Dipping into the canal

I have some early stage ideas floating around for a project that needs me to get a sense of what sort of microbial life might be found in the canals. With fellow BOM Fellow Melissa Grant running a pop-up lab for her Bioprospecting Birmingham event it was too good an opportunity – to start turning vague ideas into something tangible – to miss.

First though I had to roll up my sleeves and collect some samples of canal water.

This was done with some trepidation having spent my first three years in Birmingham reading in the student newspaper about people ending up in the canal and the tacit knowledge that what lurks within really isn’t good for you. Still, not as bad as as the Gowanus Canal in New York, eh?

I set off armed with latex gloves and tap water for washing my hands knowing that I wanted to collect 7 samples at intervals along the length of the Worcester & Birmingham Canal between where it emerges from the Wast Hill Tunnel having flowed under Hawkesley and where it ends in Birmingham city centre. I had a rough idea of where each sample would be taken, but I hadn’t really thought through how I would actually get the water from the canal into my prepared glass jars. This became all too apparent when I reached the tunnel.

The banks were a bit muddy, so I went to check out the concrete platforms right up by the tunnel thinking I might at least have a solid surface to work from and, looking at the far bank, something to hold onto too. Nope! The gate to the steps down to that side was locked. I’d already ruled out the steps on the near side: although I could get to them, I decided I didn’t want to go very far down them!

Nothing for it but to back up a bit, get a bit grubby, reach over the edge and hope for the best.

Success!

No loud splashes or tales of woe from the other 6 collection sites either. These were, in order,

#2 Where the Worcester & Birmingham Canal meets the Stratford-upon-Avon Canal at King’s Norton Junction

#3 By the electrons and chocolate at Bournville

#4 Where the water hangs in the air above the Selly Oak bypass

#5 By the Ross Barlow hydrogen-powered canal boat (where the waste product from the fuel cell is water)

#6 Under a dark bridge. We think there might be trolls…

#7 And finally from close to the Gas Street Basin

After that it was a quick dash home, a good shower and then on to BOM to check out Melissa’s latest laboratory facility and a recipe for agar growth medium featuring Marmite, honey and powdered milk.

After this curious mixture had been left to set and cool down in the Petri dishes, we swabbed water from each of my collection jars onto the agar plates and …well …nothing really. Now we just have to wait and see what grows on that lovely meal we prepared.

Bioprospecting Birmingham runs through until the end of the week and Melissa’s also giving a talk on Friday. I encourage you to go and see what’s emerged from the canals and also from the other locations around the city that have been swabbed by volunteers.

The rest of my photos from my collection expedition can be viewed on Flickr, and I’ll report back in a bit with (hopefully) some documentation of life forms from the Petri dishes.

Making templates to make things from

Having arrived at a design for the Where the Sky Widens pods, I’ve been developing it into a template form from which workshop participants can assemble their own pods.

I went back to the 3D design software and re-worked the layout of the parts to try and minimise some awkward and fragile sections. There are lots of steps and software jumps in this, so I had to laser cut the results and assemble them again to check that everything was as it should be.

It wasn’t quite, but those details were easy to fix. (I think they’re fixed, anyway!)

One thing that worked really well was the dumb-bells. I want to transport the templates still attached to the A1 sheet of paper they’re cut into. This means we’ll have to finish cutting out parts of the outlines at the workshops and the dumb-bells make getting scissors right up to the cut line a lot easier.

I also experimented with engraving the assembly instructions onto the same sheets, but this made the cut time waaay tooooo loooooong (time == money and I’ll be lasering a lot of these things!)

Twitter has declared the pods also look like tribolites. It’s not wrong.

Colony residency: final push

Only 5 more days of the residency at the PM Studio left; I’d better squeeze in another update!

After the first wave of lasering and constructing with Sarah Barnes, there was just enough time to refine the design of the creatures and squeak out enough cuts to make 3 creatures out of plywood (a lot nicer material to work with and handle compared to the MDF I had been using for the previous prototypes).

Cabourg stack waiting to be assembled

Version 9 of the spine has vertebrae that echo the street layout of Cabourg: a French seaside resort and influence in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. I like this as an allusion to the multi-path error phenomena from which the creatures’ movement is derived.

Speaking of their movement, it was a very nice moment when we got this tail moving:

It had been tense moments up until that point because as well as the change in vertebrae material I’d also changed the hose I was using for the ‘spinal column’ and tweaked the positioning of the hole used for the driver cord.

