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.
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.
http://www.listeninglistening.com/isea-2015-vancouver-bc.html
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.