June 9-15, 2019 at Shakerag in Sewanee Tennessee/USA
Electricity does not have to be cased up inside slick metal enclosures; we can also let it flow through painted pine-cones, carved traces, and the water in our bodies. The segregation of our abilities into discrete disciplines leaves gray areas to be explored and missing links to be made. This workshop will provide you with a time and place to disrupt your own practice by introducing new materials, tools, techniques, and places of making -with a focus on introducing electricity as a material property that can be used to create interactive crafts.
More information and workshop registration:
>> https://www.shakerag.org/page.cfm?p=1004
Downloads
Presentation >> http://kobakant.at/downloads/swatchbooks/19-shakerag_present.pdf
Swatchbook >> http://kobakant.at/downloads/swatchbooks/19-shakerag_swatchbook.pdf
Carbon Nature – Carbon coated seed pods. Strung from copper threads. Hanging on a burnt branch. They clash in silence, but their contact is detected. What follows? Must every physical interaction have digital consequences?
This workshop will attempt to blur the boundaries between:
– natural & artificial
– indoors & outdoors
– craft & engineering
– art & technology
natural & artificial
We will forage for materials and attempt to blend the aesthetics of what nature produces with those that man has manufactured.
Beaded Circuit – made from protoboard, beads, LEDs and seeds.
indoors & outdoors
We will strap our tools to our bodies and walk outside the studio to explore how our practice is affected by what lies beyond the familiar infrastructures of making. We will discover new materials, and expose our practices to outside views.
A Wearable Studio Practice – a collection of wearable and portable items that make it easier to become nomadic in your practice of making and manipulating the world.
craft & engineering
Combining the material and aesthetic motivations of craftsmanship with the applied and functional drive for developing ever new technologies… we might discover these fields are not as different as they seem.
Bitlace – Turkish needle-lace motifs that incorporate digital electronics to carry meanings of their own.
art & technology
We will accustom ourselves with technologies by making them ourselves. Once we have gotten to know them intimately, we can use them critically and conceptually as an expressive medium.
The Perfect Human Performance – introducing rules in order to complete the performance as a game.
Resources
Presentation slides
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ThqQAO1l0Adgr0FOfiR-2YirL0no0-cw?usp=sharing
Swatchbook pages
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Yy0C-RMIwd9kMFl4hKYrh0VS_7wArlMl/view?usp=sharing
Workshop page
Patterns
Wearable Studio Practice: http://wsp.plusea.at/
Websites
How To Get What You Want: http://howtogetwhatyouwant.at/
A Kit-of-No-Parts: http://konp.plusea.at/
E-Textile Swatch Exchange: http://etextile-summercamp.org/swatch-exchange/
Electronics and conductive materials
Adafruit: http://adafruit.com/
Sparkfun: http://sparkfun.com/
LessEMF: http://lessemf.com/
Karl-Grimm: http://karl-grimm.de/
Statex/Shieldex: http://statex.de/
Bekaert: http://bekaert.com/
Reading
Stitching Worlds: Exploring Textiles and Electronics, 2018
by Ebru Kurbak
https://www.amazon.de/Stitching-Worlds-Exploring-Textiles-Electronics/dp/3957634229
The textility of making, Tim Ingold, 2009. Cambridge Journal of Economics 34, 1 (2009), 91–102. http://sed.ucsd.edu/files/2014/05/Ingold-2009-Textility-of-making.pdf
The Charge against Electricity, 2015, Mike Anusas and Tim Ingold https://journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca/article/view/ca30.4.03/200
Reimagining Digital Fabrication as Performance Art, 2015, Laura Devendorf, Daniela Rosner
http://artfordorks.com/pubs/15_ALTCHI_Reimagining.pdf
See Yourself Sensing X
http://madelineschwartzman.com/
About the instructor….
