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

A 6 week immersion into making art in a digital age.  Through hands-on workshops, talks, lively discussions, and local gallery and studio trips we explore the current state of digital art and gain some hands-on skills.  We will use free, open source tools such as Processing and Arduino, look into digital color theory, interactive hardware and sensors, and discuss techniques and ideas, with the goal of creating an interactive work of art by the end.

Schedule: Wednesday nights at SPACE Studios in Hackney from 7-9PM starting Oct. 13.

Cost: £120 for 6 weeks (does not include materials such as Arduinos)

Please register at: http://digitalartanalogueworld.eventbrite.com or email us.

Concessions available – please email reserve@openlabworkshops.org for details.

Intro Processing for Everyone
Friday, 18th June 10.30am-4.30pm
£15 – buy your ticket via Eventbrite http://introprocessingforeveryone.eventbrite.com
Madlab (Manchester Digital Laboratory)
36-40 Edge Street, Manchester M4 1HN
(Between Thomas St and the Craft Centre, opposite A Bar Called Common)
madlab.org.uk
inprocessing.cybersonica.org
openlabworkshops.org

InProcess:ing and Madlab are pleased to welcome Evan Raskob – founder and organiser of Openlab Workshops – making art and music with open source/free software around London and the UK.

This condensed one-day version of the regular Openlab’s 5-evening course will be a relaxed but project-focused introduction to programing in Processing and interactive art and design in general. We will spend the bulk of the day on basic methods of working with code, general workflow and feeling your way around the Processing environment, along the way building some small projects and gaining inspiration from art, design and technologies such as Wii remotes, RFID, OSC, video and more. The material is flexible, based on the needs and wishes of the people attending.

Expect to learn and find out about:
Introductory coding practice
Where to find both help and inspiration
Basic drawing to the screen
Loops and time-based animation
Using the mouse: built-in mouse methods and variables
Using the keyboard: built-in keyboard methods and variables
The possibility – time permitting – of working with images and/or video

InProcess:ing v1.4

an open forum for sharing creative coding and practice
a scheme by Madlab and Cybersonica
Thursday, 17th June 7-10pm
(and third Thursday – or thereabouts – of the month thereafter)
Madlab (Manchester Digital Laboratory)
36-40 Edge Street, Manchester M4 1HN
(Between Thomas St and the Craft Centre, opposite A Bar Called Common)
madlab.org.uk
inprocessing.cybersonica.org

‘In-the-flesh’ presentation by London based live video performance artist or “pixelist” Evan Raskob a.k.a. PixelPusher – demonstrating his homemade software that generates video out of a controlled chaos of photographic images, simple shapes, animations, sounds, and live video feeds;
Informal ‘show-and-tell’ and ‘open-laptop’ sessions (go on… bring some of your own work along).
InProcess:ing focuses on the Processing language, environment and community (though not exclusively) as a vehicle to support and encourage creative collaboration and meaningful exchange between a diverse group of practitioners, creatives and hobbyists. It aims to create a playful, experimental space and a supportive framework in which people can share their work, realise new technological ideas, be inspired, challenged and stretched.
Join us at the next session to see Processing in action, meet other interested and like-minded people and find out more about the project and how to get involved;
Visit the InProcess:ing website to catch up with developments and future plans, watch past presentations and follow up on interesting links;
Join the forum and share your favourite Processing sketches, suggest practitioners/work for future presentations, offer useful techniques and online resources and tell us what you’d like to see from the project.
For full biogs, photos and links visit the InProcess:ing website <inprocessing.cybersonica.org>.

The course itself will be a relaxed but project-focused introduction to programing in Processing and interactive art and design in general.  We will spend the bulk of the first three sessions on basic methods of working with code, general workflow, and feeling your way around the Processing environment, along the way building some small projects and gaining inspiration from art, design, and technologies such as Wii remotes, RFID, OSC, video, and more.  The material is flexible, based on the needs and wishes of the people attending.

