Dear viewer, these subtitles were generated by a machine via the service Trint and therefore are (very) buggy. If you are capable, please help us to create good quality subtitles: https://c3subtitles.de/talk/922 Thanks!
Well, our next speaker is that
she's a new media and sound artist
from Canada, Dasha is known
for her examinations of communication
technology in the domestic sphere.
She uses DIY esthetics and
practices as artistic method
to create sound installation,
performances, drawings of beautiful
high tech trash.
As she writes on her Instagram,
Dashner is a fellow at the Berlin Center
for Advanced Studies and Arts and
Sciences and guest professor of New
Media and Sound at at a Karlsruhe
University of Art and Design.
Her art was presented at many
international conferences and festivals
and exhibitions.
So we are very happy to welcome
Dasha here today to MIT,
talking about the links between
socialism, lawnmowers
and media art.
Enjoy the status, your daughter.
Hello and
nice to see people in the crowd and hello
to people who also might be watching
online and later through YouTube
or however so
I I'm an artist and.
I like to do a lot of electronics,
some of the things I like to look at
are obsolete technology
and this concept of planned
obsolescence in
esthetics of failure.
Everything that's written
in my slides here,
I wanted to start out by
mentioning one of my
main people
of interest as an inspiration point.
Doctor was a la Franklin.
She's actually not so well
known here in Germany,
but she's what we call in Canada,
a national treasure.
We have a school named after her
and she's written a lot about
she comes from
a scientific background.
She's a physicist, but she's also
a strong advocate, feminist pacifist.
And she writes about technology
in these really interesting metaphorical
ways where she refers to
technology being a home and
how people live in and throughout
it and essentially thinking
of technology as a practice
and not just objects and things, but
systems where people are involved.
And myself, I'm interested
in deconstructing
electronics from the household.
And the reason why
is because it's pretty
accessible.
I went to art school.
I don't have any training in
engineering or anything like this.
So the best thing I can possibly do
when I want to experiment with technology
is go to the garbage, go
to the dumpster and pull out
all the gear that is
no longer useful to anybody
else. And I can take it into my
studio and I can take it apart and
see what it provides me with
as far as artistic inspiration.
So I never really start out with a
concept, an artistic concept.
I more look at
a machine and I say, OK, machine,
what can you tell me?
That's interesting to work with?
And so I think
a lot of us in the audience in here
at the Congress are familiar with this
concept of planned obsolescence.
I do like to introduce it, however,
because in sometimes
when I talk about it with my students,
I get asked if I believe in the
conspiracy theory of planned
obsolescence.
And I would like
to point out, as probably many of you
know, that this was no conspiracy
theory. It's a business model that
started when in the Great Depression
in USA. This was one way to get out
of a big economic jam was
to produce products
that had a limited lifespan so
that people would
buy things again and again
and again.
And we really haven't stopped doing that,
which is causing us a lot of problems
because we keep having
this approach.
So what are you going to do now is I'll
show you a few sound installations
and then I'm going to show you some DIY
videos and that I worked on.
And then a new project
which has to do with dissecting
a lawnmower.
And I'm very happy to be sort
of showing it to you guys here because it
actually has its origins in this
part of the world.
So maybe even some of the locals would
have used this lawnmower back in the day.
So.
So
how long ago was this?
I don't know, maybe close to,
however many years ago, maybe 2012,
they started to phase out
analog television signals in Canada.
And instead of letting people know that
they can get a converter
and
plug their TV to get digital signals, a
lot of people are just like, well, I
guess it's just time to throw out the old
TVs.
So I spent a lot of time
going around my neighborhood and feeling
kind of bad for these old televisions
and might like to point out I come from
a family where my father was an antique
dealer.
So anything that's old and sort
of left on the side
has always been something interesting to
me, because what I learned from my family
is that looking at
an object, looking at how it was used,
looking at how an object was used and
can kind of give you insight into
society or what was going on at
that time in history.
Kind of like if you were to look at a
painting for art historical purposes,
it's like a window onto a certain time.
So what I noticed
responding to the electrostatic
discharge from the TV.