Hannah Perner-Wilson combines conductive materials and craft techniques, developing new styles of building electronics that emphasize materiality and process. She received a B.Sc. in Industrial Design from the University for Art and Industrial Design Linz and an M.Sc. in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab, where she was a student in the High-Low Tech research group. Her thesis work focused on developing, documenting, and disseminating a Kit-of-No-Parts approach to building electronics.
Since 2006 Hannah has collaborated with Mika Satomi, forming the collective KOBAKANT. Together they maintain an online database titled How To Get What You Want, where they share their textile sensor designs and DIY approach to E-Textiles. Ever since returning from an expedition to the jungle of southern Madagascar, Hannah has been building herself a Wearable Studio Practice that allows her to be mobile in her practice of making and manipulating the world. Most recently, in 2017/18, KOBAKANT are running KOBA, an e-textile tailor shop in Berlin, Germany as an experiment in what people want wearable technology technology to be for them.
For the last ten years I’ve been working in electronics textiles, also known as e-textiles. It’s a hybrid field of craft and technology that combines knowledge and skill from electrical engineering and textile design. It is still a space without standardized solutions, and working within it has both caused and allowed me to question conventions and cultures surrounding technology production and use. With my own contributions to this field I try to expand our ways of understanding, creating, and using technology, breaking with the image of electronics as industrially produced consumer goods and presenting them instead as an expressive medium, a cultural practice, something to take care of in making and using.
Websites:
Plusea >> http://plusea.at/
Wearable Studio Practice >> http://wsp.plusea.at/
A Kit-of-No-Parts >> http://konp.plusea.at/
HOW TO GET WHAT YOU WANT >> http://howtogetwhatyouwant.at/
KOBAKANT >> http://kobakant.at/
KOBA E-Textile Tailor Shop >> http://www.kobakant.at/KOBA/
Materials and Tools
MATERIALS and TOOLS
here is the shopping list of things that we have purchased for the workshop:
http://www.adafruit.com/wishlists/486981
(we have already bought these items for everybody, no need to purchase them yourself!)
definitely bring:
– your favourite materials and tools, anything you want to try out and use during the week.
– fabrics for making wearable items – i will have patterns for:
apron/skirt: http://wsp.plusea.at/work-skirt/
apron-pouch: http://wsp.plusea.at/alwayson-tool-apron/
ohmBonnet: http://wsp.plusea.at/ohmbonnet/
Tool Vest: http://wsp.plusea.at/tool-suite-vest/
wearableManifesto:
– scrap fabrics and soft materials for making textile sensors and actuators:
http://www.howtogetwhatyouwant.at/?cat=26
– for powering our projects i’ve ordered 3xAAA battery holders, please bring three AAA batteries with you.
if you have other 3-6V battery/power options, please do bring these also (3V coin cells, 3.7V lipo battery, 5V usb powerbank, solar cells….).
– to make yourself a swatchbook cover, please bring a roughly 60x20cm piece of thick fabric (3mm felt is ideal) and a roughly 60cm long piece of string or a shoe-lace. here some photos of what the swatchbook will look like:
– a pair of headphones
– scissors
– sewing needles
– paper, pencil, pens for taking notes and sketching ideas
bring only if you already have and is easy for you to bring:
– a multimeter tool for measuring electricity (maybe ask a friend to borrow one)
– aligator clips connected by cables
– any conductive fabrics, threads, fibers that you already have
– any electronics you have (LEDs, motors, speakers, sensors, batteries, wires, enamelled wire, jumper wires, connectors, resistors, capacitors, breadboard…..)
– arduinos (lilypad, flora, uno, teensy…..)
– wire cutters, strippers
– soldering iron, de-solder tool
– a sewing machine (especially if you know you want to do a lot of machine sewing)
– iron and board
– sewing threads, yarns, fibers
– knitting, felting needles
– extra fabrics (felt, woven, knit…..)
– zippers, elastic, velcro….
– snap fasteners, beads….
– paint brushes, paints…..
– strong magnets
Leave a comment