Category Archives: Events

EAVI, Events, Staff profiles and activity, Women in Computing

6 August: Goldsmiths AV workshops + performances take over ICA London

Calum Gunn

London’s Institute of Contemporary Art hosts a day of workshops and performances curated by Goldsmiths Computing research assistant Dr Adam Parkinson.

Goldsmiths’ Embodied AudioVisual Interaction Group (EAVI) convenes a day of audiovisual workshops with Howlround, Calum Gunn and Ewa Justka. Each workshop is led by a musician who will teach participants how to make and use the unique tools they use to create music. Participants will then have the opportunity to perform alongside the artists in an evening concert.

“You can spend the day working with different musicians, making / learning the tools they use to make music, and then perform with them in the evening,” says Parkinson (aka musician Dane Law). Follow the links below for full details.

  • When: Sunday 6 August
  • Where: ICA, The Mall, London

Workshops at 2pm

Algorave Noise Unit with Calum Gunn
Algorave is a new musical practice that enables people to make music in real time by typing code: “live coding”. Each workshop is led by a musician who will teach participants how to make and use the unique tools they use to create music. This workshop requires participants to bring their own laptop

  • Calum Gunn is a musician and web developer whose practice encompasses academic computer music and rave culture and sounds. Inspired by ‘classic’ rave sounds, modern EDM and early techno, he reproduces familiar sounds, arranging them into new patterns and tones.

Voice Odder Workshop and Ewa Justka’s Acid Orchestra
Make your own Voice Odder, a unique electronic instrument used to create echoes, delays, reverbs, distortion and world domination. During the workshop you will learn how to make an electronic circuit, how to solder, read schematics and data sheets, use a multimeter and more. All materials will be provided, and by the end of the workshop you will have a Voice Odder of your own. You will also have the opportunity to perform with other workshop participants in Ewa Justka’s Acid Orchestra as part of the evening concert. This workshop will involve the use of soldering irons

    • Ewa Justka is a Polish electronic noise artist, self-taught instruments builder and electronics teacher. Her main field of research is based on an exploration of the materiality of objects, vibrant, ontological systems, and an investigation into modes of quasi-direct perception through noise performance actions, interactive installation, DIY electronics, hardware hacking, plant-molesting, breaking, deconstructing and collaborating. She recently received the Oram Award from PRS.

Tape Loop Workshop and Howlround’s Tape Orchestra
In this workshop, participants will learn how to make and manipulate tape loops. Tape splicing and manipulation is one of the oldest and most powerful techniques used to create electronic music, though one that is sometimes forgotten in the age of computers. Join Howlround to learn their unique approach to recording, cutting and playing with tape. This workshop will involve the use of sharp tools

      • Howlround normally operate as a six-piece featuring Chris Weaver, Robin The Fog and four tape recorders. They work with magnetic tape in sculptural configurations to loop and layer sound in often dense and haunting compositions. Their performances evoke the experimental era of emerging recordings played live with hands-on manipulation of their material, creating immersive soundscapes of mournfully melodies from a half-remembered past that might never have happened.
Courtesy Ewa Justka
Ewa Justka

7pm: EAVI Live
Live performances by Howlround, Calum Gunn, Ewa Justka and newly-assembled groups from the day’s workshops. There will also be DJ sets from Chloe Alice Frieda and CXLO.

Aligning with other aspects of the ICA’s In formation programme, EAVI locate audiovisual performance within spaces of collaboration and sensory connectivity, articulating new ways for collective and individual interaction to promote learning and participation.

Events, Students

Automating Soundcloud: distorted song gets clearer the more listens it gets

pipo

A graduate from our Coursera Creative Computing MOOC recently wrote to us about his project to enable songs and playlists on Soundcloud to mutate and grow.

Attila Haraszti – who describes himself as “a self-made third culture kid based in Berlin” – is a producer and DJ with releases under the Rawfare moniker.

