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DIYBio Summit in Manchester 29/30th October

Brian — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 09:14:41 +0000

DIYBio summit at Manchester http://madlab.org.uk/content/diybio-uk-summit/ this Weekend

So what is this DIYBio movement? It sits at the confluence of democratizing bioscience and the need to have the tools of science under our control or knowledge. Who are we? Artists, scientists, amateurs{in the best meaning of that word}, but primarily citizens. We have different motivations, skill sets, tool sets, but we share that need to understand, to know, to tinker, to share, to dream, of better futures. To re-examine the ‘old’ technologies and the ‘new’ technologies of biotechnology and to reintroduce them to each other, to de-commodify what we can, and to appropriate what we can’t.

Ana Nelson-Automating Scientific Documents

Brian — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 09:53:13 +0000

Imagine you find a problem with your dataset the day before you submit your thesis.
Could you regenerate it automatically?
Ana is describing how we might deal with this by using scripts
Costs may include more effort, need to learn new skills. Benefits are error reduction, reproducibility, standardization, and more.

Dexy.it is the tool she has developed.

It may also be used in Literate Programming.

Visceral-The Living Art Experiment Silent Barrage

Brian — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 11:38:41 +0000

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.

live covering #GloNet at Futureeverything Manchester 14th May

Brian — Thu, 13 May 2010 09:54:18 +0000

Image by loscuadernosdejulia via Flickr

This is my notes and everyones tweets refering to the GloNet Conference Stream at Futureeverything 2010
#futr Glonet

#AV10

Brian — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:07:05 +0000

Finding lots of food for thought at AVFest10, and also food for eating. There is too much on, of course, so it is only possible to see some of it. Then there are hard choices, like Dorkbot vs Middlesbrough and Pinker/Goldstein vs Sunderland.

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.

Bioplastic

Brian — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:40:43 +0000

Jay Cousins and friends had a hackday around bioplastics and laser cutting. Making the bioplastic from starch and glycerin (see this link for more details) and then laser cutting them. Cool stuff, they were even making different color ones. This is important as people move from using commercially sourced plastic in their makerbots to something else. Plastic is expensive to buy for these machines, but it is all around. SO be it bio-plastic or post waste plastic, ways of reusing these provide a compelling reason to throw away less waste. It is amazing that these materials are coming out of the factories, to be used in domestic situations. Together with polymorph and sugru, there are a variety of materials to play around for wearables, for prototypes and one offs. Bring on the future, with peer production.

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

atemporality

Brian — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 10:51:16 +0000

Did not make it to transmedialle this year, but with all the tweets, seems like half of Newcastle was there. However, the nice people that Transmedialle are They dont expect us all to be there, but make media available online. Bruce Stirlings talk: http://www.transmediale.de/en/keynote-bruce-sterling-us-atemporality is my pick for today. The takeaway, “make the future today”, and with the US out of the Moon race for a bit…. we better hurry.

Easyware Hardware and attribution

Brian — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 18:29:56 +0000

: Image by oomlout via Flickr

During the Nesta/40Fires workshop on Openhardware, I tweeted a quote “Arduino makes Hardware Easywhere” during Daniel Soltis’s talk about Arduino. Now trying to remember who said it as it gets retweeted to …. a few times Was it @rainycat, Daniel, @oomlout or @ni or someone else? Would the original author please stand up….I would like to attribute it (and thanks to oomlout for his lovely picture). ——- Update Daniel says it was the electrical engineer that had just picked up Arduino, just don’t know his name!

Bad Science, Good Art and wellbeing

Brian — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 13:08:45 +0000

There have been three unconnected but referential events in Newcastle around health, science and art.

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 Lif e 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.

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

Inter_Multi_Trans_Actions book out 2010

Brian — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 12:45:24 +0000

In July 2008, I headed to Napier University for the one day symposium inter_multi_trans_actions. Think this was the first time I saw HeHe talking about their lazer projected on industrial smoke stack emisions. Moritz Waldemeyer talked about the light works he has made, and pneumatic dresses. More posts from the event under the inter_multi_trans_actions tag. The proceedings are to be published as Digital Blur.