Bernie Rhode's digital sculpture, Pixle - HG Watson, Associate Editor

Quantum art

Learning to tinker with Waterloo’s hackers

HG Watson
ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Ben Grossman is making noise.

On a sunny Saturday afternoon in a Guelph conference centre, about 50 odd nerds, tinkerers, artists and tech junkies are watching Grossman with rapt attention. He’s plinking away at an old children’s keyboard; the kind that three year olds get with brightly-coloured keys and a special button that plays “drums.”

He strikes a key and the toy emits a low-pitched whine. Another gives a synth beat that doesn’t sound dissimilar to what you can hear on the radio today. “Worthy of a Nine Inch Nails recording,” Grossman quips. The room cracks up.

Every year a group that calls themselves makers and hackers comes together for the Southern Ontario Makers and Hackers Conference. A motley crew of artists and programmers, they are a movement that could represent the next steps for art and technology.

We call ourselves a maker space…

In what is likely the last factory in Kitchener not slated to be turned into condos or high-end office space, Kwartzlab has set up shop.

“We have 3,000 sq ft. to do pretty much whatever we want,” says Darcy Cassleman, president of the collective. “And we choose to make stuff.”

I’m there on a Monday night, the space’s traditional open house night.

Cassleman leads me into the back room, a huge space filled with big, intimidating equipment — at least to my untrained eyes. “This is our C&C milling machine,” he points to a large metal container. “We have woodworking tools and a welding and metal working area.” Several members are using power tools on large pieces of wood and the room is filled with the debris of various projects. It’s not exactly what one has in mind when you think of the word “hackerspace”.

“A hacker [is really] an engineer who is able to do clever things with technology,” says Cassleman. “That’s what we understand a hacker to be. But trying to convince everybody else of that when they think guessing a four digit pin makes a hacker is hard.”

We wander past two younger members fervently discussing an episode of Community (up for debate: the philosophical implications of Abed’s Dreamatorium) and into the beating heart of Kwartzlab. A bank of computers runs against one wall, while in the centre, people gather round large tables, chatting about life and projects.

Doug Moen, a user of the space, shows me busts of Yoda the group made with their 3D printer. In industry, these printers are often used to create models for larger projects. Here, it’s a way for people to play with what interests them. “We need a new 3D printer,” Moen says. “The idea is to get four new ones and run a regular series of public workshops.”

The space isn’t limited to what you can make with tech. Cassleman shows me their art wall, where the artist-in-residence (who rotates in every few months) displays their wares. It’s important to him that people understand the difference between what they believe a hacker is and what is actually going on at Kwartzlab. “We call ourselves a makerspace because there are a lot of connotations about the word hacker.”

Who says an exquisitely well-written program isn’t art…

Artists and counterculture members seek each other out for community and creativity naturally. It’s why the Impressionists splintered off from the French art establishment and why Greenwich Village and San Francisco are still known for being “alternative” — even if today they are mostly filled with expensive condo towers.

Hacklabs have a similar history, though many of the movement founders may not necessarily call themselves artists in the normal sense of the word. It begins in Germany, where a tradition of squatters’ rights and a plethora of abandoned warehouses meant people could set up shop wherever they pleased. One of the first such spaces to gain notoriety was c-base established by the Chaos Computer Club, a Berlin-based network of hackers. Their original focus did seem more in tune with what the public perception of hackers was — in 2008 they obtained the fingerprints of a German politician and published them to protest biometric data collection — but the way CCC combined art and computers laid the ground work for the labs that followed.

The idea of hacklabs began to slowly make its way over the Atlantic, with spaces popping up in New York City and San Francisco. A recent New York Times article estimates the amount of hacker spaces in 2012 to number around 200, with some cities supporting several spaces within their limits.

In southern Ontario, labs are set up in Guelph (Diyode), London (The unLondon Hack Lab), Hamilton (Thinkhaus), two in Toronto (site3 and hacklab.TO), one on the way in Windsor and of course, Kwartzlab in Kitchener. The core Kwartzlab group began planning the idea in 2009, and in six short months moved into the space they now call home.

It’s tricky to sum up exactly what it is a hack lab does. The best way to describe it is simply: whatever it damn well wants to. “The people are smart and willing to experiment,” says Richard Degeleer, the president of Hamilton lab Thinkhaus. The only thing really limiting anyone is their own limitations — and of course, space and money.

“The spaces reflect the people who run them,” says Degeleer. “They also reflect the real estate.” Site3 in Toronto is on the second floor of a house in the Kensington Market neighborhood market, which means the space can’t do the same kind of projects that can be done in a large ground floor space like Kwartzlab.

