One of the pillars of MIRA as digital arts festival is education understood as a way of providing engaging content for people to express themselves through art and technology. Thus, with the aim of promoting the knowledge we organize workshops focused on the digital creation which are configured in a theoretical part and a practical one.
This year, in collaboration with the prestigious Barcelona-based studio ProtoPixel, we are organising the workshop ‘LED mapping and expressive lighting control with ProtoPixel’, whose teachers are Carles F. Julià, co-founder of the studio and PhD in tangible Interfaces, and Jonas Johansson, designer passionate by machines and nature that explores art and technology through light.
If you are a designer, creative coder, visual artist or a DIY culture enthusiast interested in creating innovative lighting experiences, this is your workshop. You will learn the basics of LED technology control, get introduced in ProtoPixel – a framework for dynamic and expressive LED control, and you will end up creating your first interactive lighting project. Notice: no previous experience in code or hardware is needed, only a desire to learn and have fun in a first-level technological environment.
The workshop will be held at Fabra i Coats, language used will be English, and it will have a duration of 8 hours between Wednesday, November 8 (from 16 to 20 hours) and on Thursday, November 9 (from 10 to 14 hours). Register now at bit.ly/WorkshopMIRA2017, seats are very limited. The price of the workshop is 60€.
Workshop Structure:
1. Quick Introduction to expressive lighting control: problems, solutions, challenges. Here we will also introduce our approach to lighting tech (projects and tools). Examples by us and others.
2. Introduction to the ProtoPixel ecosystem (Software, Controller, Node, Satellites).
3. Use case presentation, step by step, to illustrate the use of PPx in a real world scenario.
4. Hands-on 1: Basic setup
– Setup physical working environment: connect a controller (PPx, DMX), power supply, LED fixture.
– Check everything with our controller’s built-in tests.
– Download and install ProtoPixel Create
– Configure Network
– Concepts of ProtoPixel Create: controllers, fixtures, contents
– Connect Create to controller, add a color and a fixture: it works!
– Content types (image, video, syphon, script)
5. Hands-on 2: step-by-step lighting project realization with a pre-existent structure.
– Ideation stage: present the structure and discuss possible context of use and content to be displayed (we might use a “shuffle card” technique to come up with content/context combinations)
– Setup the structure
– Step 2: Mapping
– Step 3: Content creation and display