Taking place on 5 consecutive Thursday nights from 7:15 – 9:15PM at SPACE from May 27 until June 24.

This will be a small workshop, so please reserve soon!   The cost will be £125 for the entire 5-week course, paid upfront, unless you make other arrangements with us.  A make-up session will be included.

Finally…

Please email reserve@openlabworkshops.org to reserve spot in any workshop!

All workshops take place at SPACE Studios, in Hackney, at 129 – 131 Mare St, Hackney E8 3RH

Nearest transport: London Fields (5 mins by rail from Liverpool St.), Bethnal Green (tube), various buses – please see http://www.spacestudios.org.uk/contact/SPACE/ for full details

We’re happy to announce another Introductory Processing workshops plus two shiny new workshops running at the lovely and well-outfitted SPACE Studios, this April to June: one aimed at creating interactive lighting installations using Arduino, LEDs, and DMX, and another where we explore using Processing to visualize data, learning some techniques of data sorting and visualization along the way.

Interactive Lighting With Arduino

First, we’re offering a new workshop from Arduino and interactive design guru Daniel Hirschmann:

With the ubiquity of LED lighting installations, artists and designers are looking at ways of introducing interactive elements to light based works. This class is intended to demonstrate methods and technologies to interface and create one’s own responsive light art works. Using the open source Arduino as our platform, over the course of 5 weeks, participants will learn how to use sensor information to effect their light pieces. By using various electronic components and techniques we will demonstrate how to expand the outputs of the Arduino. We will cover the DMX lighting control standard in depth – offering strategies for building responsive lighting systems with off the shelf DMX controllable fixtures. By the end of the class, participants will produce their own interactive lighting project.

Taking place on 4 consecutive Monday nights from 6:30-9:30PM at SPACE from April 26 to May 17 inclusive, with a final open workshop session on June 7.  The cost will be £160, paid upfront, unless you make other arrangements with us.  The cost includes a custom circuit board and electronic components necessary for the workshop.
[more details]

Intermediate Processing: Visualizing Data

Dry as the title may sound, this workshop will be an inspiring tour of projects using data in art and design, and the techniques behind them.  Visualizing data is a great way to learn more about Processing and what’s possible with software and visuals, because let’s face it, most of what we do in the digital world is taking data from one source (e.g. temperature, twitter messages, the daily length of your toenails) and converting it to another form (e.g. a bar graph).  In a scant 4 weeks, you will learn:

1. How to use data to create interesting visual imagery
2. What XML is and why it is useful
3. How to load and save data files (in a variety of formats)
4. How to represent data as code (object-oriented programming)
5. Basic math skills for dealing with data (mean, mode, median, etc)

Taking place on 3 consecutive Thursday nights from 7:15-9:15PM at SPACE from April 29 to May 20.  For those who have taken the introductory Processing course, or with basic exposure to programming (loops, variables, arrays).  You will need to bring a laptop, preferably with Processing installed (free download).   The cost will be £75, paid upfront, unless you make other arrangements with us.

Introductory Processing for Everyone

The course itself will be a relaxed but project-focused introduction to Processing and interactive art and design in general.  We will spend the bulk of the first three sessions on basic methods of working with code, general workflow, and feeling your way around the Processing environment, along the way building some small projects and gaining inspiration from art, design, and technologies such as Wii remotes, RFID, OSC, video, and more.  The material is flexible, based on the needs and wishes of the people attending.

Taking place on 5 consecutive Thursday nights from 7:15 – 9:15PM at SPACE from May 27 until June 24.

This will be a small workshop, so please reserve soon!   The cost will be £125 for the entire 5-week course, paid upfront, unless you make other arrangements with us.

Finally…

Please email reserve@openlabworkshops.org to reserve spot in any workshop!

