User:LEa/workshops

with Rosa

2025-08-28 @ Catu

Magick with ImageMagick

with Rosa

25-08-28

with Sunjoo Lee & Anna Pastor

2025-09-19 to 2025-10-25 @ iMal (& CCU)

Fermenting The Earth, Wiring The Mud

with Sunjoo & Anna

The Electric Garden is an ongoing artistic research project by Sunjoo Lee. Cells made from mud and plants can produce a small electric current with the help of bacteria living in there. This energy is stored in a capacitor and released once it reaches a certain threshold. During the workshop 'Fermenting the Earth, Wiring the Mud' at iMAL, we made our own mud cells and discussed potential use cases. Youjung and me worked on the Mud-cell Poem.

2025-09-19: Workshop Day 1

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

Art Projects

- Gilberto Esperanza: Nomad Plants

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

2025-09-20: Workshop Day 2

Electricity

- 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 such as 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, Mikky, Raimundo, and me

Mud-cell Poem

2025-09-20: Workshop Day 3

Presentation of the results

2025-10-10: Meeting at Creative Coding Utrecht

Sharing

- 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

- 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"; also: RSS!

- Fermentation (see: Let's Make It Last)

• How would language change if it got fermented? What if words could chemically change?

- 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
- 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)
• 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)?

- Valentino Braitenberg: Braitenberg vehicles (Cybernetics)
- Alexander Galloway: The Interface Effect
- James Joyce: Finnegans Wake
- Timothy Morton: "The whole is less than the sum of its parts."

- 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"

Writing

Directional Poetry

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  

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  

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 Poetry

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

ngngng mmmho mk
mk ho
hengng ngmm ng
ng mm
krkhen mhong fr
fr hong 

Non-human Poetry

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
...

Plans for 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)

2025-10-25: Meeting at Creative Coding Utrecht

Sharing

- Gertrude Stein: Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose (1913)

- Geopoetics

- P5.js

- Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez: Let’s Become Fungal

> “There is no regeneration if there is no degeneration”

- Perception of time (based on the culture we grow up in)

• time is not linear everywhere (cyclical time)

• geological time

• bacterial time

- Anya Peterson Royce: Becoming an Ancestor - The Isthmus Zapotec Way of Death

> “You are born fresh and you dry out”

- James Bridle: New Dark Age

- James Bridle: Ways of Being

- Sunjoo: “trying to build a mythology”

- Zoöp Nieuwe Instituut

> “speaker of the living” = representative of the creatures living around the institute

- Jacquelyn Mills: Geographies of Solitude (Documentary)

- Petr Lom: I Am the River, the River Is Me (Documentary about a Māori river given its own legal identity)

- Ground Exhibition CCU

- Strudel is a music live coding environment for the browser, porting the TidalCycles pattern language to JavaScript.

Coding

gitlab project (private)

with Yuliya Gwilym & Brigid Lefevre

2025-10-04 @ PrintRoom

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"

with Kim

mediaWiki API

with Kim

25-10-09

Wiki Website Workshop

in the URL: specify an action (e.g. parse), specify the page title of the page to parse, specify the output format (e.g. jason)

2025-10-09 @ the Aquarium

with Robin

2025-10-30 @ the Aquarium

2025-10-30

Robin's workshop page

I learned some handy VSCodium shortcuts:

• "!" for html boilerplate
• type element without tags > automatically writes opening and closing tags
• Alt+Z > fits a long string to the window size

This is the website that I made during the workshop.

with Tobias Bernard

2025-12-04 @ the Aquarium

2025-12-04

• https://github.com/p2panda/reflection
• p2panda: Building blocks for peer-to-peer applications
• "Post-Internet"
• "Incredible Journey" proof
• communication protocols: Internet, LoRa, Bluetooth
• STUN
• Hole punching
• mDNS (Multicast DNS): resolves hostnames to IPs within servers without local server
• gossip protocol / epidemic protocol
• new person joins invite network > approved by admins > joins bigger network

with Catinca Tilea

2026-01-11 @ Varia

2026-01-11

In January 2026, I participated in the workshop Biocraft with household organic waste. Make, shape, grow hosted at Varia by Catinca Tilea. Information on similar workshops by Catinca can be found here or here.

