I would like to invite Patricia Rice to talk about ClayPCB, so an alternative way to make the printed circuit boards. Thank you. Good morning. Very happy to be here. I'm presenting a project I did in collaboration with Stephanie Wuschitz and also serves as an introduction for a workshop I will be offering tomorrow in the morning at 11. And it's called Clay PCB. And this Clay PCB is one of the outcomes, let's say, of a project, a research project titled Feminist Hacking, Building Circuits as an Artist's Practice. And it was an artist's practice-based project funded by the Science Fund in Austria and done at the Academy of Fine Arts. So me and Stephanie, for the last three years and a half, we ask ourselves, what is feminist hardware? It's also important to say that we come, both of us, from, we met each other 10 years ago in a feminist hackerspace based in Vienna called Miss Patrizal Laboratory. And we have been working since then on topics of feminist hacking. have been working since then on topics of feminist hacking. So our research was informed by feminist new materialism, ethical hardware, and the colonial thinking. The idea was to enforce or to embrace de-grow strategies and politics to make hardware. So we came up with a set of rules. So it works a little bit like an algorithm, for feminist hardware making. So feminist hardware, of course artist-based hardware, is made without mining in harmful ways, it's environmentally friendly, under fair working conditions, so manufactured from ubiquitously available materials materials without generating e-waste, and with consent, love, and care. We look into the hacking, and our methodology, let's say, in the project is indeed based on hacking strategies with a more tentacular thinking, and we ask ourselves, what is a PCB? What is a printed circuit-based? And if we look at it, we see mainly precious metals and plastics so we have insulating materials that do not conduct electricity and we have materials that are precious that usually are high speed electrical conductors like gold, copper and so on. So most of these materials, as we know, they are mined many places around the world. So today I will not focus my talk in the mining and labor conditions, but I think we all sort of acquainted about it. And we wanted to find an alternative and how could we actually use some of these precious metals, the ones that exist already, the things in the world, the things we consume, the things we have. The other aspect was the non-conductive materials, so we looked to ceramics, which is also used widely in electronics, and in particular to the case of the kaolin, which is the base of porcelain. So kaolin, it's also mined in many different places around the world, in high scale, more in Asia. It's curiously not really used for porcelain in itself. I mean, only a very small percentage, most of it goes to other industries like, for instance, paper, rubber, et cetera. So our tentacular methodology is somehow involved to really look into these materials from different perspectives. So this is just an example with the cow lean. So we looked into, of course, ecological impacts of mining, but also using it as a commodity economy. So how is porcelain value in our society? And here I speak myself from a female artist working in Central Europe, and how porcelain actually was so important, in particular in the last decades, as a collectible object that was passed along in the female line of the family. So we also looked how it is understood in different contexts, in different, of course, parts of the world. And one of our first initiatives was to actually urban mine gold from this old porcelain. So this is some of my private collection. And indeed, if you measure with a multimeter, all this gold is obviously conductive, and it conducts really high electricity. So our challenge was how to implement it, how to embody it in an electric circuit. So we did some experiments and trying always to acknowledge the materiality of the objects so not to modify too much and for that we had to somehow scratch some of this gold with very careful and on the other hand we had to add some of this gold and we it by using a technique in porcelain, which is called lustering. So it's a very old technique. And you do it, it's basically a paint. So it's gold solved in an oil. And when you paint it, it's dark. And then you do a third, we call it a third fire in the kiln around 750 degrees. And then it becomes gold and is conductive. So we applied this gold. We added on this very beautiful porcelain, old porcelain. The left one is actually, it has 80 years old. And it belongs to my family since then. So we were adding, somehow trying to follow some of its ornaments and soldering sensors and connect it to a sort of circuit embroidered in a tablecloth. So this is just a little example how we try to embrace and use urban mining in our