June 1st, June 9th, and beyond! CCC wants YOU!

Heya All! I can't believe that June is here. Let me know if you see where the spring went to, I just had it around here someplace. I lost it, I think, in between starting to make a million beautiful jackets for festival season, and desperately irrigating the gardens against Oakland's fierce sun. This week I woke up at 5am to see sailor friends off on their trip south, the boat packed to the gills with bikes, surfboards, everything they could possibly need. I gave them two bean plants and two fertilized duck eggs. Hooray summer! I hope you can stop by the studio sometime and see what we've been up to, it's a lot. Buy some stuff! Trades and special deals for mailing list subscribers are on the table too, so dream big! We will be keeping regular store hours noon-six, Thursday through Sunday, but also keep an eye on your calendar for these extra special events coming up.

1. First Friday Bike Party - June 1st
2. CCC Grand & Proper Art Opening - June 9th
3. First Saturday CRAFTERNOONS! - July 7th, August 4th

Awesome! Keep your ear to the ground and your eyes to the sky. And come by our storefront, we have been workin hard to make it super amazing for you! The whole Temescal/Telegraph neighborhood is ready to welcome you into Oakland's dirty little secret - sunshine and lazy days, we got 'em!
<3
R.

coyotecounter.com

1. First Friday Bike Party - June 1st
Happy Hour + DJ Cargobike + Raffle + Group Ride
Friday June 1st 5-7 PM
Manifesto Bicycles - right next door to Coyote Counter Collective!
421-423 40th St, Oakland / Macarthur
Beer flows at 5pm, raffle at 6pm, group ride to art murmur at 7pm

2. CCC Grand Art Opening - June 9th
Coyote Counter Collective is at the heart of Oakland's independent style, where the next generation of art & design is spreading its wings. The cooperative retail group opened its doors December 1st and after getting to know their new neighborhood they are ready for the limelight with a long-awaited Grand & Proper Art Opening! June 9th will showcase visual art and photography from Jon Fischer, and Ryan McClymont, and Rachel Lyra Hospodar, with new jewelry designs from Dida Jewelry, Scarlet and Madrone, Cannibalize Jewelry, Alchemilla, and others, featuring Medium Reality and Ghetto Goldilocks garments and Project Transaction leather. Glass art by Arlo Fishman. Featuring a miniature dance party with DJ Dangerous Alien and a dress-up sidewalk photo shoot with the Lilypad Collective. Refreshments will be served.

Coyote Counter Collective Grand Opening & Miniature dance party
5-9pm Saturday June 9th
423 40th St @ Webster
coyotecounter.com

This is the real cutting edge of the next generation of design! Composed entirely of independent artists, this group rocks a truly sustainable as hell style by offering one-of-a-kind customization and repair services for clothes and jewelry while making their work right before your eyes in the attached studio. Through demonstrations, classes, and workshops, these artists educate about the killer techniques they use to customize vintage garments into a reconstructed style all your own. Coyote Counter Collective is a one-stop shop for everything you need to rock the next generation of DIY style!

Coyote Counter Collective
423 40th St, North Telegraph Oakland Macarthur BART
every Thurs-Sun 12-6pm
info @ coyotecounter.com

3. First Saturday CRAFTERNOONS! - July 7th, August 4th
Save the date!

Coyote Counter Collective is Oakland's newest DIY hotspot. This group of local artists is giving back to the community with a series of events focusing on skill sharing and communal crafting. Close on the heels of Oakland's over-the-top cool First Fridays, Coyote presents a laid back Saturday afternoon of sharing in craft techniques, tips, scrap materials (and the best sourcing tips!) as well as hands-on intros to basic sewing tools. Think of it as a salon for all your DIY sewing questions.
First Saturday - CRAFTERNOONS! - 12-6pm
Communal Crafting at Coyote Counter Collective
7 July, 4 August
coyotecounter.com

Introducing Coyote Counter Collective

Medium Reality has been suspiciously quiet for the last few months. I have been getting surreptitious inquiries from concerned friends, clients who crave attention, and art lovers who are demanding I keep up the supply of laser etched landscapes.