Making substrate from organic waste

We started by cutting up organic waste and cooking scraps into small pieces. We then mixed it with bokashi starter. Bokashi is a method for composting, but it is different from the traditional method because it ferments the organic material. We moved our mix to a big glass jar. On the bottom, we put in a barrier to leave some space for the excess water to drop down. The environment needs to be anaerobic, so we lit up a candle inside the jar and the closed it. Once the candle goes out, there is no oxygen left inside.

Colonizing the substrate with fungi

The waste with the bokashi then needs to ferment for a few weeks. Catinca brought an older jar with substrate that was already fermented. This, we used to mix with wood chips and mycelium (from Ganoderma lucidum). We watered the mix slightly so that it is wet, but not dripping. This, we filled into 3D-printed forms. Over the next one to two weeks, the mycelium should colonize the whole substrate and transform it into a solid form. After drying out, it is a sturdy, but very light object that is completely biodegradable.

Results

Unfortunately, our mix seemed to be contaminated with bad (undesired) fungi, so the object turned green and moldy. It could have been that our working area was not clean enough, or that the wood chips with mycelium were already contaminated.

Still, the workshop really motivated me to explore biomaterials more. It would be interesting to use a SCOBY from kobucha tea-making as mould, instead of the plastic forms. The SCOBY would probably stick to the mycelium, thereby changing the texture of the outer layer, and making the whole object, including the mould, biodegradable. My experiments with SCOBYs have so far not been successful to shape them into three-dimensional forms, though.

with Kaa

2026-01-11 @ toitoidrome

2026-01-25

Kaa hosted the actinomy workshop “Server Charms” at toitoidrome in Antwerp. It was part of the T_Cyberhol work sessions, facilitated by ooooo and Joke.

Step 1: Sourcing the batteries

We are reusing batteries from old vapes and the first step is to get them out of the casing. Possible tools include box cutters, metals saws and a wide array of pliers. Soon, everything smells like artificial watermelon and cotton candy, because alongside the batteries, we are also taking the flavor sponge out of the vape. Usually, vapes use 3.7 V lithium polymer batteries. We test their freshness with a multimeter.

To collect the vapes, Joke 3D-printed a lid with a hole to screw on top of a glass jar. It can be set up in kiosks or smoke shops for easy recycling.

Step 2: Soldering

At the soldering station, small bags with electronics are waiting for each of us. We connect our micro controller (an ESP32-C3 Super Mini) with a chip for battery management (LX-LCBST). Then, we connect the charging chip to the battery itself. My soldering comes loose a few times, so I need to redo it, but otherwise the zine is right: Soldering is easy.

Hot tip: Use a big stack of patafix to hold your chips in place on your work area.

Step 3: Making a web page

Actinomy provides two sample websites that we could use as a starting point: One static website that allows to click through multiple paragraphs of text, and one interactive “guestbook” website that prompts the user to leave a trace by commenting.

Using basic html and css, we each made a static website to host on our little servers. The server does not provide much space, so most of us just displayed a few lines of styled text, but it would be interesting to see if it is possible to fit images or other files, possibly encoded to use up less storage space.

Step 4: Flashing the hardware

To program the microcontroller, we need a computer that has Arduino IDE installed. During the workshop, I use ooooo's computer. The html code of the site needs to be copied into a C++ code snippet. This program then sets up a WiFi people can connect to. In the code, we can set a name for the WiFi and also define a limit of how many devices can connect to it. Once someone does, the website opens up in the browser.

I did not get around to set up the flashing process on my own device during the workshop, but I did so at a later moment. The step-by-step explanation from this manual was very helpful.

In Arduino IDE, there is a specific module that needs to be installed. Then, the sketch.ino file can be flashed onto the device. If using the guestbook page, a JSON library needs to be installed before flashing.

Step 5: Charging

The lipo battery needs to be charged on a regular basis. Thanks to battery management chip, this can be done easily with a USB-C cable. I don't know if there is a way to tell if it is charged or not without a multimeter. To prevent surprise explosions, it is advised to unplug the battery from the microcontroller when unsupervised.

Step 6: Crafting ✨

The last step is to build a safe home for the server. There are many different options for what can be used as a case: tictac boxes, cassette cases, textile pouches, hotglue, or anything else. It can be decorated to make it more pretty and personal. I had brought some yarn and fabric, but ended up using a tictac box and googly eyes. Googly eyes were popular!

with Chae & Kamo

2026-03-17 @ toitoidrome