workshop @ Landmark:
Duration: 2 day – 6 hours
Age: 12-18 years old.
Exhibition: Bergen city
The Machine to share secrets! is an art action and a poetic reinterpretation about new control technologies and the mediation of social communication. The Machine to share secrets! is a participative and collaborative project which consists on the development of small communication systems equipped with microphones and speakers tide to heliums balloons, where the spoke person and
the listener can share their secrets above the clouds.
To do so, the kids will use a flying electroacoustic transducers, mainly using waste material, which will be built as communication system.
An electroacoustic transducer is a mechanism which transforms electricity into sound or sound into electricity. Using loudspeakers, microphones and helium balloons, we develop a system which participants can use to send and receive messages. The message ́s audio signal will travel through a cable attached to a microphone in one end and a loudspeaker on the other one. This loudspeaker will hang from a balloon which will be suspended two or thre meters from the ground. A similar system but the other way round (loudspeaker closer to ground, microphone closer to balloon) will be set up so that another user can receive that message. That means, when a balloon gets closer to another one, the message sent from one end will be received on the other one. The wind or airflow will add a random
factor to the system.
The first part of the workshop the kids will develop their communication tools together with the artist, at the second part participants will test their “machines” in a public space.
During the workshop, the following questions will be considered: Are we free to express ourselves and share information in the public space? Are the new information and communication technologies secure and guarantee privacy to the users? From there we will think together how our secrets sharing machine will be.
Based on these questions the workshop participants will learn basic electronics through the use of home-made and waste materials to build small electroacoustic transducers.
Constanza Piña
http://corazonderobota.wordpress.com
Corazón de Robota
Visual artist, dancer and researcher, focused on experimentation with electronic media, open-source technologies and practices DIWO. Her artistic proposals are presented in various formats integrating dance, sound performance and participatory works.
Her work reflects on the role of machines in our culture and the human-technological units, questioning the idea of education, capitalism and patriarchy techno-centrist in relation to open
knowledge, autonomy and enhancement of technical manual work.
Interested in recycling, hardware hacking, soft-circuits, handicrafts and electronic wizardry, generates her sound project Corazón de Robota (Robot Heart) with synthesizers DIY, where she explores the field of audible and inaudible frequencies as physical perceptions, vibrations as cosmic messages, noise and arrhythmia.
Constanza works under the philosophy of free culture and electronic anarchy, her research on synthesizers handmade and electrotextiles can be seen documented on her web