• slow science, preservation techniques in times of excess for times of little, systems, and systems analysis, using appropriate technologies, not just the ones that are being sold to us.
• To learn from other cultures
• gambiarra/makeshift/makedo/kludge techniques.
• this time of surplus where the dollar/pound/euro shops are selling us amazing technologies for a pittance. I buy the cool solar powered light for a £1, because, chances are, it will retain its use till I die or cannibalise it for parts
• personal fabrication: of personalised designs designed using open source toolchains and equipment.
• smart design (like the spork, or sofie the giraffe), that embody a lot of thoughtfulness in it design
• the pseudo-sciences of recipeology and workshopology where knowledge(such as how to etc) is packaged in a format for ‘consumption’  [also something I love to do]
• the promise of DIYbo and personalised SynthBio

Nordt labs were resident in Newcastle over April. I managed to catch them at their final talk at ISISArt’s and at their temporary workspace at CultureLab. As you would know, lasersaur is one of a few open source projects (part)funded by a kickstarter call.

Having read about the project, it was great to get a better understanding of what motivates the development.

From my understanding, the lasersaur is quite easy to build many different dimensions as it uses standard railings. This is different to other laser cutters that use specialised rails for the dimensions. The first prototype is big enough to do panels of cloth and leather for making clothing and shoes. At their time at Culturelab/ISISarts they concentrated on getting starter kits together for their community and beefing up the documentation. In the last few days they put together a lasersaur for the SF maker faire(now been).

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.

Aims: investigating the process of growing microorgansisms as a domestic performance.

Materials: glowing bacteria, fish, eggs, DNA, mushrooms, gelatin, agar, various fermented “live” drinks, vegetarian and milkbased bioplastics. Outputs: skinning models of domestic artifacts, such as chairs, teapots, straws.

Methodology: trying out things space,using open source recipes by others and i am still ruminating on the “live” ness.

Crossover: wordage on the application meshes with mine, as 25sg talks about being an incubator, and it will literally be that for the period I am there. Leave a comment  if you want to come and talk and learn a bit of biologyness.

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.

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• Maker Faire Newcastle is March 13-14, 2010 (makezine.com)
• Bioplastics – the quest for Open Source material production (jaycousins.wordpress.com)

• Artists Zoë Walker & Neil Bromwich, Michael Pinsky and puppet doctor Professor Hilary presented The Panacea Casebook at the Baltic.

• Ben Goldacre visited the Centre for Life to talk about Bad Science and how journalists can kill.
• Adinda van ‘t Klooster talked about and demonstrated her emotion light protoype at Lunch Bytes Culture Lab Newcastle University(you can see her lecture at STEIM here.

What is the connection?  Panacea Casebook uses many of the methods of clinical trials, for treating a number of modern maladies. For  the sci fi hottub trial that therewas a small but significant changein peoples wellbeing after the hottub experience. Of course for there to be any prof that art was the cause of this, there would have to be an exact copy of the hottub (see left) that wasnt touched with the idea of being art.

Only by comparing in a double blind trial these two treatments, the art and the art placebo, could the hypothesis that “art has a beniicial effect” be tested.

Ben Goldacre talks about how clinical trials can be misused, using the Durham Fish Oil ‘trials’ as an example of  the effect of placebo, and  the problems of expectation on performance. They havent met, but it would have been interesting.  The Panacea Casebook and the Emotion Lights have connections around the way ‘art’ might be good, and engagement with new media art might be benificial to cure a social ill.

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• Why Clever People Believe Stupid Things (neilperkin.typepad.com)
• My quest for a perfectly awful formula (guardian.co.uk)

project2891

Originally uploaded by sctv
twentyeightninetyone.net
Inspace Gallery (Inspace, Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB).

Found myself in Edinburgh and with a few hours to kill, went wandering through the streets.
First off went to the Forrest Cafe, and from there plotted a route past a few galleries.
Went to the Inspace gallery, which is the new beta space of New Media Scotland. They are putting on a show of their alt-w funded works. It was great to see another instance of Ben Dembroski’s project2891. I had seen the last version at the CCA, Glasgow in April.
A new favourite is the Cybraphon, a strange steam punky artifact that registers his online popularity by making noises, and singing songs. A large dial tells us how happy ‘he’ is,