projects. So this tablecloth is actually a sound instrument. So it has like some other foods, microcontrollers, they are like sound triggers. And by drinking coffee, we somehow trigger a sound. And all these sounds, they are actually related with very strong colonial background, are actually related with a very strong colonial background, which is related with coffee drinking and also where the coffee is coming to Western Europe and so on. So this is just a picture of a performance we did last year in Portugal, and this is a performance we did the year before in Hallein, Salzburg. Yeah, so the problem with porcelain and the problem with this technique of gold is that we still need an electrical kiln, we need like a very precise cycle and higher temperatures and we were looking for more sustainable ways of actually producing this hardware. So we came across this great crafter. His name is Heinz Lackinger. He's based in Burgland, and he calls himself a prehistorical ceramist. So he actually studied, came up with new ways of using ceramics that he's actually collected from his backyard and fired in an open wood fire. in je pripravljal nove mene za usilje ceramike, ki so se od njega vznikali iz svojega zemlja in so jih vznikali v svetlostni hud. Imeli smo z njim zelo lepo delo, kjer smo se prejšče še en dan preživeli v hudu in se je naučili, kako se zame zamezati, in kako je lahko počutiti, kako je teren, learn how to collect these ceramics and by touch to recognize which is, let's say, the soil that has more clay properties. And we collected ourselves and modeled it and learned how to actually fire it in this way. So these are just some pictures ofčitelja v Burklandu. Poznala sem, da je ta bovni vod lahko izražuje okolo 750°C, kar je to, kar moramo, da se očistimo, da se metal v prvem stran the ceramics and stays. So we come up with a circuit for an interactive board, which is somehow based on an Arduino board. So the idea was to reuse also some of these Atmega chips. So in our hackerspace, we have Arduinos really old, and unfortunately some of them were not working, but we found out that the chips were still working, so this was also a possibility to reuse the chips. So yeah, we made this circuit, and the idea was to have like one layer PCB, so something that we would not need, we would avoid like layers, different layers of conductive material. And this board, we designed it and we made a 3D printed of the model has a stamp. And the idea was to basically stamp it into this clay. was to basically stamp it into this clay. So for the workshop tomorrow, I thought, since the program has so many already programming and so many, let's say, tasks that are in front of the computer, I decided it would be a good idea to actually work with the clay. So what we're gonna do is exactly this. We're gonna, if we have the opportunity, also collect some soil locally. We're gonna clean it, take, so learn how to actually transform into a clay that it's possible to model. And of course this clay is not like industrial clay. So it's very fragile. It really demands a lot of, let's say, knitting and a lot of care in general. And then it becomes more stable. So this is how it works. We stamp it, and then we have to paint the circuit. And here has an alternative to this gold. We found out a company in Germany that is actually producing a paint which is made of silver and this silver is collected as a waste dust from jewelry makers, so from goldsmith makers. So we can reuse this silver and transform it into a paint. This is painted in the circuit iz Goldsmitha. Torej lahko vse to zelo razvijamo in vrnimo v malo. To je malo v kranju in potem je to v hrani, v grani, v bovni. Tako se vidi. In to se odstranja od hrani, ko se začne zavrniti, v vodo in to je vseeno pravda, da je to stabilno in da bo uspešno. into the water and this is usually the proof that it's actually stable and it will work and after that there's of course a process of adapting and programming that mega-ship so we have to adapt it to work with its internal clock so without the Arduino board and so this board works like this there's an input for a capacitive sensor, a button. Also, an analog sensor could be everything. And also an output for LED speakers and a 12-volt motor. Of course, we need electricity. Otherwise, it doesn't work. That's a problem we still haven't solved. We'd like to tackle it. And this is how it works. So it's also a very delicate process of soldering all the components. So most of them, they are recycled from old electronics from our hackerspace. And we have a full tutorial and instructions from in our GitHub page. And they all look like this. So they are very different from each other. And the idea in the workshop is that we produce and board until this state, and each participant can take it and fire it in the next barbecue they have. Summer is coming. Thank you. Thank you.