fizzpop – Antonio Roberts

Tag archives: fizzpop

fizzPOP residency at The Lombard Method

09May10

If being part of the awesomeness that was Theremin Day wasn’t enough since 1st May, and running until 16th May fizzPOP have been in residency at The Lombard Method. The event kicked off with the building of The Improbable Machine, very much inspired by Rube Goldberg and his crazy machines. This is a good indicator of our progress so far

I’ve also been taking the lead on building a modified Harmonograph. Ever since seeing Mr Underwood’s Pendulum Music for Optical Theremin and Torch I’ve been inspired to make something using swinging motions. I was pointed to a Harmonograph out of our most recent hack session and the discussion that followed saw me going through several designs before settling on the method of keeping the pen stationary and moving the surface.

Like the Improbable Machine I’ve been building this using whatever junk people have brought in or whatever I could scavenge from the space, and relying on the skills and resources of others to fill in the gaps where my skills are lacking. So far I’ve got my board swinging, which has produced a good set of patterns

There’s been several challenges in making this, mostly ensuring that the board has a good enough swinging motion and also dealing with the slanted ceiling. Want to help out? fizzPOP will be in residency at The Lombard Method for the next week, so check the wiki for when we’re in and lend a hand!

Filed under Art| Tagged fizzpop, improbable machine, residency, sweet chariot, swing low, the lombard method | No Comments

Theremin Day

27Apr10

For the last month or so the fizzPOP team and Mr Underwood have been planning the awesomely awesome Theremin Day that took place at fizzPOP on Saturday 24th April.

The day kicked off with an optical theremin building workshop, which produced some very interesting sounds. One person described the noises produced as “lil creatures… being tortured by having light shone on them“. Decide for yourself:

The circuitry for all of the theremin were the same, but the housing for the device made them all that more interesting. I think Julia’s Apple Theremin wins some kind of award for most healthy looking theremin! More photos from the day:

After all of the noises we did a frantic de, then reconstruction for the evening performance featuring 8Bit Pete, Mr Underwood and Ms Hypnotique (all totally real names).

First up, 8Bit Pete treated us all to his own Thingamagoop optical theremin and even invited earlier workshop attendees to join in the performance

Mr Underwood then treated us to a rather hypnotic rendition of Steve Reich’s Pendulum Music using optical theremin and torches:

It’s definitely worth watching the whole 10 minute performance!

Finally, world renowned theremin player Ms Hypnotique treated us to a short history of the theremin, improvised compositions and performances of a few classics, including that Dr Who theme tune

Nikki has a few good videos of the performance on her Vimeo channel

I think the day was really a great success and I can definitely see a future workshop taking place and I’d really like to see Pendulum music being performed again somewhere. Well done to all involved in making this event happen!

Next up, the fizzPOP residency at The Lombard Method

Filed under Blog| Tagged bleep, fizzpop, mr underwood, ms hypnotique, noises, theremin, theremin day, Workshops, yummy apples | 1 Comment

fizzPOP’s first birthday

09Mar10

Recently fizzPOP celebrated the two of its first birthday’s. On January 26th the mailing list was set up and on February 28th we had our first meeting. We count each one as our birthday, which, in theory, means more cake!

fizzPOP hacksession 03/03/2010 (by Nikki Pugh)

Leftovers from the last session. Photo by Nikki Pugh

I’m really quite proud of what myself and Nikki have achieved so far with fizzPOP. As I’ve stated in my many presentations about hackerspaces and fizzPOP it was first set up to scratch an itch: I wanted to have a space outside of education to learn more about electronics and technology. Luckily Nikki had the same itch and we soon found ourselves working on the creating and running of fizzPOP.

I wont rattle on about the history of fizzPOP as we’re still creating it, and there’s little to gain from talking about the pitfalls we’ve had. The thing that I’m most proud of is that we can regularly get people from all over the west midlands (and occasionally reaching as far as Liverpool and London) in a room to do what they love most. I just wish we could do this more regularly, maybe even every day!

Photo by Nikki Pugh

What next for fizzPOP? I’m still recovering from fizzPOP workshop from the awesomeness that is Mitch Altman and Jimmie Rodgers, so have no brain space left to think about anything else! All I know is that I want to see more workshops like that and more people showing off their mad hacker skills.

Filed under Blog| Tagged birthday, cake, fizzpop, nom nom nom, yums | No Comments

Live coding at fizzPOP

20Feb10

Ever since I went down to an Openlab workshop last year I’ve been fascinated by live coding. From Wikipedia:

Live coding (sometimes known as ‘interactive programming’, ‘on-the-fly programming’, ‘just in time programming’) is the name given to the process of writing software in realtime as part of a performance.

I thought about doing live coding for myself ever since, so at fizzPOP‘s latest hack session I thought I’d make use of massive screen and try a bit out for myself using a purpose-built program called Fluxus, which uses the Scheme programming language.

I had briefly looked at Fluxus before but had never actually built anything in it or even used Scheme before, so stuck to modifying one of the example scripts provided in the program. Here’s a video of my results:

You can see that an aspect of live coding is seeing how something is built, which could explain the decision to overlay the code over the visuals. I quite like it, some might not.

I’ll be attempting to do some more livecoding at the next fizzPOP hack session on March 3rd

Filed under Blog| Tagged fizzpop, Fluxus, hacking, live coding, scheme | No Comments

Portrait of a hacker

18Jan10

Recently Helen Flanagan, who was mentioned on CiB last week, contacted fizzPOP about doing portraits of hackers. I happily volunteered myself and this is how one of the pics came out: