1shot #227-the art district gallery tonight

-Art District Gallery-113

I hear that some of my favourite artists are hanging and hanging out tonight for the opening of the art district gallery. James Nye, Greg Kirch, Amy Ferrari will be in the house with a whack of others. 5pm to 10pm to the right of the front door to the Kitchener Market (map) on King Street. The room was empty yesterday morning when Brohemus and I peeked in, but all the hangers were on the wall and I’m sure it will be jammed tonight.

Also on tonight and tomorrow is the Globe Studio spring show/sale only five blocks from the Market at Whitney and Cedar (map) so it’s pretty easy for you to hit both of these shows. 4pm to 9pm is the Globe thing and they’re also open on Saturday.

I’m going early to both shows. Hopefully see you there, dear reader.

From King and Cedar, this is DTK.

DW

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kwartzlab Tuesday Open Night—right now!

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kwartzlab Tuesday Open Night is on tonight 7-10pm. If you’ve never been, why not come out tonight and check it out.

Here’s maker Tennessee Carmel-Veilleux and his drawbot rig. The two servo-driven disks are hooked to linkage which has a pen mounted to it. It was a month ago that I shot this photo so I hope he’s at the lab tonight so I can check in on this project. Something I love about Open Night and this project is that Tennessee is figuring it out and those of us that show up get to see the work in progress.

Best to come to the lab from Courtland along Kent to Charles. Oh, construction!

From one of the coolest damned makerspaces anywhere, this is Kitchener.

A few more pics to entice you from the sofa… tonight…

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Monday is for shameless self-promotion

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I asked people with whom I have worked if they would write a few sentences on the value of makebright. Massive thanks to them for these thoughtful observations.

Sometimes I feel like I’m pitching a solution to a problem my potential clients don’t know they have. I’ve become reasonably articulate about the way ground-level stories work internally within an organization to define a sense of belonging and commitment, and how they work externally to genuinely engage customers/partners/investors/potential hires. Asking myself “Would I believe me?” led to this offering of other perspectives that I’ll continue to collect under Recognition on the main menu.

Happy Monday,
DW

Anthony Reinhart

Anthony Reinhart – Director, Editorial Strategy, Communitech:

“Darin White brings the eye of an artist, the mind of a maker and the curiosity of a journalist to everything he does for makebright. The result is a novel combination of rich visuals, interesting technical detail and insightful observation about the people and places that populate his stories. Whether he’s profiling an artist, a company, a musician or a fellow maker, Darin brings all these things together in entertaining, engaging and informative way. I always leave makebright feeling a bit smarter than when I entered, and a little envious of Darin for the time he gets to spend exploring his community.”

makebright’s work for Anthony includes this shoot/story of UW’s Hack The North event (Oct 2014)

Ian Pilon

Ian Pilon – Founder, Internet of Things Waterloo:

”The average attention span is five minutes. How do you compete with this limited factor of today’s distracted audience? The short answer: rapid fire creative storytelling. Darin White has a passion for authentic storytelling and a killer photography style and can unleash this creativity faster than anyone I have ever known. I have been fortunate enough to have Darin as an integral part of increasing my brand’s membership rate which skyrocketed from 80 members to over 450 in less than one year. I strongly attribute this success to Darin’s breaking news coverage of our community’s first “Internet of Things” Waterloo event. I have known Darin for many years as a fellow tech enthusiast and share a common interest in the maker movement culture. In today’s over-saturated barrage of media news, it’s refreshing how Darin doesn’t fool around when communicating the main message. It cuts through the noise fast and comes across as refreshingly raw and REAL. Hands down, Darin is the best story teller I know, not only bringing readers into the visual tapestry of his craft but also connecting the story that links out to the community in new ways. Darin’s passion as a proactive community builder in arts and culture is a gift to the Kitchener Waterloo area – If you want an authentic story told for your brand, then Darin’s your guy.”

makebright’s work for Ian includes this shoot/story of IoT Waterloo’s inaugural event (Apr 2014)

Tenille Bonoguore

Tenille Bonoguore – Founder, Grand Porch Party:

“Darin White is not only a compelling photographer, he is a dedicated supporter of the arts scene and community. He works tirelessly to support events like the Grand Porch Party, for which he is our official volunteer photographer, and to raise awareness of arts endeavours right across the region. For three years, Darin has helped the Grand Porch Party build event awareness and connect artists to audiences. He then spends hours shooting on the day, and works through the night to have a timely, thorough and thoughtful account of the event on makebright.com the next day. In his words and pictures, Darin taps into the beauty of a moment, and then shares it in time for those in attendance to relive it, and those who missed out to discover it. This kind of connection goes above and beyond “just” photography: It is an essential part of how grass-roots groups like the Grand Porch Party grow and build community. He has directly impacted our reach, and our audience engagement, and for that we are hugely grateful.”

makebright’s work for Tenille includes shoot/story/promotion on the Grand Porch Party (2014, 2013, 2012)

Cathy Farwell

Cathy Farwell – General Organizer, BOX Art Show & Sale:

“makebright, as a unique transformational form of promotion, played a fundamental role in the successful branding and growth of the BOX Art Show & Sale events. Darin’s blogging style covered not only the salient and obvious enticements to attend but expanded on information and ideas to enable diverse viewers to recognize potential personal relevance and arrive at BOX in an anticipatory state; feeling informed, comfortable, ready to enjoy. makebright intuitively informs, connects, invites, excites, and mobilizes! Darin and makebright have had a remarkable impact on the creative sector in this region, developing an impeccable reputation as an insightful trusted source of experiences not to be missed.”

makebright’s work for Cathy includes shoot/story/promotion of the BOX Art Show (2013, 2011, 2010)

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1shot #226-Sonday

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The thing about kids is that they can look right through you. My main man, Calder White.

DW

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TH&B United art show–Hamilton delivers again

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Hit the TH&B United group art show in The Hammer on Saturday. I liked a lot of the work. I liked the scale. I liked the venue. And what I really like is that Hamilton shows up!

This show at 270 Sherman Ave N was primarily composed of large-scale installations (yeah baby!) and some performance pieces. Sixteen projects from 22 artists. TH&B is the adopted name of the arts collective including Simon Frank, Dave Hind, Ivan Jurakic, and Tor Lukasik-Foss. If you’re kicking yourself for missing this show, you can still get a look during Doors Open Hamilton, May 2/3 10am-6pm or hit the closing gig on May 16 8pm-11pm.

This piece above is by Laura Marotta and is well executed with swinging components and doors and compartments. Shows really well here.

Click through for a completely unreasonable number of photos.

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Talking architecture with André Arsenault and Arden

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Big thanks to André Arsenault (right) for taking time out of his Saturday morning to talk with my daughter Arden about a career in architecture. We got connected through André’s wife Daisy via a recent blog post I did on the Douglas Cardinal talk at KPL.

André, a board member with Grand Valley Society of Architects, noted it was a timely chat given that the Ontario Association of Architects Spring 2015 publication Perspectives (PDF) was focused directly on our exploration and was themed “Dear Aspiring Architect…” Adding fuel to our journey are the words of editor Gordon S. Grice: “Exercising curiosity doesn’t just smarten you up, it gives you the courage to meet challenges.” And with that curiosity, we peppered André with questions and he shared the story of his path to the profession, covering everything from the personal characteristics the study demands, to the phases of design, to the nuts and bolts of exams and certification. It was extremely valuable to us and we appreciate his generosity.

It is, I believe, indicative of the good will of Waterloo Region, that a stranger would go out of their way to reach out and help us. That’s in our DNA here.

From King and Dupont, this is Waterloo.

DW

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Maker-made Event for All in planning

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People make things happen in your community. People like these people. Left to right: Cam Turner (of Maker Club), and from kwartzlab, Christine Van Walraven, Neil Eaton, Agnes Niewiadomski, Matt Bells, Ben Brown, Darcy Casselman, James Bastow, and then from makebright there’s me, Darin White behind the camera.

We met up Friday to get our planning freak on, ‘cause that’s how we party. I’m a few meetings behind, but I catch up fast. We’re working on a community event that is going to celebrate makers of all stripes and the stuff they make. We’re hoping you will support/sponsor/help/volunteer/exhibit/teach and above all, show up. Details are coming soon. I’ll keep you plugged into the meta as usual.