Alongside changes in the overall dimensions, we now had a structure that was a lot lighter and more manageable to carry. It would still be a bit of a weight to carry for any length of time, though, and since I want people to be able to use their hands for sensing movement rather than gripping and carrying, we also did a few experiments with binding the creatures to their guardian:

Hands free!

The process of wrapping up yourself and a creature in a long length of fabric is an interesting one and I think it has a lot of potential for symbolic beginnings and fostering empathy.

Once the 9 days of laser cutting were over (gosh we came a long way in that short amount of time!), it was time to return to the Pervasive Media Studio and tackle the code and electronics once again.

Wait! No! What am I saying?! Once the 9 days of laser cutting were over, it was time to spend a couple of days sanding the edges of all the vertebrae in order to remove the burnt wood and to make them smooth to the touch. The result was well worth it, though.

Sanded plywood vertebrae – much more touchable

After another couple of days soldering electronic circuits, the creatures were ready for assembly with GPS units, batteries, Arduino and the servos that control the articulated tail section. This isn’t yet the final set-up I want to use, but I had a group of playtesters arriving in Bristol the next day and I wanted to get something up and running so that they could have something landscape-reactive to try out.

The night before the playtesting I lay the freshly-assembled creatures out on a convenient table in the Studio and it was borderline unnerving to see them twitching away and generally just sort of quietly owning the place. Y’know, in a good way. In a very good way.

“Colony creatures are having a quick run-through of their presentation for next week’s Lunchtime Talk at @PMStudioUK”

Have we got space for another close-up of some curves? Yes. Yes, I think we might…

…And then play testing was upon us!

I’d invited a crack squad of playful people who I believed would ask me some challenging questions and push my assumptions about what I thought I’d made: Jen Southern, Stuart Nolan, David Morton, Kat Jungnickel, Sam Underwood and Laura Kriefman. I wasn’t disappointed! Much to consider, interrogate and experiment with.

The playtesters get acquainted with the creatures

In the few hours we had we didn’t focus on the landscape-reactiveness of the creatures so much, but there was a lot of exploration of how their forms related to the people carrying them. Here are just a few examples:

The other discovery was that the creatures were a MASSIVE invitation for strangers to approach us, ask what they were and, often, pose for photos with them. This process had started even before we’d left the studio, and once outside they continued to pique the curiosity of young and old alike:

A set of my photos and videos from the day is on Flickr.

This was all very satisfying and followed on nicely from my Lunchtime Talk at the Studio last year where I talked about how I see the things I make as permission givers and invitations for triangulation. Yup, I’m very pleased with that.

This Friday I’ll be giving another Lunchtime Talk at the Studio and, fingers crossed, by then we should be in a position to also try out some of the flocking aspects that Tarim has been working on.

Exciting!

Colony residency: mid-way-ish

I’m currently a little more than half way through my Arts Council funded residency at the Pervasive Media Studio developing my ongoing project Colony.

A lot has happened in 21 days, so here’s a whistle-stop tour of what’s been achieved…

Android phones reporting to a central database

Way back in the first week of July (it seems like such an incredibly long time ago now!), we (Creative Technologist David Haylock and I) were thinking that we were going to build a system where Android smartphones uploaded their positions – and the status of the creatures they were housed in – to a central database. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but a few issues with hardware and a timely dollop of sense-talking from Tarim made us revert back to the logging-to-memory-card system I had been using before.

This freed David up to work on some mapping visualisations, whilst I worked on reformatting the Arduino code into a library-based structure. This has so far evolved from looking like:

openFrameworks based plot of data points

…to looking like this:

Google map based visualisation

This visualisation of the data will be a key tool for supporting post-journey discussion and understanding of what happened. It has already been something of an eye-opener for us as we start to be able to see links between the paths walked, the calculated latitude/longitude coordinates and other data such as Horizontal Dilution Of Precision.

Visualisation showing circles scaled to value of HDOP

A Work in Progress event on the 17th of July saw us experimenting outside with some heartbeats in boxes – carry the boxes into surroundings that are too built up and the heart would beat faster in a panicked state.

Checking to see if being by the harbourside helped

Keep it panicked for too long, and the heartbeat would stop.

