Channeling the Venice Biennale at Hardware Hack Night

We channeled the Venice Biennale art fair into our humble hardware hack night

After a lot of talk, we finally got the laser projectors out. Thanks Jake! We are jump-starting the laser projector projects we did last year at SudoRoom (wiki:LaserProjectors).

This first run was pretty standard, on a silver screen, but stay tuned as we’ll be expanding to project onto the rest of the walls with stronger projectors as we have in the past.

Jeffrey Gibson at the Venice Biennale

We brought the USA pavilion from the Venice Biennale to the SudoRoom featuring Jeffrey Gibson via vernissageTV. As the first indigenous artist to represent the United States at the art fair, it was just the right mood for the evening! USA! USA! USA! We are not just a blinky lights and NFC programming hackerspace dammit, we love the fine arts, and over the course of the past few weeks we’ve been able to convince people that fine artists are the ultimate resourceful hardware hackers, fighting against all odds with very little money or support to create magical dreamscapes that make us think!

An Antidote to “STEM” education

And as part of our “learning to learn”, we hope we can do something to fight back against the toxic dialogue of multiple-choice, online remote for-profit charter school “STEM” education. Everyone of all social classes deserves the right to integrate literature and art into their everyday lives, especially people in trade school. Let’s keep the “A” in STEAM and fight for the betterment of society! Yee haw!

Stay tuned, folks have asked if we could have an artist come and speak at our hackerspace, especially someone who is working in stuff not related to Burning Man or NFC art. There’s a whole world of fine art out there to give meaning to your technology, and the shocking realization that fine artists have been doing innovative stuff in virtual reality decades before anything that hits the floor of a Las Vegas tech trade show.

Art Theory: You can Do It!

It will also be a cool way to bridge the gap between the fine arts and everyday hackerdom. Sort of like how engineers read white papers, most of us can benefit from reading art theory because it’s fun and makes us think and weave meaning into our lives. I don’t think the Space in which to place me exhibit has their papers online, but we can improvise and follow along as we do best!

They may burn our books, force us on a summarized 4 hour workday audiobook platform from hell, make us do multiple-choice STEM private education, but they cannot take away our culture! Or so we hope 🙂

Relatable Processes

A lot of Jeffrey Gibson speaking here reminds me of the principles of folks at our Fix-it group. The man speaks the truth: DIY, craft, rejecting a transactional society! It’s music to our hackerspace ears. I hope hackers get the message that artists are just like us!