From Charles and Kent, this is Kitchener.

DW

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Reinhart and Hunt at The Boathouse

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I hit The Boathouse last Thursday night after a rather hectic week. Caught a great set of the mellow urban folk sounds of Mr. Michael Reinhart, born and bred in Kitchener and now hailing from Montreal. Opening for Michael was Roberta Hunt, who regular readers may recall brings the irrepressible joie de vivre (and I rarely use that term) of Dixieland jazz.

I caught this shot above of Michael through the window as I was leaving. The tail lights of a taxi on the street were reflected in the window so I did some photographer’s yoga to put that in an interesting place.

More pics…

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Palette’s physical controls of the virtual world

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Last month I stopped by the REAP’s Felt Lab in St Jacobs to see a talk by the folks from Palette. Palette makes configurable, USB-connected physical controls like sliders, buttons, and knobs that allow you to drive your software in ways beyond the usual mouse and keyboard. Above, Palette hand model and Community & Marketing Manager Ryan Van Stralen (rhymes with Van Halen) is hitting a button on the demo rig.

I first heard of Palette in the days before our FLASH photo show back in January. Company founder Calvin Chu reached out to see if there was a fit for his gear with FLASH, but with only two days until the event we were in full execution mode and couldn’t afford the time to explore that. However post-FLASH, I went back to check out this company and product coming out of UW’s Velocity Foundry hardware incubator and was intrigued on two counts. First, I’m a heavy Adobe Lightroom user in my photography and I’m always looking for ways to more efficiently drive my post-processing. The second point of interest takes us all the way back to 2006 when I was building a MAME arcade gaming rig and looking at prior research on connecting DIY electronics to computers via USB.

Back then, I discovered a wicked open source project called CREATE USB Interface (mirror) by a smart fellow named Dan Overholt out of UC Santa Barbara. Dan’s rig based on a Microchip PIC 18F4550 (aka tiny-computer-on-a-single-chip) utilized the integrated USB peripheral to link homebrew electronics to a PC as an HID (Human Interface Device, like a keyboard). I built the circuit he designed and flashed it with my own program to map button presses from my game controls to the game emulator running on a laptop. Pressing a button on my fly-wired board made a ‘j’ appear on the laptop and by that mechanism I was able to drive the whole game emulator. At the time, this amounted to magic. Back then Arduino had just been born, though it still used an RS-232 serial connection rather than the now more familiar USB link. Dan’s goal was to enable artists, electronic-musicians, and mere mortals to hook their rigs to the increasingly dominant USB port.

Fast forward to today when both serial and parallel ports have been dropped from laptops in favour of USB. Virtually every microcontroller vendor now offers chips with integrated USB. The de facto platform for makers everywhere, Arduino, now produces some boards with chips like the ATmega32u4 on the Leonardo that have built-in USB capability.

The point of this digression is to illustrate that it’s still kind of complicated to make USB peripherals, and twice as hard to make them easy to use. Therein lies the magic of Palette. Ok, well for me the magic is that the modules click together with awesome frickin’ magnets and the configuration UI automagically knows how they are arranged. The team has also done a lot of legwork with software vendors to get deep integration with popular packages like Adobe’s Lightroom and that makes all the difference.

I’ve got some more photos for you on the other side, but first a shout out to my friend and REAP workshop shepherd Joy Smith for the invite. You should all go to a Friday REAP jam at some point.

Now more pics…

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1shot #225-abandon shoes!

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Y’all know I’m out on the street a fair bit in WR. Always looking for signs on the trail. Look up. Look down. Where did that come from? Why is it here? Surrendering to a mashup of confirmation bias and humanly-flawed pattern recognition, I am finding abandoned shoes… everywhere. Not the more obvious strain of hanging-by-the-laces-from-power-lines, but rather the ground variety.

It all makes me wonder what set of circumstances led to these shoes being alone in a public place with no obvious owner. It could be good stuff: having the time of my life and kicking off my shoes! It could be dire: totally not doing ok and not having shoes on is the least of the problems. Having never seen the de-shoeing actually in progress, it’s hard to say.

From Victoria and Oak, this is Kitchener.

DW

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