User:LEa/workshops

Workshops 2025

Magick with ImageMagick

with Rosa

25-08-28

Fermenting The Earth, Wiring The Mud

with Sunjoo & Anna

25-09-19

 Microbial fuel cells (MFC) / mud cells: 
 - fuel cell system powered by bacteria (or other microorganisms)
 - convert chemical energy to electrical energy
 - produce very little, precious electric current
 - energy can accumulate over time (and multiple cells) and discharge at once

 Useful species of bacteria:
 - Clostridium butyricum: common fermenting bacteria found in cheese, soil and the human gut
 - Shewanella oneidensis: versatile bacteria
 - Aeromonas hydrophilia: aquatic bacteria, can metabolise many fuels
 - Geobacter metallireducens: breaks down toxic chemicals, therefore useful in bioremediation
 - Geobacter sulfurreducens: breaks down toxic chemicals, therefore useful in bioremediation

 Gilberto Esperanza: Nomad Plants

25-09-20

 Mark Tildan: B.E.A.M. Robots (Biology, Electronics, Aesthetics, Mechanics)

 The Miller Solar Engine: yet another way to use a 1381 voltage defector

 LoRa: radio wave communication technique; LoRaWAN (long range wide area network): wireless, low-power communication protocol

 Mud cells > Capacitor > Switch > Arduino
 - mud generates electricity
 - mud sends data (temperature, time frames)

 Discussion: What can be done with the tiny amount of electricity and the data from the mud?
 - Generate a poem that grows over time: can either be online (on a website [on demand], sent via a mailing list) or local / "off the grid" (on an e-ink display, written into the sand with a plotter, on a USB stick...)
 - Extract sounds from the mud and play them with the help of the electricity
 - Think about collaboration and collectivity!

 Output (by Youjung, Mikki, Raimundo and me): Mud-cell Poem (1.0 ?)

25-10-10

 Sharing 
 

 Youjung: 

 - Nick Montfort  
 * The House Of Dust originally by Alison Knowles
 * Taroko Gorge: Python program developed at Taroko Gorge National Park in Taiwan, aimed at evocative description  
 * Through the Park: uses limited words modifying the discourse without making adjustments to the syntax. Doesn't use pronouns. The system is meant to tell *Little Red Riding Hood*.  

 - Zeroichi Arakawa
 * Executed Poetry: an e-ink displays the poem (also the count, processing time and micro controller's unique public key and signature); explores philosophical themes such as existence, eternity, and nothingness with the primitive features of python 
 

 Lea: 

 - Mastodon Bots:
 * Olia Lialina: Kotjaktko the cat running around
 * David Lawrence Miller via converged.yt: birdcolorbot
 * David Lawrence Miller via converged.yt: transect575 (Haikus generated from recordings of whale sightings off the North East coast of the US)
 > How would we publish our generated texts / poems? E-Mail and website were suggested, a mastodon bot could be an "in-between" 

 - Fermentation (see: Let's Make It Last)
 > How would language change if it got fermented? What if words could chemically change?  
 

 Sunjoo: 

 - Benjamin Earl
 * H&D: Coding in Situ
 * Naive Yearly: Coding in Situ
 * Coding in situ, a conversation with Kirsten Spruit and Benjamin Earl / 09.04.2022 

 - Federico Campagna: Technic and Magic - The Reconstruction Of Reality
 * grammar: like a code (semantic algorithm)
 * poetry breaks this code ("magic")
 > What makes sense in language? What doesn't? What is wasteful / not useful? How can we disrupt or break our conception of language? Language forms our understanding of an object or concept, playing with the language can shift our conception. 

 - Yuchen Li & Aldo Esparza Ramos: Seed Of Memory - Ancestral Recipes
 > "Hand" in Nahuatl is a verb! Language and our understanding of the world shape each other. 

 - Sunjoo's mom, eating cake, looking at the crumbles
 > "Actually, this is how our brains work. Every time you think of something, the crumbles come back to form the memory."
 - Cellular respiration 
 

 Mikky: 

- Biosemiotics: life as a set of signs, (some) organisms could be regarded as machines: they react to a signal (e.g. chemical > Chemotaxis) and react in certain way
 - Jakob von Uexküll > stepping away from a anthroprocentric worldview 
 - perception of the world that is not ours (humans) 

 - Valentino Braitenberg: Braitenberg vehicles (Cybernetics) 

 - Alexander Galloway: The Interface Effect 

 > Should we start from an anthroprocentric view? Using pronouns or feelings or something else? Change point of view from human to animal / bacteria / insects / plants / viruses (to write poetry)? 

