Turkish student sensor workshop
Monday, June 25th, 2007
Notes
The Bilgi Interactive Sound Project of Istanbul Bilgi University attended to a 5 day long workshop on custom built musical interfaces with JunXion Board. The group consists of Batuhan Bozkurt, Pinar Temiz, Ulas Pakkan, Ozan Sarier and Ali Bilgin Arslan as well as the project supervisor from the faculty, composer Dirk Stromberg.
The group members got into soldering and building sensors for the JunXion board in order to create personalized custom interfaces which would be used as performance tools.
The soldering job was a novelty for most of the participants. During the course of individually building the Junxion board, which can be acquired also as read-made, made it possible to be involved in the process of artistic creation from scratch and helped to form a stronger connection with the artist and the tool, which is a radical thing to do, considering the commercially available musical interfaces.
A popular tool for the participants were the photosensors. The possibility of interacting with the computer by the manipulation of light surely was interesting and these sensors were built into almost all of the boards. Regular types of sensors, like faders and knobs were also used to a certain extent. But overall, the interactive quality of the photosensors were the focus of the custom interfaces of almost every participant.