Meanwhile, thank you for making 2011 such a fantastic year!

C4CC is a new initiative in collaboration for London. It’s a pilot project and a prototype for a bigger idea. They are bringing together leading and innovative researchers from London’s universities and colleges, creative industry practitioners and freelancers, SMEs and students.

Feel free to pop in on Friday mornings for Tuttle, a friendly networking event.

G.Hack is an art and technology lab for women at Queen Mary University of London. They are participating artists in the Chi-TEK project, and have developed an interactive table for sound mapping tea houses across London.

This workshop will teach basic techniques involved in the construction of an interactive table top, using infrared sensors. It will also teach basic sound recording and editing, the basics of soldering components, as well as covering simple programming for the interactive table using Processing, MaxMsp and reacTIVision software.

G.Hack – Teapot – Sound Mapping London Tea Houses from MAT_OPEN on Vimeo.

What to bring with you (if you can)…

Participants are required to bring their own laptops, and if possible with preinstalled sound editing software, Processing, reacTIVision and MaxMsp (demo licence is fully functional for 30 days) and if you have it, sound recording equipment. All materials for making sensors will be provided.

When:

November 19th 2011

10.30am – 4.30pm

Where:

SPACE
129 -131 Mare St
London E8 3RH    - MAP

Booking

This is a women only workshop
Tickets are £25
Register here: https://mztek.eventwax.com/t-hack-with-ghack

This Chi-TEK workshop project is supported by

MzTEK has teamed up with AKA the castle to present an open hardware hack workshop as part of Moving Forest London2012 initiative by AKA the castle.

MzTEK is hosting a two day open hardware hack workshop focusing on modifying/remodelling /hacking recycled hardware for generating revolting noise, based on the Chip Tune Marching Band workshop for creating a portably powered sound circuit.

Planning for Moving Forest’s citywide insurgency acts with updated moving antennas replacing moving tree branches, these workshops also strategize a massive mobilization of london urbanites as part of Moving Forest’s distributed performance for London summer 2012.

Moving Forest is a 12 hour, five act, visual, sonic, digital, electronic and urban performance collectively realized by AKA the castle, a temporal performance troupe bringing together visual artists, writers, soundists, silk threaders, codedecoders, macromikro, boombox mass, mobile agents, wifi fielders and urbanites. 12 hours of sonic, coded action map an imaginary Castle and camouflage forest revolt onto a given modern day metropolis.

Moving Forest  was first presented at Transmediale.08 in Berlin.

The partners for Moving Forest London workshop development are MA Interactive Media & Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, Furtherfield, Space, Digital Programmes, V&A.

Please bring your own devices and tools to modify/remodel/hack, there will be a £10 pound workshop fee to cover the sound making electronic supplies.

WHEN

Take part in a one or two day workshop session 26 & 27 November.
11am to 5pm, November 26,  Saturday
11am to 5pm, November 27,  Sunday

SIGN UP

This is a women only workshop. £10 on the door to cover basic noise making kit.

Please sign up on the Moving Forest hack wiki to take part in one or two day workshop sessions or write to now@movingforest.net

WHERE

SPACE
129-131 MARE STREET
LONDON E8 3RH
+44(0)20 8525 4330

Musique concrète (“concrete music” or “real music”) utilises sound as a compositional resource in unusual ways. The material does not have to be exclusively derived from musical instruments or voices, nor to elements traditionally thought of as “musical” (melody, harmony, rhythm, tempo and so on).

A full day exploring experimental sound and composition.

Explore the history of Musique concrète, and create your very own masterpiece in a day. Learn the basics of simple recording techniques, and then test your skills on a group sound walk.

Back at the studio you will learn to transfer your material to computer and edit it using Audacity, into a short music composition. Using basic compositional methods and processing.

Bring your own recording device and headphones, such as a dictaphone, small handheld recorder or phone.