All workshops take place at SPACE Studios, in Hackney, at 129 – 131 Mare St, Hackney E8 3RH

Nearest transport: London Fields (5 mins by rail from Liverpool St.), Bethnal Green (tube), various buses – please see http://www.spacestudios.org.uk/contact/SPACE/ for full details

This 2-day workshop will take place on Tuesday 6 & 13 April at The Flea Pit (Columbia Rd nr. Old Street, Shoreditch).
Cost: £40 (for two 2-hour sessions)
To reserve please email reserve@openlabworkshops.org – space is limited.

Are you new to programming and interactive electronics? Have you ever been interested in a crash course in connecting real world sensors with your computer?

This is the class for you! We start with a gentle introduction to programming using Processing, a free tool for digital art and design. Following that is a basic introduction to electronics and sensors using the Arduino platform. Finally, we demonstrate how you can connect the two together! Use a distance sensor to control the strength of a man-made wind, or use a mouse click to start a vibrating motor under someone’s chair… At the end of this class you will have the tools to do exactly these things and more.

Suitable for beginners. No previous experience necessary.

Day 1 – Processing

• Introduction to the Processing application – installing and basic use
• Drawing to the screen
• Basic programming concepts such as decisions (logic) and syntax
• Basic animation concepts
• Resources and where to find help

Day 2 – Arduino

• Introduction to the Arduino platform (hardware and software) – installing and basic use
• Programming the Arduino (syntax)
• Digital input / output, analog input / output, and Serial Communication
• Demonstrating how to get Processing and Arduinos to communicate.
• Resources and where to find help

Processing for Visual Artists

Openlab Workshops presents a 5-week long introductory course in Processing and interactive art.  From 28 January until mid-March, take two Thursdays each month and learn some generative visual art chops.  Learn Processing from the ground up, exploring ActionScript and Arduino in the process.  This will be a project-led course with a relaxed atmosphere and small class size.  We will invite special guest lecturers, in addition to the regular staff, taking you through creating basic sketches up to creating videos, interactive art, and games.  At the end of the course, you will have a working project (game, installation, video piece) of your own design, and some knowledge and inspiration for future projects!  Compare with the V&A’s £240 Processing class for 6 weeks.  Main instructor: Processing guru and lecturer Evan Raskob.

Cost and Reservations
Reservations are limited.  The cost (before January 15th) will be £125 for 5, 2-hour-long sessions (£150 after Jan. 15th).  Sessions will take place on two Thursdays each month, form 7:30-9:30PM at Space Studios, Hackney.  (It’s easy to get to Space! Hackney Central is easily accessible from most stations, and various buses serve the area.  The Bethnal Green Tube station is about a 10-minute walk. We will provide you with more information).  Please email reserve@openlabworkshops.org to reserve a spot!

More Information
We will start from the beginning and cover the basics of Processing and interactive art – drawing to the screen, creating sketches for the web, some basic programming practices.  Then, since the workshop is project-focused, we will work with participants on more specific topics, including some of the following:  creating and analyzing sound; working with and saving to video; webcams; network communications using OSC (including communicating with SuperCollider).

If you have any questions at all, please email us and ask at info@openlabworkshops.org !!

Private sessions are also available – please email for details.

(By the way, the header image was generated in Processing)

Follow us on twitter: http://twitter.com/openlabworkshop

Last one of the year! Going out with a bang.  Third Thursdays workshops return to Space Studios in January, keep your eyes peeled for upcoming events!  Thanks for all your support this year, we couldn’t do this without you.  You are the sunshine in our lives, the wind beneath our wings, the spark in our step, the heat in our fire, the evil metal heart in our bloody-minded killer robot.  See you soon!

http://openlabworkshops.org

When: Thursday 19 November, from 6pm-10:00pm

Where: Space Studios, 129 – 131 Mare St, Hackney E8 3RH

Nearest transport: Bethnal Green (tube), London Fields (Overground), Buses – see http://www.spacestudios.org.uk/contact/SPACE/

Cost: £15 for the entire night, or per workshop (see below).
How to pay: At the door, or via Paypal to be guaranteed a space (limited to 30 people per workshop).  Please email or Paypal reserve@openlabworkshops.org to reserve a space in any workshop.

