presentation

Hear.Feel.Fear: Presentation of work, 17cox gallery in Beverley

Wednesday, November 30th, 2011

I will be presenting PC//MM alongside Joey at 17cox on Saturday, December 3rd.  Joey and I have been performing music together for about a year and a half.  Having the context of a presentation will allow us to discuss our influences and our process for composition and performance.

This will include the ideas and inspirations in the evolution of our setup, performance style, and equipment, as well as the development of WHIRL and the intersection of art, music, and community we’ve found in our execution.

So if you’ve seen us perform and wonder who is doing what, or how I’m getting the monomachine to make sounds, or where Joey finds his samples, swing by.

Yup, you guessed it- that's a breadboard synth there. Three oscillators and ring modulation.

The event is produced by 17cox, and is designed to explore collage techniques in the creative process:

In tandem with Continuity, 17 Cox is hosting events engendering collage to all forms of cut and paste media; not just 2D collage, but film, turntables, and other devices/methods that arrange prefabricated media samples like sound bites, film stills, track cuts, et al. into larger compositions.

17cox: 17 Cox Court, Beverly MA 01915, December 3rd, 6pm. 

Posted on November 30th, 2011 under Blog. Tags: , , , , ,

Some references for the Community Stack

Tuesday, September 20th, 2011

Last week, Benjamin Sugar, Adam Hasler, and I presented some of our work at the Connected Communities Symposium in Newcastle.  We are currently compiling the work into a more camera-ready form, but until then, I have put together some links that outline our references.

In short, the Community Stack is a solution stack of existing technologies that when combined can empower individuals and communities to not only identify problems, but also collaborate and create projects to solve them.  Its a way for communities to become more healthy, by encouraging creativity.  What’s exciting is that most of the technologies exist, or are in development- but people don’t know about a lot of them because there isn’t really funding for PR for all of these projects.

A lot of the reading material for Design for Empowerment informed our understanding of the social and political context of design.  In particular, the readings of

There are several projects that were mentioned in the Community Stack.

Hardware

Data

Software

Now the remaining layers are mostly based on the readings we did, rather than existing technologies- since the design for user interfaces and community is much more high level.  Here are a few references:

UX

  • Principles from readings like the ones listed above: toolkits (Resnick, von Hippel), tussels, and creative support (Shneiderman)
  • Collaborative design (d-lab influenced)

Commmunity

Thanks! Send me a message if you’d like me to keep you posted on when we get the rest of the material compiled. I will post it up on the site for sure.

Posted on September 20th, 2011 under Blog. Tags: , , , ,

t=0 festival workshop at MIT

Tuesday, September 20th, 2011

Profile from the T=0 festival lineup

Last Saturday, the 17th, I ran a workshop at the t=0 festival at MIT.  It was a festival over the weekend that brought together hackers, artists, and entrepreneurs.  The workshop I ran was titled ‘Rapid Prototyping, Creativity, and Open Hardware‘.  I put together some material on the opportunities within open hardware in product development (heavily influenced by Eric von Hippel’s work) and a gallery of some cool Arduino projects.   There is still quite a lot to be explored within entrepreneurship and open hardware- and that’s what I wanted people to get inspired to do.  You can see the material here. The idea was to explore the Arduino as a prototyping platform, and while doing so understand the implications of both open hardware, and of rapid prototyping.

Afterwards, we went over a few tutorials on using the Arduino.  This was actually a whole lot of fun.  We had students from the Sloan school, from CSAIL, and from the Media Lab as well.  Most rewarding was seeing quirks of excitement as the projects came to life.  I’ll be compiling a video documenting the workshop, and will post it in the coming week.

T=0 Festival

 

Posted on September 20th, 2011 under Blog. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Details – connected communities symposium

Monday, August 1st, 2011

Details of the connected communities symposium in September were sent out earlier today, to be distributed far and wide.  It will be an exciting conference, and I’m pumped to see ideas presented and developed there by people from all over. Adam Hasler, Ben Sugar, and I will be presenting some design principles we’ve uncovered in our research the last few months, regarding designing technologies for communities.

CONNECTED COMMUNITIES Symposium
Culture Lab Newcastle, UK — 12-14th September 2011
http://side-creative.ncl.ac.uk/communities/symposium11/

Culture Lab Newcastle is hosting an international interdisciplinary event open to the general public, on the topic of “connected communities”.
This symposium includes talks and projects from theorists and practitioners alike.
Registration is now open: http://side-creative.ncl.ac.uk/communities/symposium11/registrations/

TOPIC

In an era where digital technologies have supported transnational forms of connectedness and the efficiency of grassroot movements,
communities are once again looked at as innovative fertile grounds for alternative social organisation.

