Cities of Refuge
July 16, 2018 by Giles Lane · Comments Off on Cities of Refuge
Proboscis is one of the partners in a new project, Resilient Communities, Resilient Cities? Digital makings of the city of refuge, led by Professor Myria Georgiou of the Media & Communications Dept at London School of Economics. The project seeks to:
examine the role of digital communication in the making of cities of refuge. More particularly, it focusses on urban communities’ digital responses to sudden, unplanned and/or unwelcome change resulting from irregular migration into the city. The project zooms into urban neighbourhoods that receive large number of refugees and migrants. It examines how urban communities mobilise digital communication to respond to disruption and develop capacities to manage change. From the development of local networks in support of refugees, to local training into digital skills, cities’ resilience is tested in the capacity to sustain inclusive, integrated and prospering communities.
Our role is to design the engagement activities and direct workshop facilitation with the various groups taking part. The project will work with communities in 3 sites: London, Athens & Berlin over the next 6 months.
On Saturday we delivered the first workshop and engagement activities at the Chesnuts Community Centre in Harringay, working with a group of Syrian and Iraqi refugees to explore their needs, the resources they have access to as well as the barriers and obstacles they face in their new situation here in London. Drawing upon our previous experience of working with vulnerable communities in challenging circumstances we created a simple way for participants to discuss these issues and to begin mapping out and exploring connections between services, places, people, technologies and systems. We also provided ways for participants to reflect on how they perceive the relative values (in terms of safety and utility) of these things and some measure of where the things they value most sit in terms of emotional and physical proximity or distance.
The workshop was conducted in Arabic and the participants split into two groups, each with an Arabic speaking co-facilitator – Dr Deena Dajani & Haneen Naamneh – from the LSE. We used worksheets and stickers with familiar symbols, from app icons to common services, features and resources, to help make the process fun and visual as well as dynamic and open. It was particularly gratifying to see how enthusiastic the participants were to engage in these ways, and to observe how this kind of ‘asset mapping’ across individual experiences enables people to identify key areas of confidence as well as the gaps where things don’t work so well, don’t feel safe or where trust is uncertain. At the end of what became a long session, it was also great to hear how much the participants had valued this opportunity to come together and discuss things collaboratively. Despite having faced many challenges and obstacles on their respective journeys to this point, there was a palpable energy in the room of optimism and determination to make a new sense of home.
We will be working next with local Harringay residents who have been part of the community welcoming these new arrivals to explore these issues from their perspectives too, and a following workshop will happen later in the summer bring together a mixed group of different locals and new arrivals. In the Autumn we will adapt the process to deliver to similar groups in Berlin (Neuköln) and then Athens (Victoria).
Augmented Reality Advent Calendar
March 17, 2017 by aliceangus · Comments Off on Augmented Reality Advent Calendar
As part of my ongoing work with the Mixed Reality Lab and Horizon DER at Nottingham University I was commissioned to come up with an augmented reality, paper based, activity pack or object that incorporated their Artcodes pattern recognition system. MRL wanted to create something to help them with their ongoing research into the social aspects of pattern recognition technology. Ive been working with Artcodes on and off for a couple of years and am interested in seeing it develop more so that it can be used more widely by people to share and author their own digital content. I’d like to use it in some of my public art projects and work with groups and organisations so I was keen to use this commission to research more about how and why people might use this kind of system, what works and does not and where or how it can be socially useful.
I researched and mocking up various festive ideas for traditional decorations, cards and advent calendars, we tried these out and decided to go with the advent calendar, Advent Calendars are very familiar and fit with the idea of the codes opening digital doors. A nice calendar is a treasured item that many people use year after year and this fitted with my thoughts about it being something people would want to have out and play with, and could share and use again.
I designed and illustrated it as a freestanding, gatefold calendar with 24 opening doors. It is traditional in style and features scannable Artcodes to use with the Christmas with Artcodes app. The calendar comes with 24 Artcode stickers to put under any doors . When scanned, using the Christmas with Artcodes app, these codes open photos, videos and other media. People could personalise and replace all the content by adding their own (photos of text, images, drawings, sound, video, urls etc) and share their digital layers with other calendar owners who could view the digital layer created for them. Everyone with a phone or tablet can use the same calendar and create their own digital layer.
I’ve been surprised by the range of uses people found and in particular the empahsis on using it to make a connection with people isolated or far away. Those uses included making a calendar for a friend having a long term hospital stay; making calendars of family memories, and having your own calendar whilst sending one overseas to share christmas messages between family far away.
A lot of what the team are discovering is about the language and processes that make sense to one person but are confusing to another. When you take a risk and invite people to try out a new technology the uses people find for defy your imaginaton, they find unusual ways to use things and uses for things. If people are not creatively involved in development of technologies it can limit the potential for those technologies to develop in useful social ways.
Attentive Geographies
March 13, 2017 by aliceangus · Comments Off on Attentive Geographies
Since we worked together on Storyweir in 2012 I have had an ongoing relationship Exeter University’s GEOCAK (the Geographies of Creativity and Knowledge) research group, most recently working on the Attentive Geographies project which began in 2014/15. I have been commissioned to create new artwork reflecting on the work of the group, following from running a two day workshop and participating in a series of events over the last 2 years with the group.
Attentive Geographies looks at creative practice as research process. GEOCAK are working with artists and writers to better understand; “What happens when you commit to deepening and developing skill? What emerges when methodology becomes the subject of research? How does collaboration emerge through creative methodologies? What does it mean to be a geographer as practitioner?”
