Why....? Open Hardware Synths and old school 8Bit NoiseToys

[dusjagr]

Hei Ari, It was great to meet you and share some ideas of making new noise synths, different styles, heavy duty stage durable single big knobs stompbox to blow away the audience.

what did you say you wanted to discuss?

[microsux]

// Ari: Arrghhhh finally i found you i would like to ask something, from your CV i read a lot about you, i think you have multi talent or maybe multi tasking person.

" _transdisciplinary scholar, lecturer for micro- and nanotechnology, cultural
facilitator and artist. He works in an integral way to combine science, art and education. He performs
DIY-workshops in lo-fi electronics, music and robotics, has made various short movies and is currently
developing means to perform biological science (co-founder of Hackteria | Open Source Biological Art)
in a DIY fashion in your kitchen or your atelier_"

what's your motivation or background specially in the words combine science , art and education ?

// dusjagr Motivation? I guess I get bored too easily if I am stuck within the same bubble (or call it discipline). And also I have enjoyed meeting a diversity of people form different backgrounds, cultures, ideologies, which has then influenced my multi-fragmented path. So I wouldn't consider myself a multi-talent, but an amateur interested in the multiplication of talents through bringing them together and working across many groups and networks.

[microsux]

// Ari:

2. First time we’ve met in hackteria event 2014 in Yogyakarta, whats the main purpose of this Hackteria event ?

// dusjagr HackteriaLab... HackteriaLab! We really really like to call the event "Lab", as a collaborative and durational prototyping and production session, almost 2 weeks and with more than 60 full active participants both from the global hackteria network and beyond, aswell as a large number of Indonesian participants from different communities across the country. In contrast to hackteria.org, which is the website we set up in 2009, with a large and kinda chaotic wiki, sharing instructions to build simple lab equipment and notes from workshops, playful experiments with biology and lifesciences. Our tag line of Hackteria | Open Source Biological Art, has developed into a more physical series of events, where we share knowledge and develop new ideas and thus create also more online content for the wiki. Bringing people together for these longer events really creates many unforeseen outputs, and maybe that's the "purpose", meaning not really a purpose, but a hope that something grows further out of it.

[microsux]

// Ari:

3. You started doing DIY and hacking after your Phd, is that true ? :1st_place_medal:

// dusjagr Sadly yes! I would love to have had these experiences and skills i learned during my last 10 years in the bioart/hacking and DIY worlds already during my time as a researcher and phd student! I was always interested in electronics and experimental music, more as a consumer and sometimes at home playing with cables and loopers, but yes it was only after i left academic research when I started becoming a producer of DIY toys and synths, getting my hands really into self-made electronics and started my journey into the world of media arts, the DIY electronic synth scene and the different hacker and open culture movements. And I was really impressed on the enthusiasm of the people i met, a living transdisciplinarity and truly deep research motivations.

[microsux]

// Ari:

4. DIY (do it yourself) and DIWO (Do it with Other) culture thing. How did you got interested with this ? and how the things going between your life experience :+1: as a lecturer, researcher, electronic enthusiast and electronic/experimental music ?

// dusjagr: See above... mostly. How my life experience is with my practice inbetween so many worlds? In fact I love it, and also I personally don't feel it as exhausting (which some friends commenting or kinda suggesting). The opposite, it's kind of a way to escape boredome, but also I have grown a lot through these exposures to different cultures. I am aksing myself more on how I can possibly share these learnings to people who don't have that kinda "luxury" of breaking out of their safe zones or are bound to one "job" or discipline due to family or other reasons.

[microsux]

// Ari:

5. From your previous interview, you said that your research interest are generally at the interface between artificial system (technology) and living system. What’s that mean ?

// dusjagr: That must be quite a previous previous interview... It's definitely something I am coming from, also influenced by my teenage years reading a lof of sci-fi books and dreaming about cyberpunks, implanted brain-enhancers or other technologies to merge with what we consider as "life" or the "human body". It was also the field of my earlier research and still is part of my DIY and educator practice. Meanwhile i am more interested in in-depth human encounters and formats of collaboration of PEOPLE, than interfacing them through technical prosthetics. But I am still interested in that blurry boundary of man-made systems (aka articial) and "living", as our definition of what life is has been changing through-out history and is at this very moment very much on the stage for being shaken and redefined. So being part of that discourse and trying out our own DIY experiments that question that boundary is interesting for me.

