“Shawn Davis is a chemistry teacher. But his spare hours are spent amidst lean feathers, fine wire and tiny hooks, practicing the age-old craft of fly tying. Turning such a practical thing as a fishing fly into an artwork—and innovating while doing so, as Davis does—serves as a stirring reminder to search for art in the everyday.”
via Anthropologie
Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture
Antennae 9: Mechanical Animals (pdf)
“The main theme gathers together the work of a number of artists, scientists, and academics who over the past decade have relentlessly contributed to the creating, researching, and theorising of the cross-fields between nature and robotics. The issue resembles a journey of discovery into a fascinating alternative reality where the boundaries nature and technology are deceptively and at times disturbingly blurred.”
Antennae 13: Interspecies (pdf)
“Through the propelling enthusiasm and deep anxieties characteristic of recent post-humanism approaches, interspecies communication has become something of a chimerical entity. We all, in one way or another, communicate to animals, especially with our closest pets. The cat and the dog have co-habited with us long enough to allow the development of a shared syntax made of body language, sounds, habits and rituals which enable a bi-lateral communication. Anthropomorphism plays, of course, a part in our communicational exchanges with animals. When do we really see the real animal, or when do we just see ourselves reflected in it?”
Also:
Antennae 6: Rogue Taxidermy (pdf)
Antennae 7: Botched Taxidermy (pdf)
Antennae 12: Pig (pdf)
Proboscis’ Urban Tapestries: Public Authoring in the Wireless City project (2004-2007) changed what I thought digital storytelling could be and do, and its desire to explore what might constitute a 21st century Mass Observation still resonates deeply with me. I found myself thinking about this after the Powerhouse Museum‘s Seb Chan and Luke Dearnley presented on culture + heritage + digital at last week’s Web Directions South conference.
A few things from their preso have stuck with me, not least because they talked about some approaches to knowledge creation and dissemination that I think academics could put into practice more often. For example, over the past ten years museums have had to learn to give up some of their authority and control, or at least to understand authority and control a bit differently. Describing the current situation, they say:
“Now it is all about being a data provider, getting our knowledge and collections out into the community where they can be debated and gather feedback and attract interest. The social web and now the mobile web has made this possible at the kind of scale that wasn’t possible in 2001. At the same [time] we now have ‘contextual authority’ rather than what we previously imagined was ‘overall authority’.”
And when discussing collections, they raise some interesting points about location and scale:
“The other big change is that of scale. A collection like that of the Powerhouse used to feel ‘large’ but in actual fact it is tiny. Its value in the digital space now is no longer as an island but only in what it can contribute to national and international collections – a collection of collections. That’s a tough challenge for a State-funded museum whose majority of ‘visitors’ walking in the door live in Sydney. But at scale new possibilities emerge.
What this boils down to, at least in terms of traditional social and cultural research, is the necessity of being comfortable with the fact that we create only one of many types of knowledge, but also being comfortable with the fact that we already create the kind of contextual knowledge that can be used by others in ways we can only imagine. (I think that empirical researchers with a background in participant observation or action research are already well on board.)
But I’m reminded that I never learned about Mass Observation in my anthropology classes and, in retrospect, I think it was because in an era of privileged anthropologists exclusively studying the exotic Other, MO sought to create “an anthropology of ourselves” by recording the everyday lives of ordinary British people. In other words, “their” knowledge (both subject and object) wasn’t as good as “our” knowledge–and it didn’t belong in a formal education. But what if all ethnographic data were put together into a “collection of collections” with which people could do all sorts of things? Yale University’s Human Relations Area Files project has done a brilliant job of compiling a wide diversity of cultural materials, but when I used it to create the re/touch interaction design encyclopaedia, well, let’s just say that its digital format did precious little to help me. My point here is that we also need to work with digital media folks more often.
When I think of data visualisation and cultural heritage, I see extraordinary, but still largely untapped, potential–especially in terms of working with qualitative data that do not easily lend themselves to snappy charts and infographics. Locative media have, I think, fared much better in being able to represent less clear-cut or ephemeral information distributed across space and time, allowing us to see over and under things with extraordinary detail. (As an aside, I’m really looking forward to seeing the upcoming Convergence Special Issue on Locative Media.)
But I also remain convinced that data visualisation, either quantitative or qualitative, could be productively complemented by more critical explorations in data materialisation. I’ve written before about how materialisation can be more affective than visualisation, and while Timo Arnall and BERG get a lot of much deserved attention for gorgeous wireless visualisations like Immaterials and Wireless World, my favourite video of theirs has always been Nearness:
.