This workshop is lead by Leslie Deere, an artist working with sound. Her work can currently be heard at Kew Gardens, where she has two sound installations running daily. Leslie comes from a performing arts background in dance and has been inspired by Merce Cunningham and John Cage. She has a BA in Sonic Arts and an MA in Communication Art & Design from the Royal College of Art.

 Where

SPACE
129—131 MARE STREET
LONDON E8 3RH

When

Decmber 10th 2011
10.30am – 4.30pm

Register

This workshop if £25.
As usual, this is a women only workshop.

SIGN UP HERE: https://mztek.eventwax.com/musique-concrte

The instructions be downloaded here.

Most of the materials you can find at any haberdashery. The conductive thread and fabric can be found online, we ordered ours for the workshop from Mindsets.

MzTEK invites you to our Geekout – a session which encourages you to work on your own tech projects in a peer to peer environment, share your ideas and most of all, tinker!

If you require one, please bring your own laptop as well as any materials for pieces you’re working on. We’ll have solder irons, glue guns, some components and also learning materials from previous workshops. There will be a couple of tutored exercises, including an introduction to SketchPatch and how to make your own Soft Circuit Voodoo Doll.

We would like to thank Barry’s Lounge for sponsoring our Geekout :)

What to bring with you (if you can)…

Your own laptop

When:

October 27th 2011

8:00pm – 11:00pm

Where:

Hosted by Hub Westminster
1st floor New Zealand House
80 Haymarket
London
SW1Y 4TE   -   MAP

Booking

This is a women only session
Tickets for the fayre are free and can be booked here

Create LED light patterns or program your own PACMAN-like game.

This fabulous workshop covers how to use the basic electronic components (switch, potentiometer, resistor, capacitor etc) and introduce how to control a micro-controller, Atmega 168 using the open-source Arduino software.

In this workshop you will create your own lighting patterns, such as texts and images and also develop a simple game, using a bespoke pre-designed led-matrix circuit.

Check out this example video of the DIY PACMAN game

Where & When

5 November – 10am  - 4.30pm

V&A Museum Sackler Centre, South Kensington, London

Prerequisites

- a power supply (output: 12V, over 1A): Yes! Finally something to do with all those old phone chargers! Please check your power chargers for a mobile phone, a computer or other electronic devices.

No prior computer programming experience is needed.

To Register

As usual, this is a women only workshop.  All bookings to be made through the V&A.
Tickets are £80 or £64 concession
Please call 020 7942 2211 to book or sign up through the web site.

The Instructor

This fantastic workshop will be lead by Eunjoo Shin, www.ejoo.org, www.comms.me Eunjoo Shin, an artist, explores interaction design, sound and public installation. Her art works have been featured in many venues, including FILE festival 2009 in Sao Paulo, Peadhead at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in New York and Seoul Art Center in Seoul. Her work, Vocal Trio was selected as one of the best interaction desgins by the Korean Federation of Design Associations, and published in the design yearbook, CREATIO 2009.

HAPPY ADA LOVELACE DAY LOVE!

A day of introductory techy workshops for women

MzTEK has teamed up with our friends at School of Everything to bring you a day of techy tinkering.

Workshops include Shiver My Tea Cups, Make-a-Mic & Soft Circuit Ghosts. The day will be structured for you to chose 3x 1hour 30mins workshops to attend throughout day. Spend the day picking up skills in Arduino, soldering, noise making, sensors & more!

No experience necessary – just enthusiasm for tech, and tea!

This workshop is part of the MzTEK project Chi-TEK, a celebration of women working in arts and technology, and offers a tongue in cheek take on what women can really achieve around a kitchen table.

Soft Circuit Voodoo Doll from Becky Stewart on Vimeo.

Bring with you…

Your favourite teacup and saucer
If you have a laptop, please bring along with you.
If you have an Arduino, bringing this will mean you can take your work away with you.

The Instructors:

Katrin Baumgarten is a recent graduate from the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London. Her projects revolve around human-technology-interaction and explore future possibilities within technology and art. katrinbaumgarten.de

Julie Freeman explores relationships between science, technology and nature and how we perceive and interact with them. Julie recently became a TED Fellow 2011.  translatingnature.org

Becky Stewart from MzTEK currently runs her own company, Codasign as researcher, designer and consultant for digital music installations.

