DATE: May 6th and 7th, 4–8pm
DURATION: 8 hours
MENTOR: Martin Howse
LOCATION: Ljudmila, Rimska 8, Ljubljana

About the workshop

Through a range of guided, experimental activities, the two day Earth Coding workshop actively explores links between contemporary technology and the earth, attempting to define a new form of land art and examining the following wide-ranging questions:

• How can the earth as a process be tempted to compose software?
• What signals can be transduced from the earth, using equipment of the earth, revealing hidden process and how can these signals be exposed and converted to brute code?
• Finally, how can a dark interpreter, a shadow substrate be constructed as an experimental situation, enabling earthy instructions to recode and give voice to that same landscape?

The two day earth coding workshop embraces whole earth process in an attempt to approach these questions through the construction of a series of experimental situations.

Participants will learn how to:

• measure and make audible and visible telluric currents flowing through the earth
• construct an earth sensing glove to insert and feedback audio signals from the earth
• build an earth antenna/radio
• measure electrical power from an earth battery
• allow worms to compose poetry and listen to constructed voices from the earth
• fashion fluid logic gates in the earth

On the second day there will be a field trip to a forest location where we will extend the first days experiments and discuss the implications and possibilities of earth coding.

About the mentor

Martin Howse is mainly preoccupied with the artistic research of the connections between the Earth (geophysical phenomena), software and human psyche (psychogeophysics). He also proposes a return to animism through the critical misuse of scientific technology. Through the construction of experimental situations such as process-driven performance, Howse explores the rich links between substance or materials and execution or protocol all the while digging up the issues of visibility and concealment in the world.

Howse is a first rate artist, researcher and mentor, which is supported by the fact he regularly presents his project at events/festivals like Transmediale, Ars Electronica, Pixxelpoint, Sonic Acts, Electric Spring, CTM, BEAM, Transnatural, CYNETART etc.

Registration

Participation at the workhsop is free, the number of participants is limited to 12, so please apply/announce yourself to delavnica@ljudmila.org. Workshop will be in English language, no previous skills are needed. Newbies are welcome. Participants are asked to bring one plastic washing up glove, recording devices (paper, pens, audio recorders, cameras, headphones), scrap metals, minerals, stones.

Art and education programme at Ljudmila Art and Science Laboratory is supported by the Slovene Ministry of Culture (in the co-production with Zavod Projekt Atol) and MOL – Department for Culture. Workshop is part of Changing Weathers project, initiated by the Arctic Perspective Initiative (API) and coordinated by Zavod Projekt Atol (SI) in partnership with Sonic Acts (NL), RIX-C (LV), Finnish Bioart Society (FI), Hilde Methi (NO), Time's Up (AT) and Ljudmila (SI). Changing Weathers is co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.