Moving Forest & Soft circuits

In November I wrote about a workshop, which was led by MzTEK as part of preparations for the Moving Forest project, where we built electronic weapons / musical instruments and went out to a park to annoy people on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

This Wednesday, 4 July the main part of the Moving Forest is taking place and all MA IM students are welcome to participate. A couple of words about the MF:

Moving Forest is "a twelve-hour sound art opera of betrayal and rebellion" taking place on 4th July and "culminating in a spectacular series of disturbing performances in Chelsea College of Art Parade Ground; a one-day coda of debate.

It was first presented at Transmediale.08. Berlin 2008. Moving Forest makes use of all media, bringing together diverse visual/sonic/electronic/digital/ performance artists along with writers, walkers, coders, hackers, mobile agents, twitters, networkers and the general public to realize a contemporary version of a classic play."

So basically it is a framework for various arts projects and I expect it to be fun and have a great time! More information here: movingforest.net

The next bit of the story concerns MzTEK, which is a collective managed by a couple of fantastic girls, one of whom is an ex-imiant (that's how students of MA Interactive Media call themselves ;)). They organise all sorts of women-only workshops, to encourage female interest in technology and computation.
In April I attended one of their workshops, which was again part of another bigger project. And they showed how easily you can make soft circuits! That is sewing with conductive thread, connecting battery with any other electric elements you like. Isn't it brilliant? Wearable technology!

Sophie's soft circuit on Emilie's lap

All pictures below and the very first one were taken by Emilie Giles

The reason I am writing about all these things, is that the girls inspired me to organise a get-together during MF, to make soft-circuit graffiti together. Again, inspired by knitting-graffiti artists (e.g. Olek), I've been thinking about stitching-graffiti for ages. Hugely supported by lovely Emilie from MzTEK, I'm now preparing a SOFT CIRCUIT GRAFFITI session. If you are around London you are mostly welcome to join! We will stitch Mathew Fuller's 500 slogans, which is a libretto for MF, and then spread it on the streets! Let's invade,  intervene and misbehave! Rock'n Roll! ;-)

See you!