Verktøykassen invites #2: Poetic kinetic sculpture course with Niklas Adam/Verdensteatret
Published
As part of Verktøykassen (the Toolbox), we invite artists to teach us things we cannot ourselves. In this course you will build your own kinetic sculpture based on motors and wireless control system. Get ideas and inspiration for ugly and beautiful movement patterns from Niklas Adam, who has long experience working with the Verdensteatret‘s famous installations and performances.
Thursday 23 January at 11.00 – 17.00
Please note that the workshop is fully booked!
BEK provides the equipment needed, and participants can buy what they want to bring home at purchase price after the course. The course is free, and participants don’t need any prior knowledge. Bring your own laptop.
Sign up to the course here.
Photos of Niklas Adam live, examples with feathers, circuit board and from the performance HANNAH by Verdensteatret.
Examples of mechanized movement patterns from a future zoology
To embrace the movements of fictional animals and evoke poetic images and memories of the future; rodent-like worm-like tentacle bodies that vibrate below the transverse plane. A hardcore choreography of horizontal underlying positions.
Rodents are one of the most diverse mammals and live in a variety of places at ground level, even in human-made environments. They are one of the most successful animal groups in the conifers. Their strong teeth enable them to withstand the harsh vegetable material, and their warm furry coats help keep their body warm in hibernation. This means that they have a latent quivering property where the coat’s hair multiplies a movement complexity by small delays of swaying nature.
We will get help from an H-bridge, and some really fast diodes will cause feathers and other good things to vibrate at speeds similar to the feeling of chills. I will show my method for creating a quick prototype and showing an example of mechanized movement patterns from a future zoology.
In the workshop we will use a Teensy, which is a very small but powerful circuit board that speaks Arduino. Using bit-shifting operations, we get an ESP8266 Wi-Fi module that talks to the Teensy over Serial protocol without the use of any Arduino libraries. We will also send OSC (Open Sound Control) messages over the Wi-Fi network with the programming language SuperCollider, so we can control the future real-time movement patterns from our laptops. We will work directly on breadboards and there will be minimal soldering time.
– Niklas Adam
Niklas Adam
Niklas Adam (b. 1986) is a Danish artist, composer, performer and sound and art technician currently based in Oslo. Niklas uses programming and electronics to generate instruments and/or situations with an inherent open sentiment, and from there he examines how the ability of this work can break loose from the traditional behavioral patterns of listening and immediacy. Investigating superimposed and broken relationships between music, mechanics, kinetics, electronics, stage action, platformenvironment and structure. Sound, movement, perception and how we choose to interpret the outside world in the relation to our own position in it, is a recurring theme in his work – which is often demanding and patient.
You can find some of Niklas’ releases at the labels BIN (Copenhagen) and SOFA (Oslo).He performed in Europe, Russia, USA, South Korea and Japan, and at Stedelijk Museum / Sonic Acts in Amsterdam, BAM / New Wave Festival in New York, Henie Onstad and Black Box Teater in Oslo, to name a few. Niklas has twice been awarded the Norwegian Arts Council artist stipend and the Danish Arts Council publication stipend. He has toured around the world with the New York Bessie award-winning art collective Verdensteatret.
Opening Week BEK 2020
When BEK opened its newly renovated premises in 2019, we did so with a number of events during the opening weeks. We think this was so fun that we are happy to open 2020 with a new opening week! This year we will be inviting you again to a series of presentations, workshops and concerts January 20 – 28! See the full programme here.
Verktøykassen
Verktøykassen (the toolbox) is BEK’s meeting place to learn about and try out technical tools, be it both hardware and software. There is a low threshold for participation and a high hands-on factor. Each time, a new “theme of the day” is launched, and the participants can come with inputs or questions that are raised jointly. Verktøykassen takes place regularly, and is led by game developer and programmer Stian Remvik. Sometimes we also invite artists to teach us things we cannot ourselves.