I was fortunate enough to have work featured in the launch issue of Boulder Pavement – a new digital publication put together by the illustrious Banff Centre. Issue 01 includes photos, text, and an interview from my “Initial Investigatory Research for Glacier-Human Communications”. Though this bit of research & making is dated back to May & June of 2009, Boulder Pavement managed to beat me to the punch in getting the work online. Special thanks to Steven Ross Smith and Nick Hutcheson for making it happen! Here’s hoping I make it back up to the Columbia Icefields next summer…
Category: Banff New Media Institute
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DIY Soft Electronics Workshop
This past Saturday I had the opportunity to offer a public workshop as part of the Banff Summer Arts Festival at the Banff Centre. Together, we covered the basics of electronics, sewing, and soft circuitry. We also brainstormed about possibility interfaces design especially for the human body. With some conductive fabric and deluxe StitchLits kits in hand, we sewed up a storm and came up with some pretty exiting creations! Projects included leg warmers that light up when you click your heels like Dorothy, a cowboy hat that responds to being tipped, and disco shirt that flashes when you jiggle, and a light-up t-shirt that was featured in a bicycle race that took place later that afternoon. Thanks to the fantastically creative participants and to the Banff Centre for hosting us.
Check out my interview about the workshop on CBC radio’s Wild Rose.
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Studio Visits
At the moment, I’m holed away in the Canadian Rockies, at the Banff New Media Institute. I’m here as part of the faculty for Almost Perfect, a residency for artists who are creating works that utilize locative media. Here’s the blurb:
The Almost Perfect ‘Call and Response’ residency at the Banff New Media Institute is an annual, concentrated four-week experimental prototyping lab that explores the creation and context of location. Practitioners from all walks of locative and mobile media practice are encouraged to apply to the programme. We are particularly interested in practice that extends beyond the device out into the environment, be it landscape or datascape.
The massive scale of Banff National Parks Rocky Mountains and the expanse of the Great Plains to the east provide a unique opportunity to un-tether yourself from the usual coordinates of place. Geographies of time, scale and great disruption lay exposed, lending themselves to the call and response of technology and nature. This residency allows for the time and space to consider how modern pervasive technologies allow us to disconnect from our desktop cells and interact with the world in a whole new way.
Today I had the pleasure of doing studio visits (alongside my fellow Peer Advisors Kay Burns and Sophia New) with the 11 fabulous artists who are participating in the residency:
More info to follow on both their work and mine. In the meantime, check out the view I woke up to this past Sunday!