There is a strong and deepening relationship between geography and creative practice – art, music, writing and those practices are increasingly shaping Geographers processes. The project will identify new ways geographers can extend their skills through a variety of creative methods, skills and approaches.
Initially I produced a series of drawings based on my interactions and discussions with the group, this is developing into another series of illustrations, contributions to the forthcoming book “Attentive Geographies”, and new textile work in response to the research practices of the group.
“The creative turn in Geography has cemented the long-standing relationships between geography and creative practitioners. Creative geographies are no longer studied as a product, instead practices are attentively shaping their learning, doing and knowing, with geographers working and developing their capacities with a variety of creative methods, skills and approaches.
‘Attentive geographies’ explores creative practice as research process. What happens when you commit to deepening and developing skill? What emerges when the subject of research, becomes methodology? What is gained by undertaking creative geographies by doing? What difference does the practical doing make? How does collaboration emerge through creative methodologies? What does it mean to be a geographer as practitioner?”
Geographies of Knowledge and Creativity Research Group 2015
TREsPASS Exploring Risk
December 2, 2016 by Giles Lane · Comments Off on TREsPASS Exploring Risk
This Autumn Giles has been working with Professor Lizzie Coles-Kemp and her team in the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway University of London to produce a publication as a deliverable for their part of the TREsPASS project.
TREsPASS : Technology-supported Risk Estimation by Predictive Assessment of Socio-technical Security was a 4 year European Commission funded project spanning many countries and partners. Lizzie’s team were engaged in developing a “creative security engagement” process, using paper prototyping and tools such as Lego to articulate a user-centred approach to understanding risk scenarios from multiple perspectives. The three books and the poster which comprise TREsPASS: Exploring Risk, describe this process in context with the visualisation techniques developed by other partners, as well as a visual record of the presentations given by colleagues and partners at a Summer School held at Royal Holloway during summer 2016.
The publication has been produced in an edition of 400, but all 3 books included in the package are also available to read online via bookleteer, or to download, print out and hand-make:
Exploring Risk collection on bookleteer:
We are now starting a follow on project to develop a creative security engagement toolkit – with case studies, practical activities and templates – which will be released in early 2017.
Discovering Bikes and Bloomers
June 4, 2014 by aliceangus · 2 Comments
Over the last few weeks I have been drawing and painting a series works to be printed on silk and wool for a set of unique textile linings for Victorian ladies cycling garments; commissioned for the Freedom of Movement research project created by sociologist Katrina Jungnickel who is based at Goldsmiths, University of London. The drawings are inspired by Kats in-depth research and tell some of the stories behind each patent, the woman who invented it and the social, technological, physical and cultural challenges that early women cyclists had to face .
Through much of my work with Proboscis collaborating with communities, geographers, technologists and social scientists I’ve become interested in how drawing in public or amongst researchers can be a catalyst for conversation, observation and new analysis, revealing hidden connections and sparking alternative ways to interpret ideas and research. So, rather than being isolated from Kats research in my studio I decided to take the work to Kat’s space in the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths, and for the conversation this sparked to inform the content and feel of each drawing as it developed. Kat has a keen interest in making, craft and collaboration so at any time there was drawing, sewing, film-making, photography and desk based academic research all going on in the space. The finished linings are the a record of, and result of those intense drawing activities as well as an interpretation of the research.
One of the features of the cycling garments that attracted me to this project is that they convert from one type of garment to another. A long skirt might be folded, gathered or lifted up to above the knee by some mechanism of cords, buttons or hooks, to reveal bloomers worn underneath or perhaps a long coat on top; in another patent a skirt is taken off, to reveal bloomers, and worn as a cycling cape. In previous projects I’ve explored drawing and textiles, creating images that change or are revealed by the movement of the fabric so it was interesting to now do this with such rich research tied to the form of a historical garment and in conversation with the researcher and her team.
I was surprised to find out how controversial it was for women to cycle (particularly wearing bloomers), they were shouted and jeered at, refused entry to cafes, were socially shunned and had dirt thrown at them. The women who invented these garments had to be highly creative and balance the need for modesty with the need for free movement of the limbs and safety from fabric catching in the mechanism of the bicycle. Despite the privileged backgrounds of the very early cyclists (machines were expensive) I think these women must have had to display great courage and strength of purpose to push against convention, adopting and campaigning for women’s freedom to be accepted as cyclists, to race on cycles and wear clothing that allowed them more freedom.
The garments themselves will be worn and used for storytelling and presenting the research. You can see them in an exhibition at Look Mum No Hands from 7pm on the 13 June 2014 find out more at bikesandbloomers.com
details of silk twill linings Alice Angus 2014, photo Kat Jungnickel 2014
‘Hidden Families’ at Conference on Human Factors in Computing 2013
May 1, 2013 by aliceangus · 5 Comments
As part of our project Hidden Families with Lizzie Coles-Kemp (from the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway University of London). Alice illustrated, digitally printed and created a handmade quilted textile ‘poster’ about the wider project for the 2013 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing.
Hidden Families StoryCubes
March 25, 2013 by aliceangus · 2 Comments
“The visitors who told their stories are very proud of the work and the fact that they can see their work put to good use.” Cath Chesterton NEPACS
We were recently asked to create a set of 8 StoryCubes for Hidden Families (part of Royal Holloway University of London’s Families Disconnected by Prison project), to be used by Royal Holloway and partners such as Action for Prisoners Families, NEPACS and in training, talking about and raising awareness of the issues faced by families with a relative in prison.
