# Hacking Thai Beats, Cities & Dances by Phoomparin Mano | Devcon SEA

- Speakers: [Phoomparin Mano](https://streameth.org/speakers/phoomparin-mano)
- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2025-10-09
- Duration: 08:42
- Topics: Science & Technology
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-WrWIehDVA8E
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrWIehDVA8E

## Description

Can we inspire Thai builders to be more creative through hacking our own culture? Stories of an algorithmic Thai music festival in Thailand's oldest museum, an open-source hackathon to improve the city of Bangkok, an interactive art performance that blends algorithms with traditional Thai dance; and how you can build better builder communities by inter-disciplinary thinking.

Speaker(s): Phoomparin Mano
Skill level: Beginner
Track: Real World Ethereum
Keywords: Art, FOSS, Live Coding

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Devcon SEA was held in Bangkok, Thailand on Nov 12 - Nov 15, 2024.
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## Transcript

[Music] hello uh my name is pum and I'm software engineer at metabase and I work on open source analytics but in my free time I'm actually the co-founder of an open source initiative in Thailand called Career Garden where we basically work on open source projects and create events to explore things like synthetic biology and topics like Phil philosophy but we try to explore those mainly with coding so while working on these projects in crus Garden I got asked two questions mainly first is basically how do we get typ people or specifically typ Builders to be creative and second thing is how do you bring Builders to your spaces for example if you have uh basically an ethereum space or web three space how do you get people hooked or interested so we have been hosting these event in Thailand for about 8 years now so since I was in Middle School actually and I'm going to talk about two of these events that like kind of gives me this idea on how to engage with Builders so first is on hacking Tai beats so this is a project I work with Thailand's oldest Museum so I was working with this guy Kun Hanoi and he might look very traditional to you like a Thai musician but don't let that fool you he's actually an AI research at Tik Tok and at Google so he was working on a program that would be able to synthesize music out of AI so I was thinking what if we would take Thai instruments for example the Bai and granad and we would be able to use computer and coding to basically synthesize sounds out of nothing so that's where the idea comes in what if you can use algorith or algorithmic audio synthesis to basically create an event where musicians can come together but instead of instruments they do coding and instead of western music they do Tha music so in this events we actually did a big projection mapping onto the wall of Thailand's Odes Museum and people were using things like AI synthesis tools and algorithmic coding tools where they can basically build sounds out of nothing and I think this is one of the most like important lessons we know like over the years which is is very important not to only have a strong domain or a strong theme or a strong tool but to combine that for example a lot of hacker house they only focus on the technology for example they focus on ethereum but they didn't really let people know like what they can build with it in contrast a lot of hacker house they focus on themes so for example Finance but they don't really see it like what other interesting tools you can interact with that so with the Jax toos it kind of helps a lot so samore perer kind of puts it best when he says like people really learn best when you build things that you're interested in he was talking about children but this really applies to anyone so that kind of brings me to my second project hacking Thai cities so everyone knows like Bangkok is a great City but there's one catch well you know there's like the air we have right here is probably not the best and maybe the traffic is not the lightest and the mayor of B didn't actually like just stop and did nothing he actually hosted a hackathon uh actually was done about 3 years in a row now and I kind of like that idea but the problem is in a lot of these hackathons the idea just stop and really go nowhere so I was thinking what happened if we used the power of Open Source like I know like the space like ethereum really got this far because it's open source so why not the whole city why not make an open source city so we started with the idea of basically letting people come together but they don't have to formally form a team but rather an open-source project where anyone can join anytime if you're interested in someone well just open a PR and we started by basically bringing the domain experts in Bangkok people who have the data of the whole city like what are the problems in the city what are the areas that have flooded and the distribution of those people as well as people who have access ibility problems like people who in a wheel share for example and I think the greatest thing about open source it it lets everyone contributes so it follows the principle of low floor high ceiling and White Walls low floor means you can contribute like anytime like if you know how to do translations you can do it but there's also very high ceiling so if you're an AI researcher you can Kickstart a new project and it has white wall so no matter if you're a scientist if you're a research sure well there's a place for you to contribute and this brings like very interesting projects in the hackathon we did so for example there were a lot of motorcycles that were parking near basically the sidewalks and you cannot basically get over that and it was really annoying so someone developed a software that was computer vision to check that and automatically report that and get a bouny so in Bangkok we have that bounty system where you can make money by just catching the people who are on the sidewalks uh the motorcycles and you can automate that with computer vision or automating the tree detection of every tree in Bangkok so we did that and the last project I want to share with you is hacking tight dance in 1923 there was this photo which is the first ever photo taken of the tight Dan and the interesting things is it's 100 years later but nothing has changed we're still teaching dance the same way in school and to be honest a lot of kids like my age they don't really get interested in dance anymore it's unlike K-pop where you able to hack so we were thinking can we use AI to basically change that so we think of the project where you can generate new dance out of old dance moves like for example the 59 principal dances so we work so we were turning this into art performance called cyers subin which lets human dancers kind of dance with AI so we a software that would try to learn the characteristics of tight dance the way we did this is we started uh basically a group of Builders but also a group of tha choreographers and we were going through the old documents of how people would decompose the dance that makes us learn that there are six principles in a tie dance for example the energy in your body and the Ciro and curve that surrounds you and from the knowledge we gained from the choreographer we were able to be a software that about allows us to basically generate new dance out of old ones by tweaking the parameters so we think of things as basically a set of Animation Transformations where you would have the original dance for example the dance of uh Tome which looks like this and then you generally run that through a series of programs that would generate like very new dance that you can command and we turn this into an interface where dancers can use to basically generate dances and we put this all together in a dance performance so we just showed this up in Bali uh I think that was Indonesia and also in taipe Taiwan so this dance performance we got a lot of people like upstage to kind of join in the fun and play around with ti dance so generally I think this brings me like all the three projects to a final conclusion which is if your culture or your domain is very hackable for example if you make Finance like very hackable or you make Tai CER like there are some elements where people can go in and can use their tools or use their Technologies to hack then it make it makes it really fun so compare let's say a thai student who were learning the Thai dance in school and they were really bored because there's nothing new to make versus like kids who know how to use Ai and they're able to construct new dances and have fun with it yeah so so I would like to say thank you to my team in cyber subin for the dance production and thank you to you too for listening this is it thank you