On the week on June 21st, 2009, I will be doing a series of workshops at Art City in Winnipeg. I will be working with participants to build touch sensitive noise generating devices for the W∆LkiE T∆LkiE R0b0T M∆rChing B∆Nd. Our electronic marching band will be one of the many groups taking part in Art City’s Annual Parade. If you happen to be in Winnipeg please come out! In honour of Art City’s parade theme this year - Here are a couple of my favorite robot videos online… In February 2009, I went on a tour of the Radio Canada International Transmitter in Sackville New Brunswick. Heavy Duty Radio…See the pictures here. Grampy is an animated cartoon character appearing in the Betty Boop series of films produced by Max Fleischer and released by Paramount Pictures. From time to time people ask me who or what am I inspired by. This guy named Grampy from Betty Boop is very inspiring for me. Whenever there’s a problem, he fixes it by building an amazing gadget out of stuff found around his house. Depression era resourcefulness at its best…I’ve posted a couple of my favorite Betty Boop shorts that he is featured in. More radio related research being conducted at Palais d’experimentation Palace. This time we’re controlling a tuning capacitor on an AM radio with a motor. There is added interference on the frequencies since the video camera emits an electromagnetic field which AM radio so delightfully picks up on. Radio and AC Power Experiments | Darsha Hewitt + Peter Flemming | 2009 Darsha Hewitt too makes her process transparent, in this case by showing us her personal sketchbook, where she draws the diagrams and schematics for her devices. Her drawing style is in large part an homage to the inventor Forrest M. Mims III, who wrote many do-it-yourself electronics books and articles in the age before the internet and computer-rendered schematics. Darsha’s meticulously drawn and lettered schematics on grid paper are, to those in the know, instantly evocative of Mims’, yet manage to convey Hewitt’s obvious excitement and delight with this material. Her style is deliberately anachronistic, even the Rona Jaffe novel which donated its cover to the notebook dates from the era of Mims’ notebooks. This could well be, except for a few small clues, a document from 1978 rather than 2008.” I recently had a series of scanned images from my sketchbook included in an journal called Vague Terrain. The publication was curated by Rob Cruickshank. The article is titled Device Art. Please go check it out. Thanks Rob and Vague Terrain! I have been doing lots of experiments with AM radio and AC Power these days with Peter Flemming. To see video documentation go to EXPERIMENTS|PROCESS. Hola, I am currently doing a residency at the Western Front Society in Vancouver, British Columbia. The focus of the residency is on the research I have been doing called Ethereal Computing. If you are in Vancouver please come by for a visit! :) Darsha Hewitt will work with experimental handmade electronics to develop an environmentally responsive sound installation specifically for the Western Front called DAEMON DETECTION. Hewitt will install sensing antennae throughout the building to detect changes in the surrounding electromagnetic fields. These shifts will create subtle audible emissions through transmitter radios that have specific lo-fi/low-tech sounds including white noise, frequency distortions, voices captured from broadcasts.
June-July 2008
I am currently in Merida Mexico in the Yucatan alongside my collaborator Alexandre Quessy. I am doing a residency at the FrontGround Artist Run Center and teaching at Escuela Superior de Artes de Yucatán (ESAY).March 29th - April 27th 2008
The artist will hold a workshop during her residency and invite the attendees to create one of these devices. She will also hold an artist talk on “Instrumental transcommunication,” which is a term used to describe communication between spirits and the living through any sort of electronic device such as tape recorders, fax machines, television sets, or computers.
An old fashion robot that smokes
and a space age robot that falls…
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