What the heck have we been up to? Where have we been?! Well, a lot has been going on. The revolution, hallelujah, has come, and it's here to stay. Even stranger, though, we have moved our studio. Medium Reality has been based in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood for most of a decade. The rising cost of real estate in that neighborhood is finally sweeping through lots of little side streets that time had forgotten, though, and things are changing. We are excited to change our focus to Oakland, where a more wide-open (but still bike-friendly!) city leaves more elbow room for oddball arts projects.

Medium Reality, in collaboration with Project Transaction, Ghetto Goldilocks, and Gneiss Wood, presents:

Coyote Counter Collective
a new (re)construction experience in Oakland

423 40th St, Oakland
(leave Macarthur BART, turn right, cross Telegraph and look out for us on the right at Webster)
Open Now By Appointment

Grand Opening December 1st

We are slowly assembling an altered storefront experience, by hand, from scrips and scraps. We've already painted, hung curtains, installed glass cases, tiny puppet doors, trunks and suitcases everywhere, and cut scalloped edges into everything. There is a sewing studio in back where we are still desperately putting up storage shelves, and throughout the space we are working on small facilities projects one piece at a time.

So we're building a store? Well, yes, but. But. One of the things I am most excited about for this new space is something we are trying out - a menu of (re)construction services. Drawings, swatches, samples, and photos will bring customers in to the style re-design process, while the streamlined menu will allow these services to be offered a la carte to all members of our community, for affordable prices. Services will range from complete reconstructions (and my unique brand of elaborate layered embroidery/applique), to simpler alterations like silkscreened images or added pockets, which can be offered at very reasonable prices. We are working towards offering laser etching services as well.

It is my hope that this space will become a hub for different reconstruction communities, and I am excited to see how the cooperative part of things comes together. In assembling the business model for our collective we have drawn heavily on my experiences at City Art and Noisebridge, as well as all of our time together at Pandora's former location on Haight St. It is great to be working with these artists again.

Pants Interface - Open Hardware Summit & Maker Faire NY 2011

At the end of September, in a flurry of solder, wire bits, and threads, we finished a prototype Pants Interface controller. I threw it, still smoking, into a suitcase and flew off to New York to show it off - and ask for help. Here's what happened.



Open Hardware Summit http://www.openhardwaresummit.org/ is in its second year, and is an amazing hotbed of conversation about this growing field. Topics popping up over and over for me centered around how to share ideas, especially legal licensing and functional software tools for filesharing. It was great also to run into Autumn Wiggins, longtime collaborator from the indie craft world, there to talk about Upcycle Exchange and reminding me once again of the interesting and growing intersections between craft-making and electronics development. Mitch Altman of TV-B-Gone fame, a Noisebridge pal of mine, gave a really inspiring talk, as did Bunnie Huang from Chumby. According to Bunnie, hardware development cycles actually favor small businesses!

Developing licenses that let people share their ideas is clearly important to a lot of people, and a lot of interesting options are developing. It gets pretty esoteric but is still really interesting stuff. CERN is developing an open hardware license http://www.ohwr.org/projects/cernohl/wiki . OHANDA has an open trademark solution http://www.ohanda.org/ .

The founder of Sparkfun gave a practical talk on how they open up their documents, to what extent, and the basic functionality concerns that raises for an operating business. I went to the breakout session 'Documentation, Distribution, and Community Building for Open Hardware'. Joseph Prusa from RepRap http://reprap.org/wiki/Main_Page was there along with others, talking about how the crazy varieties of files that project uses are all managed. That project, an open source 3d prototyping printer, is an amazing international effort. Also in that session were reps from DIYLILCNC and Upverter. It was really great to hear different perspectives on document & version management, and to get some tantalizing glimpses of how the approach chosen here will affect the user communities.

I met Glyph, the founder of Twisted http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ a few years ago, and got to pick his brain on how they built a vibrant community around that open-source project. Glyph said that the project has to give users something that works before they will get excited about it. It's interesting to note the differences between what this means for a hardware vs a software project. The prototype milestones we reached in time for this conference put the Pants Interface tantalizingly close to a point where we can publish, and start this dialogue with an actual user base.