As these trends can be manipulated by current governmental agendas, the Connected Communities symposium aims to critically explore notions of community,
as evolving with the creative uses and the effects of digital technologies.

The topic will be addressed in 4 different contexts :

- A conference over 3 days, with talks selected from submitted expressions of interests under the topics of: Collective Action, Participative Platforms, Engagement,
Economies, Transnational, (Hi)stories, Technology & Society, Community Art, and Co-Creation.

- An exhibition at Culture Lab OnSite, centred on the notions of community and digital media. This will include blogs, documentation of community-based art workshops,
art and ethnographic projects. The exhibition will run until the 18th of September.

- A half a day workshop using the symposium as a temporary community of practice to explore deeper questions of community.
Registration is limited to 15 people and will be opened soon.

- A Beats and Pieces party at the local community space Star and Shadow (http://www.starandshadow.org.uk/).

PROGRAMME

For a detailed programme of the conference, please visit:
http://side-creative.ncl.ac.uk/communities/symposium11/conference/

FEE

The symposium, all events included, are FREE of charge and open to all.

REGISTRATION

As we only have limited space available, please register in advance to the conference in order to avoid disappointment:
- Day 1 (12th September): http://connectedcommunitiesncl2011day1.eventbrite.com/
- Day 2 (13th September): http://connectedcommunitiesncl2011day2.eventbrite.com/
- Day 3 (14th September): http://connectedcommunitiesncl2011day3.eventbrite.com/

CONTACT AND INFORMATION

For more information, please email us at ConnComm2011@gmail.com and/or visit the symposium website:
http://side-creative.ncl.ac.uk/communities/symposium11/

ORGANISERS

Joëlle Bitton, Lalya Gaye, Andreia Cavaco, Ben Jones, Graeme Mearns and Atau Tanaka (SiDE, Culture Lab Newcastle)
Ranald Richardson (SiDE, Center for Urban & Regional Development Studies, Newcastle University)
http://side-creative.ncl.ac.uk/communities/
http://culturelab.ncl.ac.uk/
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/curds/

The symposium is funded by the AHRC research program “Connected communities” and SiDE research program at Culture Lab.
http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/
http://www.side.ac.uk/

[from e-mail]

Posted on August 1st, 2011 under Blog. Tags: , , , , , ,

Barcamp Boston 6 talk about Maker Communities

Saturday, April 16th, 2011

I knew I wanted to give a talk about the social context of design at Barcamp Boston 6: there would be tons of people thinking of product development, marketing, start ups, open source tech, and entrepreneurship- why not describe some of the things I learned in design for empowerment and how they could be both profitable and socially conscious?

Adam Hasler (Dorkbot Boston) and Ben Sugar (who also took DFEX) agreed to join in the presentation, and we crafted a talk that would be an overload of ideas meant to inspire a discussion.  We wanted the talk to be interactive, and excited discussion that would trickle out of the room and continue through the rest of the weekend.  We made sure to include audience engagement throughout the talk- through back chatter and quick interactions- and left a good amount of time at the end for others to speak.

Take a look at the slides to get an idea of the talk:

Maker Entrepreneurs
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The discussion was pretty exciting. Some notable comments from the audience were that :

+It can be easy to fall into an us vs them against coporations, but not all corporations are bad- they can be created as platforms to work for you.  Some corporations take principles from healthy communities in their development- Southwest and Virgin were cited- and we can learn a lot from these companies.
+While changing the corporate landscape could be difficult, the interest in widening connections of the maker community is feasible- the qualities of an entrepreneur are invariant over many cultures, and these similarities could help spread the spark.
+One inherent value in makerspaces is their low barrier to entry.
+A potential source of funding for certain projects bourne out of makerspaces could be SBIR programs (small business innovation research)

Posted on April 16th, 2011 under Blog. Tags: , , , , , ,

Complexity and Creativity

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

A talk I gave at the December 2009 Research Club brunch at Tribute Gallery on applying ideas of complexity to creative projects.  Applications of complex systems ideas in the projects HEXAGON and PDX I Love You are described in the presentation.  The talks were limited to five minutes each, and a transcript is included below.

Brunch #1 / Lecture #3 / Kawandeep Virdee Talks About Complexity from Research Club on Vimeo.

Complexity and Creativity

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Transcript

Posted on March 2nd, 2010 under Articles, Complexity and Creativity. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,