We selected 48 of the images, originally created for the Hidden Families quilt, around the six key themes that had emerged – family, journey, time, finance, loneliness and support. Using a combination of participants’ photos, words and sketches with my illustrations, we created a block of 8 cubes that brings together some of people’s memories, comments and experiences.
Lizzie Coles-Kemp project lead said; “The focus of this project was to create a call to action by collecting the voices of families separated by prison and using different techniques to present the collective narrative. StoryCubes help us to develop the call to action by making the collective narrative interactive and providing another means for adding to and developing the story of this particular community. They make interactive and tactile objects from the textile quilt which are even more accessible to families, policy makers, practitioners and academics alike.”
NEPACS and Action for Prisoners Families will be using the cubes at training events and conferences, raising awareness of the impact of prison sentences on families.
View the whole Collection of 8 StoryCubes
Lifestreams : Tactile Poetry
March 21, 2013 by Giles Lane · 14 Comments
Since early December last year I’ve been carrying around one of the Lifecharm shells with me every day. It was generated from personal biosensor data gleaned not just from myself but from two other studio members last summer when we were capturing a range of experimental data sets to generate prototypes with. Using the data, Stefan generated this particular lifecharm as part of our third iteration of prototypes in late July. This shell was one of several that we later chose to have 3D printed in different materials at Shapeways – this one in sterling silver, the others in glass, ceramic, resin and steel.
I have been carrying it around to see how I feel about it, what it means to me and how I weave it into my everyday life. Our original concept for the lifecharms was that they might trigger an entirely novel way of developing meaningful relationships to the kinds of personal health data gathered by sensors (such as Fitbit, Fuelband etc) that people are now adopting as part of the ‘quantified self’ meme. Our colleagues at Philips Research, David & Steffen, told us that the statistics of use of these kinds of sensors by healthy people tended towards abandonment after just a few months as interest and engagement fades. Their interest was in exploring motivations that might make self-monitoring of wellbeing and healthy lifestyle a thing someone would choose to do before they discovered a health issue that required monitoring.
Our approach to this was to think about the way such sensor data is relayed back to users – most commonly in the form of screen-based visualisations. We wondered if perhaps these simply aren’t arresting enough to weave themselves into the narratives of everyday life that people construct for themselves. I’ve long been interested in touch as a form of knowing and sharing, and Proboscis have been exploring physical outputs from digital experiences for many years (such as tangible souvenirs) so we started out by thinking about how we might embody the data in a physical form that could be carried around and used like a charm or talisman. Stefan has written previously about our research methods and the journey that led us to devise the lifecharm and its inspiration from nature. His Lifestreams film also explains the various technical processes we adopted and adapted to create the results.
What’s so special about these ‘data objects’?
Unlike data visualisations the lifecharms are generated through a process of data transformation that does not confine them to an instrumental purpose such as relaying the original data back to us as information in a simplified and easy to comprehend manner. Instead, they are embodiments of the data, transformed from the abstract and ephemeral into the concrete and present. They establish the potential for uncommon insights to be perceived into the conditions from which the data was collected (i.e. someone’s health and lifestyle patterns), prompted through a process of tactile and intuitive reflection.
A Lifecharm shell synthesises the intrinsic qualities of the data within its morphology (visualisations, on the other hand, make extrinsic interpretations of such data). It is, at one and the same time, both an informational object – representing a state gleaned from sensor data – and also a philosophical thing triggering intuitive reflection. It unites different traditions of investigation and meaning making: the scientific and the mythic, or magical, both ‘being’ and ‘becoming’. However, a lifecharm is neither an ‘icon’ (nor iconic) nor an ‘implement’ (tool) – it embodies a state without representing it banally. What it exemplifies is not knowledge in the form of a ‘transactable’ commodity or product but a path to knowing that arises from an ongoing process of continuous interaction with and intervention within everyday habits, in this case practiced daily through touch.
Tactile Poetry?
The Lifecharms are not rational, functional objects, they are magical, irrational, indeed talismanic things by which, through tactile familiarity we may come into knowledge or understanding by way of revelation. Like poetry, which is much more than the sum of words and their arrangement on a page, they are more than the sum of the data that drives their growth parameters.
Carrying a lifecharm and touching it everyday, both consciously and even as a displacement activity, causes you to develop a relationship with it over time. You become familiar with its materiality – the feel of the shape in your hand; the weight of the material it is made of, the textures of its surface. None of these reveal the patterns in the data that generated it directly, however this is precisely the point at which the lifecharm begins to operate in a mythic or magical capacity – as a performance of patterns of being and behaviour embodied and reified into a talisman. Its ‘magical power’ could be defined as the potential for revelation that it holds for you to come into an uncommon insight by handling it over time. In this way you might come to perceive new possibilities for change and adaptation in your own patterns and behaviours – triggering your own process of subjective transformation. The lifecharm is thus not just a thing of being but an thing of becoming.
Like poetry, the lifecharms are also diachronic – we can experience and relate to them across time, whilst the meaning or data they embody is fixed in time (i.e. the shape of the shell or the words of the poem do not change). Dynamic data visualisations may often be synchronous – i.e. driven by live or recent data streams – but the way we experience and relate to them is more likely to be mediated (through devices such as smartphones, tablets or computers) and determined by our behaviours and patterns of using the devices they are mediated through. This makes the lifecharms intrinsically different to screen-based visualisations of data. The information that we may glean from them is less to do with an instrumental replay in visual form, and much more to do with how we begin to learn about the patterns they embody through a growing familiarity with their physical form. This difference becomes an opportunity to augment our means of understanding the phenomena recorded in the bio sensor data – an opportunity to explore meaning making through a relationship to complexity and intersubjectivity.
