title: game | lan instrument
type: digitally fabricated digital musical instrument & interactive sound sculpture
year: 2018
author/composer: Olivia Kotsifa (conception, 3D design, digital fabrication) , Alexandros Kontogeorgakopoulos (conception, programming, sound and interaction design) with the help of Fab Lab U.de Chile, Fab Lab Lima, and Fab Lab UNAL in Colombia
funded by: Fab-Cre8, Cardiff School of Art and Design internal grant, Cardiff Metropolitan University
first demonstration: Linux Audio Conference 2019, CCRMA, Stanford University, USA, April 2019
Game | Lan is a digitally fabricated digital musical instrument based on the Bela board, an open-source embedded computing platform. It was co-fabricated in five Fab Labs (an international network of digital fabrication laboratories) in South America. It is an ongoing project focused on the co-design and co-creation of a small orchestra of digitally fabricated digital musical instruments (DMIs). The orchestra, named Game|Lan, is inspired by the traditional Indonesian Gamelan ensembles, their music and philosophy. The instrument apart from its and electroacoustic characteristics is conceived as a sound sculpture which can be exhibited and experienced interactively.
The project was realised by stiwdio everywhere, a location-independent digital nomad art & design studio/project I co-funded with Olivia Kotsifa. The image below was taken from our collaboration with the Fab Lab University of Chile in Santiago. The video was taken during the interactipon design phase where we used mocups to test quickly our initial concepts.
The video below is from a workshop we organised in Fab Lab Lima in Peru (with festive atmosphere).
Few sound examples of the instrument can be found below:
More info about the research of the work can be found in the paper Game|lan:Co-creating and co-designing an Orchestra of Digital Musical Instruments within the Fab Lab Network in the Proceedings of Linux Audio Conference 2019
The following links present few more details about our the design and fabrication phase of the project in Chile, Colombia, and Peru.