“These are people who don’t just sit around and talk about the awesome things they could do, they actually do it,” says Terre Chartrand, a former artist-in-residence at Kwartzlab.

Chatrand’s a jack-of-all-trades who writes plays and designs the occasional tattoo. For her, art isn’t as black and white as what may appear in a gallery. “It’s people who get their hands into things and make things by hand,” says Chartrand. “Who says an exquisitely well-written program isn’t art?”

There’s a definite sense that this is a place where anyone is welcome to come play and create. One member’s kids are playing in another area, and some even get to work on projects. On the night of my visit, Chartrand and myself are the only women present, but Cassleman estimates that female membership sits at around 30 per cent.

“[Female representation in] tech in general is usually around 18 per cent,” says Chartrand, noting that Kwartzlab is doing fairly comparably. Both stress that diversity is key to a truly lively space.

One of us couldn’t make a life size dragon…

Back at SoOnCon (The short form the collective has taken on for their yearly gatherings) T. Shawn Johnson is leading the group through a workshop on free maker software. He displays little tikimen chess figures he created using Tinkercad, a free online modeling tool.

Johnson is a new member to the hacker world, having only joined Diyode in Guelph a few weeks before the conference. As an artist, he’s interested in turning fantasy into reality. He assists every year creating a huge maze — inspired in part by cult film Labyrinth — for the Guelph-based fantasy fair Enchanted Grounds. “My mandate as an artist is to expose people to fantasy in real life.”

Diyode was then a natural fit for the artist. “What excited me about [hacker spaces] is that we’ve got all these people and we can actually do this stuff,” he says. “One of us couldn’t make a life size dragon spewing fire but you get enough people excited about it you could actually make that happen.”

Educated in sculpture at OCAD in Toronto, Agnes Niewiadomski has been circling around Kwartzlab since its beginnings in 2009. The hack lab opened Niewiadomski’s eyes to new technologies that could complement her art practice. At Kwartzlab, she was able to learn how to use a laser cutter, a tool that allows precision design work. “Having the laser was an answer to a lot of the things I was doing.”

With Kwartzlab’s tools, she creates fabric plants that she sells at maker fairs — another gathering of creators where the public is invited to view and purchase their work. Working at Kwartzlab has also pushed her to think about what she does in new ways. “[When I made my projects] they were like what does it do? Does it have lights or motors in it?” She laughes. “But it got me thinking about how I can integrate some more technology in it.”

No one needs ask whether Bernie Rohde is integrating technology into his art. At SoOnCon the clockmaker and artist displays his pet project, a half bust constructed with LEDs and a mess of wires that give the sculpture a Medusa like appearance. She’s named Pixle, appropriately enough for this fusion of art and technology.

Computers haven’t reached their full potential yet, at least not for Rohde. “Computers have only built the left brain,” he says. “We’ve made a real good calculating machine and it can imitate intuitive functions but really its not working that way. Its just math inside.”

Rohde’s art practice is about working human intuition into technology. While some science fiction writers might worry about giving robots more intellectual ability, Rohde believes it’s the path to better art and computing ability. He’s following his intuition to. “I don’t plan every detail of the system. I let it show me.”

He echoes his artist compatriots when it comes to what hackerspaces give him. “[Kwartzlab] is going to be a creative environment, so you’ll have artists comfortable in that place,” he says. “Artists want to use technology in their art so they learn from engineers and the engineers want to do cool new stuff with the tech they know.”

There’s an openness and a freedom that’s part of it…

We already know the end of the story to countercultural movements. They hit the mainstream and suddenly everyone wants a piece. Iggy Pop tunes are used in cruise commercials and even the Impressionists — once the radicals of the French arts scene — are decried as too populist for any true art geek.

As hacklabs grow and expand, the attention on them has intensified. The Atlantic and Business Week have featured hack labs in their pages. Pinterest, the rapidly-growing social shopping site, was developed in one. Perhaps most troubling, The New York Times recently reported that the US Defense Department started directing funding to high school hack labs as a way of creating ties with the community. Even at SoOnCon, there are mentions that NASA is interested in this or that technology.

Degeleer hopes that the groups will keep their grassroots aesthetic. “There’s an openness and a freedom that’s part of it.” It’s what keeps the spaces interesting and innovative.

Perhaps we need a new descriptor for what goes on in makerspaces, hack labs — whatever you want to call them. At the conference, Rhode tells me a story about clockmakers who lived near the Black Forest in Germany. Although they liked making clocks, they wanted to start making something new; something inventive. So they turned their mind to making toys that still used the little parts from their clocks. Rhode calls these men tinkerers. It seems that a word that literally means to experiment might be very appropriate for people who are adapting and playing with art and technology.