Archives

MzTEK needs your help!

After the success of our first Hacked Human Orchestra workshop, in collaboration Guerilla Science, Engineer Shauna Concannon and Kobakant, we are running two drop in sessions at our home, the Centre for Creative Collaboration, for soldering and making soft sensors! The items created in these sessions will be put towards our Hacked Human Orchestra, which will be taking form at both Shambala and Wilderness festivals in August.

We need 60 little speakers soldering to wires, which will be the sound outputs for our wearable instruments as well as 99 more sensors created which will be the inputs for playing the instruments! This includes dino spikes, stretchy chains, pompoms and buttons, the latter of which you can see on our wearable piano.

To see what we got up to at our last Hacked Human Orchestra workshop, please check out the video on Vimeo.

This will be an un-tutored drop-in session so to attend you do need to have a previous understanding of soldering and working with soft circuits. We will be there of course to assist where needed however :)

Where:
Centre for Creative Collaboration
16 Acton Street London Greater London WC1X 9NG

When:
Thursday 2nd August 2012 – 3pm – 9pm

&

Friday 3rd August – 3pm – 9pm

To attend please email us at info@mztek.com or just drop in!

Please note this is a women only session.

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.

It’s under 2 days until the Hacked Human Orchestra workshop! We’re very excited about this and have thoroughly enjoyed partnering with Guerilla Science and working with Kobakant and researcher Shauna Concannon to produce it.

The process to produce it has been extremely varied, experimenting with an array of components and materials. We thought it would be fun to give you a little peek into what we’ve been getting up to over the last month whilst producing it.

One instrument which we’re very proud of is a soft circuit piano! It’s taken a lot of different iterations to turn it into a wearable instrument (displayed above in T-shirt form). The final piece has been created using a soft circuit (a circuit made with conductive thread, rather than using wires as you would in a traditional circuit) incorporating many different resistors, capacitors, transistors and 4 buttons, which depending on which resistor they’re connected to will make different sounds when pressed. The output has taken the form of a mini 8Ohm speaker which you can see attached to crocodile clips

The T-shirt was inspired by Kobakant’s solar T-shirt:

The first attempt of making this consisted of a circuit on a breadboard using various different resistors to create different pitches and the second one used the same circuit but using soft materials. We then moved onto the final iteration for which we had some help with our friend Iain Sharp from Lush Projects who helped us design the circuit. From it we created this wonderful piece which as well as the mentioned technical bits contains lots of colorful felt!

Other experiments have taken the form of playing with musical cards and other playback devices, toy hacking, making soft circuit buttons, making conductive pompoms and also creating dinosaur-like spikes which when squeezed change their tune!

We’ll be putting all the learning materials online next week from the workshop, including circuits and a list of components so that anyone can take download it and make their own wearable instruments!

Sophie and Shauna toy hacking.

Making squidgy dino-spikes, great to put on the back on a T-shirt perhaps?

Showing the conductivity of a pompom containing conductive yarn.

Making a button using felt, conductive material and foam.

Electronic instruments, sonic soft-circuits, mechanical melodies… our take on ‘live music performance’!

MzTEK is joining forces with Guerilla Science to produce the most amazing Hacked Human Orchestra EVER!

We have teamed up with PhD Media Arts and Technology Engineer Shauna Concannon and artists Kobakant to design the wearable instruments and workshops.

Join in the fun in our soft-circuit synth workshop.

Learn some basic electronics and how to make a soft-circuit synthesiser you can wear. You will be lead through the process of creating different types of sound circuits, which will then be integrated into festival goers clothing at Shambala and Wilderness in August. You will be given workshop instructions and gain the knowhow for making them at home.

If you attend the festivals in August, you can sign up to complete your wearable instrument there, and join in the orchestrated evening performance.

Where

Centre for Creative Collaboration
16 Acton Street London Greater London WC1X 9NG

When

June 30 2012
10am – 5pm

Only £8! Sign Up NOW!

This is a women only workshop. Sign up HERE