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Turn Your Electro-Junk into Art, Piven Style

GarageGeeks is a notorious group of hardware hackers based in Holon, Israel. Among their projects is the famed Guitar Hero playing android. Besides creating cool projects, they also host various hands-on workshops every once in a while.

On November the 22nd, I attended my first workshop. From the Facebook invitation:

This Thursday - Nov 22nd @ 20:00 we’ll be holding a GargeGeeks Heads workshop - hosting by our dear friend and great artist Piven Hanoch (http://www.pivenworld.com/pivenWorld.html).

We’ll be all creating head shots from electronic junk we’ll each bring from his/her own little electro-junk yard (or living room….)

Come and build faces that: Interact, Talk, Move, Light & Vibrate or just look cool

Please bring electro-junk & some basic tools

At first I hesitated about “wasting” my precious junk on a piece of art that probably would not make full use of the materials (an old printer, 3 broken cdroms, a cordless phone etc). I discovered, however, that workshops such as that one, are truly inspiring. Even though I didn’t get to build anything advanced in terms of electronics, I did build stuff. I was being more creative and productive than I ever am when working alone in my basement on various projects *cough* delayed drum machine *cough*.

Me and my two friends - Amihai Neiderman and Nur Nachman Eytan - grouped together and built “The German Mouse”. It was created from an old motherboard, a portable cd player, an actual computer mouse, a piece of salvaged circuit that spoke out something in German and some random bits.

Here are some pictures from the event - served using ZFrame of ZShow.com:

And Here’s a video of our creation:

My lesson and message to fellow makers, tinkerers and others that are stuck on the “Design and Concept” phase - Get your tools and start to build stuff. Hands-on experience is super productive and inspirational !