An exhibition of the results of a Tanglebot workshop with the young students of Wybourn Community Primary. Tanglebot workshops are open-ended, but involve taking apart old electronic toys and building them into robots that make tangles. Participants get confidence in taking things apart, and insights into the innards of technology. One aim is to expose the similarity between digital and textile technology, as wires and wool get tangled together into a mess of crossings of threads. Another aim is to create surprisingly complex results from simple, algorithmic movements.
A collaboration between pupils and staff of Wybourn Community Primary, AlgoMech festival, the Children’s Media Conference, FoAM, and the ERC PENELOPE project of the Deutsches Museum, Munich, with support of the British Science Association, Research Councils UK and Pimoroni.
Alex McLean is a musician, technologist and researcher based in Sheffield UK, conducting postdoctoral research with the Deutsches Museum Munich on the European Research Council project PENELOPE. He is active across the digital arts, for example co-founded the Algorave and TOPLAP live coding movements, and performs music regularly around the world using his free/open source live coding environment TidalCycles. During 2016 was sound artist in residence at the Open Data Institute in London. He also curates the Festival of Algorithmic and Mechanical Movement, returning to Sheffield in 8-12 November 2017.