I'll just go back to that one, sorry,
OK, maybe not.
What I noticed is that the old CRT
television televisions produce a lot
of electrostatic emissions.
So when you put
your head in front of it, your hair
sort of gets magically lifted up.
And when I was doing those experiments in
my studio with my hat, I really
thought that I came upon something
really unique.
You know, I can make a
static electricity, make things
move.
And then I did a bit of research.
And what I found out is
those were experiments being done like
over like hundreds of years ago.
I just happened to rediscover them.
So what you see here is the electrostatic
bell choir.
And in front of the television,
you have these Ballston,
these electrostatic bell stands, which
are their own little circuit in the
center. We have like the ground Rodge.
And on either side we have those bells
and hanging suspended between
each of them is a really light material,
which is called the pith ball.
It's actually the light material that's
inside of a tree branch.
And so when the TV turns
on or off, it gets this boost
of electro
static electricity, which makes it waver
back and forth.
This installation works exceptionally
well in dry environments.
So on my tech writer, I actually have a
big dehumidifier because I have shown it
before and old castles and it's
completely dead at that point because
the moisture kills it.
So I have to run around with hairdryers
and try to dry up the screens.
So this is a one of the installation.
So I sort of make something that looks a
bit like an alter.
It's using Solid-State relay's to control
the sequences of TV's going on and off.
I have a pretty basic program
running on an Arduino.
This project keeps getting more and more
challenging to make as it goes along
because the TVs are not as easy to
find anymore and I can't get the
same effect with a flat screen.
So right
now I have a lot of old televisions in
storage and I
just hang on to them.
Who knows, maybe one day the artwork will
be bought and I won't have to pay
money monthly to store them.
The bells themselves are actually from
old rotary telephones and
grandfather clocks.
So, yeah.
Next is a work called the Feedback
Babies, and
what this is, is these are baby monitors
or baby phones that were
really abundant, let's
say, in the second hand store.
This was made in 80s.
These were started to be made around 83.
So this was a big part of my childhood.
I don't know if I used one
or not, but I noticed that they would
always show up at the thrift store.
So I slowly started to collect them
because I thought, you know, if I get it
up an abundance of these things, it
could probably be interesting enough
to make an installation with
them. And I really like the quality of
the feedback because in one way
it sounds like crying.
Can you guys hear that enough or should I
turn it up?
No, it's good.
OK, I see some
of that.
And
so I noticed when they move the monitor
in a certain pattern in front of the
eye, when I move the receiver in front
of the transmitter and a certain
pattern, I get nice sounds.
And that one up here
is what's working really well.
But to figure out how to actually make
that movement took me forever.
But eventually the work transformed.
That kind of looks a little bit now and
I'm thinking I'm calling feedback.
Maybe someone looks a little bit mean.
It's like hanging it.
So here's a close up.
A couple of details.
Of what it turned into.
So in both of those two pieces, sound
is a pretty important element, but I
never approach sound as like a musician.
I'm actually really not interested
in making music.
I'm more interested in hearing
what the machines are giving me and
then sort of placing that in a space and
then seeing what it does.
So, yeah, they're not really so
composed or anything like this.
OK, so I wanted
to get into some of my
DIY videos, now I'm realizing this is
almost 10 years or so for this next
to be doing is we're going to be making
an audio representation of
AC power.
So what you'll see here is
we have a power cord that's plugged into
power by that's going to the wall and
then we have it going
to a transformer.
And what the transformer is doing is
dropping it from 120 volts AC
down to 15 volts, which is a little
bit more easy for us to manage for our
purposes. And it's it's directly
driving the speaker.
So what you're going to be hearing is
this 60 hertz 66
cycle, which generally
is something that we try to avoid.
We try to cut out, you know, a lot of
gear for music, you know,
is is made in a certain way.
So it gets rid of this hum.
But we actually wanted to hear
precisely that, nothing else.
So when I turn on this thing,
pouvoir, you're going to hear it.
So here it is.
So these are the kinds of things you get
up to in Canada when it's really cold
out.
So I.
This is at a time I was really first
getting into working with
this idea of open source software and
everything, and there is this idea like
you always have to contribute back to the
community.