Dead

A nudge of threshold values and a quick play testing excursion the next day saw more exploration of different spaces that would otherwise have been ignored.

Last week and this, I’m mostly based in the laser suite at UWE, collaborating with Sarah Barnes on the production of the articulated structures that will be the basis of the animated objects that participants will be carrying around the city.

Working our way through several iterations, we now have some promising looking mechanisms for the heartbeat and for a moving tail.

Next steps are to start combining these into a single construction and to start sending it out into the world to find out what affordances this assemblage might have. We’ve still got a few sheets of spangly lycra to experiment with, too!

More photos and videos can be found here:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nikki_pugh/sets/72157645784475769/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nikki_pugh/sets/72157645687684097/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nikki_pugh/sets/72157646221072651/

Colony residency at the Pervasive Media Studio

I’m very happy indeed to be able to announce the start of a residency at the Pervasive Media Studio, Bristol, where I shall be developing my ongoing project Colony.

The residency will be for about a month – mostly taking part in July and August – and leads on from the Place Interfaces lunchtime talk I did for them a while back and conversations sprung from the GPS Orchestra workshop I ran.

An early prototype for a Colony creature

There’s more information on the PM Studio’s project page, but in short I’m developing some landscape-reactive ‘creatures’ and am interested how use of these affects our experience of navigating cities.

I’ve just finished an introductory 3 days in the Studio which I used to suss out my approach for the main chunk of time next month. It was also a good chance to revisit my original aims for the project (first conceived back in 2011) with a few years’ more experience under my belt. This process involved a lot of post-it notes and a few push-puppets.

I’m not sure how the push-puppets felt about this.

Doing a bit of research into how pack animals signal to each other

A push-puppet robot about to reveal its secrets…

These limbs were a red herring

Now we know!

Reassembled components = more learning

Having successfully dissected and reconfigured one of the push puppets, I wanted to see if this approach to applying and releasing rigidity could be scaled up to the sort of size that the creatures I’m making will be. (I’m investigating body tension as a simple way of communicating distress.)

Drilling axial holes in dowel with a lathe

After a morning drilling and sanding dowel on a convenient lathe, I was able to experiment with much larger components and start to see how different surfaces and gravity start to play against each other.

I suspect dowel’s going to be too heavy for my purposes, so I think I’ll try beads next.

Meanwhile I’ve also started investigating use of XBee radios to network all the creatures within the colony so they exchange information with each other.

Lots of pages like this in my notebook as I think that through:

Lines of communication

Protocode

Here’s what my desk ended up looking like:

Traces of thinking, learning and doing

I think that’s as good a representation of the process as any!

A few more photos from the last few days can be found on Flickr.

Many thanks to the Pervasive Media Studio community who have already moved my thinking on a lot, and also to Arts Council England who are supporting this residency through their Grants for the Arts programme.

Of sweat and shops: a project in Longbridge

I’m just getting started on a commission from E-C Arts as one of the cohort of artists contributing to their public art project in response to the regeneration in Longbridge, Birmingham.

This area has begun to see regenerational changes in the wake of the collapse of MG Rover and the demolition of most of the car manufacturing plant that previously dominated the landscape.

Map of a small section of Longbridge – the brown bits are mostly that colour in real life as former factory land waits to be built on

My brief is to investigate movement in and around the area so naturally I started off by going for a walk…

I mostly only have prior experience of the area from driving through it on the A38 (the big green road in the map above) so I took the opportunity to explore off to the East and experience different types of landscapes.

After being involved in the BMW Guggenheim Lab project in New York a few years ago, I’ve become increasingly interested in aspects of urbanism and, in particular, the ways in which design and planning decisions impact back on our experience of a place.

So the following day I returned wearing this:

A simple skin conductance meter, with GPS and logging modules

This is a device that measures Galvanic Skin Response:

A change in the ability of the skin to conduct electricity, caused by an emotional stimulus, such as fright.
source

If you experience a strong emotion such as fear, pain, curiosity or joy, this has an effect on micro amounts of sweat your skin produces and this can be measured by its effect on conductivity.

Those two velcro straps around my fingers are holding tin-foil electrodes against my skin. When I feel, for example, pain, this increases the amount of sweat on my skin and this means that electricity can move more easily between the two contacts. This difference can be detected by the small circuit and this in turn is logged by a small computer chip (an Arduino).

