tucked away under the shade of a tree, The Headless Pin Tattoo Studio is open to all, and always hiring. come by and let us temporarily tattoo you with a design that captures your current project. while we work on you, lay back, relax, tell us about your practice. what are you making? why are you making? open up to us, tell us more, what ideas are you chasing? what ideas are chasing you?

to us makers/hackers the world is a malleable place, full of materials and tools that we can use to realize our ideas and shape our surroundings. but what about how we are equally remade in our collaborations with other materials?
if our tools and materials could talk, what stories would they tell of “our” making?

in the summer of 2021 a small group of humans headed to PIFcamp to tattoo people’s projects as stories of their making.

: tattoo artists :
https://leonivoegelin.com/
https://rodolfoacostacastro.github.io/
https://www.jannenorakummer.de/
https://julianjungel.de/
https://www.plusea.at/

she’s been storytelling

he’s been navigating

she’s been jumping

she’s been imagining

she’s been drawing

he’s been breathing

he’s been ferminting

she’s been hurting

he’s been listening

she’s been sending

she’s been wanting

more photos >> https://www.flickr.com/photos/plusea/albums/72157719753897571
pifcamp >> https://pif.camp/tattoostales-from-the-making/

S01E01 steel and wool fibers

S01E02 metal wrapped threads

see also our post on Meet the Mateirals of Electronic Textiles >> https://www.kobakant.at/DIY/?p=8012

see also:
LEVEL1_THE REMAKE >> https://www.plusea.at/?p=6605
under the influence >> https://www.plusea.at/?p=6887
this level was designed as part of Authren

general documentation photos >> https://www.flickr.com/photos/plusea/albums/72157717095909521

DOWNLOADS_

instruction booklet >>
gameboard for print >> http://plusea.at/downloads/games/MaterialAdventures/MaterialAdventures_L2/_MAboard_L2_v2_printA4.pdf
gameboard full >>

THE GAMEBOARD VERSIONS_

PLAYS_

28.1.2021 in Authren
“kennst du das wenn der raum so authred?”
“do you know that when the room goes so authred?”>> https://www.flickr.com/photos/plusea/albums/72157717095909521

This story has two origins that accidentally collided one careless morning in my studio.

One origin came from the experience of being in the jungle and trying to go about things I am used to doing inside my studio, in the wild.

>> Hacking the Wild project page
>> Flickr set https://www.flickr.com/photos/plusea/albums/72157650592167875
Hacking the Wild project page

Realizing that I was poorly equipped to work well in this different environment, but also enjoying seeing my outdoor environment as being full of materials. This lead me to start considering making as a means of experiencing the world as a topic for further projects&exploration, and to build A Wearable Studio Practice – items that would allow me to more easily take my practice outside the confines of my studio’s walls.

Among the items I made myself was a pincushion bracelet so that I could wear my pins close at hand.

The other origin began when I started considering a simple tailors straight pin to not only be a tool, but also a material with which I could build things. Leading me to explore The Anatomy of a Pin.

Their enticing sharpness allows pins to pierce through materials, including our skin. As straight lines they are capable of amplifying the movement of a surface they’re connected to, and collectively they accumulate into a soft manoeuvreable fur. With a hole on one end they can pull a soft line of thread through other materials, holding these together to construct three-dimensional forms. Being made of metal they are able to conduct electricity, and can be used to close a circuit to detect touch. As simple and commonly known tools they are transparent and familiar, and we use them to manipulate our world.

>> Anatomy of a Pin project category
>> Anatomy of a Pin Instructables Collection
>> Anatomy of a Pin Flickr photo collection

I used their sharpness to pierce other materials in order to highlight movements making Dangerous Lashes and Maneuverable Fur.

Used them to create a series of Dangerous Sensors:

And warned of their ability to penetrate our skin with icons like these:

Then went on to re-create their sharpness by 3D printing Dangerous Fur.

When interviewed for a zine on situated knowledges at the time, I said: I’ve been thinking about the straight pins that tailors use in dressmaking to pin fabrics together. They’re so reduced to their elements. There’s one end that’s intended for us to interact with and that’s the head, where we won’t poke ourselves. Then there’s the sharp end that we’re not going to interact with and that’s going to be interacting with the material. And then there’s the shaft in between, which is the distance between us and the material, which is kind of a tool.

>> http://situated.systems/knowledges/02/situatedsystems_zine02_screen.pdf

Then, one morning in September 2018, I was impatient and rushed and an accident happened. The Headless Pin slipped inside my body and stayed there for quite some time. This experience of living with one of my tools inside of me got me thinking about my relationship with the materials of my practice and how they form me as much as I manipulate them.

The following March 2019, I engaged in an experiment where I set off on a journey with a material and tried to capture all that happened both to me, as well as to the material. This journey is captured in letters, samples and a piece of writing titled Getting Lost and Unlearning Certainty.

Shortly after getting lost with thermochromic pigment, I spent one month on a game residency, thinking about what I could turn into a game while walking every day in the woods behind the house. Every project begins with a walk in the woods is the beginning of an attempt to capture how a practice of making with materials is an opportunity to observe oneself being material, and how to share this opportunity through a game that everybody could play.

That summer I gave a presentation at the CCC Camp 2019, in which I attempted to tell this story…. with some humor, but also trying to build up to the moment of becoming material, as a moment of surprise.

And finally, currently, Seasonal Sensors is the latest and ongoing attempt at remembering we are materials too.

And possibly this idea for a workshop titled Capturing Process is a desire to distill techniques for observing our material-ness (our own material qualities) in order to sensitize ourselves through observing, documenting and examining our conversations (our making processes) with other materials.

To be continued…

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
a guided meditation
in noticing the electrical conductivity of materials
including our bodies
a practice in
unraveling our material knots
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

An ongoing collaboration with Fereshteh Toosi.

