Lasersaur, Nordt
Addie wagenknecht and Stefan hechenberger
Nortd was founded as an international open source collaborative, outputting artistic research and scientific development for humanity. Their work has been covered internationally by outlets such as the Economist, CNN, Popular Mechanics and Make Magazine. During their residency at Culture Lab and D6, Nortd worked on developing the Lasersaur, an open source laser cutter. Their goal was to provide a cheap, safe, and highly-capable machine that will increase the proliferation of laser cutters and make a significant contribution to the personal fabrication movement. They work to simplify the creation and sharing of tangible objects, helping to make open source hardware mainstream.
“We create objects, interfaces and installations the same way we write software: engineer like architects and write like poets. Seemingly contradictory it makes sense when seeing software as a form of wizardry. The outcome is highly effective but the association with other areas of expertise is enigmatic. At its core, it is a language for describing actions much like the spells in fairytales. It is as if your entire childhood nobody told you there was software behind the curtain. The language of code has metalinguistic abstractions. These layers of interfaces are created on the fly, manifested by code. It's like any natural language that evolves - just magnitudes faster. Not only does this make software a way of comprehending, but it also has the ability to shift ideas beyond the realm of theoretical wizardry. Time to whip the magic out!”
Democratizing this process in similar ways as print, audio, and video will have a rippling effect through the entire culture of creating. Having previously carried out a Fellowship at Eyebeam they created the CUBIT and Touchkit projects, which were at the forefront of demystifying multi-touch computer interfaces and bringing them to the masses in an open source fashion. Their approach was simple: slashing the costs by a factor of 10, open-sourcing the hardware and software, building a developer community and making the technology accessible to as many artist and developers as possible.
“Building things is fun and we prefer custom-built bikes, cars, houses, surf boards over industrially mass-produced ones any time. For us these are indicators of a read/write versus a read-only culture. They are indicators of a society in which authorship is democratized versus monopolized, or quite simply a prosperous versus an idling culture. We understand the appeal of watching a dream team fly to the moon but ultimately think it's more worthwhile to emphasize community and allow wide-spread participation. We believe a culture that allows more engagement and collaboration is a better one.”
During their residency Nortd spent their time prototyping hardware, writing software, and collaborating in a community of like minded people. They were dedicated to making the project a community effort, bringing in as many creators as possible, hosting workshops, lectures and discussions.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Nortd aka Addie and Stefan is a research and development studio based in New York generating work in the field of art, architecture and system design. It is a studio-based incubator of creative thought engaging the overlap between science and design. Over the last half decade, Nortd's open source hardware has been built and used by hundreds of people, labs, hacker-spaces and universities worldwide. They believe that people should think globally and build locally.
“We create objects, interfaces and installations the same way we write software: engineer like architects and write like poets. Seemingly contradictory it makes sense when seeing software as a form of wizardry. The outcome is highly effective but the association with other areas of expertise is enigmatic. At its core, it is a language for describing actions much like the spells in fairytales. It is as if your entire childhood nobody told you there was software behind the curtain. The language of code has metalinguistic abstractions. These layers of interfaces are created on the fly, manifested by code. It's like any natural language that evolves - just magnitudes faster. Not only does this make software a way of comprehending, but it also has the ability to shift ideas beyond the realm of theoretical wizardry. Time to whip the magic out!”
Democratizing this process in similar ways as print, audio, and video will have a rippling effect through the entire culture of creating. Having previously carried out a Fellowship at Eyebeam they created the CUBIT and Touchkit projects, which were at the forefront of demystifying multi-touch computer interfaces and bringing them to the masses in an open source fashion. Their approach was simple: slashing the costs by a factor of 10, open-sourcing the hardware and software, building a developer community and making the technology accessible to as many artist and developers as possible.
“Building things is fun and we prefer custom-built bikes, cars, houses, surf boards over industrially mass-produced ones any time. For us these are indicators of a read/write versus a read-only culture. They are indicators of a society in which authorship is democratized versus monopolized, or quite simply a prosperous versus an idling culture. We understand the appeal of watching a dream team fly to the moon but ultimately think it's more worthwhile to emphasize community and allow wide-spread participation. We believe a culture that allows more engagement and collaboration is a better one.”
During their residency Nortd spent their time prototyping hardware, writing software, and collaborating in a community of like minded people. They were dedicated to making the project a community effort, bringing in as many creators as possible, hosting workshops, lectures and discussions.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Nortd aka Addie and Stefan is a research and development studio based in New York generating work in the field of art, architecture and system design. It is a studio-based incubator of creative thought engaging the overlap between science and design. Over the last half decade, Nortd's open source hardware has been built and used by hundreds of people, labs, hacker-spaces and universities worldwide. They believe that people should think globally and build locally.