, Room 4390
Organizers:
* Tyler Fox, Simon Fraser University/University of Washington
* Carlos Castellanos, Kansas State University
* Steven Barnes, University of British Columbia
Website: http://dprime.org/projects/mbl/isea2015/
Description: Mobile Bioenergy Lab (MBL) consists of a trailer-mounted mobile community research laboratory that invites citizens to explore the creative use of bioenergy technologies. MBL will be exhibited in ISEA 2015. This hands-on tutorial will introduce participants to the construction of Microbial Fuel Cells (MFC) with easily attainable materials and organic matter, such as kitchen waste.
As we create MFCs, we will also lead participants through different forms of techno-microbial interactions. Through a combination of facilitation and open-ended studio, we will explore diverse topics such as microscopy, chemical sensation and sonification as means of establishing interactive projects involving microbial life. The tutorial outcomes will be used as a starting point for subsequent community-based tutorials and demonstrations at the MBL site on False Creek during ISEA2015.
Title: Lab@Lab: Media Lab Networks Disrupting the Politics and Economics of Digital Cultures
Duration: Whole Day
Time and Location: August 15th 2015, 9:30am-5:30pm, Room 4945
Organizers:
*Eliane Ellbogen, Eastern Bloc, CQAM, Canada
*Alexandre Quessy, CQAM, Perte-de-Signal, Canada
*Anne Goldenberg, CQAM, Femhack, Canada
*Isabelle L’Italien, CQAM, Canada
Website: http://labalab.ca/HomePage
Description: “Lab@Lab: media lab networks disrupting the politics and economics of digital cultures” is a full-day unconference event around the theme of networking between media labs. Inspired by the experience of the organizers of LabàLab, a series of networking events between Quebec-based media labs, Lab@Lab will be an opportunity for representatives of North American media labs, artists, theorists, cultural workers, curators, and researchers to develop common tactics of solidarity, exchange, mutual aid, and networked collaboration in a context of increasing political austerity and economic uncertainty. Adopting the unconference format, organisers and participants will establish the groundwork for a North America wide network of media labs: a vibrant ecology of artist-run centres, university labs, hackerspaces, fablabs, artist collectives, and more. Through a horizontal, transversal approach, inevitably, a diversity of voices will emerge. Together, by sharing our common experiences and practices, we can take a collective, unified stand against the market economy logic driving contemporary digital cultural production and dissemination.
Title: Currency Concept Design – Warhols: A Currency Based on Obscurity & Fame
Duration: Whole Day
Time and Location: August 15th 2015, 9:30am-5:30pm, Room 4320
Organizers:
*Lenara Verle, UNISINOS, Germany
*Ilan Katin, Independent Artist, Germany
Website: http://www.coinspiration.org/warhols/
Description: In this workshop, the participants will learn how different goals (ecological, social, geographical, etc..) can be translated into currency design. They will then create several versions of the Warhols currency, each with different characteristics depending on the goals they decide to aim for. The Warhols will be fictional currencies inspired on the inverse of fame, representing obscurity as something valuable.
To get acquainted with various currency designs and how these influence the way money is used, we will play a board game that draws inspiration from real historical examples of alternative currencies from the past and present (when we mention design, this doesn’t refer to the visual look of the currency, but to the rules and mechanisms by which it is created, given value and exchanged in the economy).
The idea is to test the Warhols currency by setting up a special marketplace during ISEA. The conference attendants are entitled to receive an amount of different versions of Warhols and can use them to buy and exchange items in this market. The performance of each currency version will be then measured and displayed in real-time graphs.
Title: I-CubeX Sensor Integration with M+M and Creative Coding Platforms
Duration: Whole Day
Time and Location: August 15th 2015, 9:30am-5:30pm, Studio T Rake
Organizers:
*Johnty Wang, McGill University/Infusion Systems, Canada
*Axel Mulder, Infusion Systems, Canada
Website: http://icubex.com/isea2015
Description: In this tutorial, we present the integration of I-CubeX sensors with popular creative coding platforms such as openFrameworks, as well as the integration with the Movement+Meaning (M+M) middleware. In the first half of the tutorial, we introduce the I-CubeX sensor family as well as M+M, provide quick demonstrations followed by a hands-on session of connecting to and integrating with various kinds of sensor data. In the second half of the tutorial we combine use of creative coding platforms with the tools and techniques learnt earlier to build a small interactive application, followed by a showcase of the results.
Title: Introduction to Live Coding OpenGL Shaders
Duration: Half Day
Time and Location: August 15th 2015, 9.30am-1pm, Room 2345
Organizers:
* Shawn Lawson, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA
Website: http://www.shawnlawson.com/isea2015-tutorial/
Description: Live-Coding is a growing field of performance in Europe and North America. In both continents the primary focus of live-coding is audio. This tutorial will be an introduction/crash course into using OpenGL Fragment Shaders for live-coding graphics. We will be using a toolkit designed around WebGL and run in Google Chrome. The contents of the tutorial will be: a brief explanation of the tool, how it’s constructed, and how it works; a brief explanation of which parts of OpenGL will be used, how it works, and some basic functionalities; some simple hands-on coding examples; finally, adding in an audio source with some hands-on examples for some live-coding experience. Any programming experience is helpful but not necessary.
Title: The SoundWalk as Art Form Tutorial
Duration: Half Day
Time and Location: August 15th 2015, 2pm-5.30pm, Room 2345
Organizers:
* Andrea Williams, Sound Artist, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA
Website: http://www.listeninglistening.com/isea-2015-vancouver-bc.html
Description: The Soundwalk as an Art Form presents an overview of the history of the participatory walk as an art form, including the soundwalk and its key concepts and development at Simon Fraser University, while providing a theoretical tool box for creating ones own soundwalk as a transformative art experience. When leading a soundwalk we are combining the perceiver and the perceived, the participant and observer in an improvisatory way in the physical environment. Soundwalks may disrupt a once familiar sense of place, and instead guide us on a path created by our ears rather than by the imposed visual cues of the urban environment. Sound artist, Andrea Williams, will lead a brief half-hour soundwalk around the still controversial Woodward Building to provide one of many examples of how one might begin to work within a community to create one’s own soundwalk. Following the walk, there will be an hour of break-out groups for discussion.