I'm like, I'm definitely not doing any
fucking documentation for pure data,
even though I did, it was boring.
So I was like, I know I'll make these
videos and this will be my contribution.
So these videos that I made do go on are
on YouTube.
Yeah, but I mean, now
this is quite a normal thing,
but 10 or close to 10
years ago, I, I don't know what I was
doing. I was just putting them on there.
And it's nice to know that they still get
seen.
This next video
is.
From a collaboration I do with
Create Digital Media, where
we bring a bunch of people together
and over the course of about five days,
people do all sorts of hacking related
to music.
There's a lot of knowledge transfer going
on and sometimes we find interesting
hacks and we share them.
So here we are in the last few
hours, late at night at the HACLA, stuck
at the artifact festival and a few of
us are here to show you a really fun fact
that we found somebody
purchased a second hand child,
a fake microphone that gave some pretty
interesting Equifax.
And then, of course, it was busted open
in the spirit of the heckler.
And then we realized that there was this
really interesting disco
leidy's in there and we were playing
around with it. And then we thought it
was like, hey, man, why don't we just
jacot into the mixer and see if
we can hear the actual sounds of this
little disco.
ALDY And what we
realized was something quite fascinating.
There's actually a little chip, little
integrated circuit on the inside of the
lid that gives us some extra
special surprise.
So I'm going to parachute
into this Jack here
and then Marie,
that.
Has anyone done this before?
Yeah, it's pretty fun.
It's like little over NO2
on a chip inside of Amidi.
Yes, so that's a pretty exciting
find, it's not something that we see
every day, but any time you see a little
crappy looking party
disco led like this, you might want to
patch it into some speakers because
there's a pretty interesting sound
waiting to be heard.
So drawing schematics
and using I studied for one
one year interior design
before one of the teachers like you don't
belong here. You should go to art school.
But I learned I spent a whole year
learning how to do technical drawing and
drafting and market building.
And this was very useful because I
learned how to draw lines.
So there's a lot of line drawings.
It's not easy and different sizes
of lines mean different widths of line
mean different things.
Yeah. So then Unter,
let's move on to this one.
What I would call probably
my most technically ambitious
DIY videos.
What you're seeing here right now is the
temple wheel of the Zeidman
five thousand, which
is
the world's oldest
commercially available
drum machine, which is what Wurlitzer
said when it came out in 1959,
although there seem to have been other
things going on in different countries.
But this one got a lot of hype.
What's special about it, too, is that
it's working
on vacuum tubes and valves.
So it's particularly scary
in a certain level because it's a lot of
high voltage and people
have this mystical idea about vacuum
tubes a lot of the time.
So I made a 10 part
series online
about how each section of the
drum machine works,
including things like the speaker, the
tempo wheel and all sorts of this
saucing.
The schematic wasn't the easiest
thing I've ever done.
It was somewhat of a hunt.
I did find a retired
music critic
who was happy to email one to me
and give me some give me some pointers
as well. So Sideman would usually
be in a box like that,
and they
marketed it in several ways.
One of them, one of the ideas
is that it was a teaching machine.
So I
should say it plays ballroom dance music
at various different tempos.
OK, if you speed up Foxtrot,
it turns into techno
and then there's cha cha and samba.
It pretty much sounds like old timey,
old timey music most of the time.
Yeah.
So I think it's most impressive,
however, when the top Windom leader
is off because there's moving parts
and beautiful wiring in this sort
of thing. So I really wanted to emphasize
that.
Yeah. So I have a couple of the
videos here.
Maybe we watch one or two, but you can
watch them all online as
well.
So
take a little break.
Six.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are gathered
here today to witness the Technicolor
mystery, that is the tone generating
circuitry of Simon five thousand.
One of Simon's central goals is to
convince the human ear that it is
producing real life instruments and
this is what we call sound synthesis.
Now, try saying that three times that
sound synthesis, sound synthesis,
synthesis is the technique
of generating sounds from scratch using
electronic news flash people.
Simon isn't the only machine that
synthesizers found any of the loop
sounds or computer or video games make
all generate audio using this technique.