“I did the Coursera Creative Computing just for fun during the summer of 2014. It totally changed my perspective of what’s possible regarding creating interactive music applications. The main effect was that it encouraged me to create my own, updated context for music instead of relying on what’s provided by the outdated structure of record labels and typical music platforms. Artists can and should create their own “game”.

After completing the course, Haraszti wrote a rave-tinged track called Pipo, inspired by listening to his neighbour screaming at her pet parrot.

“In many ways, I found it to be a great fit for a fun experiment. I’ve increasingly felt that releasing tracks in a standard, ‘static’ way doesn’t make much sense anymore. It doesn’t ‘work’. The shelf life of a typical release is getting ridiculously short — you get a week, maybe two of peak attention at best. Great works get buried under the avalanche of new content, racking up only a few hundred listens.

“I wanted to reflect this relationship somehow – by connecting the markers everyone seems to care about (play counts etc.) to the content of the track itself. In short, the idea was to make Pipo ‘alive’. Just like the neighbor’s screaming, the track had to be as annoying as possible. I put the final master of the track through some of my favorite tools and ended up with a handful of trashed-up versions.”

Soundcloud Replacer

If you have Pro account on Soundcloud, you can replace the audio file uploaded for the track, without losing any of its statistics. This feature is a godsend in case you make a mistake that needs to be corrected, but, a more interesting use is to CHANGE the track entirely, depending on some feedback.

“With that, my idea was fully formed – upload a completely distorted track to Soundcloud, change it to progressively cleaner versions as more people listened to it, and gradually dial the distortion back if the weekly play counts are insufficient.”

In order to do this, the replacement process had to be fully automated. “My initial thought was to program it using the Soundcloud API, but while you can use it to make programs to upload and delete tracks from connected accounts, it doesn’t allow you to replace them. Luckily there’s a way to make almost anything on the Internet bend to your will — using browser automation. The details took me quite some time to figure out, but as you can see, the process works well. This is 100% automated, ghost-in-the-machine style stuff — I’m not touching anything.”

Songsling: online music as tamagotchi

Having built the Soundcloud Replacer, Haraszti has explored how online metrics – listens, play counts, follows, likes, sign-ups and so on – can be used to grow audience engagement.

“My own tracking engine Songsling.io turns online projects into tamagotchis – virtual pets – that need to be fed by the visible feedback of your audience. All the online metrics I can measure are patched back in to control the artworks themselves. I’ve used it for the first time to present The Bomb EP, which gradually unlocked its tracks as more people listened to them.”

This post is a mash-up edit of Attila’s emails and his detailed blogpost on automating Soundcloud. Thanks for writing to us, Attila.

Events, Staff profiles and activity, Videos

Goldsmiths’ Adventures in Cyberculture

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Computer scientists at Goldsmiths feature in a Leicester festival celebrating the pioneers of acid house, techno and early internet cultures.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s something strange was happening. Early Virtual Reality and Internet were combining with house music, neo-psychedelia and cyberpunk fiction to produce a cultural movement that would herald the new hyper-connected world. Cyberculture: The Beginning of the Modern World is a exhibition of material from this era that explores this brave new world from the perspective of those who were there.

On Saturday 17 June, all-day digital arts event Phorward includes talks from William Latham – freaky fractals artist turned Goldsmiths professor – and internet pioneer Ivan Pope, who created World Wide Web Newsletter at Goldsmiths’ Computer Centre in 1993.

The rest of the day features films, video games, VR and performances, plus a set by experimental electronic music producers & club promoters Higher Intelligence Agency.

Events, News, Staff profiles and activity, Students, Videos, Women in Computing

Call for submission: Goldsmiths hosts International Congress on Love & Sex with Robots

For the second year in a row, we will insert clunky doubles entendres into reports on the upcoming International Congress on Love & Sex with Robots.

Co-organised by Dr Kate Devlin and hosted by Goldsmiths, the conference offers an opportunity for academics and industry professionals to come together and discuss their work and ideas.

