More vibes, with the jamming tent. Photo by Thomas Amberg.
Reflections on a journey to the Swiss Mechatronic Art Society’s Homemade summer camp from July 27 to August 4, 2024 by Miranda Moss, laureate of the Rewilding Cultures Mobility Conversation grant.
A rainbow arched across the mountains as Gandalf led us up the valley toward the wooden mountain house. Birds of prey soared above us, circling the steep Alpine fields as mist swirled around their wings, cowbells tinkling in the distance. Upon arriving at the house, we were greeted by fellow campers, already engrossed in their “laser geeking,” hunched over a high-powered laser beaming into the mist. They joked that they had formulated the rainbow especially for our arrival—a fitting welcome to a place where fairytale-like landscapes mingled with technical witchcraft and wizardry.
This magical yet very real setting was the 2024 Swiss Mechatronic Art Society’s (SGMK) annual summer camp, “HomeMade.” Set in a different mountain house each year, the camp takes advantage of Switzerland’s culture of mountain and hiking communities, and turns these spaces into weird and wonderful places for experimentation. Electronics enthusiasts, artists, families, musicians, engineers, nature-lovers and curious minds of all kinds come together for a week to live, work, cook and create together, with the goal of exchanging ideas, sharing knowledge, and collaborating on projects. While most participants are based in Switzerland with long ties to the SGMK, many also travel from across Europe to join, and there are always several who travelled from further afield; this year, for example, there were friends joining from India, Lebanon, Cameroon, Brazil and Indonesia. Many of these are already on a longer residency in Switzerland, and so such a camp becomes quite an amazing intersection of practitioners on this residency-within-a-residency meetup. We joined this talented crew with the specific interest of continuing research and cultivating workshops and documentation, along with the community, on human scale, creative and sustainable energy systems with feminist values.
When I say “we,” I’m referring to myself, an artist, designer and educator working across engineering and biology and largely preoccupied with electronics and energy systems, and Urs Gaudenz, a creative microengineer, self-taught biologist, and founder of GaudiLabs. Urs describes GaudiLabs as a “third space for third culture,” a meeting point for art, science, and technology, based in Lucerne, Switzerland. Here, he runs an open source business, developing cutting edge scientific equipment and electronic musical instruments, allowing high-tech processes to be more accessible. It has been such an honour to have been able to collaborate with him over the last year, and so I made sure that after my long, but smooth, train ride from Sweden to Switzerland, to factor in some time where we could work together in GaudiLabs before the summercamp. Here, we totally indulged in blue sky ideas, including developing self-powered artificial finger nails with LEDs embedded, and researching the possibility of gleaning iron from menstrual blood to make compostable, mining-free circuit boards. We also reactivated our interest in nanomaterials science by buying a bag of clay, and experimenting with all its amazing properties, including for the fabrication of the above-mentioned circuit boards, passive cooling systems, pump-free watering systems for agriculture, membranes for microbial fuel cells, and of course, some gorgeous pottery companions for the home. We couldn’t wait to get to the summer camp to forage for wild clay and to continue these experiments.
This year, the camp took place in the Jura region of Switzerland, which has a fascinating history where, at the turn of the last century, saw the words ‘watchmaker’ and ‘anarchist’ becoming synonymous. Resisting industrialisation and the exploitation of workers, these watchmakers were formative in the development of worker’s rights across Europe, and the region still hosts the largest global anarchist meetup in the world. One person who came from this region (his uncle was one of these watchmakers), is legendary SGMK member Michel Pauli, a peace activist and technology enthusiast who has been keeping an open source digital school, solar training centre, and community maker space running in Limbe, Cameroon, alongside his wife, Chanceline Ngainku. Coming from a practice of using DIY communications technologies as revolutionary tools in various conflict regions in the world to defend human rights, in the past 15 years he has “settled down“ in the conflict zone in the english-speaking part of Cameroon where he set up the ‘Association Linux Friends’. I spent the majority of HomeMade working closely with Michel and Urs, to develop ideas and prototypes that could be used within the context of the school and community space in Cameroon, where they hope to expand their activities and grow greater confidence in working with electronics.
We started with fabricating a small scale gravity battery (chemical batteries are so 1800), which inspired Lina Lopez and Fadri Pestalozzi to synchronously work on a small scale vortex water turbine, which is similar in principle. We moved on to developing power conditioning and charge control circuitry for a small solar charger with Maximum Power Point Tracking, with a lot of extra special care for lithium cells (which we scavenged from the trash in old laptop batteries). This itself was a continuation of where we left off in the research project Regenerative Energy Communities, which had just come to an official end, after developing the project ‘windternet’.