Cost:

Standard ticket £65.
MzTEK Special buy 1 ticket and get a second half price – bring a friend! – enter this promo code when registering: 241.5  NOTE: you will need to add the code on the registration form, before you get to the ticket options.
This is a women only workshop. Booking Essential.

BOOK HERE NOW!

To book, go to mztek.eventwax.com/chi-tek-workshop-fest

Location:

School of Everything  Limehouse Town Hall  646 Commercial Road  London E14 7HA

For more info or any questions, please feel free to get in touch at info@mztek.org

The Chi-TEK project is supported by

Modified / Hacked / Enhanced tea pots by a roster of brilliant women makers:

Join us on Saturday 24 & Sunday 25 September for a digital tea party, where you can see the teapots in full working order, alongside a delicious assortment of tea and cake.

The Chi-TEK Tea Party at the V&A Digital Design Weekend / London Design Festival 2011

Saturday 24 & Sunday 25 September 2011

11:00 – 16:30

Tea, cake, and a brilliant display of hacked / modified tea pots.

Celebrate the talent and innovation women bring to arts and technology.  Come join MzTEK in a weekend of tea & cake, tinkering, play, and an electric showcase of interactive teapots.

This event is free.

The Tea Party is a fun, surprising showcase of tea pots specially hacked, modified, and redesigned by 20 leading women designers, artists, and technologists.  Read more about the artists.

Then, join us on 24 & 25 September during London Design Festival and Digital Weekend at the Victoria & Albert Museum, where we will throw a very unusual type of tea party in the gardens.  More details on that to come.

Meantime, checkout a destructive teapot  from designer Mika Satomi (of KOBAKANT).  Then head on over to artist Rain Ashford’s Flickr for a sneak peek at TeaPotty.

We can’t wait to set these up this week for display!

See whats coming up next in our events calendar…

Tine Bech’s The Lightpot

Shu Lea’s Stormy Weather Teapot

Shu Lea found this yellow Tetley teapot laying quietly among vintage silver Morrocan teapots in the cupboard at the home of madame Rokia Ben Brahim, a 93 year old Algerian woman working all her life as a cleaning lady in Paris. Inside is soldered a Vive la Resistance aka NanoSmano Sajica , a mini circuit with an oscillator and a resistive gas sensor. It produces sound responding to touch and breath.

Artemis Papageorgiou’s This Is Not A Teapot

This Is Not A Teapot is inspired by the semiotics of language used in the homonym painting of Magritte (Ceci n’est pas une pipe).  You can read more about Artemis’s project on her website at http://artemispapageorgiou.wordpress.com

Mika Satomi’s Self-destructing Teapot

Mika’s teapot constantly hits itself with nails, and is on the verge of self destructing. See the tea pot in action here.

Anna Dumitriu’s Biohacked Tea Cosy

Read more about Anna’s experience of making her Biohacked Tea Cosy for Chi-TEK here.

I struggled long and hard with the issue of what to do with the plain, white and highly uninspiring teapot I received in the post from MzTEK several months ago, mulling a series of scenarios in my head over and over again. I am very supporting of MzTEK and their aims and was really happy to be involved. But when I opened up the parcel my heart slightly sank.

I considered taking a Pico projector apart and trying to get the teapot to project tea pouring from the spout when tilted (cool but too expensive considering the risk of breaking the projector), turning the teapot into a piece of lab equipment (nice but would that work within the constraints of a ‘tea party’ and what would it do?), smashing it and rebuilding it as a bionic version or simply strapping it to a robot chassis so it would roll up and down the table. None of these ideas really convinced me though. It felt like a backwards way of working. Usually the overall concept and the final artwork are intrinsically linked for me from the very start. This constraint of the teapot felt exceptionally restricting, like I was back at school working on a project with a brief. If I was a designer then it might have made sense, but I am not, I’d probably describe myself as a kind of ‘conceptual artist’, I often make tangible objects but they are always very much ideas led.

