The Ghost and the Machine with artist Diana Burgoyne

Saturday, October 24, 2009 – 2 - 4 p.m.
Banff YWCA, 102 Spray Avenue
Tickets: Free

This workshop is just in time for Halloween. Come make a piece of fruit, a box — or even your friend — scream in a two-hour workshop that introduces you to simple electronics.

The workshop is for people (adults and children) with no electronics background and teaches them a recipe approach to electronics: how to read a schematic, identify the components, and connect a circuit. We will be building two circuits. The first project uses the conductivity of objects and people to complete a circuit to control frequencies of sound. The second circuit that you will be building uses light as the control for the frequency of the sound. Once built, we will be designing Halloween-inspired boxes to create a screaming box you can take home.

Artist Diana Burgoyne, who has been working and teaching electronics since the 1980s, puts on the workshop. Diana Burgoyne refers to herself as an electronic folk artist. Her performances and installations have been exhibited in Montreal, Toronto, New York, France, Holland, and Estonia. She was commissioned by TELUS Science World to collaborate on a piece that was exhibited as part of Contraption Corner. She has been the artist in residence at the Surrey Art Gallery’s Tech Lab, participated in SCANZ in New Zealand, and has just finished working on a work entitled Audio Quilt as artist-in-residence at the Roundhouse Community Centre. Audio Quilt is an interactive installation that reflects the sounds and voices of the Roundhouse community by utilizing 100 audio chips, each recording ten seconds of sound. She was awarded a 2009 Fleck Fellowship by The Banff Centre and has taught a class entitled “Creative Electronics” at Emily Carr University of Art and Design since 1998.

This workshop is part of the Banff New Media Institute’s Touch and Go — Accessing Art and Technology program which brings new media artists to Banff to run accessible, fun, stimulating, and thought-provoking public workshops. The Touch and Go series is supported through the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.

Sharing your
Digital Stories

Monday, November 30, 2009 – 6 - 8 p.m.
Banff Rotary Community Hub
Free

Do you want to learn how to take effective digital photographs? Use critical thinking skills to interpret stories from images? Remix photographs and words to create an original story? Choose and add sounds to communicate a message? The National Film Board of Canada and the Cultural Olympiad’s Digital Edition (CODE) are offering digital storytelling workshops in communities across Canada. In addition to learning new skills, you will contribute to Canada CODE, a collection of words and photos by Canadians collaborating online to welcome the world in 2010. During the Winter Games, a selection of these stories will hit the big screen for the world to see.

Canada CODE is coming to Banff as part of the Banff New Media Institute’s “Touch and Go” series, which connects people in the community with new technology. The Touch and Go series is supported through the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.