Blog

Dates: 14/08/2019-28/08/2019

Project: The Sustainable Zine: Being a zinester for many years I’ve noticed how unsustainable zines can be depending on how they are produced. At Dinacon I plan on using natural dyes and inks on natural materials to explore all the ways that Panama and it’s nature can create colour and story. The goal is to make a zine inspired by Dinacon and the experiences in Gamboa that will eventually fade and degrade until it doesn’t exist at all except in pictures, much like memories!

Sid Drmay is a nonbinary queer multidisciplinary artist based in Hamilton, ON. They use textile art to explore growing up online, nosebleeds, queerness and transness and all the weirdness that comes with that. They love weaving, embroidery, screenprinting, their two cats, and sour gummy candies.

August 4th – 10th 2019

I’ve recently finished my PhD on plant biomechanics. I studied physics and teach it, but find a lot of things fascinating, including plants, art, cats, humans and other sentient beings. I like making things, thinking about things, and things that make me think.

Life of Leaf: The project I have in mind is a structure made mostly out of what can be found in the woods and some connective tissue. It will include sub-structures at various scales, which change in time as the plant elements in it grow or decay. Plants dynamics have many timescales, from seconds to years, and I aim to find a way to incorporate plant motion and function into a cool and totally useless thing that will be fun to look at.

I’m also curious to see unique patterns in local plants, and collaborate with other people who work on projects I can relate to.

16. August – 31. August 2019

We are Janne Nora Kummer, Tomas Montes Massa, Lena Maria Eickenbusch and myself: we found each other as a group within the ¨Spiel && Objekt¨ MA program, sharing the desire to develop an ecologic & non-anthropocentric view of arts. Our research motivation drives us to explore the interaction between the biodiversity of the rainforest with the behaviour of light, using these local biosolar entanglements as inspiration to create a techno-vegetal monster. Relevant milestones for us are monstrous & cyborg thinking, kinetic sculptures and object-oriented theatrical narratives. We imagine a solar-powered, Arduino-motored, light-searching hybrid creature, a wired-photosynthetic robot that aesthetically condenses our research and friendly coexists in the jungle. Speculating on the fusion of organic material and new technologies is for us an artistic urgency, and therefore we are eager to prototype and meet this critter!

13 – 21 August 2019

My name is Nacho Sanguinetti. I’m a berlin based neuroscientist and improv theater /comedy performer. I study the neuroscience of play behavior.

I’m joined in Gamboa with my Improv partner Trevor Silverstein with whom I plan to collaborate with and perhaps do some improv permormances.

www.neuroetho.com

My plan for Dinacon is the following:

Project 1:

Biological origins of musicality

Music is clearly one of the most important aspects of human cultural life. However, there is very little known about the biological origins of musicality (For a recent review: Kotz, Ravignani, Fitch, 2018). Even though youtube is a treasure trove of animals responding to music , few scientific studies have addressed this very interesting issue (for examples: Patel et al., 2009). Given this amazing opportunity to explore the Gamboa Jungle, a place with such animal diversity, I decided to study wild animals listening to music.

I plan setup he following pilot experiment: a speaker playing music in the jungle while cameras and microphones record possible animal behavior close to the speaker. Are animals curious about human music? Are some animals more curious than others? Do they synchronize movements to the rhythm, do they vocalize, sniff etc? Can we record them to produce more animalistic music that will engage them? (Looking for Collaborations).

Backup plans include : Concentrate on a single species, Agoutis?. Record animal vocalizations and do more controlled playback experiments.

Project 2:

Short Film

I am joined in Gamboa by my artistic partner Trevor Silverstein, with whom I plan to shoot a fictional short film.

(Aug 13-21)

I’m a filmmaker/comedian from the USA but based in Berlin, Germany. I’ll be shooting a short film with another Dinacon particpant, Nacho Sanguinetti.

8/24 – 8/31

Project: Field sound recording along Pipeline Road in order to create a radiophonic journey into its birdsong and wildlife around the clock. Hard science will inevitably be mixed with soft fiction, so zoological correctness not guaranteed.

Writer and journalist, budding birder, interested in both science and fiction involving non-human perspectives, zoology, ecology, technology, evolving ecosystems and documenting the sixth mass extinction.

DATES: Aug 24-31

BIO: I am a percussionist, composer, writer, and field recordist with a background in ecology and entomology.

PROJECT: My collaborator Kristina Dutton and I will compose new music and sound work based on observation and field recordings. I am particularly interested in the sounds of ants and the Passalid beetles, and have been researching these sounds in the Brazilian Amazon. Kristina and I will illustrate contrasting ecological variables through our recording and composition processes. We will use hydrophones, ultrasonic mic, contact mics, and shotgun mic, and build the compositions using found instruments and Ableton Live. If there is mutual interest, we can create this work as a sonic aspect of another researcher’s work at Dinacon. We also want to interview participants at Dinacon about larger questions related to artists and scientists producing work together.

www.lisaschonberg.com