My art practice is really centred on two main areas of very much linked research. I work with microbiology, I am currently Leverhulme Artist is Residence on the Modernising Medical Microbiology Project, University of Oxford who are looking at how transmission of pathogenic bacteria operates, what (near) real-time whole genome mapping of bacteria can tell us and also with robotics, working in partnership with the University of Hertfordshire’s Adaptive Systems Group. The themes that reoccur in my work are the microbiological life, artificial life, ethics and public engagement in science (which I view as a political issue considering how much misinformation is put out by the media). I make installations, interventions and performances using a range of digital, biological and traditional media including live bacteria, interactive technologies and textiles.

Finally I started to think deeply about tea itself and its properties. Since the beginning of the year I have been experimenting with dyeing embroidery silks with natural and man-made antibiotics: from turmeric to Vancomycin. My recent work the “MRSA Quilt” uses the tools we have against this well-known hospital pathogen in combination with fabric stained with actual MRSA bacteria (grown on chromogenic agar). For instance the polka dots on the quilt fabric are made with Vancomycin susceptibility disks (the way they can tell in the lab if a bacterium can be treated with that drug). I remembered that green tea is a natural antibiotic and an effective dye and started to think about that.

I began to try to culture a green tea resistant bacterium and to use it as a stain. I had previously developed an embroidery using green tea stained thread and it occurred to me that I could use kitchen/lab technology to create a textile piece that was stained with bacteria (sourced from tea, biscuits and cake) in interplay with the green tea’s antibiotic effects. Additional later embroidery is impregnated with negligible amounts of Vancomycin. The bacterial culture medium (Dr Simon Park’s “Park’s Kitchen Agar”) was created from supermarket ingredients and lab equipment was sourced from the local pound shop (and ebay). I had a failed attempt trying to culture Lactobacillus when I discovered they are microaerophiles and not likely to grow in air and at one point I went crazy and crumbled a chocolate biscuit on it. After 2 days I had signs of life and then went away for the weekend. Upon my return I had even more of signs of life and moulds had started to take over, sending their filaments deep into the cloth. Finally I made it safe and killed off all that life. Taking no chances I used surgical spirit, boiling water, mould killer and pasteurization, so that should do the trick. Pasteurization (originally developed by pioneering microbiologist Louis Pasteur to stop wine from spoiling) should be enough in itself but the mould killer will do for any spores remaining after rinsing. The risk of culturing anything nasty was also severely limited by the fact that all the bacteria were sourced from tea and biscuits and cultured at around 20 degrees Celsius (much less than the human body temperature).

The embroidery shows my first attempt at ‘Cutwork’, which is a technique, where in portions of cloth are cut away and the resulting ‘hole’ is reinforced and filled with embroidery. I wanted to do this as I have also embedded a video screen in the work, showing my processes. I was quite intimidated in many ways to think my embroidery would be shown in the V & A Museum, alongside so many of the world’s best textile works. But for me working in embroidery is a conceptual choice rather than a demonstration of my craft skills.

Around the time of the enlightenment the perversely difficult practice of whitework embroidery was considered to be one of the highest levels of achievement for a woman. They would sew in the evenings by candlelight straining their eyes to see the tiny stitches, hunched over their embroidery hoops, their bodies twisted and constricted by tight corsetry, one pinprick of blood meaning the whole piece would be ruined. This coincided with the period in which many of their male counterparts started to become ‘gentleman scientists’ beginning to rigorously study the world around them ‘scientifically’. This was the time when the scientific method was developed and disciplinary boundaries were drawn between art and science. I’ve made several large whitework embroidered pieces inspired by these ideas which for me is a way to consider paradigmatic changes in the process of research and current moves towards transdisciplinarity, alongside a consideration of what ‘feminine’ approaches to science and technology might mean.

