The one and only, first time ever "X-Spirituaahl Sound Hacks" workshop, combining the easy hackable mantra boxes with some local sound toys, buddha machines and maybe even some musical souvenirs from indonesia. We plan an introduction into simple music toy hacking for making experimental and noisy tunes, first steps into lo-fi electronic circuits needed to expand the hacked circuitry with oscillators and amplifiers and most of all having fun hacking!

By dusjagr & Keith Lam, dimension+ studio, Kwun Tong, Hong Kong

X-Spirituaahl Sound Hacks Workshop from dusjagr on Vimeo.

see more impression on dimension+ fbook page

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There has been a loooong phase without any post here on dusjagr labs, sorry about that. Most of the recent activities have been either posted on project pages, such as the Hackteria | Open Source Biological Art or on my facebook/dusjagr. But of course a looooot has happend.... I just briefly describe some of the highlights below, put some links together and continue the tour. Sitting in a coffee in Hong Kong at the moment, reflecting back on the last couple of months, enjoying the local climate and looking forward for another intersting year, its hard to beat 2011 though!

How it started
After having schemed and planned many activities for this year, i even got an award from Schaffhausen, my hometown, which allowed me to fund various activities last summer. So thanks to KulturRaum Schaffhausen for allowing this interesting times to really happen. Thus from May onwards, I officially started my World tour, beginning with a visit to Luzern, to do some lasering in the FabLab ... start small, when your are on a world tour! Then further to Fribourg to visit anyma's research week, see some stuff on the hackteria site. And of course various visits to festivals for workshops, hanging out, networking, scheming etc... Mal-au-pixel in Paris, Festival für Angewandte Akkustik in Köln, a short visit to Touch Me Festival in Zagreb und poolloop in Zürich, for a nice SGMK OpenLab session...

HackteriaLab 2011 | Romainmotier / Zürich
This event was definately the most important one of my activities this year. Loads of people involved, planning, organizing and enjoying it. See the hackteria website and wiki. The second international HackteriaLab took place this year at the 12th century monastery L’Arc in Romainmotier, Switzerland, from the 28th July to 4th August. Following on from the success of last year’s HackteriaLab at Dock18 in Zurich, this year we have invited around 30 artists, scientists, DIYers and hackers to spend a few days sharing skills, knowledge and expertise centered around the basic Hackteria idea. For the first time in a long time, the three Hackteria founders Marc, Andy and Yashas will be in the same place at the same time, along with some old faces and some exciting new ones.

BioCyberKidzz | Ars Electronica, Linz
This year I got a double invitation, both for hackteria and for SGMK, from Ars Electronica for workshops with children during the U19 - Create Your World Festival for the Future Generation. So we started to call for more people to help on the workshop and ended up with a super international team of educators, artists, scientists and hackers from Slovenia, India, Germany and myself, wherever I am from.
Hackteria KitchenBioLab
The Hackteria BioLab introduced the world of microorganisms to children or adults any age. At the end of the workshop they will be able to take home little amulet Petri dishes with their own “living” fingerprints, a yeast powered balloon or simple bio-accoustic ear amplifiers and many more. With this workshop we hope to emphasize that observing life is not just fun, but also takes time and patience.

Dowload, fold and view the review booklet here

DIY makeaway
And with this year's SGMK diy makeaway at Ars, we introduced two new workshops, Vive-la-Resistance developed by myself during NanoSmano, and the "Seifenschaumlicht" by Uwe Schueler and Joerdis Drawe.

KIBLIX Festival | Maribor
As an invited co-curator, together with Miha Horvath (son:da), Pei-Wen Liu and the Kibla team, we were happy to experiment with new format on how to run a festival. With the curatorial concepts of "Festival as a Laboratory" and "Festival as a Cultural Performance" we spent 2 weeks working together, making together, living together with more than 50 invited participants and many visitors from the region of Maribor - Slovenia - Balkans....

see more info on the KIBLIX 2011 wiki

It was a great experience, working with an international team, in another cultural environment, influenced by all our earlier activities and visits to festivals in various corners of the world and we are working now on a reflection on Festivalomics. Stay tuned...