That single video did more to help me understand how RFID works than dozens of other papers and visualisations put together, and all because it didn’t just make the invisible visible, it made it physical or materialised it. As Jack Schulze explained:
“RFID is a complex and fairly abstract technology to grasp. We have to be careful in how we communicate with it. There are many leaps of imagination and understanding required to grasp it and hold a useful model of how it works and what is happening, let alone see how it maps usefully and elegantly into the world around us. The familiarity of the chain reaction form, means the audience quickly grasps that the normal kinetic transfer of force in the sequence is replaced by invisible forces that work very closely together. Like invisible digital breaths between objects. Because the form was familiar, our hope was the concept of nearness without touching would be clearly understood.”
But back to Seb and Luke’s presentation. They showed a bunch of interesting work, and I was completely taken by the New York Public Library’s historical menus project. Oh, how I wish that radishes would become popular again! But mostly I would love to see these data materialised as cookbooks and servingware.
The UK’s National Maritime Museum and Citizen Science Alliance‘s Old Weather project is also pretty impressive. As Fiona Romeo and Lucinda Blaser explain:
“A programme of citizen science allows our museum to link cutting-edge science and issues with our historic purpose and subjects. The Old Weather project also delivers a reusable interface for the distributed transcription of archive materials … The logbooks, which date from 1914 to 1923, contain previously untapped information about the weather, ships’ movements and daily events onboard. This data is not available anywhere else, and has the potential to advance scientific understanding of climate variability and change. By taking part in Old Weather, members participate in and gain an understanding of how climate science research is undertaken, data are processed and results used, allowing them to contribute towards important climate research activities.”
Of particular interest to me is how the project treats participants as collaborators in knowledge creation rather than as mere informants or labourers:
“The Citizen Science Alliance is guided by a philosophy that all projects must answer a real scientific research question. The projects must never waste the ‘clicks’, or time, of volunteers, who should be respected as collaborators, including, where appropriate, recognition as co-authors of academic papers.”
The transcription tool also allows for the recording of additional data that keeps volunteer participants interested and engaged:
“While there may be an initial pleasure in encountering the poetic language of the weather scale, there was a risk that the task of extracting observations would be considered ‘dry’ or repetitive after a short time. But our volunteers have been inspired by the real human stories that they discover in the logs and they capture weather data in order to follow the stories of vessels and people through to the end. In doing so, they gain an insight into life at sea during this time period. For example, they come to understand that enemy combat was not as common as they might have imagined, and there is much more in the logs to do with the practicalities of living life at sea.”
Again, the richness of this information and the experience of working with it really makes me want to see people making some ship dioramas!
But the final lesson from their project, I think, is relevant to all public cultural heritage data visualisation and materialisation projects:
1) Provide a platform for volunteers to share their data, findings and challenges;
2) Ensure that professional researchers enter into discussion with the volunteers, both to set specific challenges and provide feedback, but also to respond to the questions and interests that emerge from the community itself;
3) Release all of the analysed data back to the community, as soon as is practicable for the project.
And now, writing all this down just makes me realise how much I want the Counting Sheep project to be a solid exploration of what socially and culturally focussed design research can contribute to the visualisation and materialisation of cultural heritage…
“If you’re a both nature lover and a geek, you would certainly love the Yahoo Farm. The Yahoo Farm is a 60 cm wide diorama, sitting in your bedroom and bringing you online data from the Yahoo ecosystem.
For example, the wind mill rotation below is directly controlled by the wind speed outside (being connected to the Yahoo Weather API), the hand-painted backgrounds are switched according to the weather state, a new sheep is coming out of the barn each time one of your friends gets online on Yahoo Messenger, and each new email lights up a fruit in the Email Tree.”
The RoboFun Team developed and presented this at the 2011 Yahoo Open Hack in Bucharest, winning the Hacker’s Choice Award.
First of all, dioramas are totally awesome. And this tech is interesting and cute as.
I’ve always been amazed by Björk. I like how her works combines the old and the new, the natural and the technological.
The Modern Things
All the modern things
Like cars and such
Have always existed
They’ve just been waiting in a mountain
For the right moment
Listening to the irritating noises
Of dinosaurs and people
Dabbling outside[...]
All the modern things
Have always existed
They’ve just been waiting
To come out
And multiply
And take over
It’s their turn now(Post, 1995)
But Björk latest project, Biophilia, involves some epic multimedia art and service design that I suspect doesn’t just preach to the converted, and might actually create some new critical and creative publics.
