Join us for a session of Ten Minute Tutorials on Wednesday 15th May, 7-9pm at the Centre for Creative Collaboration.

Tutorials will vary in level, but you don’t need to have prior experience or knowledge of the topics to attend.  These are in a presentation format, rather than a workshop. Feel free to bring a laptop or a note pad. Come along and learn something new, and/or meet like-minded women.

As our innaugural TMT! session, we’ll host 3 tutorial presentations of ten minutes each.  After presentations and a break for refreshments, we’ll show screenings of online tuts, how-to’s and resources covering a range of topics.

Presentations

SuperCollider Live coding tool for audio performance.
An introduction to the programming environment and language for real-time audio synthesis.

Alexandra Cárdenas is a composer, musician and live coder from Mexico.
tiemposdelruido.net

Collaborate on Open Source Projects using Git(hub)
Create and manage open source projects using Git, a popular open-source version control software, to manage changes to source code.  We’ll look at using it with Github – a site that allows you to open a git managed project to the public.

Sally Northmore is a Co-founder of MzTEK, and a web developer at creative studio SHOWstudio.

Learn to create simple visuals in Processing
Learn to write a simple For Loop & a conditional for interactive visuals, in the programming language ‘Processing’. Download Processing here.

Sophie McDonald is a co-founder of MzTEK and sketchPatch.net.

This is a women only event.

Sign up to attend here.

A soft-circuit introductory workshop with MzTEK at the V&A Museum.

Come and make a cute Chatbot that talks back! This course is an introduction to soft-circuits and E-textiles, and basics of electronics for wearable technology.

Using conductive materials for basic soft-circuit interaction techniques, the workshop will hack and embed a recordable device into your Chatbot, playing back Chatbot chatter.

Price:

£80, concessions £64

When:

Saturday 4th May 10.30pm – 5pm

Where:

The V&A Digital Studio, Sackler Centre
Cromwell Road, London SW7 2RL

Sign up Here!

Back by seriously popular demand…

This workshop will show you how to programme a real-time graphical visualisation using live Twitter data.

You will create your visualization using Processing. Processing is an open source programming language and integrated development environment (IDE) built for the electronic arts and visual design communities. You can download Processing here: http://processing.org/download/

You will need your code to communicate with the Twitter API to retrieve tweets and information about users and their connections.  To avoid running into bandwidth limitation problems, you must authenticate using your own Twitter account details. Please create a Twitter account before the workshop if you do not already have one.

We will cover the basic principles of Processing, working with pre-existing example code to highlight how it functions and the type of visuals you might want to create.

You will design your Processing sketch using Twitter4J, a java library for the Twitter API.  We will the look at how to install and use the Twitter4J library and cover some of the queries that it supports to give you an idea of the type of information you can extract from the Twitter API.

By the end of this workshop you will know how to produce a simple visualization using Twitter that will change in real time, and think about how you can incorporate an element of user interaction or simply display information in an illuminating or aesthetically pleasing way.

What you will need to do in advance of this workshop

Download Processing: http://processing.org/download
Create a Twitter account: http://www.twitter.com

Who?

Shauna Concannon,  a literary studies grad turned electrical engineer, Shauna swapped Samuel Beckett for Alan Turing, taking up a PhD in the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary in the University of London.

When:

18th May ’2013 11.30am – 4pm

Where?

SPACE 129—131 MARE STREET LONDON E8 3RH

Only £35!!!  This is a women only workshop. :) Sign Up!

Generously supported by

TeenTech runs lively one-day events to help young teenagers see the wide range of career possibilities in Science, Engineering and Technology.

We were soooo excited to have been invited personally by our all time futurist techie heroine  Maggie Philbin! :)  Remember Tomorrows World? Now a days she’s presenting the brilliant Bang Goes The Theory, as well as running TeenTech of course.

Events like these always find it hard to get a balance of women and men showcasing and talking about technology, so it was great to be able to present work by women working with technology to young people.  The fact that all the technology was creative and most of it was interactive was a crowd pleaser.

TeenTech are an award winning, industry-led initiative, founded in 2008 by Maggie Philbin and Chris Dodson to help the “X Factor” generation understand their true potential and the real opportunities available in the contemporary STEM workplace.

As part of a day of workshops, events and performances MzTEK presents the workshop: Soft-Circuit Synth, 2.30 pm to 6 pm.

Make a wearable electric piano using e-textiles and soft-circuit techniques, sewing all electronic components and a speaker into fabric. Feel free to bring your own textile project to embed your synth into.

Sign up!

This workshop is open to anyone. Tickets are £55, and include day programme and entry to the evening performances. Book here for the MzTEK workshop.

