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Back by seriously popular demand…

This workshop will show you how to programme a real-time graphical visualisation using live Twitter data.

You will create your visualization using Processing. Processing is an open source programming language and integrated development environment (IDE) built for the electronic arts and visual design communities. You can download Processing here: http://processing.org/download/

You will need your code to communicate with the Twitter API to retrieve tweets and information about users and their connections.  To avoid running into bandwidth limitation problems, you must authenticate using your own Twitter account details. Please create a Twitter account before the workshop if you do not already have one.

We will cover the basic principles of Processing, working with pre-existing example code to highlight how it functions and the type of visuals you might want to create.

You will design your Processing sketch using Twitter4J, a java library for the Twitter API.  We will the look at how to install and use the Twitter4J library and cover some of the queries that it supports to give you an idea of the type of information you can extract from the Twitter API.

By the end of this workshop you will know how to produce a simple visualization using Twitter that will change in real time, and think about how you can incorporate an element of user interaction or simply display information in an illuminating or aesthetically pleasing way.

What you will need to do in advance of this workshop

Download Processing: http://processing.org/download
Create a Twitter account: http://www.twitter.com

Who?

Shauna Concannon,  a literary studies grad turned electrical engineer, Shauna swapped Samuel Beckett for Alan Turing, taking up a PhD in the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary in the University of London.

When:

18th May ‘2013 11.30am – 4pm

Where?

SPACE 129—131 MARE STREET LONDON E8 3RH

Only £35!!!  This is a women only workshop. :) Sign Up!

Generously supported by

As part of the Natural Circuits Barbican weekender MzTEK will be running 6x 2 hour workshops throughout the weekend, so come and make your t-shirt for FREE!

This summer we designed three wearable instruments for a collaboration with Guerilla Science to create the Hacked Human Orchestra. Come make your beatbox t-shirt this weekend and join the phenomenon that is the Hacked Human Orchestra!

You will find us in the main foyer near the canteen from 10am – 6pm Saturday and Sunday.

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 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.