 - James Joyce: Finnegans Wake 

 - Timothy Morton: "The whole is less than the sum of its parts." 
 

 Niels: 
 
 - Measuring Leaves, Gathering Trees
 > 1m2 to quantify nature 

 - Robert Frost: Gathering Leaves 

 - Ursula Le Guin: The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics
 > studying the languages of non-humans
 > mindset to keep while working with nature as a subject: try to see non-human perspectives (perspective of a stone / a pigeon)
 > a passive "Art of the Plants"

 Output
  

 directional poetry  

 There was a mouse in the hut
 After breakfast it always scurried up
 To eat the small scraps
 That humans had left
 And then go to sleep in the mud  

 There once was a mouse in hutboom
 Faster than your imaginatioon
 Can think of up there
 This poem goes where?
 Let's start all over quite soon  

 who jumps down the hole tonight?
 up and running would be alright
 the mouse goes click click
 then it stops mid lick
 to complete the circle of squares 
  

 conlanguage poems 

 SEE tp tp tp
 FEEl brp brp brp
 SEE TP TP TP
 FEEl BRP BRP BRP
 MAKE
 HO N O NH TWO
 HO NO NH TWO O OH
 a little bit of H THREE C N PLUS C H THREE O OH C H THREE
 TP TP TP BRP BRP BRP
 TP TP BRP
 BRP
 MHHHHM 

 Ik voel in da aard
 Än appel en laard
 Gaan fermenting heel far apaart
 /
 Ik voel in da tuin
 Än teamtje of gruin
 Zoun grawening een moie duin
 /
 Ik voel in da skie
 Mijn loef voor da vieh
 Munchenen on da grasslie 

 ngngng mmmho mk
 mk ho
 hengng ngmm ng
 ng mm
 krkhen mhong fr
 fr hong
 non-human poems 

 non-human poems
 Leuconostoc mesenteroides' words on the the fermentation of tomatoes
 *** LEa (talk)
 ~ ~ ~ ~ hhhhhuh
 ~<~~*^
 ...
 /
 burp flll
 ~^>~>~<
 <~~*<^^y
 ...
 /
 burp flll
 ^l~<^>^<
 ^^^<^v^v^ 

 Bacteria multiplying and dying
 ANN KATY DAN
 ANN KATY KATY DAN DAN
 ANN ANN KATY DAN DAN DAN DAN
 ANN ANN ANN ANN DAN DAN DAN
 ANN ANN ANN ANN ANN ANN ANN ANN DAN DAN
 ANN ANN ANN
 ...

 Next Time 

 think about... 

 input ( / dataset / offering)
 - texts with a shared quality / topic (e.g. poetry about trees)
 - texts from the same / similar source (e.g. all poems made today)

 output
 - make it make sense semantically (e.g. "noun that verbs")
 - use repetition to make it more poetic (e.g. House of Dust: "A house of ... / inhabited by ...")
 - destroy part of the rhythm or structure of the poem (make it decompose / die)

Let's Make It Last!

with Yuliya Gwilym & Brigid Lefevre

25-10-04

 Fermentation Workshop / Tasting / Story Sharing

 Fermentation: umbrella term for chemical processes that involve microorganisms (bacteria, fungi, yeasts); conversion of carbohydrates to alcohol or organic acids 

 Pickling: can be fermentation (anaerobic fermentation in salt water), or not (immersion in vinegar) 

 Zymology: science of fermentation

 Leuconostoc mesenteroides: a lactic acid involved in fermentation (of vegetables) > "The Legend of Luca" 

 Saccharomyces cerevisiae: first used for brewing beer, then also for baking bread; refined over centuries through advancements in microbiology (ability to produce pure yeasts) 

 Lactobacillus (genus): first discovered in milk products; also very common in vegetable fermentation

 "Do you consider fermentation to be very spiritual?"

 Rotterdam DIY fermentation kit: "Rotpot"