Write my neurons draw

Originally uploaded by Dr Brian

Last night I attended the Visceral-The Living Art Experiment opening at Science Gallery in Dublin.
One of the main draw cards was the opportunity to see a lot of biological art pieces in one place. Many I had heard of, having met the artists at and around SymbioticA in Perth Australia. SymbioticA is a artist studio based in the school of Human Biology at the University of Western Australia. This exhibition co-curated by Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts shows selected pieces that have been developed at SybioticA by resident artists over the last 10 years.

Silent Barrage(pictured) is the next step in an series started with Fish and Chips, and continued with the Multi electrode array Artist(MEART).
The ‘brains’ behind MEART and Silent Barrage are a collection of approximately 30000 rat neuron cells growing in the Potter lab in Georgia Tech.
In Silent Barrage people moving through the sculpture are captured on video, this is then compressed and the signal fed to the culture through electrodes. The signals coming out of the culture electrodes are visualised as action potentials scribbled on the poles.
So this work is a techno hybrid, needing wetware, glassware, electronics and mechatronics to function.
The rat neuron cultures are interchangeable but not identical. They only have a limited life span. (I want to know what is the reason they die, is it mostly due to infection or do they get old?-will get the answer to this). Some cultures are ‘good’ and some ‘bad’. The variability is related to the fact that they are primary cell cultures, each comes from a rat brain. (want to know how many cultures/brain)
The scientist from the Potter lab explained that these culture need input otherwise they seize, its like a room of strangers that are listening more and more, but no-one is talking.

Energy is the theme, but am getting the idea that its more about transformations, transformations through devices that make things intelligible, measurable. Energy is transformed to data, to sound, to vision, to enable it to be perceived by us as the receptors. Art is this transformer.

Gina talks of Materiality of film processing at the film coop, how costly errors, eg exposing a week of work caused her to look to the new technology of video to make her animations.

A lot of her work becomes ‘real’ in the appropriate context,she explains that you cant evaluate an artwork immediately after, it needs time.

Development of artworks for waiting rooms, medical ethics. How to make artwork for bright lighted waiting rooms, producing a text based piece, that develops and is alive, how the piece has found its home.

Communication between research,public health and medicine.

If you are on the edge, then you have a chance to make a new space.

New ways……see the failure in one piece of art is the inspiration of the next, a tropical garden.

Parasitical studies, sandflies, a disease that comes out of deforestation, collaborates with Rod Dillon

Art review, collab with Lizzie Muller, how audiences interact with artwork, it created an evaluation document, for the welcome trust grant, contageon.

How to use something to the best for you, and how to make it work for the benifit of the institution you are working at.

Moved towards making a fit with other projects. Current loophole is how to use the human remains, you can’t keep that in medicine, but in cosmetic’s you can use the waste materials from cosmetic surgery.

Interested in the grey hole that is still here, stem cell banks. Reality behind the hype,

She dosent have to work with the ethics as it is already being addressed by the medical people in the collaboration.

How do you change the system so that artists are valued in this enterprise of research.

Related articles

Axel Lapp blogs about Gina : http://dm.ncl.ac.uk/events/ahrc-crt/blog/?p=15

Dunn, D, Cruchfield, JP Insects, Trees and Climate: the bioacoustic Ecology og Deforestation and Entomogenic Climate Change http://acousticecology.org/dunn/solitsounds.html

Sonification

Katie Patterson : Vatnajökull (the sound of ) http://www.katiepaterson.org/vatnajokull/vatnajokull.html
Earth–Moon–Earth (Moonlight Sonata Reflected from the Surface of the Moon) http://www.katiepaterson.org/E.M.E/eme.html

Human movement as signal

ipoi http://www.jennifersheridan.com/projects/ipoi/ipoi.html

Times Up! Sensory Circus http://timesup.org/sc/index.html

Mapping

milk project (Esther Polak +leva Auzina http://www.milkproject.net/

HeHe-Nuage Verthelsinki-power station http://hehe.org.free.fr/hehe/nuagevert/index.html

the lake http://www.juliefreeman.co.uk/lake/

Autonomy

heath bunting http://www.irational.org/

“forays” http://forays.org/

HeHe Smoking Lamp http://hehe.org.free.fr/hehe/smokinglamp/index.html

Steim Blogs on the talk

http://steim.org/jamboree08/?p=547

The biomuse is an instrument that takes muscle nerve impulses and digitises them. Originally a wired system, it now wireless over bluetooth and using some differential sensors from http://infusionsystems.com/

As an instrument, Atau finds the biomuse satisfying, he was interested in living with a novel technological instrument over an extended time.

At the mapping session at the Steim Microjamboree. Have seen Atau‘s performance a number of times, it is only in the last few days that I have heard how it is being developed, and understood why it is important.

What I find fascinating is that he is playing a novel instrument that he has worked with for over ten years and now it gets a number of extra parameters, through the accelerometer and mode changes through a number of buttons. This allows a more hands off way of interacting with the software patch.

Another blog by Kristina Andersen on this at the official STEIM blog here

Brief notes for my Arduino session at BarcampSheffield.