And just like the guts of the tone
generator, synthesizing sound can seem
quite complicated.
But what we have to keep in mind here is
that the science behind sound synthesis
is derived from how real life spans are
produced.
As you know, sounds are waves of air
that travel in different patterns with
varying frequency and amplitude, and our
human ears can make sense of a wide range
of frequencies.
For instance, these sounds.
Our high frequency and this
sound
is very low in level, the brains
behind sound synthesis have applied math
to the physics of sound, and once we've
got numbers, we can engineer electronic
models that allow us to manipulate waves
of electrons so that they behave the same
way as we sound
to systems inside of Simon's
right.
This is what we call our
Suay Noise
people. I put the wrong one on,
but there is a whole section that you
are going to see.
We'll just skip over and look at the tone
generators. All right.
So Simon is going to play some
broken down tango and we're going to take
a closer look at what's going on with the
troops inside a home generators.
Now up in this corner here, we have
an AC nine two.
This is a very important part of the
circuit because this tube is in charge of
generating all the signals required to
make all of the seismic sounds.
So in a way, it's sort of like genesis
of cell synthesis inside five
thousand.
Further down, we have these three tubes
here behind s.E.C.
Eight three NBCC nine two
and the F ninety three.
They're part of this circuit that I just
mentioned here, that they're also
connected to the SHEMER generator and the
Schimmer generator is creating
symbols across
America.
Now, if I pull out the
F 93 C here,
that pulling out one of Simon's teeth.
Yeah.
And the down on symbols, we
don't have anything anymore.
Now, if I put
it back in Marmolejo
yet carefully
symbols is back in pictures.
No below we have a
series of four s.E.C.
Eighty threes.
And inside each of these
glass envelopes we actually have two
elements of each element just controlling
one of the other cells that Simon
makes. And either half
of the two.
We have something called
a trigger protection order.
And this is something that can be
adjusted to change the
the filter or the tone filter.
And then that allows us to sort of change
the tenor of the sound that's being
created.
What's cool about this chamber pot is
it's got a specific little spot for me to
jam a screwdriver in.
And I can do that here right
now. Affecting Temple Block.
I think that sounds a bit better.
Come on, I mean.
Now, lastly, up in this
corner here, we have s.E.C
83 and this section of
the circuit is a corporate
amplification. So all of the signals that
are being generated inside this part
of end up over here where they get
boosted once before going
down over to the amplifier.
So I should point out, Simon is a bit
of a beast, I
got her a lot of the time
along the way, there's
parts where there's like 300 volts
coursing through.
And it's like I
or I thought
it would be cool to do performances with
it. And the first one I did I
like bent over to use my mixer.
And I had just gotten my my hair
cut and it was too short to put in
a ponytail like I usually have, which is
not just for fashion but for function.
And my hair got caught in the rotor
and a big clump of it came out and I sort
of disappeared behind the machine for a
few minutes while I tried to figure out
what to do with myself.
So I don't really do performances with
that anymore.
Anyhow, as I mentioned before,
there's an increasing number
of people and
women to taking part in this
world of DIY videos.
And one controversial
figure who I kind of really
love is
Naomi Wu, the real sexy cyborg.
Do people follow her?
Yeah. OK, so
she's from
Shenzhen and she makes videos
in her workshop. A lot of it has to do
with 3D printing and coding
and other things. She's pretty like into
her, like badass cyberpunk style.
So there's a lot of
fashion related hacks too.
And she's also a pretty strong advocate
for women in science
technology, STEM, as they call it,
transhumanism opensource
and body modifications.
So also, if you can see, she's
done a lot of work on her body because
she's like becoming a cyborg.
But unfortunately,
there is this scandal that
occurred where the CEO of Make
magazine actually didn't believe that
she was a real thing.
Like the idea was like too mind blowing
for him to think that there wasn't like
people behind this woman doing DIY
videos with the 3D printer.
So she called it the equivalent
of getting GamerGate by
him. But what was really interesting is
she's
she's pretty persistent.
She was pointing people to her.
