Ed Bear and Yazmine Mihojevich will each lead workshops involving the creative transformation of e-waste components included in the exhibition, Penelope Umbrico: MONUMENT, and brought by participants. In between the two workshops, Zak Sherzad will present a sound performance on the didgeridoo, inspired by and highlighting elements of the exhibition.
*Please bring your broken/outdated Smartphones, tablets, iPods, etc., that you are willing to disassemble.
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1:30-3:30PM - Yazmine Mihojevich Workshop: A Field Guide to Conflict Minerals
A Field Guide to Conflict Minerals is a collaborative field guide-making workshop. Through smartphone disassembly, discussion, and field note taking, participants will interact with the parts that make up cellular devices through the conflict minerals that devise those parts. Similar to psycho-geographic map-making, individual field note taking will be a personal, spatial, and political exploration of our everyday devices. Suitable for ages 16 and up. Limited to 15 participants; advance registration required.
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3:30-4PM - Performance by Zak Sherzad on the didgeridoo.
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4-6PM - Ed Bear Workshop: {almost} Free Radio Stations
Surplus electronics are everywhere in modern life, and ripe with creative applications. Maybe you remember the iTrip, which transmitted music to a car stereo? It turns out that these radio transmitters can be hacked back to life very quickly! We will cover the basics of running a low-power radio station for art and fun, from soldering circuits, to the legal limits. At the conclusion of this workshop every participant will have one upcycled FM transmitter which is secretly a synthesizer!!! All ages, no experience necessary. Limited to 15 participants; advance registration required.
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BIOS:
Yazmine Mihojevich facilitates community programs in waste management sector. From e-waste up-cycling workshops to community reuse programs, she enjoys interacting with the discarded and exploring the material, subjective, and semantic frameworks that determine the mutable value of organic and synthetic entities.
Ed Bear is a performing artist and engineer. His work with robotics, sound, video, transmission and collective improvisation investigates the questionable calibration of perception. As an educator and designer committed to an open source world, he researches and practices material reuse and as a civil responsibility. He has toured extensively in North America and Europe as a performer and teacher, working with organizations such as The Mattress Factory, The Montreal Pop Festival, Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Since receiving his BS In Electrical Engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of NYU, Ed Bear has provided freelance design, manufacturing and engineering services to start-ups, acclaimed artists and musicians, film and theater productions, and leading education institutions. He is currently working with littleBits, Inc. to revolutionize modular electronics.
Zak Sherzad engineer with BRIC's Community Media program, and a multi-instrumentalist and multimedia performance artist born in Lausanne, Switzerland, and raised in Kabul, Afghanistan. Sherzad moved to the U.S. in 1986 to obtain an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College Center for Contemporary Music, Oakland, CA, where he first fell in love with the didgeridoo instrument. His intent in this collaboration with Penelope Umbrico's MONUMENT is to explore the correlation between the interdisciplinary elements of media and the human mind/brain. Sherzad will also explore the relationship between e-waste and the branch of a tree howled-out by thermites (the didgeridoo), including the sound reverberation/reflection created and static verses movement within the space.
Venue Information:
The 3,000 square-foot Gallery in BRIC House has soaring 18-foot ceilings that permit major exhibitions focusing on emerging and mid-career artists and curators.
Beginning Nov. 1, 2022, attendees of any BRIC House programming will no longer have to show proof of vaccination or a negative test to enter the building. Masks are encouraged but not required in all BRIC operated spaces. If you have questions regarding this protocol, please email Safety@bricartsmedia.org