... and then the World
So I finally had to repack my luggage into a mobile BioHacker's Lab-in-a-Box into flight compatible mode. Heading off directly from Maribor to continue for workshops, meetings, shopping, visits, reflections and chill-out to Bangalore, Goa, Chengdu, Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Yogyakarta. More about these trips seperately.

First of all i was invited for a talk and a hackteria workshop for HAIP festival. Great and familiar atmosphere, and first time to work on a new project for future hackteria workshop, "getting on plant's nerves"...

Then there was also KIBLIX happening at the same time in maribor, so i drove through the snow a couple of time, to see the BioModd project, visit my friends (indonesians and locals, hooray to son:DA: Grandma's rocks!!!) and plan the collaboration for Kiblix2011, where we hopefully can collaborate with SGMK.

because anyway we tried to combine the KIBLIX loves HAIP loves MFRU. and had a great jam session and food with friends at cirkulacija 2, thanks to stefan, borut and bostjan.

see the presentation and panel discussion online

You can download the minutes of the presentation from the following link:
dusjagr_sdn_transdisciplinary_education_final.pdf

because the movies wont show up, you can see them here:

The movie shows 20 hours of culture of HeLa cells on a designed patterned surface showing the FHNW logo.

but the next thing is already coming up, one night in singapore and a nice visit to Post-Museum, in little india, where we could a hardware/bio-hacking workshop next time, when passing through singapore. now finally heading to taipei and getting prepared for Playaround 2010 - DIWO culture

The first few days were already busy, lots of interesting workshops, parties and discussions. also i met a lot of people, both new but also good old friends. I already got some first soldering action, and tried ways to make a diy version of the diy makeaway bitbadge. sadly i got the wrong site of pcb and cant use the shim for screen printing the solder paste. but with some patience we managed to get a few going...

also had some talks and workshops about new hackteria tools, such as the hacked optical mouse and the hacked PS3 eye mounted on an old microscope stage. i worked with akbar, a young microbiologist from UGM, on it and tested the DIY3 eye microscope for use with a haemocytometer to count yeast cells, which we then presented at the workshop at UGM later.

I was also happy to finally meet Georg Tremel again, from biopresence. He got some great recent work on DIY plant tissue culture and uses it with a blue flower, which is genetically modified for aesthetic reasons. He also did a workshop at UGM and hopefully the "Moondust" will grow there soon... and we got to have him collaborating for hackteria soon!

Today I had a talk at the Plexwerk Tagung 'transfer' in Basel, where I presented some ideas about hackerspaces between digital- and biotechnology.

the slides can be downloaded dusjagr_plexwerk_hackerspaces_draft_2

I also wanted to show this movie about design of cellular patterns...

A first prototype for the diplay at dock18 ist finally finshed. we used an arduino to control 2 daisy chained TLC5940 16 channel PWM LED drivers. From the 5V circuit we control the 220V lamps using a TRIAC. The prototype shown above is a matrix of yellow LEDs which are behind a paper screen.

i am currently working on displaying genetic data using 4 different symbols to represent the nucleotides of the genome. It should kinda play with the idea of digital vs. genetic data. in addition to the the large amount of genetic data in an individual human genome, issues are touched such as genetic privacy, open access and visualisation.

While at the moment the display shows a random DNA sequences generated by the atmega microcontroller, further developments could use the one and only downloadable complete genome sequence of a human individual (of course by craig venter). instead of using advanced visualisation tools such as the HuRef Genome Browser, displaying it on a 5x4 pixel screen turns it into a completely ridiculous lighting scheme. calculating the number of basepairs (3.2 billion bp) in a human genome displayed with a reasonable frame rate would render a single complete sequence to last around 100 years