Where & When

Saturday 30th March 2013
Workshops 2pm until 6pm
Performances until 11.30pm

Onboard the MS Stubnitz, Canary Wharf, E14 9SB, London

The evening program is headlined by Leafcutter John who combines vanguard electronics and processing with improvisation and traditional folk forms to great effect. He is joined by Riz Maslen and many further instrument builders, noise artists and electronic indeterminists from around the world.

More info on the Hackship  program HERE.

Ellie Harrison, Fabio Lattanzi Antinori, Phill Archer and Benedikt Gross.

Find out more about the artists and the artworks.

Where

Open Data Institute, 3rd Floor, 65 Clifton Street, London, EC2A 4JE

When

16 March 2013, 12pm – 6pm,
with informal presentations taking place between 2.30 – 4pm.

Be inspired by the David Bowie exhibition, and design your own wearable electronic noise instrument.

Learn to build a simple synthesiser by soldering components onto a specially designed Printed Circuit Board, that can be embedded into a garment using conductive thread and soft circuit techniques. The tone of the instrument is manipulated using home-made stretch and pressure sensors.

This project was designed by MzTEK as part of the Hacked Human Orchestra, a production in collaboration with Guerilla Science.

Where

The V&A Digital Studio, Sackler Centre
Cromwell Road, London SW7 2RL

When

Saturday 23 March, 10.30 – 17.00

Sign up here

Come and celebrate International Women’s Day with a day of geekery, and make amazing #InternationalWomensDay visualisations.

This workshop will show you how to programme a real-time graphical visualisation using live Twitter data.

You will create your visualization using Processing. Processing is an open source programming language and integrated development environment (IDE) built for the electronic arts and visual design communities. You can download Processing here: http://processing.org/download/

You will need your code to communicate with the Twitter API to retrieve tweets and information about users and their connections.  To avoid running into bandwidth limitation problems, you must authenticate using your own Twitter account details. Please create a Twitter account before the workshop if you do not already have one.

We will cover the basic principles of Processing, working with pre-existing example code to highlight how it functions and the type of visuals you might want to create.

You will design your Processing sketch using Twitter4J, a java library for the Twitter API.  We will the look at how to install and use the Twitter4J library and cover some of the queries that it supports to give you an idea of the type of information you can extract from the Twitter API.

By the end of this workshop you will know how to produce a simple visualization using Twitter that will change in real time, and think about how you can incorporate an element of user interaction or simply display information in an illuminating or aesthetically pleasing way.

What you will need to do in advance of this workshop

Download Processing: http://processing.org/download
Create a Twitter account: http://www.twitter.com

Who?

Shauna Concannon,  a literary studies grad turned electrical engineer, Shauna swapped Samuel Beckett for Alan Turing, taking up a PhD in the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary in the University of London.

When:

9th March ’2013 11.30am – 4pm

Where?

SPACE 129—131 MARE STREET LONDON E8 3RH

Only £35!!!  This is a women only workshop. :) Sign Up!

Generously supported by

Use soft-circuit electronics to make a wearable interactive neuron glove that lights up the Axon and buzzes at the Presynaptic Terminals when you stimulate the Dendrites.

This workshop maps a neuron’s main components along an arm length glove, and uses electricity to send the signal from a touch sensor on the finger, up the arm via some lights to a buzzer in the elbow.

The workshops are free and open to all, and will run for 2 hours on both days.  We recommend you come and sign up early on the day to avoid disappointment.

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RFID tags are used all around us, from your Oyster card to security tags in shops. They are tags that have a unique serial number, which can be read and identified by an RFID reader by placing the tag near the reader.

Using the LilyPad Arduino, you will learn to identify your tags and, based on the tag ID, trigger a different colour light for each tag. We will use soft circuits to embed the LilyPad and RFID tags into a piece of fabric.

All kit provided for you to take home a fully functioning RFID project.  Feel free to bring your project, cushion, soft toy, garment or bag to embed your RFID into.

This would be an ideal for anyone that has attended our LilyPad Arduino Introductory workshop, but is suitable for complete beginners too.

Who

Sara Heitlinger.

 Sara is currently a PhD candidate in Media and Arts Technology, at Queen Mary University of London, where she is researching designing interactive systems to support grassroots urban food growing communities.

Where

SPACE 129—131 MARE STREET LONDON E8 3RH.

When

16th February ’2013 11.30 – 5pm

Tickets:

£80 including LilyPad Arduino
£50 WTHOUT LilyPad – for those who have their own.

Sign up

This is a women only workshop,  SIGN UP HERE!!!!!

