 Hi, I'm Andreas. OK. Where is my first, oh yeah, the mortgage money. So it's my first time here at Hackware. And after hearing Mihail talk about something that I understand a little bit, I hope I'm right here with what I have prepared. So my background is in the arts and design. But I've been working with software and hardware for quite a long time. And I use it in my practice. So I write software. I've been doing this for a couple of years. I make hardware, not very high-tech like this, but low-tech, you will see that in a bit. And I think I will talk a little bit about the in-between the arts and technology. I teach at LaSalle. I also run a small lab at LaSalle, the media lab. And it's mostly about using technology within an art practice. It's about collaboration and it's about making art with technology. Just a few examples. That's how our teaching space looks like. I think what is very important for me or what I have figured out over the years is that you have to work together as a team. You have to gather around the table and you don't have to put all the stuff on the table and just figure out what all these things, especially electronics, are. We work a lot with Arduino boards. So I think again after seeing these boards here, I think for you guys there's like children's toys. But I think we have been quite successful in getting students interested in technology using these boards. In terms of materials, we use a lot of electronics, but very big electronics. Not very small electronics. Listening to Mihail earlier, I thought you guys probably use tweezers and I would use a hammer instead. I think we work in larger dimensions I guess. Prototyping and developing everything from scratch for me is very important and I also try to pass it on to my students to build with what is available. To build with very cheap materials that can be good, that can be cardboard, that can be what is just available, maybe an art friend. And I try to convince them that you can make great things with it. So that's my Arduino collection. There's more, but I'm very proud of the Arduino. There's a picture in the background. One of my students brought it back from India when he was visiting home and it's like really double the size of an ordinary Arduino and comes with big parts. And of course we work with Raspberry Pi's and other systems on the chip. ESP8266 I'm very excited about. So I think these are not really foreign islands for us. So we're trying to get on the train of this constant development of technology. I think I have to say I came here 2008 and when I asked our finance department to buy some Arduino boards, they were like, what do you want to do? Arduino that couldn't even pronounce the name. And I think after these seven years that I've been here now, almost eight years, that definitely has changed. So people know now what is an Arduino board and I think this is also due to the community. So I think that's really a big component in Singapore that promotes technology which, as I said, eight, seven years ago really didn't exist even though I speak of the arts. But now with 12 geeks and all these online shops for students, that's really great to get into electronics and have access to it. Just two projects that I like. 2008, OngKiang Peng made this device which he calls a flat helmet. And it's a visor which is hollow inside. And on his backpack, back then there were no mobile phones. So I think today you can really compress it into maybe a quarter of the size. So he was carrying this backpack with a laptop, with a water pump. And he mapped his location, his visit location against the map that he got from the NUS water department, which predicted the water rise in Singapore in the next 50 years or in 50 years. So he would walk around with his visor whenever he got to a location where the predicted water level would rise, so the blue water in his visor would rise. So it's kind of a real-time, on-the-side visualization of something quite scary which might or could happen in the next 50 years. Another project is by Mitru Rikenshwara, who built this little device that kind of looks like a camera, but is an object that you can point in any direction and it returns the emotional states of cities that are within the, what is it called, within the radar, the field of view of the camera. It's a little device, a custom build, laser cut, a vinyl board inside, a compass inside at the back it could slot in your mobile phone and then connect to Bluetooth to your vinyl board, and then the compass would tell you which direction are you looking at and then the data would be displayed on the display. The data was collected from Twitter over 30 days, then evaluated based on keywords like happy, sad, aggressive, and so on. There were eight different categories and just some of the data collected you see here. And interestingly, where you cannot see it, but South America turned out to be very aggressive. Hong Kong and Singapore turned out to be quite boring, so there are seven lines, so each represents one day per week and Hong Kong is not even the weekends get exciting, so every day is kind of the same. Singapore kind of looks the same. Buenos Aires on the other side is very aggressive, a lot of purple. Jerusalem was the only city which was very anticipating, probably has a bright future ahead. So I mean these projects, if you look at it from a scientific perspective, I think they might not have, like I said earlier, they might not have these values or data that you'll pick up with a tweezer, so it's more like, you know, the shizzle and the hammer. So the data is quite raw, but I think the idea or just coming up with this idea and making it happen and making it show to the world or showing it to the world, I think that's what I appreciate and that's also what I try to convince my students to do. Teaching. I have one class that is called Electrosounds, so I teach that to music technology students and when they come to me, they don't have any technical software, hardware background. They play an instrument, they're interested in electronic music, they're interested in their effects and they're quite good at that, but when they