EFIC, U.S., if you were ever interested
in reading it, which gives a really
interesting background into her esthetic
and the way that she moves about
her city and the big differences that
might occur between what people consider
sexy or what have you between
a Chinese culture and Western
culture. So this was pretty interesting.
And eventually she got
she did get a apology
from the CEO of MAKE,
which was quite a thing to happen.
Now, unfortunately, though,
MAKE has continued
to have a bit of
problems, even in the German
publications.
There's this one publication, the
Smart Home Hacks,
and there's
in the introduction, there's a section
called about Wah
Wah. I translated it from German
and WOF refers to something called
The Wife Acceptance Factor,
which let me read here.
Wife acceptance factor or
wife approval factor is
an assessment of design element that
either increases or diminishes the
likelihood of a wife
approving the purchase of
expensive consumer electronic
products such as High Fidelity
loudspeakers.
It's like, OK,
that's a I didn't I didn't know that one
before and I kind of like old things.
I was a bit surprised by this, but I
was more than anything, a bit
more surprised by what this what this
book was saying. So if you look at the
sections that I've highlighted here, I'm
saying only a few things would make me
more happy than if a woman would pick up
a screwdriver after reading this book
to replace her regular light switches
with radio controlled buttons.
And I don't know if we need a book
to tell us to pick up a screwdriver.
And then later on
it goes on to say that she will go
ballistic if
the self install radio controlled alarm
system cannot be shut off in the most
simplest ways.
And he, on the other hand, will open the
case and bypass the right context.
So anyways, I
think this was an attempt at a joke.
However, I don't think it's very funny
and I don't think that I would go
ballistic in this instance.
I mean, they go ballistic if people are
making jokes at the expense of
my people.
So this is one of the.
Things that still occurs when
entering into this discussion of
a DIY
DIY culture
while being a woman.
Now, what are you going to do?
Wedding, thank.
And what are you going to do now?
Is it going to kind of look at that
look at that concept, but through a
different lens, they're going to switch a
little bit into this next part.
And I'm going to give
you guys a little brief introduction to
to the history of a Cold War,
Eastern Germany, which feels funny
because I'm here in Leipzig.
So just it's just some very
brief points
during this time when the wall was up
on this side where we are now
in the east, there was really a scarcity
of raw materials and industrial
materials.
There is an abundant skilled
workforce.
There was a severe import
restrictions and limited access
to domestic technology and household
electronics.
But there was a strong culture of
ingenuity and repair.
One of the things that I noticed myself
doing, especially when I started out
doing electronics, was I was always
trying to find other people like me
in in
electronics.
So if you can imagine, it's
kind of exciting to find a
user manual where there's a woman fixing
a lawnmower.
And it turns out that
there's actually in the GDR,
a lot of women
showing us how lawnmowers
work.
Now, this idea of equality
of women was a very strong,
strongly propagated goal.
Like this is something that's very
present in socialism.
So that's part of the socialist
ideology.
But at the same time, there was a lot of
people who didn't come back
from the war. So women needed to
take on a more
a role that was outside of the home,
for instance, to help rebuild,
rebuild the country afterwards.
So like people
who are once housewives were all of a
sudden in brigades to rebuild.
So it was normal that
there was this sort of imagery going
around to encourage people to
be women, to be
taking on responsibilities that might
have otherwise been just seen
for men.
And there was yeah.
So I have a collection of these manuals
and I will point out a lot of people ask,
how did I come across the
trolley cars?
And me and I
did live in Vimal,
which is pretty close by for
about a couple of years while
I worked at the university there and I
lived with a retired television
repairman.
That's this guy, that's Wolfie.
And his
home really hasn't changed since the
wall came down, which is really
interesting for me.
And it was interesting for him to have
somebody around that wanted to look at
the old televisions that he would fix in
this sort of thing.
So I spent a lot of time learning how
things were
learning German at the same time.
And this is what it all revolved around.
I was looking at this old technique.
I found this I thought maybe people
at the CCC might find
this interesting. He was also
making plans for
fixing keys and getting into locks.
People might be here
anyways. One of the things that I would
do is
work in the garden.
