 I'm used to talking to artists, maybe philosophers, so this is a strange audience for me, and I'm probably a strange speaker for you as well, so I'll start with that, the door's just over there if anybody needs to leave. I wanted to, I guess start by giving a little bit of a kind of historic, or not really historic, but over the last ten years explain my involvement with some open source software and then transitioning into open hardware discussions with artists who are not really makers but they're kind of artists that are programmers or technologists or their interested in the relation between art and technology. So I guess that started in Huddersfield, which is, I don't know whether people know the region, but it's a small kind of large town, I guess just over the hill, and I worked at the university there at the time and in collaboration with an organisation called the Media Centre. And we managed to attract funding from the Arts Council and from the university, I guess, innovation sector fund, so just like the first speaker today, I can't see where Hannah is or whether she's still here. Very similar territory to a kind of university model of kind of makerspaces, but it was kind of prior to many of them being named makerspaces. I'm talking about, I guess, at the start of this, it was around 1998 and I guess ended around 2008. So we managed to just about shut down at the point where the kind of escalation of these practices was occurring. Never can I be accused of snatching or clutching defeat from the jaws of victory, but that's my history. So this project was by a kind of French collective, an international re-operating collective of artists called Go To Ten, very active in open source software, and they did a kind of fork of a live Linux distro. I think it was built on top of one called Dynbolic, which was like a multimedia kind of platform, you know, install it, get access to all of the tools that you might need to be a media producer, and they were kind of activist organisation about kind of taking control of the media and making your own media and making your own news and so on. Pure Dyn was a fork that was more targeted at artists who were programmers, so very much in the kind of live sound and video territory. I think that was around 2008, and it was around the same time that we were commissioning people to write about a kind of political relation between art, software and society, I guess. This goes a little bit further back. So this is around 2004. These two, I think, I've described them both as kind of Finnish artists, but they're not. One of them hails from Hull. So Dan on the left hand side here is from Hull and Tuomo is from Finland. They're both currently living in Finland. But around 2003, the organisation that I was part of, we hosted a series of residences for artists who were kind of technologists to come and work with us for maybe three months at a time, sometimes longer, so half a year and so on. But Tuomo became someone that stayed with us and returned to us over a more extended period of time. One of the things that he and Dan ended up working on was this project, which is a kind of tile-based toy, like a puzzle-based set of modules that you could rearrange and arrange in different combinations. And you could kind of program different kinds of puzzles. You could hopefully kind of build these as kind of sound interactive kind of pieces. This was around 2000, I think between 2004, I'd say, and 2007. This was being prototyped. The reason I'm talking to you about it now isn't a kind of nostalgia. It's because it was one of the earliest encounters that I had as someone who's maybe more of a cultural theorist in the idea of open hardware. So they were interested in how and why they might kind of start to release this through an open licence. None of us had any experience or understanding of what that might be at the time. And they were simply wanting or looking at ways in which they could use the kind of GPL and ways in which that might be extendable to a hardware system. This is just some prototyping images of this. The kind of workshopping practices that we initiated involved factories worth of students at the time, kind of building many, many tile toys once they got into a kind of operational mode. And the other thing, I mean, I guess the more pertinent thing I wanted to be able to talk about was the work that we're about to do in Hempton Bridge in a couple of weeks time with an artist called Martin Howes. Martin's a kind of sound artist but builds his own hardware. In fact, I have one in my pocket as long as I don't get out the speaker. This is one of his, you can pass it around. It's called the Black Death Synthesizer. And it's the first open hardware sound synthesizer with the plague inside it. So be kind of careful with it when you're passing it around. It's something that Martin has designed and has manufactured himself. He's a kind of interesting artist. This is his latest. He started making quite a few of these things now. So he's supposed to be here this week. So it would have made much more sense if he was here this week than in two weeks time, but he couldn't make it. This is a modular synthesizer that he's recently produced. Again, it's a sort of viral plague-like idea that he has going on here, but there's kind of dirt. I think if you go online and you wanted to order one of these, there are kind of discounts for different soil types. So it's particularly interested in the idea that you might get soil from Whitby. That being the place that Dracula kind of arrived in history. Martin is kind of interesting because he's both a kind of noise artist and is very esoteric in his practice. He's kind of deeply technical, so he's a brilliant Linux programmer. And yet, at the same time, he's interested in the possibility of using the Earth as an operating system and seeing whether he can kind of get the Earth to kind of boot up one of his computers. So that's the work they'll be doing with us. So this is the Black Death synthesizer. I guess this is as close as I get to a circuit diagram it says in and out. And then there are various kind of filters that you put the input source through, which are algorithms modeled on the bubonic plague, which of course is also interesting because no one really knows what the bubonic plague was. So it's a simulation that in a sense is built on top of a kind of fiction. So as much as his work is kind of rooted in kind of real electronics, it's also tied to a kind of electromistical property of the Earth as an operating system and it ties through to these sorts of areas where I guess facts can't really be trusted. They're kind of, you know, it sort of betrays everything, everything factual is a kind of fiction. So I'm interested in how artists like that kind of work. These are some other examples. This is, I can't remember the name of this one, the sort of meta-susperia or something like this. This one's called The Dark Interpreter. And again that's the Black Death. So there you are. So Martin will be here in a couple of weeks' time. He'll be here for three days from the 9th to the 11th of October, working with us in the, there's a kind of new hacker space that a few of us, there's three or four people in the room who are involved in trying to get that space to work. A bridge rectifier, it's just one of the canal. I don't know if anyone has any idea to kind of pop along at any point, but we'll be around all of this week I think. Yeah, I guess that's all I wanted to say really. It's an audience that I don't really know. I'm kind of daunted by in a way. I thought you might at least appreciate that there were kind of artists who were kind of in the same territory as some of the projects that you might be working in. But there's a sort of very different sort of language I think that he might be using to some of you. I don't know, maybe if you meet him you'll kind of find out. I don't know whether there are any questions. Yeah, that's all I wanted to say.