When: 19-20 December 2017
Where: Goldsmiths, University of London

The conference is now open for submission of papers on teledildonics, robot emotions & personalities, humanoid robots, clone robots, intelligent electronic sex hardware and roboethics, as well as papers from psychological, sociological, philosophical, ethical, affective and gender standpoints.

On 16-17 December the conference will be preceded by Sex Tech Hack, a 24-hour hackathon organised by Hacksmiths. Last year’s hackers created sexy robot nipples, computer-generated erotica and a fisting machine powered by the stock market.

Events, News, Students

CATALYST Digital Arts Computing degree show

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This May, you are invited to CATALYST, Goldsmiths’ third annual BSc Digital Arts Computing exhibition.

This year our students demonstrate their imagination and skill in working across a diverse range of media including textiles, live performance, live streaming, 3D printed sculpture, virtual reality, sound and scents.

Expect robot children, interactive hairdressing, smell-o-vision, CCTV psychodrama, textiles, a virtual metal band and robotic sculptures.

Where: St James Hatcham (the church), New Cross SE14 6AD. Map
Opening night: 5.30-9.30pm Thursday 4 May 2017
Exhibition continues: 10am-4pm Friday 5 May 2017

disco brain

Programme leader Dr Simon Katan explains: “What binds this collection of works together is that each of them constitutes an integral engagement with computation and responds to the challenge of how to make art through code.

“This is the first graduate show for BSc Digital Arts Computing. The degree was conceived to nurture a new generation of artists who are not only conversant with computational processes and techniques, but also develop a critical understanding of the socio-economic effects of computation and its expressive potential within the world of art.”

 

Events, News

Upcoming events in Spring 2017

roderick
Here’s a load of great events for the technology-minded. Most are organised by Goldsmiths Computing – and most of them are free and open to all.

Being a Junior Games Programmer at 22 Cans
5-6pm Monday 6 March // Room 142, Richard Hoggart Building

Hacksmiths: Learn Ruby on Rails
4-7pm Wednesday 8 March // G11 St James Hatcham

VR in Games Now!
4.30 – 5.30pm Thursday 9 March // Room 256, Richard Hoggart Building

The Invention of Consciousness
4-5pm Wednesday 15 March // Lecture Hall, Ben Pimlott Building

VR The Next Frontier: A Masterclass with Dave Ranyard
5.30-10.30pm Thursday 16 March // LG02, Professor Stuart Hall Building

Science Showoff at the Amersham Arms
6.30-10pm Wednesday 15 March // Amersham Arms

Hearts & Minds: The VR Interrogations Project 
4pm-5pm Wednesday 29 March // Cinema, Richard Hoggart Building

Anvil Hack III: a creative hackathon at Goldsmiths
Saturday 22 – Sunday 23 April // Goldsmiths

Exhibition: Health Tech and You
25 April – 8 May // Design Museum, Kensington High Street

Events, News, Students

Anvil Hack III: a creative hackathon at Goldsmiths, 22-23 April

anvilhack3

Anvil Hack is back for the third year! Run by Goldsmiths tech society Hacksmiths, the hackathon invites current or recent students to focus on the creative applications of technology.

Use your skills to make something wonderful, arty, musical – anything you build will be awesome. We’ll provide you with food, drink, electricity and internet, so that you can get on with the real work – making cool things!

This year we have the privilege of sharing our brand new fabrication lab with you, built right into the church. You’ll have access to state of the art equipment just a couple of months after it’s been installed. Exciting!

When: Saturday 22 – Sunday 23 April 2017
Where: St James Hatcham Building, Goldsmiths
Tickets: Free. Register here

What is Anvil Hack?
Anvil Hack is a two-day invention marathon for developers, designers, psychologists, researchers and more. During the event, participants will build projects that answer our challenges to build awesome creative projects.

But what are you expecting to actually be built?
Anything goes! We’re really interested to see what awesome things you can build, especially interesting generative art, awesome audio projects, and DIY hardware.

Do I need to be a student to attend?
Yes, you need to be a current student or have graduated within the last 12 months. We will work to ensure that there is a diverse range of people in terms of skill set and ability.