Workshops and educational experiences can be more conceptual or more practical. In all cases, I try to build them around lots of 'interesting stuff'! These have included Ear Changing headphones, Augmented Reality headphones, instruments that respond to interpersonal space, to movement, to breath and to heartbeat. Microphones that respond to radio waves, to lasers and that are made from cooking ingredients. Devices to visualise the sound of your voice and devices that can distil only the expression in your voice and remove the rest...
Tech itself is a creative medium and the use of tech is an extremely creative experience.
Various kinds of synthetic reality. There's some interesting questions about what happens when a machine tells a lie...
This animation was made in an afternoon using AI to interpret motion. A machine vision of people as data. Its very easy to anthropomorphise and think of computers as human. The opposite mistake may also be true and they tend to see us as machines...
Tech to express through movement, or to separate expressive movement from from the people making it.
'Expressive Machines' a workshop about our non-human relationships
The theme was our relationship with machines. How we see them, how they see us, what happens when they try to deceive, or are use to deceive us...
Participants built robots to capture expression in movement, interacted with A.I.s and used A.I. to create, saw through the eyes of the machine, felt things that weren't there and enjoyed getting confused about which way was up :)
Pictured here are the Virtual Actual Reality Goggles
...and a small army of robot arms. (This is half of them!)
'Sound and Place' workshop
This workshop explored nature of sound and its role in the experience of place. Particularly successful were the binaural Augmented Reality Headphones. Plenty of students found these utterly terrifying! Great fun :)
(Some more details on these in 'Recent Inventions'...)
Augmented Reality Headphones
'Young Creatives' at Milton Keynes College.
The students created the sounds playing here with unexpected methods and equipment ranging from laser pointers to home grown piezoelectric crystals.
A thingy...
Having fun making things for the students to use...
A couple of examples from what turned out to a car-load of crazy stuff!
Some analog stuff including old school magnetic tape. A fifth of the gear as it
turned out!
A similar and simplified experience for at Jubilee Wood primary school.
