WORKSHOP SERIES WITH ARTIST JAMES B STRINGER
Unreal Engine for Beginners

SAT 21 OCT - SAT 4 NOV 2023, 10am - 12.50pm

James B Stringer leads a series of workshops exploring the real-time creative possibilities of the video game engine Unreal Engine 5, and how its video game development tools might be used within fine art practice.

WORKSHOP WITH ARTIST JAMES IRWIN
AI: Prompting Images of Digital Life

SAT 9 SEPT 2023, 3 - 6pm

With the recent emergence of image-generating AI systems such as DALL-E, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, the task of generating images with computers has been remodelled as a text-based process known as 'prompting'.

Prompting involves instructing a pre-trained AI model to hallucinate images in reaction to the specifics of text-based inputs. Prompts dictate image style, composition and genre, to the extent that images generated using these systems often appear as weird pastiches, with giveaway aesthetic signals - 8-fingered hands, for example - that point to their artificial origins.

Workshop participants will experiment with trying to find the cracks in these systems, using creative prompting to explore whether these systems really are the dawn of a new horizon, offering the potential for breakthroughs in digital image-making beyond the offset of human labour.

Participants are required to bring their laptops.

WORKSHOP WITH DIGITAL ARTIST SHINJI TOYA
Lives of Your Smartphones

SAT 8 JULY 2023, 1 - 5pm

This hands-on workshop uses a website-based version of Lives of Your Smartphones to contextualise the ecological issues of e-waste and planned obsolescence.

During the session, the participants will produce decaying versions of their smartphone handsets as png images to be uploaded online. The workshop contextualises the materiality of smartphones and their ecological implications, to consider how the operation of the current mainstream technological development is harming the environment. The participants will collectively create a toolkit of alternative cosmological and cultural frameworks - this includes the poetic aesthetics of decay to counter the progress narrative of mainstream tech development, and the cultural perception associated with Japanese animism and other ideas to think about alternative technologies with empathy and provision of de-anthropocentric views. The workshop and its development have been supported by Arts Council England through the grant Developing Your Creative Practice.

Participants are required to bring their smartphone.
This workshop is intended for 18+

The workshop has been developed by artist Shinji Toya with the support of artist and researcher Tanya Boyarkina, and is supported by Arts Council England through the grant Developing Your Creative Practice. Image-processing tools that will be used during the workshop have been developed by Machine Learning engineer Ashwin D’Cruz. Ashwin also supported the development of Lives of Your Smartphones.

MASTERCLASS WITH CLIMATE EXPERT ANGELA YT CHAN
Towards More Environmentally and Socially Responsible Digital Practices

SAT 20 MAY 2023

Develop a socially and environmentally responsible digital practice in this Masterclass with climate change specialist, researcher, curator and artist Angela YT Chan. Learn about the historical roots of the climate crisis, gain tools for applying climate literacy in your digital projects, and develop frameworks for building a sustainable future in the digital sector.

Digital Practices in
Climate Change History

11:30-13:30

The session starts by presenting an introduction to climate change history in order to inform the core aims of intersectional climate justice. This session will cover how the colonial histories of exploitative extractions from peoples and the planet have led to the climate crisis, and continue to sustain it through uneven global developments. Understanding these concepts will ground our work in determining how evolving digital practices play an important role in positive change.

For this session, please bring your laptop or tablet

Climate Literacy in
Digital Practices

14:00 - 16:00

This session presents some of the tools available to digital practitioners to gain climate literacy and apply while developing your creative projects. We will cover the different terms in climate literacy including carbon footprint, carbon offsetting, sustainability, sustainable development, among others. All the while, we will focus on a climate justice approach - one that forefronts the people at the heart of the climate struggle. We will consider the uses of software and hardware in digital practices and their environmental impacts in the creative process.

Framework for
Responsible Practices

16:30 - 18:30

What kind of commissioning, material and financial support do digital practitioners require from funders and cultural institutions to build into the future? This session discusses the long-term infrastructures and resources that digital practitioners want to see in the sector and explores what already exists at the grassroots level or within other digital practices. This sessions allows to develop intentions towards a sustainable practice that goes beyond climate literacy, towards a compassionate understanding of the wider cultural, social and political dynamics intrinsic to the climate crisis.