The project
“Biophilia consists of ‘a studio album, apps, a new website, custom-made musical instruments, live shows and educational workshops,’ not to mention a documentary film. Over the next three years, she plans to play six-week residencies in eight cities, all at intimate venues, to audiences of less than 2,000.” [src]
The apps
“Biophilia for iPad will include around 10 separate apps, all housed within one ‘mother’ app. Each of the smaller apps will relate to a different track from the album, allowing people to explore and interact with the song’s themes or even make a completely new version. It will also be an evolving entity that will grow as and when the album’s release schedule dictates, with new elements added. Scott Snibbe, an interactive artist who was commissioned by Björk last summer to produce the app, as well as the images for the live shows (which will combine his visuals with National Geographic imagery, mixed live from iPads on the stage), describes how Björk saw the possibilities of using apps, not as separate to the music, but as a vital component of the whole project. “Björk’s put herself way at the forefront here by saying, ‘We’ll release this album and these apps at the same time and they’re all part of the same story.’ The app is an expression of the music, the story and the idea.” For one song, Virus, the app will feature a close-up study of cells being attacked by a virus to represent what Snibbe calls: “A kind of a love story between a virus and a cell. And of course the virus loves the cell so much that it destroys it.” The interactive game challenges the user to halt the attack of the virus, although the result is that the song will stop if you succeed. In order to hear the rest of the song, you have to let the virus take its course. Using some artistic license, the cells will also mouth along to the chorus.” [src]
Björk’s Biophilia 1.1 featuring Virus, Crystalline, and Cosmogony apps
The instruments
“For these shows, Björk has commissioned the creation of a number of new music instruments. Says the press release, ‘Among these creations are four 10-foot pendulum-harps, in which the swinging motion plucks the strings and illustrates the songs’ gravitational subject matter. There is also a unique 10-foot pin barrel harp called the Sharpsichord, a midi-controlled pipe organ and celeste (re-fitted with bronze gamelan bars), twin musical tesla coils, a hang player and an award-winning 24-piece Icelandic female choir’.” [src]
“Another of Björk’s Biophilia cohorts was an Icelandic organ maker called Björgvin Tómasson, who received a call from her last summer. Following a meeting in Iceland, Tómasson was given the job of creating two brand new instruments: one, a small organ controlled via MIDI equipment, allowing Björk to play it using a computer; the other, an old celeste that was rebuilt to incorporate the sounds of a traditional gamelan (Björk refers to this new hybrid instrument as a ‘gameleste’). ‘Prior to this experience, I would never have thought of the possibility of doing anything like this to a 100-year-old instrument,’ Tómasson says. ‘A new instrument was created in that moment’.” [src]
The Gameleste – a custom instrument for Björk
The workshops
“At these performances, she’ll use the apps to perform Biophilia in full twice a week. During her residencies, the venues will also collaborate with local schools to host music-education workshops.” [src]
“So, with the songs for this project, I try to address scales, chords, rhythm, different time signatures. A lot of things that are meant to be 3D are going through a revolution with touch screens right now, including music teaching– it’s perfect for all the algorithms. In each city that we visit for this tour, we are going to have classes for kids where they can try out the instruments and the iPad and write songs and take them home. And they’ll be teachers showing them the basics of musicology and showing them how, for instance, the viruses on the ‘Virus’ app move in similar ways as the music.” [src]
And last, but definitely not least, here’s the new video for Crystalline, directed by Michel Gondry:
Gorgeous.
Ars Electronica: Temporary tattoos fitted with electronics make flexible, ultrathin sensors
“New research published in Science describes technology that allows electrical measurements (and other measurements, such as temperature and strain) using ultra-thin polymers with embedded circuit elements. These devices connect to skin without adhesives, are practically unnoticeable, and can even be attached via temporary tattoo.
[...]
The authors suggest there are a huge number of applications for this technology, including remote medical monitoring, biological/chemical sensing, human-machine interface, and covert communications. There are a couple areas where further development is needed, however: RF communication frequencies change when the circuits are stretched, and dead skin and sweat have to be dealt with during long-term use. These aren’t insurmountable complications, though, so we’ll be interested in following this as further work is done (the unclassified work, at least).”
Nature:’Electronic skin’ could replace bulky electrodes
“The device is thin enough to stick to skin using only the short-range van der Waals forces that hold molecules together, as the forces that threaten to detach it are 10 million times weaker than they would be for a chip a millimetre thick. The circuits are fashioned as a net of narrow S-shaped filaments, so they can stretch and contract without breaking.
[...]
One major downside is that the continual shedding of skin cells means that the patch falls off after a few days. The researchers are looking for ways around this, so they can be worn for months at a time. The electronic skin is also expensive to make, but Rogers hopes that the patches could eventually be mass-produced. ‘We’re building on existing technology rather than reinventing it, so I think the technical hurdles to commercial manufacture are lower than you’d ordinarily see’.”
This is interesting and important on so many levels my brain hurts.
But I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, GECKO PHYSICS FTW!
I love this new Kiwi TV advert so much that I’m willing to overlook that it’s a bank advert and just focus on how sweet a story it tells about a boy and his sheep:
The moral of the story: You don’t have to kill your sheep to get a Nintendo DS. (Also, females of all species are fickle.)
Or, as Ben says, “Teach a boy to kill a sheep, he has a DS. Teach a boy to shear a sheep, he has a new game every growing season.”