Arduino

What is it?

microntroller

What does it do?

interface to other devices (temp sensors, gps, ethernet, i2c motors etc)

Why would I want one?

for solving problems or making project….. some examples

robotics

using servos and sensors

wearable

embedded wearable electronics using lillypad

toyhacking

Is it hard to use?

it has a gentle learning curve and lots of resources online

learning by doing

Where do I get one?

come in a variety of versions from very small (wearable) to large(for controlling RepRap, a rapid prototyper)

arduino

arduino.cc / tinker.it

arduino clones

freeduino nuelectronics.com

seeduino seed electronics

lillypad and arduino pro

sparkfun

What have you done with it?

artwork

LightResponsiveDevices http://transitlab.org/2008/11/15/light-responsive-objects-using-arduino/

sound

Auduino – granulator using code from http://code.google.com/p/tinkerit/wiki/Auduino

others

webserver that posts environmental data or energy consumption

http://www.pachube.com/users/ni/feeds

wiimote controlled RGB led

http://www.coldclimate.co.uk/2008/04/28/wiimote-arduino-ibook-leds-yay/

Learning Resources

Arduino

http://www.arduino.cc/

Freeduino Database

http://www.freeduino.org/

ITP physical computing

http://itpa.nyu.edu/physcomp/Main/HomePage

LadyAda

http://www.ladyada.net/learn/arduino/index.html

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I have a twitter stream, but have it protected but want to share only the #keywords. Maybe one day there will be a semiporus privacy setting, which would be nice, but in the meantime…

#foct08 JimHendler new ways of teaching? should we try to bring childrens attention to focus, or ask better questions on how best to teach 7 minutes ago from TwitterFox

#foct08, Jim Hendler “we love disruptive technology as long as it isnt disrupting us” 10 minutes ago from TwitterFox

@Eingang, but how you know the people you know is related to what you know, if you are trusted, have reputation and skill. 17 minutes ago from TwitterFox in reply to Eingang

@sleepydog made hires through meeting over twitter in his company #foct08 20 minutes ago from TwitterFox in reply to sleepydog

#foct08 content, methods of delivery , and validation, how to get quality 25 minutes ago from TwitterFox

I want something that retweets # even though the rest of my updates are protected, useful at conferences 32 minutes ago from TwitterFox

#FOCT08 social networking brings me into a group that I care about… 34 minutes ago from TwitterFox

FOCT08 technology is complicated, and has social and political ramifications 34 minutes ago from TwitterFox

#FOCT08 social networking brings me into a group that I care about… 35 minutes ago from TwitterFox

#FOCT08 social networking brings me into a group that I care about…(think by @sleepydog) 36 minutes ago from TwitterFox

#FOCT08, management of privacy, privacy as a threat vs privacy as an rethink….. 38 minutes ago from TwitterFox

#FOCT08 cultural blocks on use of social technologies in schools. shortsighted? about 1 hour ago from TwitterFox

#FOCT08 crackle on the phone psychosocialhuman ‘feel’ of digital technology about 1 hour ago from TwitterFox

#FOCT08 @josiefraser knows who i am quoting at the technology workshop,but i am not…..but there are about 10twitters here…… about 1 hour ago from TwitterFox

#FOCT08 but the portion that arent are multiply disadvantaged about 1 hour ago from TwitterFox

#FOCT08 digital divides are present even in the creative industries, but what about wider community? Many are socially networked. about 1 hour ago from TwitterFox

#FOCT08 is it possible to make maps of exciting possibilities. about 1 hour ago from TwitterFox

#FOCT08 creating packages of overviews of what exciting is happening in New Media, then introducing then to new areas of expertise. about 1 hour ago from TwitterFox

what is the future Orson Welles “War of the World” moment #FOCT08 about 1 hour ago from TwitterFox

Technology workshop: who is “real” who “virtual” where doe the “work” happen #FOCT08 about 1 hour ago from TwitterFox

The public stream: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23foct08

Finished trialling my light-responsive objects that I developed at the AA2A placement and the ISIS Arts mini-residency. My motivation was to make a work that encoded knowledge of natural systems, to create a gentle empathy in the viewer. Over time these devices have transformed themselves in my eyes into pets, or dependant creatures. Although simple, they are evocative, they have metaphorical attachment points for anthropomorphism.Some of the verbal reactions to the work are that they are “sweet”, “cute”, “life-like”. So as well as a model system to learn about interaction, they are also a site of inquiry into human relationships with machines.
Approximately thirty people came to the work during ‘Feeding Times” in tic space at the Fine Arts School of Newcastle University. This was part of Connecting Principle2008 event. As the theme was Dialogue, it was apt that this gave me the opportunity to discuss the work, its future directions and get feedback from an diverse audience.

The work is a series of light producing and responsive devices. By having more than one, a feedback loop comes into being (emerges?), where the movement of one causes changes in the local light environment that produces a movement in the other, ad infinitum……

In this first installation, the 3 arduino devices share power through a mains powered usb hub and it is apparent that there are fluctuations in the power supply. This could be removed by separate power supplies, but this would remove some of the glitchyness and perhaps the idiosyncrasies that make this work appealing.

video LightResponsiveDevice

Next was a talk by Matt Pyke of Universal Everything, showing that it was possible to live in a smallish city and do interesting jobs for companies like Nokia, Nike, Audi. The tip seemed to be having a network of potential collaborators so that the team evolves and can change to suit the job.

As well as collaborators, there is also a pool of interesting ideas that Matt and colleagues find interesting, inspiring, which they document at www.everyoneforever.com.