Award Winning Work by Our Instructors!

Cave of Sounds

We’re always proud of the work that our instructors do, and it’s great to see them recognised by others as well! Congratulations to two of our instructors, Ron and Tim, who have been recently racking up prizes for their computation-led artwork.

$echo Wins First Prize at Hack The Space

On 14 June, Codasign instructor Ron Herrema, along with a team of three other hackers, had the good fortune of winning first prize in the Hack The Space event at the Tate Modern. The 24-hour event was hosted by The Space, a joint venture of BBC and Arts Council England intended to promote and fund digital arts in the UK. The challenge given to the 144 hackers chosen to participate was simply this: use digital means to create art from data. Data was contributed to the event by a variety of sources, including prominent Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei, who donated his personally assembled list of the names of 5,196 school children who died in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.

Ron and his team – calling themselves ‘$echo’ and including Guy Armitage, Gavin Clark, and Marko Kirves – chose to create their work by leaving ten servers unprotected and monitoring the inevitable attacks that would follow. Whenever an attack came from China, one of the names of the 5,196 children was displayed on screen and a series of sounds was triggered. The web app thus not only commemorated the deceased children (many of whom Ai Wei Wei felt died as a result of the government’s failure to build structually safe school buildings), but also celebrated Chinese hackers’ acts of resistance against the firewall used by the Chinese government to censor that country’s internet access.

Cave of Sounds Wins Sonic Arts Award (Digital Category)

The Cave of Sounds was created by Tim Murray-Browne in collaboration with seven members of London’s Music Hackspace during a ten week residency over ten months through Sound and Music’s Embedded Composer in Residence programme. The project began in November 2012 with an open call to members of the Music Hackspace interested in creating an instrument for a new ensemble.

The Music Hackspace is a London-based collective of musicians and engineers interested in subverting technology to create music. The invitation was non-selective and culminated in a group of eight diverse individuals, including musicians, programmers and artists.

The Sonic Arts Award is aimed at the production and promotion of sonic arts at an international level with a cash prize awarded to each winning selection from four categories.