Posted Tuesday, 22 March 2011

First Week at Jaaga

I'm one full week in to my residency at Jaaga, so what have I been doing?

First off, introductions! I gave a short informal presentation of my work to the Jaaga crew, and began preparing and editing video for a public presentation in week 2.

I met up with my collaborators on Jaaga Light & Sound, (Agnese Mosconi and Tobias Rosenberger). They had already kicked off a series of workshops to stimulate involvement from Bangaloreans, which we continued this week. We cover topics from Arduino to Max/MSP and encourage the guys to contribute ideas for Jaaga.

The workshops are open to anyone and we get a nice mix of people. They range from graphic design students with zero electronics experience through to advanced hackers (many are techs from some of the many big R&D centres that multinantional corporations have built here in recent years). These guys already have very advanced skills and are looking for cool projects to get involved in, so I've been focusing initially on getting the newbies up to scratch.

To facilitate the workshops and experiments we took a visit to SP Road to stock up on components and tools.

We are searching now for composer(s) to work with us on the sound aspect of the project, so get in touch if you are in Bangalore and compose using Ableton or any other software we can send control signals to (via OSC for example)... we'd like to hear from you!

And to round the week off was the Indian celebration of Holi - the festival of colour. For the wealthy this seems to mean getting made up and elegantly applying a dash of colour. But for a lot of people it means randomly tossing dye all over your friends. So my new roommate Mandy & I walked the streets looking for trouble. We find a little - mostly from ourselves...