Maker Faire New York was the same weekend as OHWS, and it was really fun to check out such a wide-open field of makers at the faire, after the intense focus at the summit. I presented the prototype at both events and got lots of interested questions and feedback. My Maker Faire presentation seemed to inspire a lot of people to consider getting involved with wearables, which was super exciting for me. I also got a couple of really great tips on solving specific problems, and more detail on how certain aspects of the project work. It is great to find such an engaged group of people that are interested to see our project, and give feedback on it.

Special highlight for me was meeting up with Clothbot http://clothbot.com/wiki/Main_Page one of our Kickstarter supporters - and getting awesome experimental 3d-printed fabric circuitboard connectors to try out. You can see them, and lots of other goodies, in this photo of my swag from the weekend. Lots of notes on everything if you click through!

Pants Interface - last call!!

There are just over 48 hours left in our kickstarter fundraising drive for the Pants Interface. Read on below for more information on the project, or check out the videos and other materials online!

http://kck.st/iyusM4

Here is a little breakdown of how the fundraising drive works - people can pledge money, a lot or a little, towards the Pants Interface project. Different funding levels come with different fabulous prizes, starting with the launch party for this crazy control device, including experimental supplies for people who want to make their own soft circuits, including art prints of the schematics and your very own pants controller if you want one bad enough! BUT if we don't reach the target amount, nobody gets charged and the project doesn't get funded! We are very very VERY close, and only need $212 to get to the minimum. Don't you want to help make sure this science project gets off the ground?

Now that you are all jazzed up about it, before you head over to pledge a little cash, just fix that excitement in your mind - and if you go over there and see that we met our goal, oh please put the money in anyway! Every bit we raise over the bare minimum raises the stakes and saves a little stress.

http://kck.st/iyusM4

And oh, endless gratitude to all who have supported this project already! I am humbled by the amount of belief others have had in my dream.

<3


Pants Interface is a family of wearable technology projects that are completely open-source and aim to make it easy to install wireless interface devices into any garment or costume. This project is the brainchild of artist and designer Rachel Lyra Hospodar.

Right now Pants Interface is focused on something very simple - making fabric buttons. These soft circuit momentary switches use arduinos and wireless radios to allow anyone wearing the device to trigger, well...anything a piece of electronics can do. The device can speak USB to a computer and control computer software as well as speaking MIDI to sound, video, and lighting equipment. A performer could trigger projection cues, lighting cues, sound effects, audio loops, anything at all. A home user could advance songs on computer playback, control volume, or play games without being tied to a desk chair.

Next will come a full computer keyboard and mouse embedded in a pair of pants - so that users can get up from office chairs and work from more ergonomic (and varied) positions. It will also represent an interesting direction in the conception of computer interface devices - by attaching the devices to the users themselves, Pants Interface can change the way we relate to and use technology objects.

Some links to find out more about the project:

Our kickstarter fundraising drive - ends in 48 hours!
http://kck.st/iyusM4

A four-minute video about the kickstarter project
http://www.vimeo.com/24525501

The project website, listing more info about the project collaborators, the mouse touchpad project, and the philosophy behind it all.
http://mediumreality.com/pantsinterface.html

Pants Interface!

Pants Interface is a family of wearable technology projects that are completely open-source and aim to make it easy to install wireless interface devices into any garment or costume. This project is the brainchild of artist and designer Rachel Lyra Hospodar.

Right now Pants Interface is focused on something very simple - making fabric buttons. These soft circuit momentary switches use arduinos and wireless radios to allow anyone wearing the device to trigger, well...anything a piece of electronics can do. The device can speak USB to a computer and control computer software as well as speaking MIDI to sound, video, and lighting equipment. A performer could trigger projection cues, lighting cues, sound effects, audio loops, anything at all. A home user could advance songs on computer playback, control volume, or play games without being tied to a desk chair.

Next will come a full computer keyboard and mouse embedded in a pair of pants - so that users can get up from office chairs and work from more ergonomic (and varied) positions. It will also represent an interesting direction in the conception of computer interface devices - by attaching the devices to the users themselves, Pants Interface can change the way we relate to and use technology objects.

Some links to find out more about the project:

Our kickstarter fundraising drive - ends in 1 week!
http://kck.st/iyusM4

A four-minute video about the kickstarter project
http://www.vimeo.com/24525501

The project website, listing more info about the project collaborators, the mouse touchpad project, and the philosophy behind it all.
http://mediumreality.com/pantsinterface.html