Listening without speaking alludes to eavesdropping and the covert monitoring of communications. The audience can influence the clarity of the message by adjusting the controls on the machine, giving a physical side to the sense of searching and trying to hang on to the messages. However, the piece includes the deliberate design of interfering with the descrambling process to cause the gradual degradation of the audio so that the messages eventually become engulfed in machine noise before cutting off suddenly to silence.

"In the U.S. and Europe, people are starting to realize that there's this opportunity to make again," Muren said. "I think in the rest of the world, they're kind of like 'Well, isn't it funny you all call this 'making.' We've been doing this forever. That's one of the things that's exciting to me is the meeting of those two places. "

At last Fall's PopTech conference in Camden, Maine, he talked up some of the products that have been created with the help of Humblefactory, and other creations from the "maker movement" including the aforementioned Egg-Bot.

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The course is designed to help creative people visualise what's going on inside a computer by touching and physically moving items around. This helps to demystify computing and let people realise that "everything a computer does is either very dumb or a very smart implementation of what, as humans, we are able to do".

Participants are told to put their computers away -- the workshops feature no actual code, editor or screens. Instead, budding programmers are given pens, paper, tape, sweets, ping-pong balls, wooden boxes, cups and other common objects.

Troika is a London based studio founded by Eva Rucki, Conny Freyer and Sebastien Noel who are known for their experimental practise and projects that employ a cross-disciplinary approach and intersect between sculpture, architecture, and contemporary installation.