I’m interested in how this effect varies as a move around a place, so I also added in a GPS module so I can log my position. I’ve never done this myself before, but I once took part in a bio-mapping workshop led by Christian Nold where he did much the same thing, so I thought it might give some interesting results.

On Sunday I walked for a couple of hours, seeking different types of space: the residential area of Austin Village and the tower blocks; busy roads and junctions, road crossings, car parks and a small section of cycle path.

As I walked I tried to pay attention to being wherever I was. You know how, quite often we filter out a lot of what’s going on around us as we move between A and B? Well I tried not to do that.

When I got home I mapped the data according to the GPS co-ordinates and colour-coded it according to the Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) data. Lighter colours relate to greater skin conductance. Triangles show the direction of movement.

There’s a lot of ‘noise’ because of the nature of the equipment and also because my hand wasn’t being held entirely still, but here’s the bit where I was walking around Austin Village and decided to explore down an alleyway (the spur to the right). Halfway down the alleyway a man came out of a side gate to unload his car, causing me to startle.

Walking from the top of the image, feeling quite relaxed, then turning left (right as you look at the image) down an unknown alleyway

Here is an overview of all of the data:

Galvanic Skin Response and GPS data combined into a map

Can you guess at what types of space I was walking through at each point, and how I was feeling in response to my immediate environment?

GPS Orchestra with the Digital Producers Lab

I’ve spent the last week running GPS Orchestra as an ongoing element woven through iShed’s brilliant Digital Producers Lab (a development programme for 12 producers working across Wales).

As a counterpoint to the programme of presentations and discussion settings led by some great speakers, GPS Orchestra was intended as a practical set of tasks to introduce working with GPS, electronics and the Arduino platform.

Starting with a ‘site visit’ out into Millennium Square, the producers were tasked with observing the space and thinking about how they’d like to nudge the atmosphere and/or behaviours they noticed.

That was the easy bit! What followed was a steep-learning-curved introduction to coding and prototyping to get them to the point where they could control motors and LEDs through live GPS data according to the movement of the contraptions they were to make.

Layering up the skills through the week, it was very heartwarming to hear that by Wednesday quite a few of the group were already planning to purchase Arduino bits and pieces to continue tinkering with after the lab!

By Friday lunch time – after only about 5 or 6 hours on their projects – they had made some amazing things:

• Something that responded to the number of satellites it could see – initially intended to be rolled along the floor, but ended up getting lots of hugs.
• Happbee – a wounded bee whose recuperation could be assisted if you carried him fast through the air as if he was flying.
• The musical box – a small box that had the power to make you dance (or at least move differently).
• The Digital Harp / y Delyn digidol – plays when you walk towards Wales and plays more the closer to are to the homelands.

It wasn’t an easy challenge by any means, but I was really impressed with the outcomes (not just the things they made). A lovely group of people and a very inspiring week overall. Thanks to everyone who contributed.

My photos from the week are at http://www.flickr.com/photos/nikki_pugh/sets/72157637471578064/, and below are a collection of Tweets relating to the sessions:

Coming up: The Mad Hatter’s Magic Tea Party

On Saturday the 19th of October I’ll be down in Bristol helping Watershed host The Mad Hatter’s Magic Tea Party – the only logical thing to follow up a family screening of Alice in Wonderland.

I’ll be enlisting the diners’ expertise to try and pin down what the Jubjub bird (mentioned in The Jabberwocky) looks and sounds like.

Here’s a sneak peek at how we’ll be going about that:

Many thanks to everyone who responded to my Twitter crowd-sourcing request and sent me a voice recording of what they thought the Jubjub sounds like – the above video is just a small selection.

Young Rewired Art

I recently spent a week as a mentor/lead artist on the Young Rewired Art programme, a parallel project to Young Rewired State.

YRA took 10 young artists with varying practices (poets, actors, writers and graphic designers) and, over a week with myself and Antonio Roberts introduced them to different ways of working with data. The aim being to support them in exploring ways in which data and digital tools could be integrated into their work.

I led the first day, introducing concepts of physical computing and live datastreams coming from sensors. What better way to do this than with the sonar goggles!

We were based in the BCU section of Millennium Point, but it wasn’t long before the participants rose to the challenge and ventured out into more public space.

Later that day I did a quick introduction to Arduino and we finished off with a few MaKey MaKey boards and a chain of everyone we could find triggering a plum-based piano.

