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Yes, you read right! MzTEK will be making interactive merkins as part of the Guerilla Science tent themed Sex, Drugs & Rock’n’Roll, at this years Secret Garden Party !

Why not come along and embellishing your merkin, whilst you munch on a gherkin (provided).

We’ll be making merkins that light up when you shimmy, by embedding lights into fabrics using conductive thread and conductive trinkets.

Merkin & video by Mika Satomi

When & Where

Saturday 27th July, 11am -2pm ish
Guerilla Science tent at Secret Garden Party

The workshop is £10, open to all. Sign up on the day.

MzTEK’s Beat box t-shirt from the Hacked Human Orchestra at London Music Hackspace

MzTEK and the Music Hackspace invite all you techie women (and women who want to get techie) to join us for a one day workshop where you will learn to make one of the instruments from the project, the Beatbox t-shirt!

This last summer we worked with Guerilla Science, and KOBAKANT to bring a fantastic Hacked Human Orchestra to Wilderness and Shambala festivals, making wearable instruments with festival-goers that created the most awesome music ever!

Creating soft circuits with conductive fabric, conductive thread and an array of electronic components, people turned their t-shirts into synthesizers, screechers and recorders.

On this occasion the Beatbox t-shirt arrives to the London Music Hackspace, a place for artists, innovators, entrepreneurs and hobbyists passionate about music and technology.

In this workshop we will hack a small re-recordable devise, discard the hard wires and replace them with conductive fabric and thread, and learn e-textile techniques to make soft circuit buttons to embed the devise into a t-shirt or textile. We will provide a standard t-shirt, but feel free to bring a fabric patch, hat or bag etc, to use instead.

This would make a funky Xmas prezzie!

This workshop is perfect for someone wanting to learn the basics of how to create a soft circuit, but also for those wanting to work with electronics in a slightly different way. T-shirts will be provided but please feel free to bring along your own garment to adorn as well!

For more information about our adventures with Hacked Human Orchestra over the summer please check out: http://www.mztek.org/programs/hacked-human-orchestra/

When?

Sunday 16th December 11:00am – 4:30pm

Where?

Music Hackspace, Unit 30. Cremer Business Centre. 37 Cremer Street. London E2 8HD

£50 + £1.60 booking fee – standard ticket

£80 + £1.60 booking fee – 2 people discounted ticket (saving of £10 for each person!)

SIGN UP HERE

After a lot of considerable hard work by the wonderful Florian Lunaire, the musician that we’ve been working with on the Hacked Human Orchestra project, there is an amazing sound piece online that was created with input from all our participants at Wilderness and Shambala:

We hope that you enjoy it and we’d like to thank Guerilla Science for making this all possible – they’ve been an amazing group of people to work with on the project :)

Another big thank you to  Lush Projects, Jamie Allen and Jo Kazuhiro for helping us with the circuits, to Kobakant for working so closely with us on the design of the instruments and a HUGE thank you to PhD student Shauna Concannon for becoming part of the MzTEK team for the Summer – you’ve been awesome!

You can again watch a film by Debbie Davies, depicting the first workshop which we ran for the project back in June, at our home The Centre for Creative Collaboration, and there is an article by Shauna Concannon about her experience of working on the project here. We’ll have all the learning materials up on our website soon.

Hacked Human Orchestra has been generously sponsored by the Royal Academy of Engineering.

This week not only sees the beginning of the London Design Festival, but also London Fashion Week. To tie in with the latter, The Science Council are launching a new section on their Future Morph website, entitled Fashion & Textiles. The page explores many different areas within this field, from wearable technology, to textiles used for medicine, as well as how science and fashion can work together for a more sustainable world.

The page is also a great for tutors as it contains learning resources as well as an insight into the work which different people are doing in this area so as to inspire students with regards to career choices. If you’re interested in this area, then it’s definitely worth a read!

The Science Council very kindly asked us to contribute towards this section of the site as MzTEK has been doing  a lot of work with soft circuits recently, including the Hacked Human Orchestra project in collaboration with Guerilla Science as well as a variety of workshops.

We have been running classes in the Lilypad Arduino as well as a beginners soft circuit course in which students can create a soft toy with light-up eyes, which you can participate in at the V&A’s Digital Design Weekend this week!

To read our article as well as others in the section, check out the Future Morph website.

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.