Finally the textile pieces were stitched together to create what I am guessing is the first ever bio-hacked tea cosy/video installation!

You can still add your support HERE

In no particular order, THANK YOU

Bethan McDonald
Sally Caulwell
Paul McBride
Lucy Bannister
Julie Freeman
Varvara Guljajeva
Molly Kleiman
Helen Northmore
James Carrigan
Stephen Mccarthy
Mika Forsberg
Davide Della Casa
oomlout .:.
Janet Giles
E R Jones
Alexandra McDonald
Brian Nolan
Alan Waldock
A Rodnes
Anna Dumitriu
Kate Jessop
Sally Caulwell
Anne Donlon
Keith Simpson
George Profenza
James Carrigan
Iain Sharp

Hope to see you at the Chi-TEK Tea Party in the V&A Museum garden on the 24th & 25th September!

Join in Chi-TEK – get your teapot hacks to us at info@mztek.org and we’ll post them on our website :)

Just a quick hack I made up today :) Really good for showing that you should be getting on with some tea drinking before it’s to late!

We’d like to say a big thanks to our friends at sugru! They have given us a load of packs of sugru to give away with donations to our Chi-TEK project. :) Thats the green stuff sticking the thermometer to the side of the teapot. It’s indestructible when it sets, so will stay on through the wash and is heat proof – which is good for teapots.

Get a sample of sugru when you donate £10 to Chi-TEK! :)

Come and join MzTEK on the July 23rd & 24th at the Barbican’s Extraordinary Voices weekend of events and workshops.

MzTEK will be running two drop-in workshops all weekend, free for all the family. Come and find us in the main foyer in front of the fountains.

What Does Your Face Sound Like? readings by MzTEK Meg

MzTEK Meg (aka Julie Freeman) presents the fantastically farcical yet fully functional facial translator. Step into the booth and have your face captured and transformed into a sonic sequence of sampled speech. Hear your face! Make it your ringtone!

FIND YOUR FACES AT www.mztek.org/meg

AND…

MAKE-A-MIC

Ever wondered what makes a microphone hum? Come and make a mic, and add you’re own tune to the mix!

Join Eunjoo Shin (previously known to MzTEK for DIY Pacduino), and Sophie McDonald (also known for her sketchPatch workshops) for MAKE-A-MIC! Learn how to wire up a jack with a piezo transducer to make your very own microphone, or musical instrument. Then join our rock band and crank it up real loud! You will have a chance to collaborate with other participants to produce a cacophony of musical eloquence.

When & Where

Find us in the main foyer of the Barbican Centre on July 23rd & 24th.
These workshop are open to the public, and will run from 11am – 4pm Saturday and Sunday as part of the Barbican Weekender – Extraordinary Voices.

Please help raise money for Chi-TEK, a brilliant women’s art and technology project by MzTEK, involving technologically modified teapots!

The project involves techi tea related workshops for women, a show case of tea pots and a tea party in the V&A garden, which you are all invited to.

We have set up a sponsorship page here: http://www.indiegogo.com/Chi-TEK with a chance to get a limited edition Chi-TEK goodie as a thank you. ;o)

There are only have 10 days to go, so don’t miss out!

This autumn MzTEK will be launching Chi-TEK, a celebration of women working at the intersection of art and technology.

Chi-TEK will bring you an inspiring showcase of technically modified teapots in the V&A Sackler Centre, tea related workshops, and the Chi-TEK Tea Party, open to the public in the V&A garden.

Our aim is to promote women’s contributions to technology in the arts. What better way than through highly visible and fun events and workshops?

We need your finical help to ensure this goes off with the bang it deserves.

There are perks for your contribution too – limited edition Chi-TEK badges, tea towels and mugs. Don’t miss out!

To find out more about our campaign, please visit our funding page at http://www.indiegogo.com/Chi-TEK

Leave us a comment on our funding page to help us get featured on the front page of indieGoGo, to reach an even wider audience.

Thanks for all your support,

All at MzTEK