Helen Leigh is currently an artist-in-residency at Catch. Leigh is a creative technologist who specialises in music technologies, craft-based electronics and education. Her approach to technologies are playful and creative and she strives to make simple and demystify complex technologies and electronics. Through her practice, she wants to empower a wider audience to think about how they can use technologies and physical computing as tools. As an example, she wrote the book The Crafty Kid’s Guide to DIY Electronics on craft-based electronics to teach electronics and physical computing through methods of craftsmanship to kids. Furthermore, Leigh also writes about creative technology for a number of publications, including Make, Hackspace Magazine and Hackaday.

 

At Catch Leigh is working on developing a new addition to her series of sonic creatures. The past years, she has been working with sound artist Andrew Hockey on the creation of a series of interactive kinetic creatures that sing when you touch them. The creatures become sonically enchanting instruments that enable music to be experienced outside of a linear form. Through their creatures Leigh and Hockey want to empower people to investigate electronics and physical computing as tools for musical creativity. 

 

 

As part of the residency we want to work on the development of an open hardware business model, which can support her practice of hardware development and artistic production. Therefore, parallel to the development of a new creature, we are examining how to turn her sonic creatures into sellable DIY-kits. Turning the creatures into sellable DIY-kits, will provide Leigh with an income and at the same time enable people to build and experiment with their own creatures – all in line with Leigh’s interest in empowering people to play with and think differently about technology and physical computing.

 

The residency is a collaboration with Feral labs, a European network of organisations working with art, technology and DIY. Feral labs is co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.