Having a background in traditional arts, my electronics knowledge is entirely curiosity-fuelled and community supported, and community learning environments such as HomeMade have been instrumental in my knowledge-building process. Through the community, I have recently learnt how to reflow solder Surface Mount Devices (more on this later), and at the last HomeMade I attended, I was treated to a workshop on how to design circuits using open source software. The first circuit board I etched was also with the guidance of the SGMK. It was really special to see all of these skills coming together this summer.
Through learning all this techy geeky stuff, I hope to bring artistic and creative approaches to electronics and energy to more diverse, non-technical demographics. To me, it seems a convenient problematic of the medium, to seem difficult, inaccessible, dangerous, unintervenable. If we want to get anywhere with a Just energy transition, these practices need to be opened to more than engineers. We need more poets writing about copper, cobalt and full wave bridge rectifiers. We need grandmothers with knowledge of fermentation and crochet to be involved in the design of agrivoltaic systems. We need musicians to circuit bend hydroelectric dams and offshore wind farms. We need Hollywood, Bollywood and Nollywood films glorifying train drivers and making biogas bus operators sexy, instead of pilots and space capitalists. We need to drastically change the cultures underlying the technologies we use, design, and pollute with
We also need those who have historically been excluded from – and often bear the socio-ecological burden of – the development of electrical technologies, to rethink electrical technologies. Flashing back to working on the Cameroon project, we were thinking of not just how to keep up with trends in electronics manufacture, but also imagining how these processes can be made more sustainable and accessible. We don’t just want to keep up, we want to do it better than the toxic capitalist, colonial industry. And, of course, we only want to bring the freshest, most advanced technologies to Africa, while they are still bare and able to be built upon and hacked. #Africaisthefuture!
A significant challenge we face as DIY practitioners is the shrinking size of electronic components. Surface Mount Devices (SMDs) are becoming the norm, replacing the ‘through-hole’ components of the past few decades. While this miniaturization is great from a material sustainability perspective (let’s take a moment to celebrate how much less copper we use now with the ubiquity of transistors instead of the older, wire-wound transformers!), it’s difficult for independent tinkerers to work with these components without expensive tools and a factory full of robots. DIY frustration grows as online stores stop selling through-hole components. How can we, as DIY practitioners, repairists, actual custodians of our own electronic devices, as artists redefining what is possible with these technologies, continue striving to be active agents in this system already so intent on locking (or literally glueing) us out? And, to go even further, how can we do so in a way that is radically sustainable, even regenerative? I’m not going to pretend that the materials and processes we are using here are without negative externalities, but we push back where we can.
One of our major breakthroughs at the camp was to design a way of reflow soldering without an energy-hungry electric oven, but rather using the passive power of the sun. We used a fresnel lens to concentrate the sunlight on our freshly etched and assembled circuit boards, which to our surprise worked far better than we could have anticipated. Our aim was to make and assemble the solar charger we were working on entirely without electricity.
After the week of successful prototyping, Urs and I solidified our commitment to visit the school in Limbe, with the aim of a longer-term collaboration, and excitedly booked flights and visas to Cameroon.
Tech philosophising aside, the week wasn’t without its bumps. I fell ill midway through the camp and spent much of my time in bed, as well as being pretty much in a perpetual state of horror about the state of the world. But I was once again reminded of the importance of community and care, and that rest and recovery are, after all, critical parts of any energy work.
As this report comes out of receiving the Rewilding Cultures Mobility Conversation grant, for which I want to thank Schmiede Hallen for selecting me and allowing me to join HomeMade, I might end off with a few notes on the train ride back to Sweden, which was less smooth than the journey there. It ended up taking three days (instead of 23 hours) due to track works and disruptions, and spontaneous cancellation of the night train. However, this allowed for a stop over with friends in Mannheim, where we also visited a phage therapy startup and could continue thinking about phages as piezoelectric nanogenerators. The slower trip through the days also helped reveal more clearly how energy, transportation systems, agriculture are intertwined and embedded within landscapes and cultural attitudes in Europe. And all this fancy futuristic research we had seen over the summer made me think, can we not just first fix the trains y’all?
To get a stronger picture of the HomeMade summer camp, check out the video made by Krautfilms:
And, if this looks interesting to you, join the summercamp in the first week of August 2025! Reach out to homemade@sgmk-ssam.ch for more info, or follow the SGMK wiki for updates.
Check out Association Linux Friends Limbe! Donate to this amazing project tackling sustainability, education and the future of technology on the ground! Linux Friends.com A few Euros go a long way towards paying the incredible teachers, engineers and researchers who hold this project together.
Find out more about Rewilding Cultures, a program co-funded by the European Union.