I came to my own uncommon insight – that the shells were in fact, tactile poems – partly as a result of my stay in Reite village in Papua New Guinea and the conversations I have had since with anthropologist James Leach, and also with poet Hazem Tagiuri. The villagers of Reite lead a traditional ‘kastom’ lifestyle in the jungle with a fairly minimal exposure to a ‘modern’ existence predicated on patterns of consumption and mediated sociality. (Although the modern world of industrially produced goods and telecommunications is slowly but surely encroaching and making an impact on their lives and culture). They were traditionally a non-literate people and remain highly skilled makers, carving and weaving many of the things they use. Touch is a powerful sense through which they acquire information, as it could be said to be with highly skilled artisans and craftspeople of our own society. But coupled with the incredible sense of presentness in everyday Reite life and the intensity with which they conduct social relations that is so unlike our own society of discontinuous being, I felt that their physical knowledge of materials connects at a deeper level and is more attuned to detail and granularity; whereas in our own western culture it has been debased as a lower form of skill and social standing – such as the negative way manual labour is contrasted with intellectual labour, or how craft is ‘lesser’ than art.
Since returning from PNG my conversations with James have often turned on this intensity and presentness – the form of radical continuity with being that life in the village feels like. I have, in turn, attempted to convey my experiences to friends, to describe how utterly different I felt whilst in the village. During the course of one conversation with Hazem I described watching a man ‘conjure’ fire from cold sticks in a firepit without using any form of tinder, ember or fire-lighting materials. What seemed like magic was a demonstration of the uncanny power and knowledge this man had in knowing how to feel for residual warmth within the sticks, and arrange them in just the right way that would amplify the heat enough to stimulate combustion. A skill and power I have not witnessed nor even heard of before. Hazem wrote a poem about my description of this act which he sent me as I was grappling with writing about the lifecharms and what they are. His poem helped me to connect the lifecharm’s talismanic nature to poetry. It helped kindle the spark of revelation that, like the way we come to know a thing through poetry, so the kind of knowing that resides within our hands and sense of touch is not just symbolic knowledge, but practical; that we may truly come to know something through touch alone. And that, like in poetry, the precise, elusive moment in which we come into the knowledge that the lifecharm offers us remains on the edge of conscious thought; a sensation we intuitively call revelation.
Invoking Fire by Hazem Tagiuri
We talk of his time in the jungle.
He describes one marvel in particular:
how a fire was conjured from cold sticks,
as if heat swelled in their fingertips.
No tinder, hot coals; embers a day dead.
“It’s not that it seems like magic, it simply is.
Their magic. These are not illusions.”
No sleight of hand. Smoke, but no mirrors.
What we mimic through tools,
these men of power can summon,
with quiet majesty. No incantations;
they save their breath for the flames.
Hidden Families publication
February 27, 2013 by aliceangus · 2 Comments
We have just finished putting together a new publication for the report on Families Disconnected by Prison, of which the Hidden Families project was one part. The project is led by Lizzie Coles-Kemp from the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway University of London and is going to be on show at the AHRC Connected Communities Showcase on the 12 March.
New Threads
January 31, 2013 by aliceangus · Comments Off on New Threads
A delivery of digitally printed fabric arrived this morning with the work for the Hidden Families project and for my mermaids and monsters work. I’ll be spending the next few days sewing up the quilts for Hidden Families partners.
The other fabric that arrived is part of new textile and embroidered work inspired by the traditional knowledge, memories and myths of the sea and water that have come up in Storyweir and Tall Tales Ghosts and Imaginings, In Good Heart and Sutton Grapevine.
Hidden Families
January 16, 2013 by aliceangus · 2 Comments
In the last few months I’ve been working on Hidden Families, a project with families with someone in prison. The project, run by by Lizzie Coles Kemp of the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway University of London, was trying to find out how to improve the way information is made available to families, because people sometimes don’t or can’t engage with support services. The hardships families experience are diverse;- travel, costs of visiting, the huge distances to visit,the stress of uncertain weather and travel conditions that might cause someone to be late and miss their visit, bringing children, access to pension, welfare and benefits advice, sentence planning, prisoner safety and welfare, being stigmatised and outcast, and not expecting help or having the ability to improve the situation.
The project has several facets and I was involved in working with Action for Prisoners Families, NEPACS (who provide support services for families separated by prison), performer Freya Stang and visitors to a visitors’ center in a Category A prison.
Action for Prisoners’ Families (APF),
works for the benefit of prisoners’ and offenders’ families by representing the views of families and those who work with them and by promoting effective work with families…
A prison or community sentence damages family life.
NEPACS builds bridges between prisoners, families and communities that they will return to, they
believe that investment must be made in resettlement and rehabilitation to ensure that there are fewer crime victims in the future, and less prospect of family life being disrupted and possibly destroyed by a prison sentence… After all, the families haven’t committed the crime, but they, especially the children, are greatly affected by the punishment
Lizzie’s approach to working with people differs from typical academic studies. Rather than only surveying or asking questions of a community she collaborates with groups to create projects, workshops and events that are independently of value to that group, rather than just to fulfill research ends, she often works with artists, writers and performers to support partners and participants in articulating ideas.
