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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.

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.

MzTEK has teamed up with AKA the castle to present an open hardware hack workshop as part of Moving Forest London2012 initiative by AKA the castle.

MzTEK is hosting a two day open hardware hack workshop focusing on modifying/remodelling /hacking recycled hardware for generating revolting noise, based on the Chip Tune Marching Band workshop for creating a portably powered sound circuit.

Planning for Moving Forest’s citywide insurgency acts with updated moving antennas replacing moving tree branches, these workshops also strategize a massive mobilization of london urbanites as part of Moving Forest’s distributed performance for London summer 2012.

Moving Forest is a 12 hour, five act, visual, sonic, digital, electronic and urban performance collectively realized by AKA the castle, a temporal performance troupe bringing together visual artists, writers, soundists, silk threaders, codedecoders, macromikro, boombox mass, mobile agents, wifi fielders and urbanites. 12 hours of sonic, coded action map an imaginary Castle and camouflage forest revolt onto a given modern day metropolis.

Moving Forest  was first presented at Transmediale.08 in Berlin.

The partners for Moving Forest London workshop development are MA Interactive Media & Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, Furtherfield, Space, Digital Programmes, V&A.

Please bring your own devices and tools to modify/remodel/hack, there will be a £10 pound workshop fee to cover the sound making electronic supplies.

WHEN

Take part in a one or two day workshop session 26 & 27 November.
11am to 5pm, November 26,  Saturday
11am to 5pm, November 27,  Sunday

SIGN UP

This is a women only workshop. £10 on the door to cover basic noise making kit.

Please sign up on the Moving Forest hack wiki to take part in one or two day workshop sessions or write to now@movingforest.net

WHERE

SPACE
129-131 MARE STREET
LONDON E8 3RH
+44(0)20 8525 4330

Musique concrète (“concrete music” or “real music”) utilises sound as a compositional resource in unusual ways. The material does not have to be exclusively derived from musical instruments or voices, nor to elements traditionally thought of as “musical” (melody, harmony, rhythm, tempo and so on).

A full day exploring experimental sound and composition.

Explore the history of Musique concrète, and create your very own masterpiece in a day. Learn the basics of simple recording techniques, and then test your skills on a group sound walk.

Back at the studio you will learn to transfer your material to computer and edit it using Audacity, into a short music composition. Using basic compositional methods and processing.

Bring your own recording device and headphones, such as a dictaphone, small handheld recorder or phone.

This workshop is lead by Leslie Deere, an artist working with sound. Her work can currently be heard at Kew Gardens, where she has two sound installations running daily. Leslie comes from a performing arts background in dance and has been inspired by Merce Cunningham and John Cage. She has a BA in Sonic Arts and an MA in Communication Art & Design from the Royal College of Art.

 Where

SPACE
129—131 MARE STREET
LONDON E8 3RH

When

Decmber 10th 2011
10.30am – 4.30pm

Register

This workshop if £25.
As usual, this is a women only workshop.

SIGN UP HERE: https://mztek.eventwax.com/musique-concrte