DorkbotBRU#12

Wednesday, 6 May 2015 | 20:00

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People doing strange things with electricity

For this 12th edition of the DorkbotBRU, we’ve invited 3 guests to share with us their ongoing projects and/or experiments.

Elias Heuninck, a Ghent based artist who makes videos, graphical designs and interactive works, will present his work in progress “Lightkeeping”. Out of a curiosity to create a new image quality, he made a digital camera, that builds up an image pixel by pixel by making one simple measurement at a time. The camera starts at the top left corner and works its way to the bottom right one, just as you are reading this text. The resulting images are digital by nature, yet the visual resemblance with prints from the early days of photography is striking. Whereas the conventional camera is a darkroom that captures light, this camera is more like a lighthouse. Similarly, the picture written by this camera could be the map. “Lightkeeping” will be showed for the first time at iMAL in November 2015, during a joined exhibition by Werktank and Overtoon.

In August 2014, Jo Caimo was in residency at Fablab.iMAL, where he worked on his “Rode Oortjes Meter” or SEBCTool (Social Excitement Behavior Communication Tool). He will explain us more about this device that is used to measure an emotional state. With this project he started a social experiment, raising questions about new communication tools and social interactions. The tool shows the amount of excitement through the change of color, with a scale that goes from blue (low excitement) to red (high excitement). Also in other works Jo often plays with the concept that the work can only be completed in collaboration with an audience. By making use of self-built devices, he collects biological data and tries to create a common experience.

Theo Lalis will be discussing two recent projects from the experimental architecture studio LASSA involving large scale digital fabrication of non-standard architectural elements. For one project a CNC milling machine was used, to fabricate different components of a house. The parts were then transported from Belgium to Greece, where the house was constructed. Theo will be presenting all the steps from the process of design in 3D, in house prototyping and fabrication and finally self-construction. Through these cases, he will be discussing new creative possibilities enabled by digital craftsmanship as a way of liberating architecture from the limitations of standardization.

This Dorkbot session will be streamed live on iMAL.tv

About the speakers

Elias Heuninck makes videos, graphical designs and interactive works. At the School of Arts in Ghent, he became interested in the different ways in which landscape imagery could evolve into a contemporary form and become the starting point for numerous experiments. Through very simple computer algorithms, he creates an alternative version of these landscapes in which their flat nature is transformed into a spatial quality. As a result, very complex images emerge with both jaggy, digital, poetic and emotional characteristics.

Jo Caimo is a visual artist, radio producer at Radio Central, inventor and maker of hyper-mediative products, artistic director of the Megaphone-Ensemble, experimental musician and performer. He holds a Bachelor degree in Product Development, a Bachelor in Open Atelier and a Master in Media Art. His work is situated on the fringes of performance, music, product development, installation and the digital world. In many of his works he tries to scan the boundary of a medium and the limits of our senses. This can range from a website with recordings of the sound and image of each position of a metronome, to an 'unstable' live performance of swallowing a Bluetooth microphone, or to a live streaming of the sun over the internet on www.sunstream.tv.

Theo Lalis is co-founder of LASSA, an experimental architecture studio operating at the intersection between the fields of art, technology and social science. Theo is concurrently engaged in academic research through the work of diploma 17, at the Architectural Association in London. His work enables new forms of collaborative practice and a new approach to craftsmanship, through a core focus on the role of digital design and manufacturing technology. He has taught postgraduate studios at Harvard and Columbia Universitiy and has run architecture and urban design workshops in the US, the UK, Brasil, China, Iran and Sweden.