This ice breaker made me think of performing arts lessons in which I have to wonder around blindfolded and tune into my other sense. I thought the glasses would be great for my performing arts practice for when I wanted to work on spatiality.

Other tangible technology Nikki introduced to us were ‘Makey Makeys’, I have to say that this was the highlight of my week; with the aid of the ‘Makey Makeys’ we were able to make a piano out of plums! By doing this we were able to also interact with the Young Rewired State young people by bringing them into our room to see how many humans we could add to our live circuit and still have it working (23 and that’s only because there weren’t more of us). Lexia Tomlinson

After Antonio had done similar introductions for data-bending and glitch art, it was time for the participants to get into groups and come up with a prototype project that hybridised their existing practices with some of these new ingredients.

What emerged were a set of glitched Vanley Burke images, a short film exploring digital dependency and twin bears that used proximity sensing to trigger audio contrasting different political viewpoints.

On the final weekend we ventured down from what was now our base in the Custard Factory and displayed our projects guerilla style amongst the amazing chaos of the Young Rewired State Festival of Code.

We struggled to compete against the lunchtime noise, but finally found a spot for the bears outside and stood back to observe the interactions.

All my photos and videos are in this Flickr set, keep an eye on the project’s Tumblr for the participants’ final videos which should be published shortly…

Thanks to all who took part – it was an intense and inspiring week!

Young Rewired Art was devised by Amy Martin in partnership with Young Rewired State and Lara Ratnaraja. It is funded by Arts Council England.

Inkvisible #4: smooth moves and scribbles

Today was our last day of Inkvisible playtesting. Having decided to move away from the L.A.S.E.R Tag software to a motion-tracking based system, it turns out we still stayed with the Graffiti Research Lab.

Ben Eaton hacked an installation of BlitzTag to work with a Kinect sensor.

After a bit of configuration for the space, we started getting our first curious bystanders.

They rapidly became participants!

The first observation was that this system gave much smoother results. Strangely the projected line almost felt elastic at times. The second was that people seemed to get really very absorbed into the movements – in the same way that you might run your fingers through sand on the beach or trail them through water. It’s quite a different experience from the version that tracks a laser pointer. This is much more about the movement of the body.

The snippet of video gives a small sense of this, but basically we were finding that people (of all ages) were doing this for several minutes, content to just swirl their arm around and see the traces formed.

With very few exceptions, the results all looked like this:

Although we did have one or two cases of people writing their names:

People seemed to filter out the paintings we were hoping they might respond too. I think most people would have preferred to have had a blank area of wall to mark onto.

This, however, was not what we were trying to investigate so, time to change things up a little!

We relocated to the gallery next door and set up over an abstract painting. Here we wanted to see if we could find a base layer that resonated more with the projected graffiti layer.

It started to show some promise, so we did a slow pan of the room to see what different scales and substrates did.

I very much liked the feel of working on a huge scale as when happened when the projector reached down to the far end of the room. The corresponding drop in intensity was noticeable though, in that the lines were quite faint. It would be really good to try something on this scale, but with a much more powerful projector so that the results are still vibrant.

Next we came to Ana Maria Pacheco’s Man and His Sheep.

Oh yes.

Now we started to be actually interacting with the artwork. Admittedly still through kind of scribbling, but when you mark across a face, a part of you feels it on your face too.

So, this was significant not only for the shift in interaction, but also because this was the first time we had been able to successfully project onto 3D sculpture (reflection and scatter problems with the lasers).

Both systems we trialled have their pros and cons. In particular with this one we missed the ease of being able to tweak settings and the effect of the paint drips.

As with L.A.S.E.R. Tag, BlitzTag was not without its quirks when it came to problems with tracking. For some reason it simply would not detect and respond to the movements of several people.

We weren’t really in a situation that enabled us to do de-bugging of what was causing this, but we suspect it to be partly to do with differences in clothing.

The system was generally able to detect me, so we devised a couple of work-arounds that sometimes worked. The first was to give people my brown shirt to wear (see above) and the other was for me to stand in front of people to act as a sort of shield.

In summary we think this has got a lot of potential, but we think any next steps would benefit from a particular context (giving a direction to the types of responses being sought) and a big chunk of time that could be spent de-bugging the installation and customising the nature of the projections.

That’s us out of time, though. Next week we report our findings back at King’s College.