Printeractive Workshop at LJMU Arts
On 24th of November we ran an open workshop at the John Lennon School of Art and Design which was sponsored by Bare Conductive. We had participants from a wide range of backgrounds such as Printmaking, Fine Art, Design, Fashion, Makers and Architecture. It was a very intense day, but got loads of positive feedback.
We had two guest speakers. Tracy Hill, who showed us her artwork that aimed gallery visitors to touch her work. She mentioned that it was difficult to foresee how these visitors (users) might engage with her work. Nevertheless, she also mentioned that it is always interesting to find out these different behaviours.
Another guest speaker was Michael Shorter, who showed us loads of examples, even some inks that react with urine! In addition, he showed us a series of integrated circuits where he used conductive ink.
After their talks, we made a series of circuits that enabled us to interact with them. For this we used S4A, a ‘Scratch’ based programming software to send the data to the Arduino. Using S4A allows people to quickly build interactive circuits to interact with. The main objective to present this was to increase the confidence of the participants when working with our interactive objects. We provided participants with a wide range of inks such as thermochromic, and conductive, as well as other materials such as conductive thread. A very interesting example was by heating the thermochromic ink using the conductive thread. (See below)
So far we have been experimenting with a wide range of conductive inks such as silver based ones from Circuit Scribe, carbon based from Bare Conductive. Showcasing these examples to our participants have been extremely helpful getting us to think beyond how we can produce diverse interactive prints.
Some of the tutorials presented in the workshop are now available here. Feel free to go through them and let us know if you need any help.