[Jan 25/26] Wearables – Soft control for your visual & sonic arts

This workshop will serve as an introduction to soft circuits, to learn how to translate your circuits into wearable projects and create your own soft controllers for visuals or audio. Soft circuits, or electronic textiles, are electrical circuits created using flexible conductive materials such as conductive threads and fabrics altogether with discrete electronic components, such as resistors, capacitors or transistors. We will provide basic knowledge in those materials, how to work with them and embed them into a wearable piece and possible applications to let the users explore new ways of electronics and design, using Processing as a software.

Merche Blasco and Manuela Donoso
Sat/Sun, Jan 25/26, noon to 4pm
Cost: $165 (student/Member, $190 (regular) + $22 for materials
When you pay through our PayPal store, the cost for the soft circuits ($22) is included in the payment. Total for the Student/Member price is $187, for Regular is $212.

Students need to bring an Arduino and a laptop for the second day.
Purchase the Arduino here: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11021
Note: you need a standard A to B plug USB cable for the Arduino board. These are older versions of USB cables, so if you don’t have that one anymore, here’s the link: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/512

Location
Harvestworks
596 Broadway, #602 | New York, NY 10012
Phone: 212­431­1130
Subway: F/M/D/B Broadway/Lafayette, R Prince, 6 Bleeker

[img]http://www.harvestworks.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/wearable2.png[/img]

Soft circuits, or electronic textiles, are electrical circuits created using flexible conductive materials such as conductive threads and fabrics altogether with discrete electronic components. We want to provide a basic knowledge in those materials and some possible applications to let the users explore new ways of electronics and design.

We will divide this course in two sessions of 4 hours each, Saturday and Sunday.

In the first session/first day we will learn about the specifics of the new materials used in the class and how to work with them to create basic components for our circuits, such as switches/buttons, pressure sensors or potentiometers. We will work then altogether to build a simple synthesizer where we will mix those soft components with discrete ones and the intricacies of how to connect soft and hard components.

[img]http://www.harvestworks.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/wearable1.png[/img]

The second session/second day we will teach how to use the soft­controller that we built the day before to command an application with visuals and sound that we will code with Processing. In order to do this we will connect the soft­controller to an arduino first and learn how to read and understand the different values that come from our soft materials. The following step will be sending the data to Processing and learning how to translate those numbers in parameters that manipulate the visuals and sound of an application.

Hardware Requirements

An Arduino and other components will be required in order to build the controller.
Here is a link to buy an Arduino Uno (if your have another version this also would work)
Sparkfun: www.sparkfun.com/products/11021 ­
Adafruit: www.adafruit.com/products/50
Other components are included with the kits.

Software Requirements

Participants will need to bring their own computer with Arduino and Processing IDE installed (both free).
Download Arduino IDE: http://arduino.cc/en/Main/Software
Download Processing IDE: https://processing.org/download/?processing

[img]http://www.harvestworks.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/wearable3.png[/img]

Mercedes Blasco

Trained as a Telecommunications Engineer, Merche Blasco developed in parallel to her studies a more creative path related with music, video, installation and performance. As en Electronic Music Performer she has participated & collaborated with various artists such as Chicks on Speed or Cristian Vogel, establishing a strong relationship between different mediums of artistic expression & her own musical direction. She has presented her work in Sonar Festival in Barcelona, Mapping Festival (Geneve), Sonic Art Circuits (Washington), Queens Museum of Art (New York), NIME2012, among others.

She has recently graduated from the MPS Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP / NYU) where she mainly focused on Interactive Design for exhibitions and new tools for Electronic Music Performance, meaning visual sound reactive pieces, choreographic tools through computer vision and New Interfaces for Musical Expression.

[img]http://www.harvestworks.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/wearable4.jpg[/img]

Manuela Donoso

Manuela Donoso is a graphic and interactive designer. She graduated from PUCV’s School of Design and Architecture in Chile, where during four years she experimented with materials and new ways of graphic expression, forging her own conception of the graphic design process.

Her interest in shaping space using light and materials led her to work as a light scene designer for large scale music concerts –Yelle, Tiga, Miami Horror, among others– and to pursue a Master in Lighting Design from the University of Rome Sapienza.

She lives in New York City, where she has recently graduated from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. At ITP she focused on physical computing, exploring new materials, and developing a deeper understanding of sound. Her projects continue to address designing interactions in space through graphics, light and sound.

Additional Information and Videos

http://half-half.es/interactive-design/Ramona-oruga/

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/41014558[/vimeo]

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/41735339[/vimeo]