ISEA2015

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.

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.

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.

Please, bring your personal laptop! 

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.

 “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.

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.

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.

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.