We first met in June 2019, during a week-long workshop titled Blurring Boundaries that Hannah taught at Shakerag. We had a chance to experience each other’s practices and discovered that we are both trying to understand how humanity has come to perceive itself as separate from nature, to trace the effects of this ideology on the current environmental crisis, and to explore possible undoings of this distinction, through our artistic and technological practices.

We next met in November 2019 for a 1-week residency titled —Tasting the Change— in the English countryside. Here we shared thoughts on how conversation on the climate crisis has turned to the possibility that we have run out of time. Movements like Extinction Rebellion are calling for us to consider human extinction as a real possibility. In the face of this possible future, some are seeking new ways to survive while many people around the world have already been suffering displacement and health effects of material extraction for a long time. It is the residents of wealthier countries who are only now beginning to feel threatened by humans’ impact on the earth.

We’ve tried to distill our thoughts into three leading questions:
* How to make our way towards a new vantage point of human-nature-culture entanglement?
* How do render ourselves careful instead of helpless?
* How to deal with our positions of privilege in such an undertaking?

Unraveling our Material Knots is our first step in tracing our human-nature-culture division. What >means< make ourselves feel more part of the material world, and not separate from it?
We want to act upon this feeling.

//
other working titles:
Invisible Circuits
Common Ground
Human-Nature Interactions (HNI)
//

Photos >> https://www.flickr.com/photos/plusea/albums/72157711843743071
Tasting the Change: residency >> https://artdotearth.org/hothouse-coolhouse-residency/

Looking back, four things stand out to me as insights that I’d never before seen this clearly:
::: I’m following most of the time
::: Materials contain the stories we use them to tell – and we think the stories are ours!
::: I’m not as skilled as I thought at smoothly transitioning between the abstract and the tangible
::: My idea of “getting lost with the materials” is not about engaging in an extreme material-lead adventure as much as it is departing from social frameworks of value
: : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : :

that the more dense the material the more power it took to heat and the longer it took to cool down again. +//Every time I make a decision, I’m revealing underlying motivations, intuitions, expectations that can be uncovered if I only take the time to reflect. —————- Reduced my selection back to 3-4 items to help myself focus on some concrete experiments.
++//There is a gap between thinking-about-making and making. It requires energy to make the jump. Energy in the form of courage, hope, stamina. //How to make the jump when the energy is not there? >>>>>>>>>>>>> Going through familiar motions with the most obvious of opportunities. Mixing the pigment with acrylic paint, textile paint…… painting it on fabrics, papers, seashells, pine needles, transistors…. >>>>>>>>>>>>> Hooking up the ends of a 20cm piece of steel thread to a 9V battery and using it to heat the what I had prepared. Swiping it across my samples and observing them change colour. +++//By simply doing something with the materials I had set myself up for discovering something interesting [origin of word interesting: from inter- ‘between’ + esse ‘be’ – to be between] that could then lead me further in. |<<>>|<<>>|<<<“Submerge myself in the process” (quote from letter, 1/3/2019)>>>|———— Thin, porous fabrics coated in the thermochromic mixm, held up to my noise/mouth, breathing out causes heat to spread, breathing in sucks cold air though the material. ++++//This interplay of bodily heat and electronic heat drew me in…. ——————————- Once submerged in the process, it was easy to keep meandering…. one idea leads to the next to the next… until I had lost track of what the point was. It was here that i made some of my most surprising and motivating discoveries >>>>>> Continuing to mix the pigment with vaseline, nail varnish, water…… and finally wax. I never would have thought that the pigment would mix so well with wax! And that I would return to my childhood enthusiasm for poking my fingers into melting candles, dripping it on snow and making thermochromic candles. I used snow to make moulds, bringing in the outdoors, seasonal materials, adding lines of thread for composite flexibility and surface coverage…. +++++// Experiments in creating surface heating with carbon paint were not successful. ——————— ((((Wanting to be submerged, lost, aimless…. but also needing to feel comfortable in this state. grappling for what I had experience with.)))) +++++++//What I found most intriguing was the interplay between the electrically controllable heating and the bodily (uncontrollable) heating and cooling caused by breathing as well as the heat from regular body temperature. I wanted to achieve a setup that would allow for these two different sources of heat to meet through the material actuation in order to reveal something that would otherwise not occur. ———–>>>>>>>>_______I am able to electrically change the colour of the thermochromic wax mix by embedding lines of steel thread (10-20 Ohm and can withstand high temp) in the wax, crimping their ends to copper threads, powering them from a 3.7V LiPo battery. Controlling the heating via a MOSFET triggered by a microcontroller. Controlling the microcontroller with a sensor. Controlling the sensor with my body heat._______<<<<<<<<———- ::: Combining wax with threads resulted in a rigid yet fragile structures that could hold their form while retaining some flexibility. Since the circuitry was also comprised of connected threads it should also become such an integral part of the structure. Since the wax became soft with the same heat that was intended to change the colour the shape could shift, and I would love to to collapse. ::: Pressing my face into the fold snow and then dripping molten thermochromic beeswax onto the cold snow mound. I was making a mask, a object to use to tell of change and control. */>

Getting Lost and Unlearning Certainty: Material Encounters in an Electronic Craft Practice
by David Cole and Hannah Perner-Wilson, published in the Critical Maker Reader
Download PDF >> https://networkcultures.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/CriticalMakersReader.pdf
Free copy >> https://form.jotformeu.com/93243662209356

Links:

Flickr set: https://www.flickr.com/photos/plusea/albums/72157690651821403
YouTube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/user/Plusea
>> http://networkcultures.org/blog/2018/10/31/call-for-contributions-the-critical-makers-reader/