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6PM – Graphic Design Using Inkscape with Jake Rayson

Graphic design for the masses!  You know that you need to do that flow chart, wireframe, presentation, or cute portrait of your cat using vector graphics (so you can blow it up to wall size and scare the fur off her back), but you don’t want to plunk down £1000+ for Adobe CS5.  That’s where open source vector graphics program Inkscape comes in.  Jake will take you through the basics, and was nice enough to provide a detailed list of them:

1. Welcome to Inkscape v0.47!
2. Creating images: Bitmap vs. Vector
3. Using images: Print vs. Web
4. Shapes: fill, stroke, transform.
5. The wonder of Bezier Curves.
6. Creating type.
7. Crack Compound Paths.
8. Combining bitmap & vector.
9. Export for Web!

Please download Inkscape from http://inkscape.org/ before the workshop, but if you can’t, then we’ll have some copies laying about.

7:45PM – Animation in Processing with Alias

So you know Processing and/or Flash, now how do you make your pretty graphics move around the screen in ways more interesting than left-to-right and then right-to-left?  Cue Alias and “Animation in Processing.”  In this workshop, we will cover the basics of getting things moving in Processing, starting with simple 2D sprites, moving on to more complex concepts like using tween equations, and finally touching on 3D animation using OpenGL.  This is an intermediate level workshop – a little knowledge of Processing is advisable, but you should be able to pick things up if you are reasonably familiar with the basic concepts.

~=~=~=~For More Information~=~=~=~

Please reply and tell us if you don’t want to receive more of these emails at this address. We’re not into spamming people…

Follow us on twitter: http://twitter.com/openlabworkshop

Sign up to our events announcements list!

You can also keep up with all general Openlab events, performances, workshops, etc. on our low-traffic email list: http://lists.pawfal.org/listinfo.cgi/openlab-announce-pawfal.org

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~= Workshop #6: Special Daniel vs. Daniel Edition ~=~=~=

When: Thursday 15 October, from 6pm-9:30pm
Where: Space Studios, 129 – 131 Mare St, Hackney E8 3RH
Nearest transport: Bethnal Green (tube), London Fields (Overground), Buses – see http://www.spacestudios.org.uk/contact/SPACE/

Cost: £15 for the entire night, or per workshop (see below).
How to pay: At the door, or via Paypal to be guaranteed a space.  Please email or Paypal to reserve@openlabworkshops.org to reserve a space in any workshop.

Schedule:

6PM: Simulating and Sonifying Natural Systems with Daniel Jones – £10
An increasingly popular practice in digital arts is creating sonic representations of dynamical systems — simulating natural phenomena such as insect swarms, tree growth, wind turbulence and neural networks, and translating such phenomena into sound, to create organic, dynamic audio-visual works. Working from a *basic knowledge* of the Java-based Processing environment, Daniel Jones explains how to create such a simulation and subsequently connect it to the open-source SuperCollider synthesis engine, providing a valuable addition to a digital artist’s toolkit.

Requirements:

• Processing (from http://processing.org/download/)

7:45PM: Introduction to Arduino: Microcontrollers, LEDs, Sensors, and You! with Daniel Hirschmann – £10
Newly-minted Goldsmiths’ lecturer Daniel introduces you to the Arduino as a platform for prototyping physical & digital interactive objects, installation, and things.  We will cover the programming environment, some basic electronics, and learn how to make sensors do stuff to lights.

Requirements:

• laptop computer with Arduino downloaded and installed.  Go through the Getting Started guide on the website.
• An Arduino Microcontroller platform.  These can be bought from Tinker.it.  If needed, a few will be on hand for use, or for sale.  Please let us know by email (see above) whether you’re interested in buying one on the day.
• Breadboard, hook-up wire, switches, LEDs, Potentiometers, Infrared Rangers, Ultrasonic rangers, FSR’s, other sensors…  If you don’t know what these are, DON’T worry!  We’ll have some available to use during the intro.  If you DO know what these are, and you have a them – bring them along and we can help you wire them up!

