BUY TICKETS HERE
Dates and Times: 19:00-21:30 on 13/3, 20/3, 27/3 (Tuesdays)
Venue: [ space ] on Mare Street
Participants: 20 (5 groups of 4)
Price: £99/person (£69 conc), £329 for team of 4
Instructors: Evan, Becky, Adam

Description:

This is our second run of the successful BYOSH workshop!

Working in small teams, you will build your own augmented reality system that instantly turns anyone into a superhero. Develop super powers – shoot lasers, see through walls, fire rockets, turn invisible, all using some coding and the Kinect and OpenNI! We will provide the hardware and tools you need. We will use free and open source tools such as Processing, toxiclibs, Kinect and OpenNI, and introduce techniques in 3D graphics and interactive sound synthesis. Food and drink provided. Assemble your own team, or come and meet some creative people to form a team.

Day 1: Intro, inspiration, brainstorming ideas, using our code for Processing and the Kinect (examples)
Day 2: Audio-visual programming – coding your characters visual appearance and sound effects and/or theme song
Day 3: Finishing projects; Showing off everyone’s superheroes

Code from the last workshop is open source and can be found here on Github.

Requirements:

Bring your art skills and superhero ideas! Some very basic familiarity with programming concepts required. We will cover some basics of programming using Processing, a simplified version of Java for interactive art and design. We will provide Kinect cameras and computers for each team, but you may bring your own laptop.

Ticketing:

We sell both single tickets and a special group ticket for a group of 4 people who would like to work together, and can purchase their ticket at the same time.

Refunds:

We are a small organisation and spaces are limited, so if you’d like a refund please ask us up to 48 hours before the event or else we will not be able to refund your full price.

Use your laptop to turn light into sound!

BUY TICKETS HERE!!!

Location and Time

Where: [ space ] studios, 121-129 Mare St., London E8 3RH, UK
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Dates and Times: 4 Mondays (13/2, 20/2, 27/2, 5/3) in 2012

Over 4 nights you will learn enough to put together a spectacular sound and light performance.  Composer and interactive designer Simon Katan will teach you how to track an LED light with your computer and a webcam using Processing and then turn that data into music using SuperCollider.

If you’ve never heard of Processing or SuperCollider, don’t worry ! This is an introductory course.  However, you should be comfortable using lots of different computer software and not afraid to learn some computer programming techniques. On the other hand, if you’re a hard-core coder but don’t know SuperCollider or have no musical experience then this workshop also has plenty to offer you.

Over 3 nights (2.5hrs each), fueled by a tasty spread of sliced Italian and French meats, olives, hummus, and the all-important beer and coffee, 4 teams of participants hacked our example code into 4 very different “superheros.”

Jesson Yip and and Nicola Plant created Laura Croft (with Rainbow Shooting Crotch^TM) and MegaMan (complete with a working version of his particle weapon).  Hats off to Jesson for illustrating the characters himself:

Dan and Pollie created “Super-Bach,” a hopped-up version of the venerable composer in digital puppet form, Danny and Stewart pieced together “Batfink” complete with real head (a superimposed live video feed of the participant’s face):

Lori Ho hacked a Harry Potter puppet:

As always, you can find our workshop materials online.  The main materials are at hosted on Codasign’s website and the code is in a github repository (as always, open source).  We’re going to do this workshop again at the Kinetica Festival in February, hope to see you there!

More photos of the workshop can be found here.

6pm – 9pm Thurs 13 and Fri 14 October 2011

Openlab Workshops and SPACE Studios invite everyone to an exhibition of the Life Project, an ongoing series of weekly making sessions where we build a digital ecosystem of aftificial creatures.  Part art project, part communal crafting excercise, it could be described as both a conceptual work of art and a colelction of “Tamagotchis on steriods.”  Come see for youself, talk to the participants, and even participate in future sessions!

SPACE STUDIOS (in the Medialab)
129—131 MARE STREET
LONDON E8 3RH
020 8525 4330

About the workshop:

Working in small teams, you will build your own augmented reality system that instantly turns anyone into a superhero. Develop super powers – shoot lasers, see through walls, fire rockets, turn invisible, all using some coding and the Kinect and OpenNI! We will provide the hardware and tools you need. We will use free and open source tools such as Processing, toxiclibs, Kinect and OpenNI, and introduce techniques in 3D graphics and interactive sound synthesis. Food and drink provided. Assemble your own team, or come and meet some creative people to form a team.

Where: [ space ] studios, 121-129 Mare St., London E8 3RH, UK
View Larger Map

Dates and Times: 19:00-21:00 on 11, 18, 21 (Tues, Tues, Friday) October, 2011

• Day 1: Intro, inspiration, brainstorming ideas, using Processing and the Kinect (examples)
• Day 2: Audio-visual programming – coding your characters visual appearance and sound effects and/or theme song
• Day 3: Finishing projects; Showing off everyone’s superheroes

Requirements:

Some familiarity with programming concepts required. We will cover some basics of programming using Processing, a simplified version of Java for interactive art and design. We will provide Kinect cameras and computers for each team, but you may bring your own laptop.

Maximum Participants: 20 (5 groups of 4)

Instructors: Evan of OLW and Becky and Adam of Codasign

Ticketing:

We sell both single tickets and a special group ticket for a group of 4 people who would like to work together, and can purchase their ticket at the same time.

Refunds:

We are small organisations and spaces are limited, so if you’d like a refund please ask us up to 48 hours before the event or else we will not be able to refund your full price.