And so here we have the Toli
and I mean, there's something
quite captivating
about it. I mean, I this
is this helmet looking thing.
This is just the motor hood, OK?
There's slots in it for there to be air
circulation.
But I couldn't quite help but feel
like there's definitely like something
menacing about that lawnmower.
And it looks like it's about to like, do
more on the grass
in the yard.
I mean, I, I don't
think I don't think
it was like meant to be that way.
I think this is pure functionality.
But as an artist, I'm looking at this and
it's really inspires me in a certain
way.
So the project that I'm look that I'm
working on right now is this idea of
reimagining
GDR technology
in the age of planned obsolescence.
And the idea is, can deconstructing
socialist era technology and
connecting it to present day
digital culture offer alternative
readings of our critical entanglement
with technology?
So what kind of patterns
and juxtapositions emerge when domestic
electronics and commonplace attitudes,
cultural practices and techniques that
surrounded technology from this
historically significant socialist period
inhabit the realms of capitalist
culture?
I'm specifically interested in this
idea of use
and reuse. And when we look at how people
from the GDR were
and are still working with technology,
this question of obsolescence becomes a
bit blurry because things keep getting
repaired and keep working.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world keeps
buying new lawnmowers.
And so I'll
show you a bit of the work that I've done
so far with it.
Um.
I worked on this.
Introduction video with
AGF, who's a
musician who's also from the
originally from the GDR.
And the idea here is to to look at the
sort of object, the fetishized objects
that we see in tech
culture now.
And sort of apply it to this
motor hood.
Has anybody that anybody is there anybody
in the audience that had a totally
Langmore?
Yes. And where were you, like,
scared of it?
I'm kidding.
Yeah. So anyhow,
I'm presently also working on
a series of photographs with the
let's just call them Helminths,
because that's what they are really
looking like.
So I had I when
I first came across the
the lawn mower in my yard and my
mom, I was like, oh, man, this thing is
so special and unique.
How do I get all of them?
And then I realized I don't have to worry
because eBay Kleinhenz is full
of people selling parts,
selling blades, selling just
the motor hoods.
And I'm now part of this cool
club of old guys that
trades parts.
And sometimes I can have one motor
hood if I give like a motor bed
or if I have wheels or something like
this. So it's really fun.
It's like often it's, you know,
and then sometimes they get very
skeptical. They're like, what are you
doing with all these?
You got seven trollies.
And I'm like, I'm an artist.
They're like, I don't care.
You can't have it.
You can't have them if you don't need
them. So, yeah, I have to
look down to downplay that part because
it doesn't get me very far.
So yeah, the photographs
are large scale, although that
kid's pretty small too.
And I'm putting
them in on unbuckles
on pedestals.
So they look like they had this history
as like some warrior, the
warrior of the lawn.
And yeah, actually there'll be an
exhibition in April at
Filton and this this work will
be part of it.
And I will close by showing you the next
most inspiring lawnmower from
the GDR.
There's something quite lovely
about the Z
r m 450.
Now, what you purchase,
what you purchase is you get
the chassis of your lawnmower
and then you find somebody that has
a ball of
Bulmash. You screwed
a trailer electric drill
and then you put both of them together.
When I looked in these, I didn't laugh
like you guys were. This is like restored
my faith in humanity.
I was like, this is amazing.
You know, you this is really a concept
that's useful for us now to think like
we don't need more stuff.
We just need to make friends with the
neighbor who has the thing that we need
to make our lawnmower work.
And I like this idea of fuzing two
pieces of technology and getting
something new out of it.
So based on this
new wonderful
insight,
the next plan with the with the
poly is to try to
somehow turn it into a record player.
The motor goes pretty fast on the
totally. But I think I could slow it
down. And there's lots
of information out there in the high
fidelity world of
record turntable building
about how to build your own record
player. So the idea is to really, like,
smash some of these Charly's into making
a music thing that can play music.
So, yeah, and that's
the end. And just a small reminder
for New Years to
make sure to turn off your computer
before midnight.
Thank you.
Very inspiring talk, I'd say,
on.
We now have about like 15
minutes for questions, so a lot of time.