This workshop provides an overview of current available applications and softwares for the creation of artistic Augmented Reality/Mixed Reality experiences, whilst introducing cases for new ways of communicating and understanding the augmented space. Studio Above&Below will introduce 3 softwares: Adobe Aero (a new Adobe Software which allows to extract 2D drawings into 3D experiences), Unity (a leading accessible software creating markeAR experiences) and Spark AR (Instagram’s leading AR software which becomes more and more popular for artists).

Improviz is an environment built by Guy John aka Rumblesan, which can be used for live coding visual performances. Its easy-to-learn language for creating visuals can be extended through the use of custom GL shaders and by using your own GIFs, 3D models and image textures.
This two-hour workshop, led by visual artist Antonio Roberts aka hellocatfood, will introduce you to the world of live coding, and guide you through the basics of using Improviz for live visuals. This workshop will also include a short look at how artists and musicians use code to make visuals and music in real time at Algoraves.

Berlin based composer Jessica Ekomane hosts this short introductory workshop focused on music making with Max. In collaboration with Mutant Promise.

The session will give an introduction to elementary skills for working with sound synthesis in the music programming software Max/MSP, in the context of experimental electronic music performances and sound art.

Bring a new dimension to your practice with this online workshop from Marc Blazel. Using Blender 2.8, a versatile and accessible open source software for 3D design and composition, you will learn how to model, texture and light your own 3D artworks. From finding your sources, to learning the interface and producing a final image, this workshop will take you through an artist's full workflow and leave you with an original piece for your portfolio. If you've ever wanted to try 3D, this is the place to start!

The internet, like the art world, is a system of rules that can be navigated creatively to create unexpected results.

Learn the basics of taking over the internet and forcing it to listen to your desires. Learn to identify what you want and then use your website, social media, and the internet to make your dreams come true. Gain a better understanding of how the internet works and how you can make it work for you!

This workshop will throw you into the deep end of deepfakes. Libby will start by giving you an overview of deepfake tools out there, speaking critically about their applications. She will then show you how to set up and run a deepfake machine learning model on your PC (necessary for running machine learning models locally, you may also adapt Heaney’s instructions to train models in the cloud). You will leave the workshop understanding how to build quality datasets and how the model works including training and converting footage.

This workshop provides an overview of using Unity for Augmented Reality/Mixed Reality experiences, introducing a workflow for AR Foundation and building to IOS and Android devices.
Studio Above&Below will introduce and expand technical workflows for making digital sculptures and artworks which can be output using augmented reality. The final outcome aims to build an AR environment which includes environmental occlusion, spatial sound, Universal Render pipeline and plane detection.

Looking to add interactivity to the work you are producing? In this workshop, Danielle will take participants through examples of the mediums and design methods that have been used to make her interactive work, from internet-based tools to physical devices like dance pads and motion capture. Participants will also develop their own short interactive experience using a medium of their choosing to share with the group.

Are you a creative practitioner interested in exploring game engines but have never used one before? In this workshop Chris will introduce participants to Unity, where you will focus on creating dynamic behaviours, i.e. making things spin, bounce, patrol paths and react to a viewer or player. These simple yet flexible techniques can eventually be chained together to create complex interactions and dynamic environments.

Are you using Unreal Engine to create environments and ready to start building the characters who inhabit them? In this workshop, Keiken will use Unreal Engine’s Metahumans to guide participants in how to create a high fidelity and fully rigged digital avatar. By the end of the session users will become familiar with the basics of setting up facial animation, recording and sequencing for digital characters using this freely available animation software.

Back for a second time this year! Bring a new dimension to your practice with this online workshop from Marc Blazel. Using Blender 2.8, a versatile and accessible open source software for 3D design and composition, you will learn how to model, texture and light your own 3D artworks.

From finding your sources, to learning the interface and producing a final image, this workshop will take you through an artist's full workflow and leave you with an original piece for your portfolio. If you've ever wanted to try 3D, this is the place to start!

Explore the possibilities of emergence and code in this two-part workshop that will provide you with basic skills in unity and C# to start building your own dynamic and emergent universes. Working with artist George Simms you will see how a few lines of code can produce beautiful interactions as well as the unexpected.  The first session will focus on providing foundation knowledge and skills, covering basic concepts of code and the Unity interface. Moving on to the second session where we will start to put these skills into action and build up some basic emergent interactions. You will need to download the latest 2019 LTS Unity from HERE. You will also be sent a package with some scenes and example codes to work from and reference.