2 Day Course
Date: Friday 10th + Saturday 11th June
Times: 10.30am to 4.30pm
Price: £200.00
Instructor: Evan Raskob

You’ve played games on your phone, now make them! In this 2-day workshop you will be taken through the basics of Android programming using Processing, up to moving a character around the screen in a real game that you can play on an Android phone.
You will start with drawing shapes and images on the screen and end up with creating animations and game play.
You will need to bring your own mobile phone or tablet that runs Android (as many do), we provide the computers. Or, bring a laptop and we will discuss installing the free, open source Processing for Android software on your personal computer, for Mac, PC, and Linux.

General
Each student has their own workstation for the practical parts of the course and can discuss any specific areas of interest they may have towards the end of the day with the tutor.

Bookings
http://www.eventbrite.com/event/1517772699

Enquiries
020 8525 4330
training@spacestudios.org.uk

Presented by SPACE Studios: http://www.spacestudios.org.uk/whats-on/courses/game-design-for-android-devices

Week 1 Evan gave a lecture in cellular automata (via a long wiki page on http://wiki.openlabworkshops.org), generative art, “biological” creatures rendered in digital-mechanical form, and went over the original proposal for the project.  Then, we introduced ourselves to each other and had a getting-to-know-you session which eventually ended in a small session at the local pub, the Cat and Mutton at the top of Broadway Market.  Before that, we expressed our preferences for the 4 “teams” we’d vow loyalty towards over the course of these 8 weeks – an “embedded systems” team responsible for microcrontrollers and hardware, including sensors; a “design” team responsible for overall design including sketches, user scenarios, storyboards, etc.; a “materials” team composed of hands-on artists with practical experience responsible for the actual physical building of the devices, and choosing the materials to build it out of; and a “web” team to take charge of communication with the greater world outside the project team, including coordinating Twitter, the project blog, and .

Week 2 we got down to discussions, via our brand-new forum at http://forums.openlabworkshops.org.  After a brief re-introduction of the project concept, that of “digital husbandry” and cellular automata writ large in a physical installation using smart cultures that communicate, love, live, and potentially die, we started working out the details of what we’d do over the next 7 weeks.

The original plan was to divide up into 3 teams – design, embedded systems (lets call it “hardware” for now) and materials, then have each brainstorm independently, bringing everything together at the end in a mass discussion form different points of view.  What made more sense, as we looked at people’s strengths and expertise, was to divide up into 2 teams that could tackle the problem from two different (and possibly opposing) perspectives – a “conceptual design” team working on a high conceptual level, working out issues of artistic intention, human interaction, as well as the conceptual relationship between the different parts;  on the other “side” sits a more practical-minded hardware-focused team responsible for looking at the problem of communication, interaction, and ecosystems from the view of what is possible with sensors, microcontrollers, and related techniques.

As the facilitator / project manager, I flitted between both groups to get them started and keep discussions on track.  Both teams, start out sprouting a dense forest of ideas and concepts and discussion from our original conceptual seed.

The design team looked carefully at the relationship between the creatures and humans, and between the creatures and their environment.  To sum up from their notes, they first started out simply with “robots that talk to each other” and looking at the interaction between them: feeding, sleeping, procreating, being lonely, loving each other, even boredom.  Without care, they die; left to themselves, they cooperate with one another; overstimulated, they grow apathetic and, bored, even to the point of dying.   This follows closely the basic concept of Conway’s simple cellular automata, his “Game of Life.”

A theme arose about anthropology vs. husbandry – watching these creatures and trying to figure them out from a distance without disturbing them, versus taking a hands-on, directly intentional approach to guiding their evolution.  Captivity versus “The Wild.”  Nature versus Nurture.  Ecology or Evolution.  Here is where the discussion entered moral territory, where we could explore our ideas on which one was, for lack of a better term, “better” in our minds, and whether or not that was a fair, or even defensible, point of view.   Is it a questions of “purity” and “contamination?”

“Please don’t feed the machine” writes Elvia in her notes.

“Robots should communicate with one another foremost and then how the audience interacts with them can be considered the emergent behaviour of the system” writes Gustavo.

Either way, the “cellular” machines could have their own behaviour when people were not around, as well as their own language for communicating with one another.  Soon the creatures would organize themselves into neighborhoods of those nearby, following the age-old urban pattern.

There was some discussion as to whether this light-and-sound-based language would be understandable to humans at all. Either way, the creature would use Twitter and possibly other Internet mediums to broadcast out thoughts and desires whenever they felt necessary.   “Language as virus” – our language or interaction can spread amongst them, and they can contaminate us right back.

The hardware team started on similar conceptual territory, of course wanting to tackle the main issues first, but I gently prodded them towards more of a hardware-design focus as the discussion wound on.  We looked at what sensors were available (and affordable) and what experience we’d had between the group of us with using them.

We came up with a laundry list of techniques and hardware, some of which would make interesting experiments:

Wireless
Photocells
RFID
Infrared
Twitter
Color sensors
Part of a system
Compass
Tilt switch
Solar powered water pumps
Temp sensors
Capacitive sensors
Microwave motion detector – how much movement
Sound impact sensor – clap patterns

vibrating motors for when held
Tricolor LEDs

What’s more, we expanded on the idea of simple single creatures to look at “tribes” and mother/child relationships:

Motherships and babies? Reproduction? Could “babies” be sensors? Would “mothers” protect them?

Are there tribes that emit different sounds, different colors?

Many questions that will need some discussion/resolution at the next session.

Some tasks for next week:
- Nominate forum moderators
- Customize forum
- Choose WordPress template, install, customize

Evan did a the “Silky Sounds of Circuitry” workshop at The School of Everything’s HQ in Bethnal Green, and we made a wicked amount of synthtastic noise, including some 2-player synths (video included!)