transitlab

As part of Inter_Multi_Trans_Actions

First up was Bengt Sjolen(Stockholm)(http://www.automata.se/people/bengt/). He talked about a number of his works including one utilizing a servo-controlled citroen rearvision mirrors (Picture house at Belsay Hall, Northumberland) that used reflection to make a pixelated picture.
An elegant piece was the wifi camera – a single pixel camera that builds up images over a 20 min period of the local wifi environment.
The elephant phone connecting two distant elephant house, allowing the elephants to talk to each other.
One of the take home messages was that time is not money, money is time. So the few months he is working on other people projects buys him the time to make his own(http://www.automata.se/).
He placed an emphasis on peer production networks, in that the network became the artist. This network is sited at Teenageengineering(http://www.teenageengineering.com/), where Bengt and a number of others run their commercial operations(eg http://www.elektron.se).

This is full of useful tech like cnc machine and laser cutters etc. Not coming from a design or manufacturing background I found his brief description of small scale fabrication of circuitboards interesting eg the cnc machine can be used to cut circuit boards, place solder paste and pick and place components, then into the oven.

One of the questions that was directed at Bengt was why if there was software that was off the shelf that could drive his cnc machine, why he chose to code in python.
This gets to the heart of being a tooluser vs a tool maker.
A generic software needs to be generalised, and is often not open to modification. A bespoke software can be built to do what its maker wants.
Bengt mentioned that the process of making the tool slowed him down and thus errors werent made later in the process but as part of the development of the tool. This slight slowdown was preferable to an error at the production level.

This also brings into the debate, should new media artists know how to code? Are the simplified tools that are being provided to us (ie Arduino, Processing) a help or hindrance?
Are we asking for it to be too easy, and losing some of the nuances? This issue came up at the SketchingInteractions and SpacePlacePace events at Culturelab in the previous week.
My take is that the opensource tools arduino and processing allow a gentler introduction to the complexities of microcontrollers and programming than a full blown avr programming suite. At this stage I am not likely to do a 4 year engineering course.