come to me, so they have heard of an Arduino board, but they haven't touched one or they haven't programmed one or they haven't worked with one. So what I do with them then is we build our own instruments and I think it's very important to not educate in a very generic way. Say here you have an Arduino board, here you have the blink example, here you have other examples, and then just go through the books. I figured it's very important to relate it to the practice, to one's practice, so I teach fine arts, I teach design, I teach music technology and for each of these different disciplines I have to adjust my teaching methods and I have to adjust to their practice and to their interest, otherwise I fail. So I think it's very important that students really can relate to what they make, that they can relate to what they use in order to make this very dry and very scary subject, interesting. Surprisingly, most of the students come to the arts because they didn't like the science. They come to my class and then they have to write software or make hardware. That's why we use these led shields. Just one example, that's an electro-sitter, so adapted from the instrument-sitter. That's sick and you experience the technology that you create. These are early experiments, so after a while that gets much more fine. But students are also exposed to making their own instruments using physical materials. Today students come with a laptop and a lot of students think everything happens in the laptop, so when I tell them we get a little bit physical, we have to really use our hands to make, in this case an instrument, then some of them haven't even touched some wood tools before. I think which is not bad, but if you expose them to the workshop that we have at Lausanne, they get quite happy that they build something with their own hands and laser-cut something with their own hands, not with their own lasers, but they initiate the process. Very important, I feel, is to have a public presentation where you present the tools or the instruments, in this case, that we have built. In that case, that's the Art Science Museum. They have this monthly event, which I think, I don't know, has anyone been there where they invite schools, NUS, NTU, Polytex to present student works and I think for students that's a great exercise and great exposure in order to show their works. And also to get feedback. I have eight minutes left, so I just flip through these images because I want to show something else. Very important for me is light and wood as a material. So I think looking back at my work over the past five years, I really have used these materials excessively. So wood for me is really easy to work with. I can cut it, it's very solid. I can build large, big sculptures, installations. I can unscrew them, I can pack them, I can do a lot of stuff with it. Lights coming from a screen-based background. I think lights are still the closest to where I came from. It illuminates the space, it creates emotions and that's why I really like to use LED lights. I just show a few videos that probably don't need any more explanation. So from a small model to a prototype and then to the start. This is a circuit, so it's A3. Strangely we defaulted back to breadboards. I think we find it really easier to replace parts to quickly modify the circuit. We tried prototyping boards, soldering, night sessions of soldering. Yeah, it just didn't turn out so well. So we defaulted back to breadboards and I think breadboards actually is a great material for the things at least that I do. And then from this small prototyping box model it kind of got applied in many different applications over the past three years, installations, side-specific installations. Theater performances as a stage design. Sound performances at the Art Science Museum. And now we are preparing another collaboration together with the dance department for the night fest. These are the initial tests for this new setup. The last five minutes I want to spend talking about a project called Urban Explorations which started in 2012. I just came back in June from Paris where we did the second edition of the Urban Explorations project. The Urban Explorations project is a project that looks like an urban environment. We built our own tools to sense that urban environment, to sample that urban environment, bring back the data, kind of try to make sense of it and create an artifact from it that we then exhibit. In Paris we spent five weeks conceptualizing, building, evaluating and exhibiting our works. These are two works that have been built. One on-campaign on the left. On the left we built a 12-channel sound recorder that we just put up in different locations in the city and collect sound intensities that would come from different directions. And then we would build small sound sculptures from it. On the right that's my colleague Patrick Koflik from Berlin. He built a frequency sensor. It's basically a DBBT antenna that allows you to scan the frequency spectrum. It starts at 800 MHz and then goes up all the way to 1800 MHz, 1.8 GHz. So he would just go around in the city, set up his little antenna and then collect data for 30 minutes. And these are all nine tools or instruments, data collection instruments that we have been built. On the top left we see she just went around sampling whatever is on the floor and putting it into her bags and her suitcase. And the second one that's on-campaign, 12-channel sound recording device. On the right that's a pigeon camera. So it's a platform with a few buttons. Whenever a pigeon would come and press one of those buttons or initiate these buttons, a photo would be taken of these pigeons. Second row on the left, that's my project that we'll talk about in a second. Patrick's in the center. On the right that's Cindy's snail lab. She went and go around in Paris and look for snails. Look at their pH values. Bring them back into the studio. Big mess. It was great. And work with snails she would find in Paris. Bought them left. That's an extension for a mobile phone. It's a magnifying glass with a microscopic lens. The next one, it's a stethoscope for listening