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~= Workshop #7: Programming is More than Just Words ~=~=~=

When: Tuesday 20 October, from 6pm-10:00pm
Where: The Roebuck pub (upstairs room), 50 Great Dover Street, SE1 4YG
Nearest transport: 5, 133, 343, 21 buses, Borough Tube (Northern line)
About 8 minute walk from London Bridge Station (Northern and Jubilee tube, rail, and bus station: 48, 47, 149 buses)

Cost: £15 for the entire night, or per workshop (see below).
How to pay: At the door, or via Paypal to be guaranteed a space (limited to 30 people per workshop).  There will be a few spaces for people who show up on the night.  Please email reserve@openlabworkshops.org to reserve a space in any workshop.

Schedule:

6PM: Processing Beginners’ Workshop with Evan Raskob – £10

You’ve heard Evan’s intro workshops and been slightly terrified by the advanced stuff (it’s ok to admit it).  So bring your basic questions and project ideas, and Evan will work thorough them to everyone’s benefit.  Or, if people are feeling quiet, he will go through some of his endless bag o’ tricks, including OSC and MIDI.

7:45PM: Understanding Sound and Music by Programming Computers with S. Jagannathan – £10

Session 1 (of 2): Building a music tuner program.

Your very own accurate musical instrument tuner spanning the entire audio range to tune any instrument.  Several tuning schemes supported including roll your own.  About 50% of the workshop/talk will have computer sound & music ideas – these will be programming language agnostic – in a format that musicians without any prior programming background but with an interest in computer music can understand. PD, max/msp, SuperCollider, etc. users will benefit from looking into that primal black box of sound generators!

Requirements:

• Basic knowledge of C – variables, loops, conditionals, basic pointers. (if you have done programming in the past it should be fairly straightforward.)
• Computer with the ability to compile and run C programs linked to portaudio libraries.

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See our entire Fall / Winter schedule on http://openlabworkshops.org

Follow us on twitter: http://twitter.com/openlabworkshop

You can also keep up with all Openlab events, performances, workshops, etc. on our low-traffic email list: http://lists.pawfal.org/listinfo.cgi/openlab-announce-pawfal.org

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When: Thursday 17 September, from 6pm-10:30pm

Where: Space Studios, 129 – 131 Mare St, Hackney E8 3RH

Nearest transport: Bethnal Green (tube), London Fields (Overground), Buses – see http://www.spacestudios.org.uk/contact/SPACE/

Cost: £12 for the entire night, or per workshop (see below).
How to pay: At the door, or via Paypal to be guaranteed a space (limited to 30 people per workshop).  Please email reserve@openlabworkshops.org to reserve a space in any workshop.

1) Markup for Mortals: HTML and Web Design with
Jake Rayson – £8

For beginners who are interested in learning about how to write content for blogs and web sites but who aren’t very techie. Understand what makes a web page by using the easy-to-learn and easy-to-read Markdown markup language. If you can write an email, then you can write HTML!

2) Processing for Visual Artists: Sonic Visuals with Evan Raskob – £8
For beginners to intermediates with basic experience using Processing or Java.  In this session we look at the Minim library and how to make visuals that respond to sound.  The session will cover installing a Processing library (Minim comes with Processing!), a quick overview of Minim, what the heck is an FFT, and various techniques that pixelist PixelPusher uses to make things flash on screen to various types of music & noise.

~=~=~=~For More Information~=~=~=~

See our entire Fall / Winter schedule here.

Follow us on twitter: http://twitter.com/openlabworkshop

You can also keep up with all Openlab events, performances, workshops, etc. on our low-traffic email list: http://lists.pawfal.org/listinfo.cgi/openlab-announce-pawfal.org