[microsux]

// Ari:

6. From your work, microscope from hacked webcam. and making workshop for this one in Indonesia. What did you see in it. I mean Is that a lack of knowledge?, gap between technologies and lack of easy access to information or maybe just third world country problem ?

// dusjagr: The lack of knowledge... i think it's everywhere, even more a lack of curiosity or let's say a lack of the interest to do things differently. In Switzerland, I believe, that's our main "first world problem". So my first experiences in doing such DIY science workshops had also a very big impact on myself, how I saw the world and the differences within. Having embraced a culture of open source in my practice and in my heart, the "lack of access to information" should not really be the problem. In fact the hack of using cheap webcams as microscope has been around since the first lenses were produced in the 16th century and been described in various blogs and wikis all over the net. So I got more and more concerned about how such "knowledge", and in this case of the DIY microscope I really believe it's something "worth spreading", can grow and be shared across many many places. But how? Something I still have sleepless nights over it...

[microsux]

// Ari:

7. According to opensource.com, "Open source isn't just a methodology for developing software. It's a way to think about building anything, including the devices that utilize that software. Hardware, too, can be open—easily copied, shared, modified, and improved” :+1: . How did you improve it and make it as a part of your field of work?

// dusjagr: Exactly! Most of my DIY workshops and prototypes are about "hardware" in it's broader sense. Meaning not only electronic hardware, where a well described schematics, a bill of materials and hopefully full design and production files, can be shared in places like github (that's here!). The larger sense is also hardware in sharing a way to build it yourself, skill needed for crafting objects, places where you can source the materials needed, or even more so the skill to adapt a project to what is available in your own environment. So from the open source in software, the hardware world is much larger, more complex and especially it does much more involve the people building it. It cannot directly be copied, it will have to be MADE. To your second point, yes, open source (hardware) is only then truly successful if it's modified and improved. And in the case of this repo we are having the discussion in, the 8Bit Mixtape, it's somehting that is just about to start. Some people have already picked up the project, adapted it, shared it back into the commons and "improved" or let's say adapted to their own needs. But in fact it's not something that easily grows by itself. Hardware always invovles MATTER and PEOPLE, not just code and knowledge. I thus have embraced methodologies for doing workshops that should allow such adaptations, modifications and improvements. Instead of just merely soldering together an electronic circuit board or follow step-by-step instructions to build a DIY microscope, i try to keep my workshops much more open-ended, giving enough space for personalizing and prototyping the stuff we build together. Through this also the projects have grown a lot and I can also learn much more myself. Which again is my main motivation mentioned in the first question.... just making sure i don't get bored.

[microsux]

// Ari:

8. Open hardware, whats your personal definition and your explanation about this, and also the correlation between this open hardware with creative common license?

// dusjagr: I think this is a place where we should also add some links to other resources and get inputs from other people!

We usually use the cc-licence in the instructions we write on the hackteria wiki, the photos and video documentations we produce. The cc-licences allow an "author" to get attributed and share his creative content, a piece of lyrics, a text, a drawing etc.., to others and clearly set the right for it being modified, copied, etc under the terms of the cc-license chosen. The notion of an "author" and his "creation" is very different when we develop open source hardware. We already rely on so much infrastructure, factories, mines, we rely on various existing technologies being smaller parts in the open source hardware system, such as IC-chips in an electronic circuit, we just maybe create something new and open on how we use / connect it. For the hardware itself, the schematics, the build instructions, I think the cc-licence are not working. There are many groups out there such as OSHWA, who have been working long on something like a "label", that than guarantees something is "good open source", so all the files are available and it really CAN be reproduced (copied) and modified. We have seen a lot of "open-washing" recently, meaning a fancy pimped up and over-designed kick-starter style product maybe has 1 or 2 parts in them like an arduino (which is open source) but the project itself is completely closed as a whole, and they use the term "open" more as a branding to sound cool and trendy.

We have recently also join a movement called GOSH | Global Open Science Hardware, where we focus even more on how Open Hardware can be used "in science" or better to say how it can be a path to "open science". Also there we discussed a lot about these definitions and came up with more specific but also case-by-case approaches which we discuss mostly on our forum online.

As said above, hardware is about matter and also about people, beyond the core of having good and reproducible, adaptable information available online for other people to build upon.