The project partners and visitors contributed to booklets, postcards, conversations and a wall collage gathering experiences of the practical, technical and emotional issues people face. I brought together the stories, experiences and sketches, with a series of sketches I made, into a digitally printed textile hanging based on the idea of a patchwork quilt for the NEPACS Visitors’ Centre. Participants expressed a wish to produce a version that could hang in the Chapel and Action For Prisoners Families have versions which they will using for their training, education and work raising awareness of the hidden issues families face.
New Lifecharm Shells
December 12, 2012 by Giles Lane · 2 Comments
Our colleague at Philips R&D, David Walker, was kind enough to have some more shells 3D printed in metal for a small experiment we’re planning to run in the new year. Here are some photos he’s taken of them.
Health, Bones, Teeth, Shells and biomineralisation
December 4, 2012 by stefankueppers · Comments Off on Health, Bones, Teeth, Shells and biomineralisation
This post is one of several exploring the research and creative processes Giles and I have undertaken for our project Lifestreams, an Art+Tech collaboration with industry partner, Philips R&D in Cambridge as part of Anglia Ruskin University’s Visualise programme.
What I did not yet know – and have been discovering – is just incredible!
Our explorations for Lifestreams initiated further research into bio–mineralisation in animals such as bones and seas-hells. It has opened my eyes – even more widely – into the utter inventiveness of Nature.
I studied architecture and spend several years in design research working on the analysis of morphology and dynamics at urban and architectural scale; e.g. how streets and public spaces and their features are organised and how people move through them – so, naturally, I have an ongoing fascination with patterns large and small, both man made and natural, as inspiration and reference for design ideas.
From this basis and with previous personal explorations into biomimetics many years ago (screen sculpture), I thought that it would be good to connect the idea of lifecharms and our shell concepts with the actual processes of bio–mineralisation as they occur in living systems.
To do this, I would need to have a better understanding of the real thing. Extraordinarily the last 30 years or so can really be seen as a new dawn of human discovery of the nano-scale in nature: Many scientists have been uncovering the most amazing natural phenomena of biological fabrication, self-assembly and material composition at the micro-scale.
Knowledge and research into bio–mineralisation has been of huge area of interest in biophysics, chemistry, medical and biological science. It has opened up new routes in areas such as tissue engineering for bone healing, design and production of prosthetics (i.e. limbs etc) and insights into nano-technologies and materials. For instance, this has helped in identifying bio-ceramics for bone scaffolds that could be used in medical procedures. Research into bio-mineralisation has prompted many innovations and holds a further promise in others fields well beyond medical sciences.
So setting out with virtually no understanding of bio-mineralisation I have come to learn that most living systems – ourselves included – are in fact expert at producing hard mineral deposits by growing them in crystal form. Organisms mix living tissue structures with the creation of a variety of crystalline substructures in very deliberate (and often quite subtly different) ways.
These structures of interlacing soft tissues and crystals of different configurations act as composites which are employed within our bodies to do different things; so you could say that ‘growing’ is more than just about purely organic matter but incorporates and embraces the growing and connecting of crystalline structures in our bodies all the time. We effectively grow our own bio-material composites: we have a variety of patterns in our different tissues that make these crystals assemble in very particular structural ways to – for example – construct bones that act as structural internal support, exoskeletons, teeth, sea-shells, glass-spines, beaks, etc.
The mineral/ crystalline deposits that animals and plants can form vary incredibly and – to my great surprise – have even produced such strange objects such as up to 1 meter long glass rods (spicules)
(capable of transmitting light similar to a glass fiber) in certain species of glass sponges
and even metal–composite teeth in molluscs!
Growth really encompasses quite complex interactions within cellular tissues where deeply integrated biological, chemical and physical processes result in layers of both living tissue and hard mineral deposits.
Human and animal bones, animal teeth and seashells alike are chemical compositions that are produced by cell tissue acting as templates and scaffolds. These provide the structure along which biologically controlled mineral deposits are formed. As well as the effect of many different chemical compositions, the patterning of these varies greatly depending on the functions they fulfil and what stresses they are under.
One extraordinary type of bio-mineral composite can be found in the teeth of chitons, a type of mollusc that even incorporates iron; in particular an iron oxide called magnetite which together with the organic components make them three times harder than human teeth.
So what good is this to our project research? Well, we are now exploring these phenomena to design a sculptural piece that will use aspects of this bio-mineral composite growth approach in nature. Our experiments are on the way so watch this space!
Installation at Bridport Arts Centre
October 17, 2012 by aliceangus · Comments Off on Installation at Bridport Arts Centre
Some images of the last of the various Storyweir installations from this summer and autumn made with Gary Stewart and Stefan Kueppers, these works are at Arts Centre 13 October till 23 November 2012.
We are showing a new 2 screen audio and video work and a series of 22 works on paper tracing the research ideas. Inspired by the notion that history looks different depending on your perspective, the video clips are randomly selected from a bank of video shot at Hive Beach along with maps, scans of the seabed, drawings and old films. It features footage of several people whose activities bring them into contact with different cycles of life of the area including a fossil hunter, an archaeologist, a kayaker, a member of Coastwatch and Bridport Wild Swimmers. Data about Wave height, wave period and wave direction data gathered over the summer at West Bay is being used to control and modulate an ambient soundtrack that accompanies the voices of many people who live, work and play on the coast.
