CrystalPunk!

crystalpunk

’What the Elephant man is to the Athletic Body, the Crystalpunk room will be to the Smart House’

Just back from the Crystalpunk Workshop for Soft Architecture which was in operation in Utrecht, Holland. Wilfried, the greatest PsychoCrystallographer in the World, did a fantastic job of bringing together a fine selection of interesting Crystalpunks for the weekend allowing the opportunity for collaboration, discussion and amusement.

The main crystalpunk lab existed inside a glass cube inside a room located inside a disused modular office building not far from Utrecht’s beautiful city centre. The room, which became its own subject created a space for those wanting to become active at the intersection of new media, architecture, design and programming to explore nu-edge paradigms and become Crystalpunk!

On Saturday Manuel Dahm gave a Proce55ing tour and workshop. After 3d lattices were obtained via code he showed us how get Proce55ing to talk to Wiring boards. A special breakthrough came when Manuel found that he could control the speed of rotation of a servo-motor to produce a kind of music! I suspect a full ensemble of servo-motors controlled by proce55ing will come into existence before very long.

On Sunday talks were given by Jo Walsh – presenting her semantic web work and Inga Zimprich who discussed the work being done at Thinktank – a group she co-founded. Later I presented Talysis – a film work in progress utilising video feedback, expect some documentation to follow. Drawing the weekend to a close, Pete Gomes showed some of his films including the classics ‘Central Control’ and ‘I am not afraid.’

It was also good to meet up with Karen Curley who brought along some fine analogue video feedback films she has made. Auke Touwslager who talked about his info-schema philosophies and mapping tools. and Ursula Lavrencic who’s work I mentioned previously at Dataisnature. I also had the opportunity to meet Thomas of PedestrianLevitation; and Franziska Huebler + Jeremy Abbett of Truthdaredoubledare who work with physical computing devices and textiles.

The workshop has been running since September 10th and is on to December 17, 2005. Its is open to anyone interested every Tuesday (19.00-23.00) and Saturday (14.00-18.00) In the coming weeks there will also be a wide variety of quality guest presentations – check out the workshop page for more details on the program of events.

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