An Ecology of Practice: Chiptune Marching Band Jamie Allen Areti Galani Kazuhiro Jo Culture Lab International Centre for Cultural & Culture Lab Digital Media Heritage Studies Digital Media Newcastle University, UK Newcastle University, UK Newcastle University, UK jamie.allen1@ncl.ac.uk areti.galani@ncl.ac.uk kazuhiro.jo@ncl.ac.uk ABSTRACT workshop-performance that explores these issues through Chiptune Marching Band (CTMB) is a workshop- localized energy generation and public sound performance. performance held in diverse public venues internationally It further discusses CTMB as an “ecology of practice” to (http://chiptunemarchingband.com/). The CTMB project indicate how resources, information and creativity relate to proposes a contemporary form of dialogic art – an each other in the context of amateur engagement with inclusive, participatory event designed to provide direct creative and performative uses of technology. experience of resource, social and creative dynamics. In this poster we invoke the phrase “ecology of practice” to WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION describe CTMB in terms of a number of interrelationships: CTMB is a workshop-performance, inviting attendees to amongst skills, with materials, in creativity and between learn, build and perform together while engaging with participants. We also present our evaluative methods for localized energy generation and public sound performance. ‘participant’ feedback within this type of event that are CTMB workshops were hosted by Maker Faire UK, designed to be congruous with the overall intention. Pixelache Helsinki, and Bent Festival NY (all in 2009) with 7-20 participants at a time. In the 3 hour event, participants ACM Classification Keywords build a small sensor-driven sound making circuit J.5. Arts and Humanities: Performing arts. (oscillator), powered by an alternative energy source (hand- crank generator). Contrasting comparable workshops [6], a General Terms kit of parts is provided to participants. The activity is Experimentation, Documentation supported by presentations and discussions on concepts such as energy technologies, audio synthesis and public Author Keywords performance. Cardboard tubes, colorful tapes, paint etc. are Community, art, performance, hacking, user studies, DIY also provided for the construction and personalization of the instruments. With instruments in hand, the ‘band’ parades INTRODUCTION in the streets of the host city as a public performance and Interest in the study of collaboration and skill sharing is spectacle (Fig. 1). At the end of the march, participants take revolved around the development of skill communities and their instrument home. pro-sumer [5] cultures due to wide-scale proliferation of online resources of many types. These communities have been looked at primarily as a resource-centric and cultural capital based, in which actors are able and presumed to act in the interest of accruing or disseminating information to some personal, authorial end [5]. Of further interest within these communities are the social, real-time and real-space repercussions of online culture towards enabling creativity. Can we create meaningful, creative, ad-hock communities around a set of material or knowledge resources? How do resource-based communities (taking ‘resource’ here in its broadest context, i.e. all attributes, information and capabilities useful in a given situation) form around technologies and information? Figure 1. CTMB in action in Maker Faire, Newcastle, UK This poster describes Chiptune Marching Band (CTMB), a EVALUATIVE TECHNIQUES The study and evaluation of how everyday individual Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). creativity may be materialized in the context of hands-on C&C’09, October 26–30, 2009, Berkeley, California, USA. ACM 978-1-60558-403-4/09/10. creative workshops/performances often overlaps with the documentation of these events. Moriwaki [6] productively 347 discusses workshops in terms of the instruments/artifacts blurred [4]. Each person is a listener of others, and a produced by the participants; reflection on the value of the performer to others. The traditional role of the creator is workshops is based on her own observation. Moreover, thus called into question [2]. We enact the shift to socially- participants are often seen as individual artists/performers engaged creativity which questions traditional paradigms of [9]. Distinctly, evaluation of CTMB focuses on the creative creative production and exchange, specifically within the process, and seeks to understand how participants perceive musical-performance sphere. the sessions by capturing their motivations, i.e. their reasons for attending the workshops, and their response to the CONCLUSIONS concepts addressed. It further looks at how individual and This work forms part of a practice-led research strand collaborative creativity interrelate in the context of the entitled “Art Off the Grid.” This research is centered on the workshop-performance and how the process and outputs of use of alternative energy strategies to sustain technology- the event might fit with participants’ everyday lives. based art. CTMB, as an interpretational and dissemination strategy towards building further capacity in this area has Initial studies included brief semi-structured interviews been consistently successful. with 21 participants in Maker Faire and Pixelache CTMB events, video-recordings of the workshop/performance, and Our experience has also indicated that effective evaluation a postcard, asking participants to respond to the question of collaborative creative sessions that bring together artists, “What’s become of your instrument?” after they had left the technology and source communities requires the CTMB event. The postcard, drawing on the cultural probes development of hybrid research methodologies, which [1] approach, highlights that everyday DIY creativity reflect the multifaceted and reflexive nature of the event as extends beyond the boundaries of a single event – perhaps artwork, performance and workshop by the artist/researcher though the subsequent alteration of the creative output by who created it and its participants. its owner – and attempts to capture this trajectory. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS WORKSHOP ECOLOGIES We would like to thank all workshop participants, Digital The term “ecology” for a dialogic art-event implies a fluid Media students, Atau Tanaka and Culture Lab. equilibrium between actors and with the environment in local relationships. We describe three resonances with REFERENCES ecological ideas, related to aspects of CTMB. 1. Gaver, B., Dunne, T., Pacenti, E. (1999). Design: cultural probes. Interactions, 6 (1), 21-29. 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