to buildings. So there's a piezo sensor. And you just put it on top of buildings. Put on your stethoscope and then wait until it starts moving. And some of them actually did move. Or data was recorded. And then the last one, the shoes. The heel, you can take off the heel. And then it's hollow. So you can put in some sensors. And the whole idea was to put in some sensors and collect data while you were walking. These are the nine projects that we created over a period of three weeks. And I will just talk a little bit about my project movement of things. And it's about this little chip here which I'm quite excited about. I think you guys, oh, I have one minute left. I will... This little chip was designed by a French startup called Tangible Display. Maybe some of you have seen this guy, Simon. Sorry? All right, all right. So I met him here in Singapore and I was quite excited about this little chip. So it just runs off a cell battery. No wires involved. There's an accelerometer, magnetometer. It gives you six values. Acceleration, XYZ, and orientation, XYZ. And I thought that was great for what I wanted to do to record the movement of things. I could just use this little chip, attach it to different objects. In this case it's a piece of plastic, a roll, quite heavy. And you will see the later in the video, I will just roll that piece of plastic along different surfaces and then record the data that these surfaces would resonate to. It advertises Bluetooth LE. So it just sends out data. The data is included in the description of the chip. So you don't need a connection. So you just turn this thing on. You have in this case an Android application running that just listens for these advertising messages and then you just snap the data and record it or display it like in this case. So that's how I would run around in the city. This guy attached to six different microcontroller extensions, I would call them, for different purposes. And then have my mobile phone record the data. I think that was my favourite. So this air vent with all the metal air coming out. And that was very strong. The tool that I built here is just a plastic bag from a shop, nylon strings, and what's it called, a back room. That's the data that I got back. Displayed as a graph. Time. Six lines, XYZ acceleration. I got closer. XYZ acceleration and orientation at the bottom, that's from a water canal. But of course that's not very pretty to me. That's too raw. So then I tried to find method, I'm running out of time, I ran out of time. I just go through some images that show how I kind of beautify the data or make them pretty or beautiful myself. How I translate this whole experience into small little vision objects. Then the plastic bag, then the helicopter we found on the streets, and then a ping sensor just to activate the helicopter. That piece is called X versus Y. So I took the Y channel and the X channel of a data set and then played them back using a stepper motor. And I had these feelers. Nice moments when they kind of wiggle or when they touch each other and they move fast and are very active or very calm. So these are kind of translations of the data into something that might be a little bit too abstract but kind of resonates my experience or the experience of that process. So this is the exhibition. These are some shots from the exhibition and I'm done. Awesome, thank you. Your students last year had some projects there. So this year they're having as well. Which project was it? Nothing. There was Isla in La Salle. La Salle? They're everywhere. Yeah, they're everywhere. But Isla at the Isla Festival but that's already like three or four years ago. We had a piece there. It's a night festival. We're going to be at the deck. I don't know if you guys know that. It's photography space, exhibition space. Right across from La Salle. So it's containers, stacked containers and they converted that into an exhibition space. So we're going to have two containers there and we're going to have a performance using wooden boxes, light strips, LED light strips and the twist. Questions for Anne? Yes, please. What are you getting to ask of this? Well, first of all, they have to take the class. Then I started using processing software, screen-based outcomes. But I feel that working with an Arduino board, I mean the language is almost the same. It makes it easier to pick up these principles of these languages or object-oriented programming. So usually we start with an Arduino board. We go through some of these examples just to get the basics down. And then they either build instruments like in the Electrosounds class. I have another class called Drawing Machines. So they build drawing machines in Fine Arts. When I work with dancers, all the work is on my plate. So it's more about feedback. So what does the dancer, what does she want to do and how can we work something out so that she can do it. But yeah, so usually I start with Arduino and I also teach a class in processing. So that's usually the path of getting them into coding. What's the name? It's called the TWIS, TW-I-Z, TWIS.IO. It's by tangible display. So it's a small startup from Paris and they have a very funny studio in the suburbs of Paris. I think it's not in production, no it's not in production. So thankfully I got a couple of them to work with and experiment with. But I think they're also very excited to see what can you do as an artist that looks maybe a little bit different from what maybe a demo, an engineering demo would look like. So I think we had very good discussions and good exchange and yeah. So let's see what this dance project, what will come out of this dance project using TWIS. Thank you, Andreas. We hope to see some of your students come and present as well. We would love to because I think as electronics many get moved with arts or science or any other things of your projects. I mean later maybe if we have a little bit of time to talk on an individual basis. I think I would also be interested what your perspective is on how artists or designers could come into your domain. And yeah, maybe I'll just leave that here. Absolutely. Thank you so much. Thank you.