Sea Shell Maths
October 16, 2012 by stefankueppers · 1 Comment
This post is one of several exploring the research and creative processes Giles and I have undertaken for our project Lifestreams, an Art+Tech collaboration with industry partner, Philips R&D in Cambridge as part of Anglia Ruskin University’s Visualise programme.
Our interest in using sea shells as the basis for making tangible lifecharms meant that I had to dive deeper into the maths, biology and development of shells to get a handle on how they grow and also to understand a bit more about what actually goes on at a physiological level. Fortunately there is a long history of the study of shell shapes and morphologies by different disciplines, biologists, mathematicians, artists et al to draw upon.
In my research I have come across many descriptions and models of shells, ranging from mathematical descriptions to those exploring the more complex biological processes involved in their genesis: these for example incorporate the growth of so called cellular templates which then undergo bio-mineralisation solidifying a soft scaffold of tissue into a rigid structural extension of the shell.
Essentially shells represent a geometric pattern that nature embraces and uses repeatedly in many biological structural systems such as the cochlea in our ears. sunflower blossoms and pine tree kernels. It is the the logarithmic helico-spiral. Imagine a flat logarithmic spiral that is then dropped from its centre on to the top of a cone and the spiral path then successively drops and drapes itself onto the surface of the cone.
This results in the 3-dimensional spiral that provides the growth direction for a generating curve which deposits different types of cellular tissue in sequence. The generating curve moves in three dimensions twisting, turning and changing dimension and rotation, at times even (depending on the shell species) changing its edge shape along the route. This then creates the intermittent bulges and outgrowths and sometimes sinusoidal waves along the shell edge.
Different types of shells come to being from a variety of generating curves and shapes that expand along the length of this spiral path as the shell grows. The height or flatness of the cone determines the compression of the helico-spiral on its central axis. As the shell grows the leading edge can vary in shape following rhythmic patterns or sporadic outgrowths. This has equivalents in natural growth phenomena in plants and becomes visible for example as growth rings in trees.
As a shell grows in volume it simultaneously adds variable patterning on the exterior surface of the shell affecting growth based both on environmental and health factors. The surface colouring of the shell is patterned through a diffusion reaction process taking place just at the outward facing shell edge. The mollusc itself is never in direct control of this external pattern as it grows and even within the same species these patterns can vary dramatically.
What has been interesting in taking the formulas as a departure point into a series of parametric and other model variants is that the math evidently only is an approximation of the sea shell form. Some nuances are missed in the pure formula generated shell approach and this became evident when I changed the way I was modelling my shells in different systems and moved away from using straight functional geometric models to more iterative and generative types.
D’Arcy Thompson: On Growth and Form @ InternetArchive
Seashells: the plainness and beauty of their mathematical description
D. Fowler, H. Meinhardt, and P. Prusinkiew, Modeling Seashells
Storyweir at Bridport Arts Centre
October 10, 2012 by aliceangus · Comments Off on Storyweir at Bridport Arts Centre
Yesterday we delivered a series of research drawings and video work made in collaboration with Gary Stewart and Stefan Keuppers to Bridport Arts Centre for their exhibition of a selection of work from ExLab2012. Gary and I have been working on a new two screen audio & video work inspired by conversations about the experience of time and memory we had with the Cultural Geographers from Exeter University we’ve been collaborating with this summer for our Storyweir commission at Hive Beach. Hive Beach is a continually shifting strip of shingle between the land and sea where the endless cycles of sun, tide and waves cause changes larger than we can imagine, but which are also felt by humans on a daily basis.
The new video at BAC is a new piece combining video shot at Hive Beach with maps, scans of the seabed and archival material. It features footage of several people whose activities bring them into contact with different cycles of life and histories of the area including a fossil hunter, an archaeologist, a member of Coastwatch and Bridport Wild Swimmers. Data on wave height, wave period and wave direction data gathered from the Channel Coastal Observatory beuy at West Bay is being used to control and modulate the ambient soundtrack that accompanies the voices of people who live, work and play on the coast.
You can see it at BAC from 13 October to 23 November.
Shell drawings
September 25, 2012 by stefankueppers · Comments Off on Shell drawings
This post is one of several exploring the research and creative processes Giles and I have undertaken for our project Lifestreams, an Art+Tech collaboration with industry partner, Philips R&D in Cambridge as part of Anglia Ruskin University’s Visualise programme.
I have talked in a previous post on lifecharms to shells about talismanic, engaging and tangible transfigurations of lifestyle and health data in the form of sea shells. I now needed to explore the real thing. Off I went on another little spree of discovery both on-line and the real world, picking up a variety of ‘snails’ trails if you will.
I had been making some initial sketches of shells whilst looking at some of the mathematical models that have been around for shells (more of this in a later post) and got deeper into the strange and wonderful world of shell forms to pick p ideas for forms and processes that I could draw on in the making of our own shells.
Aside from producing a large haul of images from various on-line searches I wanted to make sure I would see a broad variety of the ‘real thing’. So being in London I went on to do take some pictures of ancient and contemporary shells in the wonderful and inspiring Natural History Museum within its fossil and invertebrate collections.
From these I made a lot of sketches for our life-streams shells so that I could get a deeper taste and sense of the kind of shell shape variations that exist. To me these sketches helped me to gain a clearer more visual understanding of some of the various archetypes and key differences in different shell structures that I came across. It got me to think about routes for the shell modelling process I have been evolving alongside on the computer and the 3d printers.
