MusicMakers Hacklab workspace

 

 

We asked the American audiovisual artist and technologist, Peter Kirn - who led the MusicMakers Hacklab - few questions about the idea and the results of the meetings.

 

CyberEmpathy: This year during the CTM there was a week long MusicMakers Hacklab. Who could take part in it and what was the main focus of this open lab?

 

Peter Kirn: For the Hacklab, this year as last year we held an open call. My co-facilitator Darsha Hewitt and I then selected a group of under two dozen artists whom we felt represented a diversity of interests and skills and an uncommon desire to collaborate. With dozens more applicants, that meant writing rejections to some very capable people; we had some incredible applicants.

 

Our focus really was collaboration. We wanted people to discover new ways of expanding their practice, to encounter some new skills and approaches from their colleagues. And we found artists who were passionate about that kind of exchange, not only from a technical standpoint but a creative one.

 

CE: How the work looked like during this week? The participants had also an opportunity to work with Andrey Smirnov, former director of the Moscow Theremin Centre - how did it influence on the young developers?

 

PK: The relationship with Andrey Smirnov and CTM's Generation Z exhibition were fascinating. From Moscow to Mexico City, we found our participants really drew inspiration from what Andrey and the exhibits had to offer. On paper, I had imagined this would happen, describing a hacker scene today that has resonance with the experimental sound design, optical sound, noise, and gestural work of the early Russian avant-garde. But then it was our artists who made it happen. Andrey is an incredible individual, a walking storehouse for information who's a talented engineer and teacher, too. He walked us all through the exhibition, then got us working with an ingenious variation of Theremin's sensing circuit he has designed. In the end, we saw a variety of projects that responded to these stimuli in different ways, from their approach to gesture and inter-media work to projects that sampled historical sounds from the exhibition.

 

CE: What kind of solutions were used by the hackers and which did you find the most interesting and boundaries breaking?

 

PK: There was something novel in each project. We made a project involving mobile phones that got the whole crowd involved - that code is now open sourced. We had an electro duo working with a dancer and trying sensors from the Makey Makey. There was a stunning, new live collaboration involving optical sensors and flashing lights and raucous noise that brought the house down. And these collaborations kept happening on-the-spot - someone from outside the lab jumped in and added projection mapping to a beautiful lattice of handmade oscillators.

 

CE: So far hackatons used to be more like specified geeks societies meetings. This year's the main program of Transmediale festival also consisted Art Hack Day exhibition. What position do you think the coding and DIY takes on the art scene?

 

Right, the hackathon originated as something engineers self-organized; that's even the origin of the term. Now, it's something different - it's more that these skills are part of the basic literacy of many fields. It may not be that you become an overnight master of code or electronics, but getting intimate with these skills is part of what you want to do as an artist, because it's part of the medium.

 

The Art Hack Day exhibition was a great counterpart to what we were doing, and some of our participants actually got involved in helping with those exhibition pieces.

 

But I should be clear that I don't think everything has to be an all-night hacking session. For us, this was more like an intensive exchange of ideas, a chance to quickly incubate prototypes for performance pieces. And I wanted to then push everyone to perform. After six days of work, people were able to do that - they really did get up in front of a big audience and sweat this out and make this stuff work live, which was tremendously exciting and a great test. (And, remarkably, everything really did work.)

 

We also had a series of lectures in which the public was able to engage people mixing art and engineering work, from the private sector (Native Instruments' lead designers on Maschine and Traktor DJ arrived), to artists exhibiting at CTM who had spent months, not days, building their performances. Actually, that's a great example: Robert Henke spent many, many months writing custom software for his Lumiere performance. But he, too, had to take a 'hacklab'-style mentality to making the piece work, because renting the lasers he uses is so expensive. So part of being an artist is being able to maintain your creative voice, but wrestle with these intensive situations, to make the technology work for you.