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As part of the Natural Circuits Barbican weekender MzTEK will be running 6x 2 hour workshops throughout the weekend, so come and make your t-shirt for FREE!

This summer we designed three wearable instruments for a collaboration with Guerilla Science to create the Hacked Human Orchestra. Come make your beatbox t-shirt this weekend and join the phenomenon that is the Hacked Human Orchestra!

You will find us in the main foyer near the canteen from 10am – 6pm Saturday and Sunday.

Last weekend was not just the very much needed August bank holiday, it was also our last workshop for the Hacked Human Orchestra project *sob*! The workshop took place at the absolutely lovely Shambala Festival in  Northamptonshire, which prides itself as being a ‘..space to play, to reinvent and revitalise…’. We couldn’t agree more :)

With us were our awesome collaborators on the project, Guerilla Science, PhD student Shauna Concannon and Hannah Perner-Wilson from Kobakant. It was a pleasure to have Hannah with us as Kobakant have been an inspiration to us throughout the project and have helped us along the way with the design of the wearable instruments.

Like Wilderness Festival a couple of weeks ago, participants at the workshop made wearable pianos:

Beatbox machines:

And a new screech instrument!:

The latter we are VERY proud of, as for it we designed our first PCB:

Like at Wilderness, after finishing their instrument each participant went and played it for composer Florian Lunaire who is creating a track from all the sound samples he took. We can’t wait to hear it and when it’s finished you’ll be able to listen to it on our website. We will also be releasing all the learning materials from the project on our Workshop Material page.

We would like to thank a number of people for helping us with the project; Lush Projects for helping us with the piano instrument as Iain very kindly provided us with the circuit diagram for it, the Royal Academy of Engineering for supporting the project and Jamie Allen and Jo Kazuhiro for letting us use their circuit from the Chiptune Marching Band project for our screech instrument.

For more images from the Shambala workshop, please see our Flickr stream.

TWO AMAZINGLY GEEKY WORKSHOPS FOR WOMEN AT THE ELECTROMAGNETIC FIELD FESTIVAL…

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Introduction to interactive and wearable technology, using the Arduino and/or LilyPad Arduino.

This workshop will focus on the principles of interactive and physical computing using the Arduino. We will introduce some basic interaction using sensors and lights, which can also be applied to the LilyPad Arduino, a wearable micro controller used to make interactive cloths and textiles.

This will be a 2hour workshop over the weekend of the EMF camp. Time and day tbc.

There will be opportunities throughout the weekend to develop projects, and learn more about soft-circuits and e-textiles.

MzTEK will provide an Arduino Uno, sensors and LED’s to borrow.  If you would like to use an Arduino LilyPad you will need to provide your own kit.  Please see our MzTEK EMF wiki page for where to purchase items.

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sketchPatch generative art badge making

sketchPatch is an online programming playground, using the programming language Processing. The workshop is a game of tag, in which everyone contributes to each others work as they are passed around the group.

At the end of the day we will print sketches out and turn them into BADGES!

So come and join sketchPatch.net in a round of sketchTag!

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Where & When

The workshops will be held at Electromagnetic Field Festival, for which you will need to purchase ticks here… Electromagnetic Field

There is no additional tuition fee for these workshop, but you may need/want to buy your own kit.

To sign up get in touch at info@mztek.org or add your name to the MzTEK EMF wiki page.

Visit our EMF page for more info 

Last Saturday we hosted with Guerilla Science the first installment of the Hacked Human Orchestra workshops at our lovely home, The Centre for Creative Collaboration. We’ve been very lucky to work with Shauna Concannon, who is studying for her PhD at Queen Mary, and Kobakant (Mika Satomi and Hannah Perner-Wilson) both of whom have been working with us on developing the workshop.

Our wonderful participants stitched an elaborate soft circuit which will power a wearable piano and also made sensors including soft circuit pompoms, french chains, buttons (or keys) for the piano and even dino-style spikes!

Soft circuit for a wearable piano

Dino spike which closes a circuit when squeezed!

Soft circuit pompom, made with conductive and non conductive yarn, good to use as a tilt switch.

Learning about the circuit for the wearable piano.

Testing the circuit with a button/piano key made from conductive fabric, felt and foam.

The Hacked Human Orchestra workshop space.

The next stage is to take the project to Shambala and Wilderness festivals where festival-goers will add to the circuits made in last weeks workshop, creating a wearable piano, and also work on more instruments as well. The result will be a walking, soft circuit orchestra which will be lead by composer Florian Lunaire.

Our presentation and the learning materials from the workshop can  downloaded here and you can find more images from the day on Flickr. A great video of the day, created by Debbie Davies is below:

This project is generously being supported by the Royal Academy of Engineering.