Innovate – Attaya Projects

Borderline Newcastle

Lalya — Mon, 03 Aug 2015 13:27:39 +0000

During her artist residency at ISIS Arts in Newcastle, we teamed up with Canadian sound-artist Jessica Thompson to explore sonic notation, borderlines, gentrification and big data in the work-in-progress project ‘Borderline’.

Having both worked with soundscapes and urban space throughout the years, Lalya and Jessica worked on identifying borderlines during times of social and economic change that manifest themselves sonically. Alistair MacDonald from Makerspace Newcastle also participated in the tech side of the project by helping producing interactive sound maps.

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Tricot Wax

Lalya — Wed, 04 Feb 2015 01:52:02 +0000

Tricot Wax is a series of experiments in transferring patterns typically found on wax fabric (the printed fabric manufactured in The Netherlands that is hugely popular across Africa and its diasporas) into digitally-augmented knits using a knitting machine.

This project was started during Lalya’s residency at Digital Media Labs in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, in 2014, with the help of Sam Meech and Laura Pullig. Recent developments include projection mapping on the patterns during the Yorkshire Hack at Digital Utopias in Hull in 2015, as well as the development of more intricate designs.

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Muqarna Illuminated

Lalya — Sat, 03 Jan 2015 12:56:43 +0000

Mark Hursty is an internationally acclaimed glass artist doing research at the International Institute for Research in Glass at the National Glass Centre in Sunderland UK. In this project, he produced a system for sculptural glass installations inspired by mould-pressed glass techniques and specific elements from Islamic architecture, called muqarna – ornate stalactite-vaulted ceilings. Using digitally-manufactured moulds, he transformed molten glass into sculptural components, the goal being that once assembled these muqarna could be used in mixed sculptural and electronic media installations.

Mark worked with Attaya Projects to experiment with electronically illuminating the muqarna in an interactive way, using a DMX light set-up powered by garageCUBE‘s MadLight.

These experiments with transmitted and reflected light were inspired by traditional muqarna “as tangible metaphors for celestial light and spiritual communication”, as one potential source of communication in future artworks.

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Mobile Music Workshop

Lalya — Fri, 20 Sep 2013 23:13:04 +0000

The International Workshops on Mobile Music Technology were the very first events to focus on the field of mobile music and locative audio. They played a key role in the development of the field, starting with a first workshop in 2004 and concluding with a final one in 2008.

The workshops gathered a mix of researchers, designers, musicians, new media artists, social scientists, hackers and representatives of the industry. Their goal was to raise awareness about existing projects as well as help actors of the field with backgrounds in multiple disciplines to identify common goals and issues, share resources, and introduce one another to relevant technologies, methods and concepts.

Workshop programmes included various combinations of keynote presentations from invited speakers, peer-reviewed paper presentations of high academic quality, poster and demo sessions with state-of-the-art projects, in-depth discussions about crucial issues of mobile music technology, break-out sessions, hands-on technology tutorials, feedback sessions with experts about projects still in the work-in-progress stage (some of which have gained international recognition since then), as well as live performances. From having been 1-2 days short and small events, the workshops grew into a mix of mini-conference and festival, with activities opened to both registered participants and the general public.

The workshops were held at:

The Viktoria Institute in Göteborg, Sweden, in 2004
The University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, in collaboration with the NIME conference in 2005
The University of Sussex, in Brighton, UK, in collaboration with PLAN (Pervasive and Locative Arts Network) and Futuresonic (Urban Festival of Art, Music and Ideas) (now called FutureEverything) in 2006
STEIM and the Waag Society in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in 2007 (website).
The University of Applied Arts Vienna in Austria in 2008 (website).

Besides being instrumental in the development of the field, the outcomes of the workshops were presented widely outside of the context of the workshop itself, among others places at the Futuresonic and Conflux festivals. A report about the first three workshops was published at NIME’06. The workshops were also at the origin of a panel debate about the future of music at SIGGRAPH 2005, which included former workshop participants and organisers.

A book was published by the University of Vienna as a retrospective of the 5 years of the Mobile Music Workshop.

(Top photo credits: Cathy Van Eck)

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Sonic Interaction Design Workshop at IRCAM

Lalya — Thu, 19 Sep 2013 13:04:01 +0000

In 2008, Lalya co-organised – together with Frauke Behrendt (University of Sussex) and Karmen Franinovic (ZHdK) from the EU SID COST ICT Action – a hands-on sonic interaction design workshop at IRCAM in Paris, France. The workshop was based on the idea of exploring new means of designing for sonic interactions, using everyday artefacts in context. It was held as part of the 14th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD’08).

This workshop introduced participants to the use of creative interaction design methods, in order to use them in a collective exploration of the design of sonic interactions with computational artefacts. Specifically, focus was put on physical interactions that rely on continuous sonic feedback. Participants generated future scenarios and concepts for such interactions, and everyday sounding objects in context were taken as a starting point. By taking part in the workshop activities, participants got an embodied understanding of the challenges of designing for meaningful and engaging physical interaction with computational sonic artefacts.

The methods employed in the workshop were innovative in an ICAD (auditory display) research community and emerged as good complements to the cognition or technology-based approaches to designing sounding objects that are mainstream within it.

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