Getting to grips with Arduino

Today was the start of Digital Producers Lab in the Pervasive Media Studio, Bristol. The day included talks and a chance for the participants to start getting to grips with their creative task for the week.

To start the day, Kate Tyndall led a discussion on the role of the producer. She began by describing the motivations behind her book, The Producers, Alchemists of the Impossible.  The emotion that drives producing can be tacit, reliant on hunches and a faith in projects and the people connected to them. At its core the role is one of taking an idea into the world to be experienced. This requires the producer to draw on a range of abilities. At every point there is a range of people skills, creative skills and finance skills to be employed.

The producer must be able to locate various values and promote the right one to the different audiences, be they funders, peers or the public. In this vein, Anne Siegel from Ffotogallery discussed the gallery’s experience of Kickstarter. Whilst it is a more informal structure, the relationship with the funders still calls for a commitment to selling an idea. This means a producer must be able to engage and excite audiences about the projects they work on.

On the topic of regional funding there was a feeling that it is difficult to attract commercial partners for projects outside of large cities. It was felt that this might be countered by finding the appropriate values to promote when creating partnerships. Asking for help and using social media to do so was another approach to breaking through such barriers. Later in the week specific sessions will pick up on the issues of funding, so it was good to see these issues arising early.

David Jubb's ‘Five Point Guide to Producing’

Drawing on her book, Kate used David Jubb’s ‘Five Point Guide to Producing’ to round up the session and the group were asked to start compiling their own list over the coming days.  Given that it has been seven years since David Jubb complied his list, and the fact that the focus of this Lab is digital producing, it will be interesting to see how the new list compares.

Next, artist Nikki Pugh introduced her own work as a meeting of place, playfulness and technology. In her practice Nikki explores the behaviours and barriers inherent in public space and challenges these by prompting conversations. Over the week, the group will be constructing instruments with Arduinos in order to form a GPS orchestra. For all of them this is their first experience of using these micro controllers. Thankfully they have Nikki and Creative Technologist David Heylock on hand to help them work towards their performance on Friday. 

Today’s tuition began with a run down of Arduino, breadboards and resistors. Flashbacks to GCSE Physics abound, Nikki soon had them on the right path. In the space of an hour the group had built circuits, had LED’s flashing and fading, and some even started editing the code to get different effects.

Clare Reddington finished the day by talking about digital trends. This covered real world gaming, the Internet of Things, mapped projections, new routes for distribution and much more besides. Focusing on how this technology can be used to augment human experience rather than fed into a service economy underscored the growing relevance of the Digital Producer in the cultural landscape.

That was day one. Bring on tomorrow when we will cover the producer’s skills in more detail. You can follow the day as it unfolds using our twitter hashtag #digiproducers or on Storify