Keep them coming.
The mikes are open for you.
I also wanted to know if there's people
who have the
people who have the email or the
lunch at home.
I would like to
talk with you about it.
Or in general, in general,
just your experience
from from this time and
now, just with tech, because this is my
main big interest.
Yeah.
I have a case I have a background in
dance and theater, and
so I wonder in the community I come
from, I see you two times
with Adidas
and so I wonder what you see idea with
the Adidas, because
as a community I come from you just
don't like that.
You do. Oh, well, there's two things
about that jacket.
OK, first of all,
it's a vintage Adidas jacket.
And when you move in it,
you feel like people like you feel
kind of like a superhero.
And I think this is an important part
of standing up in front of a bunch of
people and explaining how
sound synthesis works.
And also I
teach a lot of a lot of electronics
related courses and sometimes it's
fucking boring.
And I somehow feel that if I get up there
and sort of like remind
people that there's something exciting
going on, they'll somehow be part
of my take part
in the discussion more.
So it wasn't a new Adidas jacket.
It was very old.
And yeah,
it was to make myself
feel good and to
encourage people to so to watch
me in the machine.
It was a tactic like that.
Too bad I didn't bring the again.
So do we have another question?
Yeah. Microphone two, please.
I just
think someone could fit his head inside
the.
And I like how happy
everybody puts it on their head.
They get confused when they have like the
Turbo One with three slots.
Now, what's interesting, though, is
that the material that
it's made out of varies quite a lot.
There's something that's very hard
plastic and some that's very light.
You could you could wear it as
to your next fight
club. If you want to
scare somebody, you
could wear it. Yeah,
like putting it on top of my hat
and maybe put another one on top of
that, just like try
working out with some lights and
a hot dog going
here and my go.
I've got quite a few.
If you ever wanted to test it out, I
personally won't go that that
route with
the performative thing.
But yeah, I think it could be it could
be fun if somebody else
did it.
Thanks for this question.
I think we have a question from fashion
related questions and
it goes to I
think we have a question from the
Internet.
Yes. First of all,
of course, everybody should invest
in Longmont's now because of the prices
will rise.
I think after the stock
exchange is asking, what machines
are you going to build in the future?
Are there any upcoming projects?
And of course, there's
always many machines that I'm thinking
about, the next one being
the the record player.
But there's also
from learning about sidemen, I really
dove into this world of vacuum
tubes and there's a vacuum tube that's
called the mercury
rectifier.
It's quicksilver.
And the way it generates electronics
is electrons as it heats
up, mercury and this beautiful blue cloud
glows.
It's really fascinating to look at, but
it's also kind of creepy to think that
these were like heavily used
in industry, like up to
100 years ago,
and now they're just sort of
not used anymore and they're kind of
hanging out. And I want to track where
these things might be because mercury
is a bit of a problem sometimes
if it's not contained.
So I think I might be looking into
Mercury rectifiers, but I never know.
Sometimes you just come across I come
across something and then it just takes
my inspiration.
Know things like No one
place, all right, sort of building
on that on future ideas and
the long that's
run from a drill motor.
Do you have any ideas of these kinds of
combinations that we could be doing in
our lives or in
in.
Yeah, not not yet.
But I mean, I would like to maybe
work with my students specifically
on this topic in a in a seminar,
do workshops where it's specifically on
smashing two things together
or more.
Yeah. Do you have any ideas.
That's what I'm curious.
No, not not yet.
But I really like this idea of
something becoming
repurposed and work
and being worked through in another way.
Mike and Mike, number four, please.
Hi, thank you for the talk.
It was very inspirational and I have a
similar question.
If you could only work on one machine for
the rest of your life, what would that
be?
What kind of question is that
difficult?
Well, I mean, here's the thing, like
a machine can be many things, right?
Like a wedge that
like it's yeah, I don't know,
a slinky.
I don't know. I'm not sure
this ironmen is really fulfilling.
There's so many parts to it
that I could potentially work with that
again. I mean, I also work very
extensively for
with sound and electro mechanics with the
five five five timer.
And this gets me really far as
far as pushing it for
in many different ways.
