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Stand out in the dancing crowd!

We’re excited to be heading to sunny (?) Wales for the Green Man Festival 15 – 18th August. Come and find us in Einstein’s Garden at the Mad hackers Tea Party! 

We’ll be embedding interactive lighting into soft-circuits, so if you’re in town, why not bring a sparkle to your step with the ultimate in festival chic!

By using conductive thread, lights, and conductive materials, you will learn how to embed a ‘soft circuit’ into fabric, which can then be attached to your favourite t-shirt, bag or even your favourite festival fashion wellington boot!

WHERE & WHEN:

This workshop is free & open to all
Einstein’s Garden – Workshop Dome
16th, 17th, 18th @ 2.45pm  till 5.45pm

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MzTEK will be on board MS Stubnitz along side Music Hackspace for a one day festival of musical hacking and contemporary sonic arts.

As part of a day of workshops, events and performances MzTEK presents the workshop: Soft-Circuit Synth, 2.30 pm to 6 pm.

Make a wearable electric piano using e-textiles and soft-circuit techniques, sewing all electronic components and a speaker into fabric. Feel free to bring your own textile project to embed your synth into.

Sign up!

This workshop is open to anyone. Tickets are £55, and include day programme and entry to the evening performances. Book here for the MzTEK workshop.

Where & When

Saturday 30th March 2013
Workshops 2pm until 6pm
Performances until 11.30pm

Onboard the MS Stubnitz, Canary Wharf, E14 9SB, London

The evening program is headlined by Leafcutter John who combines vanguard electronics and processing with improvisation and traditional folk forms to great effect. He is joined by Riz Maslen and many further instrument builders, noise artists and electronic indeterminists from around the world.

More info on the Hackship  program HERE.

An introductory workshop with MzTEK at Phoenix Brighton to learn how to create soft circuits and make stitched or wearable electronic and interactive artworks. This course will teach you hot to make a soft circuit toy, in this case a chatbot (or a creature of your choice!), but the skills can be applied to other projects.

Make crochet chains with conductive yarn, sew with conductive thread and make buttons with conductive material.

The workshop is aimed at women only and celebrates Alan Turing Year.

Price:

£20

When:

Saturday 8th December 12pm – 5pm

Where:

Phoenix Brighton, 10–14 Waterloo Place, Brighton, BN2 9NB

Tutor:

MzTEK’s Emilie Giles

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.