I had looked at both ancient fossils which had lost any of their external pigmentation as well as contemporary shells that still retained all their wonderful colour and detail. I am continuously amazed at the range and expressiveness of shapes and colours pigmentation of shells that are out there.
From lifecharm to shell
September 19, 2012 by stefankueppers · 1 Comment
This post is one of several exploring the research and creative processes Giles and I have undertaken for our project Lifestreams, an Art+Tech collaboration with industry partner, Philips R&D in Cambridge as part of Anglia Ruskin University’s Visualise programme.
From its beginning our collaboration with Philips R&D had a focus on lifestyle and health as the two key subject areas so they have formed an integral part of our dialogue and explorations. We’ve spent time in our discussions making and reflecting on the cross-connections between the two; how they intersect and influence each other. As our discussions evolved, we became more interested in some of the challenges for expressing and documenting personal and collective lifestyle choices visibly or invisibly affecting personal health and quality of life.
Stimulating personal motivation for change or reinforcement of positive activities through new means of reflection emerged as goal worth exploring further. Our primary purpose has been driven by thinking of ways and means to make lifestyle choices visible as a means for reflection and possible behaviour change.
We debated what the possible scale and scope of factors affecting our lifestyles were that could be points of reflection; what the nature is of the need for both individuals and groups to see and reflect on the impact of their own and collective choices on health, well-being and quality of life. Our enquiry ranged from evolving ways to make visible and re-enforce positive patterns to ways of making bigger changes to negative patterns. Our aim is to be able to engage people both through individual and collective reflection and debate.
For instance, what could be vehicles for change that have broad reach spanning young and old without requiring great depth of knowledge to ‘read’ complex information? What could be more emotive, accessible, tangible and shareable? That could indeed inspire a visceral and instinctual form of personal and public reflection? What would form could this take?
Our response to these questions was to take totemic objects as emotive points of reference – iconic and tactile tools for ongoing reflection. We began planning to evolve talismans of self-health, personal pieces that could be carried around on a keyring or as jewelery to remind ourselves of what matters to us. The might be like the charms of old, bracelets embellished with objects, tracing key events and people in our lives but extended to become markers for health and quality of life.
From these ideas of the charm we searched for physical forms that could act as personal objects attached to life, as symbols that are already in the public mind. We arrived at the seashell.
Lifecharm Shells Redux
September 18, 2012 by Giles Lane · Comments Off on Lifecharm Shells Redux
Our collaborator at Philips R&D in Cambridge, David Walker, was generous enough to have some of the Lifecharm shells fabbed in a range of more exotic materials than our initial prototypes using Shapeways (a 3D printing firm spun-out of Royal Philips Electronics). The materials used range from metal/silver, ceramic and frosted and transparent glass.
Many thanks also to Dipak Mistry, our collaborator on Visualise Lifestreams at Arts & Business Cambridge who dropped them by the studio this morning.
Storyweir at Hive Beach video
September 8, 2012 by Giles Lane · Comments Off on Storyweir at Hive Beach video
Saturday 8th and Sunday 9th are the final two days of Storyweir on Hive Beach. This video documents the two evenings of projections and live cello performances, by Matthew Benjamin, on August 3rd & 4th.
Proboscis at Burton v3 from David Rogers on Vimeo.
Storyweir – last few days to see
September 5, 2012 by Giles Lane · Comments Off on Storyweir – last few days to see
Our installation on Hive Beach in Dorset, Storyweir, finishes on Sunday 9th September. Here are some photos taken by photographer Pete Millson. From October 13th we will also be participating in an exhibition about the ExLab commissions in Bridport Arts Centre’s Allsop Gallery.
Presenting the Lifecharm shells
August 9, 2012 by stefankueppers · Comments Off on Presenting the Lifecharm shells
This morning we are off to Cambridge for our final meeting with our collaboration partners at Philips R&D, where we will be presenting the lifecharm shells we have generated from our health data and talking about where we will be taking the project next.
Of fly-eye domes and public health data sets
August 8, 2012 by stefankueppers · Comments Off on Of fly-eye domes and public health data sets
This post is one of several exploring the research and creative processes Giles and I have undertaken for our project Lifestreams, an Art+Tech collaboration with industry partner, Philips R&D in Cambridge as part of Anglia Ruskin University’s Visualise programme.
As part of our quest to explore making health data tangible we began to research means of experiencing larger volumes of collective health data as a complementary experience to the ‘lifecharms‘ illustrating individual data streams. We imagined these different strands operating in tandem to provide micro and macro perspectives on how we can forge new relationships to health and wellbeing.
The question immediately arose of how we could achieve meaningful translations of complex health data. Our initial solution was to turn public health data (derived from Network of Public Health Observatories) into varied surface expressions on a larger installation work, allowing a degree of participation from direct public interaction to inform manipulations of the public data sets. To achieve this we thought about the production of manipulated stacking surfaces that would aggregate into a communal structure.
Our idea for manifesting this health data was to take each data set, determine its dimensions (i.e. which and how many data ranges does it have, what do they represent? e.g. mortality rates, obesity, etc.) and take each of these to be the driving parameters of a set number of ways to cut, punch, emboss or bend thin sheets of material, either paper, card or metal. We would then create one layer of material for each data dimension, apply the parameter controlled action for it (ie, print, cut, punch, bend; where and by how much) and do this for each of the data dimensions.
For each dataset (by ward or time span) we would end up with a stack of screens which together would define a unique surface or mask that would be specific in both tactile and visual effect. These stacked screens would make up the facets to be collated into a larger physical structure that would evolve out of the geometry of the base shape and be assembled by members of the audience to ‘collectively grow’ the public health data installation piece.