This is an integrated circuit that's you
can create a clock
of different frequencies with and
it's all over the place.
So this one, I would say, is the one that
I've really gotten
like I could almost build in my sleep.
So, yeah, that maybe
it would be the five five five timer.
Thank you.
Yeah, thanks.
We have another question from the
Internet.
CIBM users asking,
have you ever seen KC
85, which is a computer
from the German Democratic Republic?
I haven't seen it yet, but I want
to.
Yeah, no, not yet.
Right, things like number two, please.
All right, thanks.
You know, I love your work.
I'm just wondering because there's a bit
of socialism missing from this project,
and I'm wondering if you have thought
about what record you
will use on the side.
I yeah, good question.
I have no idea yet.
I have no I have no I don't
know. Maybe I have to build
a sleeve to cut
the record and then go from there.
I'm not sure
this is what's keeping me up at night,
by the way.
Yeah. Is no place
that I this is the first
I see of your work and I think it is
amazing. So you've got a new floor.
And also have you
done these kinds of projects
with like modern Intec, the Post.
Two thousand.
Uh, no, not normally
post 12.
Like garbage you waste.
OK, one thing that often
gets dissected in workshops that I do is
the three and one printer, because that
thing's full of really useful parts.
Um, but otherwise I just
like look at something that's seemed like
surface mount components.
I'm like you boring.
I can so not
so much there or do I.
Yeah, no. I'm mainly interested in things
that have motors.
So the, the, the three and one
Ganor printer thing is a pretty
is a pretty big deal.
I did a workshop where one
of the students stripped it down and
built like this and there was ink left
over and he built like this
like Poca postapocalyptic
tattoo parlor slash machine.
I wasn't, I didn't stick around for the
better part.
I make tattoos, but yeah.
Yeah, I can.
Number four, please.
I had, um, thank
you first of all for pointing out the
wife acceptance factor bullshit
and also showing me
which whose work I also think is really
great and weird and provokes,
of course, a lot of discourse
also in the feminist movement, I guess
whatever.
But I was wondering, as of course
statistics still show that there's
less female engineers and stuff like
that. Um, how do you consider
your role, female role
model function and what
is it with your students?
Are there a lot of female students and
what do you do especially to encourage
girls?
Um, I don't do much
other than just show up.
Um, yeah.
I think in the in the
education in the
education
bubble, um, if
I'm if I'm there teaching, there's just
generally in the art
school at least, there's generally young
young women, young women
and and men.
I try to make a space that really
encourages
like failure is just as important
as a success
because this is an important link.
I feel like a lot of people
don't necessarily recognize that,
like when you're doing this kind of
thing, like, of course, you're going to
break something.
And that's sometimes the way that you
learn. Um, and.
Yeah, just also, I think
that there's this idea that we have about
how electronics needs to be taught, like
you need to do Ohm's Law first and you
need to do this in these equations.
And I'm like, to me, this is not
how I learned it.
I learned I walked into it backwards.
You know, I was an IV technician
at school and I had to learn how to use a
multimeter that had like a needle.
And I didn't know what the hell
I was doing. So I just spent a lot of
time inventing
things and then eventually came around to
figuring out how it worked.
So it's more about an exploration and
discovery and also knowing that
you can look at look for patterns
instead of thinking that you need to know
a theory.
And sometimes if something's not working
right, but it's doing something, maybe
that's interesting enough and you can
build artwork around that.
Yeah,
I think we have another question from the
Internet.
Yes, it might be your next big
project because the stream is asking,
would you be interested in participating
in a lawnmower army workshop at
the next council computer camp?
OK, wait, is
there a prize?
I think they're more talking about Wi-Fi
access points on lawnmowers and other
things.
Oh, OK.
And of course, blinking lights.
Yeah, of course.
Of course. I'm interested in making and
making an army with these with
these guys.
Why wouldn't I be?
Yeah, this is a great idea.
I think,
OK, so no questions
anymore, then I'd say thank
you all for these fun and interesting
questions. And most importantly, thank
you again for this great talk
and thank you.
Such a pleasure to have you.
Let's give her a last round of the.