Contact-mic building workshop, co-taught with Michael Prior, at Testing Grounds

the poetics of connection, immediacy + restraint: ground to ground, crystal to signal.

Between 13-14 August 2018, myself and the Naarm Melbourne based sound artist Michael Prior took a 2 day workshop with students enrolled in the course Sound, Screen and Materiality at RMIT University, on building and using a contact mic for recording, at Testing Grounds. 

We emphasised collaboration, skill-sharing and DIY, technological simplicity and access, and the ownership and transparency of artistic tools. There was a lot of great experimentation.

Here is some (anonymised) photo-documentation of the students' efforts. 

Mini-FM transmitter building workshop, part of the B.Y.O. BATTERY series.

On July 24 I hosted a mini FM transmitter building workshop for ten people at The Anteroom, an non-profit artist run space based in an ex Masonic Lodge in Port Chalmers, run by the media artist Charlotte Parallel. The workshop was part of a four-part series of D.I.Y creative technology and skill-sharing events Charlotte curated called 'BYO Battery’. You can read Charlotte talking about the series in an article in the Otago Daily Times HERE.  

This workshop's intention was to make transmission technologies accessible, with participants constructing their own simple hand made ultra low watt transmitter with which to narrowcast their own sounds.  Grounding this practical making within wider theoretical reflection and discussion of how DIY analogue technologies might inform our understanding of communications within the post-digital present, drawing on the histories of DIY radio making and free radio experiments in 1970s and 1980s Italian and Japanese media art and activist histories, we also discussed the use of transmission media for artistic and non-centralised cultural purposes. With participants coming from various artistic backgrounds, including dance, experimental music and film, as well as wider community participation, it was a stimulating day. True to the spirit of the series, everyone also brought along their own 9v power source.