We proposed to use Buckminster Fuller‘s fly-eye dome as the base for a slightly larger than human size dome structure which would rest on a tripod-like support structure under which visitors could move to look up and in. The fly-eye dome is a design variation on Bucky’s earlier geodesic dome structures lending itself well as a projection structure. We planned to use it to present transformed public health datasets which become layered and patterned masks to produce alternating light and shadows from within the dome surface. Each facet, or mask, would be representative of a specific grouping of public health data, either by time interval or by geographic proximity.
In thinking about how this would work as an installation, we came up with two different projection approaches creating two types of experiences:
- Outward facing masks with switch-able internal illumination creating projections that are cast on the gallery wall interiors and,
- Inward facing masks with with external illumination where the audience steps inside the dome structure manipulating an exterior light source (or ‘sun’) around the dome structure by hand.
A very attractive benefit of collaborating with Philips is their expertise and product range in professional lighting. In particular, Philips has developed a product series and related technologies called LivingColours which we considered to be a good option for the illumination in our fly-eye domes.
Despite developing this concept quite far, we eventually moved away from it as we felt it didn’t encompass enough of a sense of the living and organic processes which we want to engage people in. In many ways we felt it was moving back towards static data visualisations that are too readily ‘readable’ and which soon cease to have the power to engage people in an ongoing and reflective relationship with how public data can be seen as part of the environment in which we exist.
Video clip of Storyweir Performance at Hive Beach
August 8, 2012 by Giles Lane · Comments Off on Video clip of Storyweir Performance at Hive Beach
A short video clip from the Storyweir performance at Hive Beach, Dorset on Friday 3rd August 2012. Video projections by Proboscis (Gary Stewart & Alice Angus) with live cello by Matthew Benjamin.
Newsletter July 2012
July 28, 2012 by admin · Comments Off on Newsletter July 2012
Its been over a year since we sent out our last newsletter – not that we haven’t been busy, in fact we’ve been absorbed in a whole range of projects and activities :
Storyweir at Exlab, Hive Beach, Dorset
We have been commissioned by Exlab to create a new project at Hive Beach, Dorset as part of the Cultural Olympiad. The work opens on Saturday 28th July and will remain on site until 9th September. We have 3 days of free talks and 2 nighttime events (projections with live cello) on Friday 3rd to Sunday 5th August – all welcome.
http://proboscis.org.uk/tag/storyweir/
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This October sees the launch of our new monthly publication – each month we will crowdsource, print and post out an eBook to subscribers created and shared on http://bookleteer.com sharing the most beautiful, experimental, thought-provoking and inspirational eBooks people have created to inspire and provoke others into creating more of their own.
SUBSCRIBE HERE : http://bookleteer.com/blog/2012/07/introducing-the-periodical/
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We’re also introducing a whole range of new features to http://bookleteer.com this year – public sharing, library pages as well as some exciting new developments later this year. Follow our progress here :
http://bookleteer.com/blog/category/updates-improvements/
We’ve also dropped the minimum print run for our Short Run printing service to just 25 copies per eBook and the prices for printing A6 eBooks have dropped between 30-50%. Check the prices with our estimator tool here:
http://bookleteer.com/blog/ppod/
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Proboscis have been collaborating with Royal Holloway’s Information Security Group (as part of the their EPSRC/ESRC/TSB research project Vome – http://www.vome.org.uk) to work with a local community in Pallion, Sunderland to create a sustainable knowledge and support network for local people to help each other cope and deal with benefit changes. We have developed a set of simple tools and processes to assist this “Ideas Exchange” – co-designed with the local community and are helping them integrate and adopt them into their ways of getting things done.
http://proboscis.org.uk/tag/pallion/
This Autumn we will be releasing a “Neighbourhood Ideas Exchange” package with versions of the tools that any community will be able to adopt and adapt for their own uses. Look out for announcements in September/October.
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Visualise Lifestreams
Proboscis has been commissioned by Futurecity and Arts&Business Cambridge to collaborate with Philips R&D in Cambridge as part of Anglia Ruskin University’s Visualise Public Art programme. We are exploring new forms for motivating people to incorporate health monitoring into their lifestyles by linking personal health data to systems that create tangible outputs. Starting with 3D printed ‘shells’ whose growth and shape is determined by data sets collected from ourselves, we plan to move on to feeding data to affect the growth of crystals and eventually towards ‘growing’ a shell organically through tissue engineering.
http://proboscis.org.uk/tag/lifestreams/
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Recent Publications
Professor Starling’s Thetford-London-Oxford Expedition
by Lisa Hirmer, Andrew Hunter, Josephine Mills, Leila Armstrong, Giles Lane and Hazem Tagiuri
Download Free : http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=2587
Buy a limited edition set : http://proboscis.org.uk/store.html#profstarling
Material Conditions
by Active Ingredient, Desperate Optimists, Jane Prophet, Janet Owen Driggs & Jules Rochielle, Karla Brunet, London Fieldworks, Ruth Maclennan, Sarah Butler
Download Free : http://diffusion.org.uk/?cat=1043
Buy a limited edition set : http://proboscis.org.uk/store.html#materialconditions
City As Material : London
Contributions by Tim Wright, Simon Pope, Ben Eastop & Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino
Download Free : http://diffusion.org.uk/?cat=976
Buy a limited edition set : http://proboscis.org.uk/store.html#cityasmaterial1