Generously supported by

Listen to the podcast of the event here…

To celebrate the final day of our exhibition at Norwich Arts Centre, we are giving an introduction to soft-circuits on Saturday 9 March.  Come and make a fabric patch, or sample, that lights up when you move or press a button. You can attached your patch to garments or a bag for the ultimate in fashion accessories.

By using conductive thread, LEDs, and conductive materials, come and learn how to embed a ‘soft-circuit’ into fabric.

You will make a patch that can then be sewn or stuck using Velcro to your favourite t-shirt, bag or even your hat!  Alternatively, bring your own fabric or garment to sew the circuit onto directly.

Norwich Arts Centre, Norwich

Saturday 9 March : 10.30 – 4pm
£40.00
Women only

MzTEK will be presenting the Hacked Human Orchestra this Thursday evening, 7pm onwards, hosted by the good people of Music Hackspace at the Troyganic Cafe.

Open to all!

Where/When:

Thursday 17 Jan,  7pm

Troyganic Cafe
132 Kingsland Road
Corner of Cremer Street
London E2 8DY

Artefacts will include projects devised and developed through MzTEK workshops, the Hacked Human Orchestra wearable instruments, e-textiles, hardware, and the a selection of the amazing teapots from our Chi-TEK showcase of technologically modified teapots.

We will also be running a soft-circuit a workshop at 9th March at Norwich Arts Centre. More details coming very soon…

Seasons Greetings from all at MzTEK!

Outriders is BBC Radio 5 live’s programme dedicated to exploring the frontiers of the web. It is broadcast on Tuesdays at 0300 in Up All Night.

In curating the showcase for the ODI we wanted to select a range of works that would not just reflect different data sources, but that would challenge our understanding of what data is, and how it may affect and reflect our lives.  The works range from geomagnetic data visualisations, to wall painted cellular automata, to tabloid newspapers of search term trend graphs – all tangible interventions into the mass accretion of data around us.

 Semiconductor’s 20Hz (2011)

Martin John Callanan’s Text Trends (2012) 

As data becomes more accessible to artists, as it opens up for use as a raw material, we are seeing more of its integration into works that explore environmental socio-political and economic aspects of society. By utilising data in an experiential way, this selection of works pulls data out of the virtual domain and into our physical world. We hope the exhibition provokes discussion around what open data is, how it informs and affects us, and how we interpret it in a way that is meaningful.

Find out more about the commissioned Artists and the Artworks.

To keep informed about this please follow us on Twitter, or sign up to our mailing list. 

Viewing is by appointment. Please contact the ODI at info@theodi.org.

MzTEK and the Music Hackspace invite all you techie women (and women who want to get techie) to join us for a one day workshop where you will learn to make one of the instruments from the project, the Beatbox t-shirt!

This last summer we worked with Guerilla Science, and KOBAKANT to bring a fantastic Hacked Human Orchestra to Wilderness and Shambala festivals, making wearable instruments with festival-goers that created the most awesome music ever!

Creating soft circuits with conductive fabric, conductive thread and an array of electronic components, people turned their t-shirts into synthesizers, screechers and recorders.

On this occasion the Beatbox t-shirt arrives to the London Music Hackspace, a place for artists, innovators, entrepreneurs and hobbyists passionate about music and technology.

In this workshop we will hack a small re-recordable devise, discard the hard wires and replace them with conductive fabric and thread, and learn e-textile techniques to make soft circuit buttons to embed the devise into a t-shirt or textile. We will provide a standard t-shirt, but feel free to bring a fabric patch, hat or bag etc, to use instead.

This would make a funky Xmas prezzie!

This workshop is perfect for someone wanting to learn the basics of how to create a soft circuit, but also for those wanting to work with electronics in a slightly different way. T-shirts will be provided but please feel free to bring along your own garment to adorn as well!

For more information about our adventures with Hacked Human Orchestra over the summer please check out: http://www.mztek.org/programs/hacked-human-orchestra/

When?

Sunday 16th December 11:00am – 4:30pm

Where?

Music Hackspace, Unit 30. Cremer Business Centre. 37 Cremer Street. London E2 8HD

£50 + £1.60 booking fee – standard ticket

£80 + £1.60 booking fee – 2 people discounted ticket (saving of £10 for each person!)

SIGN UP HERE

Learn how to make super shiny festive decorations in this seasonal soft circuit beginners workshop! Whether you want to make a star, Christmas tree or a snowflake, you will learn how to stitch basic circuits using conductive thread and adorn your felt decoration with LED’s. Led by MzTEKer Emilie Giles, the workshop will give you new skills in working with textiles as well as learning basic electronics.