# AFVS-173F-Workshop-Planning

Date: Thursday, February 27, 2025
Location: Learning Lab
Time: 12:00 – ~1:00pm
Enrollment: 20 students

**Workshop Goal**: Introduce students to both digital and physical creative techniques that align with the course theme of adopting a "plant perspective."

## Plan

- mk sets things up in 5 min or so, each person will introduce themselves quickly and indicate what they do, but mk will unpack the station
- then 3x15 minute rotations
- introduce your station and what's where, but then let them choose the activity they'd like to work on. If people seem to be getting bored or have exhausted an activity, move them on to something else (this will vary a bit by station--Christine has more of an arc, Madeleine has more some different making zones)
- mk and llufs will try to do some event processing, and may try to force some people into the podcast room (Kevin could also help with this)
- let's aim to show something towards the end
- try to find bridges between the stations, encouraging the students to think about that interconnectedness

## Tasks

- set up timelapse 1 this morning on top of purple cabinet (or in that corner) wide enough to get the rest of room. 30 second exposures with 30 second increment (for 180 degree shutter).
- connect system and restore yesterday's keys if people were happy with them
- flip vertical projector and place on other side of truss
- make sure cables aren't running across the floor--determined shooting positions that don't require this
- assign ME1 through 3 to the 3 main projectors, vertical gets vertical screen from blue machine
- find/create a good "contact us" sign to show under overhead
- set up two-microphone podcast station in small studio (we'll capture this all hour on the a4k)
- launch hijack and hijack watcher and name scenes
- print readings leading up to today's class
- do we have "Close to the Stuff the World is Made of: Weaving as a Modern Project" from Anni Albers, ed. Ann Coxon, Briony Fer and Maria Muller-Schareck (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018), 26
- find a timelapse clip from casey's station with a blur of humans/cars and stable city, another of movement at a plant's pace
- Christine and Casey and Leo should all understand the luma key threshold . . . and we should all have in mind the two-to-three sentences that help people see that this sort of threshold with a hard cut-off produces something like a wood cut, a binary with a hard cut between black and white, present and absent, and that when you combine this with some organic like the plant or the grass it yields interesting results (this will echo for them some of the ways the human-environment or building-plant dialectic plays itself out in the reading)

## Stations

Tastes of some of the media tools and maneuvers you might think about deploying in a project, broken into three stations:

1. a physical station where you'll do physical thinks with plants, objects, art supplies, your voices and bodies,
2. a capture station where you'll learn about capturing (photos, videos, audio)--and will capture some of the things that the physical station people create
3. a digital station where you'll manipulate (whether is old school editing tools or with AI) the stuff that gets captured

Right now and again at the end I'm going to share our contact info, because today will go by quickly, and we want to extend you the offer to drop by to consult with us (anyone you meet today whose approach resonates with you or who knows a bit about a tool you'd like to learn).

### raw materials: plants, structures, humans

At this station we'll actually DO the stuff that gets captured and manipulated at the other two stations.

- At one table we have reeds and grasses for weaving;
- at another we have some printing/inking/painting supplies for you to use in conjunction with grasses and leaves.
- For some brave volunteers we will actually be inviting you to engage in an improvisational podcast interview, or even
- a performance stage where we will encourage a couple of volunteers to mimic the movements of plants

### capture: cameras, cyanotypes, microphones

At this station we'll learn about ways of documenting and preserving the traces of plants and buildings:

- a quick cyanotype of some plant materials
- a quick demo of how old school architectural photographers removed keystoning
- an exploration of how we can use camera angles and depth of field to tell different stories about plants and their relations to other shapes and structures
- the whole while we'll be capturing a timelapse of today from back in this corner, and we can help you all know about a few of the key considerations should you wish to perform a timelapse (we can talk about this at the editing station too)
- we'll also show you the recording-side of what's going on in the podcast studio for anyone interested in audio projects (and you can perhaps sample some plant sounds if you'd like)

### digital manipulation: editing, analysis, data, ai

At this station we'll take what we capture at other stations (along with some stuff we can grab from the internet or generate with computers) and modify it, edit it, distort, remix it, etc. We'll show you how to
- source materials (from YouTube, Prelinger)
- how to generate images, audio, etc with AI
- how to visualize, edit and maniplate audio and video
- and we'll also be transforming some of your plant-poses into AI-generated plants, or woven structures into buildings, etc