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"

 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"