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PCD Bristol 2019
Back in February I was part of the Processing Community Day global celebration – a team of us organised a Bristol node to the global network of people sharing ideas at the intersection of art, code and education. I have made this post to share our process – the good practice, the workshop details, the…
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Soft synth jam session
We ran a soft synth jam session at the hackspace – it got a lot of interest from members so we might run another one soon. We assembled the Nom Nom Nand Nor 4093 PCBs and embeded them in “soft toys”. Set-up for jam – we hooked up the synths through a mixer so we…
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PCB design
I’ve been designing Nom Nom Nand Nor circuit boards. They came back pretty. Next boards I’d like to experiment more with illustration – you can make custom shapes for the board. I also found out how to make the circuity curved so will try that too. Designed with Fritzing (open source hardware designer, which takes…
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Nom Nom testing
Breadboarding the 4093 oscillator based on Nicolas Collins book. Using bike light to change frequency makes some squidgy sounds (?)
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Meshwork Orchestra
Meshwork Orchestra is a series of workshops with people at the Midlands Art Centre to embroider sensors for a music instrument using conductive yarns.
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InkLabs
This January I co-taught one of the InkLab workshops that were coordinated by Zarah Ash-Harper at the Pervasive Media Studio. The aim of the workshop was to encourage artists and creative people to get involved in technical making. Often in the studio people are making work with different technologies through collaboration, but they do not…
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Inktober
I made a sketch in my notebook every on most days in October with a Pental brush pen, and then I programmed a digital sketch with the drawings using Paolo Pedercini’s p5.play library. The whole process was intentionally quick, and (including the gif creation) it usually took about an hour and a half. I wanted…
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2017 Swatches
The swatches I made this year use conductive yarns to create pressure sensors around threadbare garments. The sensors can be connected to an Arduino or Pure Data circuit (see below, add pull-up/down resistors from the input if needed), and the feedback used to create musical or dance scores that are based on the worn areas.…
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Swatch experiments
This year for the etextile swatch exchange I am making swatches from the conductive darning work I have been exploring. These are my early tests.
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Alice underground
I dusted off the old puppets the other day and took them to a studio in Old Market. I was working with long time friend and collaborator Joseph Wallace for a few days to create an animated video that will be projected 14 meters wide for the latest version of Alice Underground at The Vaults…
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World book day at Filton Avenue
This week I ran a workshop at Filton Avenue Primary School to test the new version of Bear Abouts. I’ve been working with creative producer Sarah Warden to plan and deliver the testing workshops. Through the workshop we were both testing the new technology we have developed, and also trying to find how kids use…
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Roots and things
I’m still making generative drawing with p5.js (which I am calling “drawgramming”). This sketch generates random (and rather lovely) roots that have grown from a very slow snail. Try it out here >>> https://www.beccarose.co.uk/code/rootz/ I didn’t manage to figure out how to add a button to this to generate new snail-root-growing-formations (well, I did add…
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More drawgramming
I’ve made some further explorations into programming and illustration inspired by . This program (here >>> https://www.beccarose.co.uk/code/drawgramming/) uses the open library API to generate “book covers” with a number of images (that were lurking around my desktop at the time of making). The writing highlighted in green is from open libraries collection of book…
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Sensing pages
We have got to some kind of break through in developing the sensors for Bear Abouts -the system recognizes pages and (although basic) it is very very cool. I’ve been working closely with Mark, and (mostly through his brilliant programming skills) we have developed an algo that detects and translates touch patterns into animations. There’s…
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Sensing
I’ve been working with Mark Wolloncott, who is a unity3d wizz, but also a brilliant game designer and maker. He is working on some changes to the Bear Abouts program. This week we have been testing different ways to get touch input to read from objects. First tests with conductive inks: This Bare Conductive tutorial…
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Bear Abouts V2
I found out in December that we have been successful in another phased of the Bear Abouts project (yay!). This means that I have received further funding from Innovate UK for the storytelling app project I have been working on for a year and a half now. I plan to work with a number of…
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Playable City Tokyo
About a month ago I received an email from one of my favorite organizations (the Pervasive Media Studio), who were inviting me to apply to be part of a Playable City creative lab in Tokyo. I applied, thinking that they probably would not select me, and eagerly waited for a response. I contemplated wearing a…
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Tentacumas
This year’s Christmas card design was in celebration of reading a whole book by Donna Harraway. Watch a video version of the book >>> https://vimeo.com/97663518. I screen printed, enveloped, and sent these to folk I don’t get to see that much. Sending out tentacular love to people of the world x
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Drawgramming
It’s been a while since I posted anything on this blog because life has been pretty busy. But alas, my evenings are back and I can tinker away at making pointless sketches once more. Joy. I’ve started to use P5.js, it is another processing project, but based on Javascript, which means it works really nicely…
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e-stitches Bristol
Annie Lywood (e-textile maker extraordinaire) has started a Bristol based e-stitches group (based on the London group of the same name. We meet every few weeks to make anything related to e-textiles or soft-circuits. Get involved here. Some pics from our first meet up: