Kieran Nolan

Here are the slides from the Hacking Toys Into Tangible Interfaces workshop that was held at DKIT last week for the ISEA 2009 conference. Thanks to everyone that participated :)

I'm presenting a paper at the ISEA 2009 Conference (International Symposium on Electronic Arts) in Belfast this August. It's under the 'Posthumanism' category and called 'The Real Virtual Living'. Basically in it I'm examining what people thought the 'cyberfuture' would be, how it actually turned out and how that future vision has inspired creative work in different digital and electronic mediums, both in cyberspace and meatspace :)

Also as part of ISEA 2009 I'm running a workshop on 'Hacking Toys Into Tangible Interfaces' at Dundalk IT. We'll be building unique game control gizmos by adding usb connections to cheap electronic toys. The workshop is an introduction to physical computing, covering some basic interaction design theory along with practical hardware hacking techniques. There's more on the workshop and everything else that's happening as part of the conference at isea2009.org.

Here are some recent projects from year 2 of the Creative Multimedia degree at DKIT. The student groups were each given a toy and assigned the task of hacking it together with a keyboard to create a controller for an original interactive experience made in flash and/or director. (more...)

Circuit bending is "the creative short-circuiting of devices such as low voltage, battery-powered guitar effects, children's toys and small synthesizers to create new musical instruments and sound generators." (Wikipedia). Here's a little video of some audio glitching that happened during the beginning stages of a project with DKIT's Creative Multimedia 2nd years, where we modified children's toys into tangible multimedia interfaces.