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Join us for a session of Ten Minute Tutorials on Wednesday 15th May, 7-9pm at the Centre for Creative Collaboration.

Tutorials will vary in level, but you don’t need to have prior experience or knowledge of the topics to attend.  These are in a presentation format, rather than a workshop. Feel free to bring a laptop or a note pad. Come along and learn something new, and/or meet like-minded women.

As our innaugural TMT! session, we’ll host 3 tutorial presentations of ten minutes each.  After presentations and a break for refreshments, we’ll show screenings of online tuts, how-to’s and resources covering a range of topics.

Presentations

SuperCollider Live coding tool for audio performance.

An introduction to the programming environment and language for real-time audio synthesis.

Alexandra Cárdenas is a composer, musician and live coder from Mexico.
tiemposdelruido.net

Collaborate on Open Source Projects using Git(hub)

Create and manage open source projects using Git, a popular open-source version control software, to manage changes to source code.  We’ll look at using it with Github – a site that allows you to open a git managed project to the public.

Sally Northmore is a co-founder of MzTEK, and a web developer at creative studio SHOWstudio.

Learn to create simple visuals in Processing

Learn to write a simple For Loop & a conditional for interactive visuals, in the programming language ‘Processing’. Download Processing here.

Sophie McDonald is a co-founder of MzTEK and sketchPatch.net.

This is a women only event.

Sign up to attend here.

MzTEK will be taking part in the women’s open source conference  FLOSSIE this Friday 25 and Saturday 26 May at Queen Mary University.

On Friday at 3.50pm we will be presenting our amazing Chi-TEK tea party project we delivered last year in the V&A garden. For more details on the project click on the teapot on the left (or here).

On Saturday, 2.30pm, we will join up with Embroidered Digital Commons to contribute some soft circuits to the epic collective embroidering of the text from ‘A Concise Lexicon of/for the Digital Commons’.

We invite women to come and join us and learn some of the basics to soft circuits, adding switches and lights to your embroidered patches. This is a free workshop, but your embroidery work will become part of the collective Embroidered Digital Commons project.

FLOSSIE is a free conference, so sign up and spend the day with a bunch of like minded women, and attend workshops in Arduino, soft circuits, and learn about Free/Libre Open-source Software (FLOSS).

WHERE

Conference venue at Queen Mary University, Mile End – in the maths building.

Check out the programme here.

Ele will be talking about her current research project Open Source Embroidery. Please feel free to bring along your knitting and coding patterns to share and modify.

This Wednesday 17th June from 7-9pm
Location:
Leon restaurant, Bankside, 7 Canvey Street (Behind the Tate Modern) London, SE1 9AN See MAP

The Open Source Embroidery project was initiated by Ele Carpenter in 2005. The project has grown to support and facilitate a range of artists practice investigating the relationship between programming for embroidery and computing. It’s based on the common characteristics of needlework crafts and open source computer programming: gendered obsessive attention to detail; shared social process of development; and a transparency of process and product. Open Source Embroidery is a socially engaged art project developed through workshops and an email list: os-embroidery@googlegroups.com There are also groups on Facebook and Flickr.

Ele’s blog Ele Weekend documents the project and posts information about current workshops and exhibitions.

Ele Carpenter is an independent curator and researcher based in Umea in Northeast Sweden, Newcastle upon Tyne and London, UK. She is currently undertaking a Research Fellowship at HUMlab in affiliation with the BildMuseet at the University of Umea, Sweden. Her curatorial practice responds to specific socio-political cultural contexts in collaboration with individuals, groups and organisations. Her life-long interest in the relationship between creativity and political action, has been influenced by her formative years at Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp and on Cruisewatch. Fleeing the polarities of activism to join the art-world, she has continuously interrogated the relationship between cultural and political change through curatorial creative practice. Her research has written, curatorial and creative outcomes including mapping, embroidery, and research projects on this website.

Ele recieved her PhD on the relationship between politicised socially engaged art and new media art, with CRUMB at the University of Sunderland in 2008. She has a Post Graduate Diploma in Art Gallery & Museum Studies from the University of Manchester (1996), and undertook her BA (Hons) in Fine Art at Leeds Metropolitan University (1993).

Calling women MzTEKers and techies!

Photoshop Workshop

The next Peer2 Peer workshop is going to be a  Photoshop workshop lead by Laura.

date for your diary… 14th MAY from 7pm – 9pm

Laura is keen to know what you want to know (photoshop for web? photoshop for photographers?), and what level you would like the workshop to be aimed at (beginners intro or advanced skills and techniques?). Please RSVP with thoughts and requirements to info@mztek.org or leave a comment on this post.

Although this will be mainly a photoshop workshop (a useful tool as it is the media industry standard), Laura will also take some time to introduce in brief some of the Open Source tools available for image processing, such as
Seashore,
Gimp
Inkscape (for vectors)
If your are interested we will arrange another geek-out with pizza session to explore these tools in more depth.

the workshop will take place at SPACE media in Hackney
129 – 131 Mare St
Hackney
E8 3RH

14th May  7pm – 9pm

What are you up to, this Wednesday night? Why not come out to Leon Bankside (directly south & facing the Tate Modern) to join us around the table for another Unplugged sesh?

This week, Julie Freeman will chat about the politics of Open Source software and code, and will introduce some of the useful programs, packages and tools available for artists, and tools she uses in her work.

Julie Freeman’s work explores transforming complex processes into sound compositions, objects and visualizations. Her work spans visual, audio and digital art forms and explores the relationship between science, nature and how humans interact with it.

For the past 12 years, Julie’s work has focused on using electronic technologies to “translate nature” – whether through the sound of torrential rain falling on a giant rhubarb leaf, a pair of mobile concrete speakers lurking in galleries haranguing passers by or by providing an interactive platform from which to view the flap, twitch and prick of dogs’ ears. Her pioneering artwork The Lake used hydrophones, custom software and advanced technology to track electronically tagged fish and translate their movement into an audio-visual experience.

Julie holds an MA in Digital Art from the Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts, Middlesex University, and is a NESTA fellow and Wellcome Trust arts awardee. Her work has been exhibited across the UK, including at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Science Museum, and internationally in Brazil, Croatia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Russia, and the USA.

www.translatingnature.org

Where: Leon Bankside (directly behind the Tate Modern) Closest tubes: Southwark, London Bridge
When: Wednesday, April 29, 7pm — 9pm

MzTEK Unplugged is a fortnightly talk series open to everyone & free. We gather around a table for a drink and interesting conversation, inviting renowned artists and technologists to discuss a range of topics in the arts, new media, and technology.

You don’t have to be techy to get involved — a curiosity for the arts and computing helps!

[ Here’s a comprehensive list Julie created for MzTEK of Open Source software for artists.]