Next sP adventure is to take our badge making skills to Swap Meet tent at the Big Chill Festival in Eastnor Castle Deer Park, Herefordshire, August 5th - 8th 2010.

http://www.bigchill.net/festival/line-up/swap-meet

We will be sharing the tent with our Dorkbot London friends and MzTEK. Fun & games include

sketchPatch badge making,

light up your rists, MzTEK will be

wiring up bangles

with LEDs, they (and me) will be stitichin', it'll be bitchin'! and Julie will be making some

home made flying moths!

plus more...

so

heaps

of creative

techi fun

and games to keep you busy of a

sunny

/rainy afternoon. 

As you may know, if you have come here through the sP website, this June/July we have had great fun working with the the wonderful people at the Barbican to deliver sP workshops to the wonderful pupils of City of London Academy Islington and Oaklands School in Bethnal Green.

We worked together to create some stunning pieces of interactive visual art, that we then turned into beautiful, unique, wearable art... i.e. badges! (beacuse everybody loves badges!:o)

I worked alongside Ric Carvalho and Julie Freeman to deliver about 25 workshops, to over 200 pupils!  It was an intense week, but so worth it!

sP's aim from the start was to provide a fun environment that demystifies code (traditionally kept at the 'back end' of a piece of work), is easily accessible to everyone and allows a platform for collaboration.  So the workshop felt like a an opportunity to test that out, and it worked out really well. We used the 'hint?' link from the 'write a sketch' page to quickly introduce the code, it was only an hour long workshop and half was taken up by badge making, but we had enough time to talk about different functions and changing variables, and to get some stunning results. The progress of the pupils, who were mostly newbies, was surprisingly advanced. You can take a look for yourself by visiting their Featured Sketchers page here and following the links to each groups sketches.

The project has inspired us to seek other educational outreach projects, so keep an eye out for future sP fun!

CoLA Islington Arts Fest on sketchPatch.net from Sophie McDonald on Vimeo.



Introducing sketchPatch's new game... sketchTennis - featuring slub!!!!!

For the whole of June, slub will be playing sketch tennis online here at sketchPatch for your coding delight.  They will be writing new and inspired sketches, and bouncing them between each other to adopt, adapt, mutate and create new versions, all while we watch on in awe as we see evolution in process before our very eyes.

slub are three live coders, Alex McLean, Dave Griffiths and Adrian Ward, a process-based sonic improvisations trio that perform live generative music using hand-crafted Unix applications, in networked synchrony.

slub's sound emerges from slub software; melodic and chordal studies, generative experiments and beat processes.  With roots in UK electronica and tech culture, slub build their own software environments for creating music in realtime, and have made software to make music and visuals to drink beer to for the last nine years. http://slub.org/

For the month of June slub will be channeling their coding creativity into visual sketches online at sketchPatch.net using the Processing programming language, so don't be shy, join the match!

As some of you might have spotted already, we are proud to welcome our second featured sketcher on the sketchPatch site: Ricardo Carvalho.

Ricardo is an artist working on interactive installations which question the spectator's physical, political and biological conditions in relation to the urban enviroment they inhabit. Recently he has started incorporating physical computing and computer vision into his work as a means of generating original poetic manifestations by exploiting these new emerging technologies, as well as creating new platforms for social interaction and change. He is currently studying on the MFA Computational Arts programme at Goldsmiths University.

You can check out his sketches here: http://www.sketchpatch.net/FS_Ric.html , and see more of Ricardo's work at his wicked site: http://www.sertik.com