openingadoortowhatIdon’tknow

It was great to hear and in some instances see what the other teams have been up to. The final meeting of Parallel Practices made me even sadder that I was unable to get to the other meetings as I feel that I have missed out on the sharing element of the process to some extent.

Anyway – it was in another great new space in London that I had no idea existed – the Life Science Museum within the Hodgkin Building. To get to it we walked through a labyrinth of endless shelves with thousands of bottles of unfamiliar body parts , then past the oddest folk art I have EVER seen (see above) into a room where we sat a large table surrounded by glorious examples of skeletal structures. I and Naomi were first up and we talked about new tools, thinking space, open-endedness, mapping the process, creating taxonomy, although Richard named the activity. http://www.naomimcintosh.com/

Celia was great and the idea of carving out space for reflection and thus her revelation that at the core of her work was the idea of care was beautiful. She spoke very movingly about respect and responsibility around the bodies she had worked around. http://celiapym.com/

Karina was very focused like her project and she spoke eloquently about the role of the machine with and verses the hand, the value of what she was doing as a maker and how stitch and textiles or at least non-robotic materials could become a part of robotics ‘teaching’. I love the precision of how she uses language, supporting the finding of the right word after my questioning of Celia’s comment about the ‘ordinariness’ of her practice, rather than its extraordinariness in the world of the throwaway. http://www.karinathompson.co.uk/

Tamsin had her workbench nearby and was able to show us all sorts of wonderfulness; exploding ceramics infested with calcium, crystal growth on ‘bones’ and a see-though blue mouse. Listening to her and Richard talk about providing access to the space was empowering.  http://www.vanessendesign.com/

There were so many areas where we overlapped – although it was more of a constellation of possibilities - I could have listened all day. Some notes I made which I have to think about – it opened a door to what I don’t know, technology adding a new dimension, anatomy as an act, the supervised machine, sometimes I can sometimes I can’t, the idea - no the feeling of ownership, enabling others to rethink what it is that they do, I’m never going to know what I mean, negotiating a re framing of practice.

relentlesscuttingcreasingfoldingfitting

relentless cutting creasing folding fitting - a day of construction. the piece explores the negative space whilst friction enables the exploration of jamming/grinding.  

activelyrecognisingcontrollingpassivity.

ok I think that i might of finally got this soft robotics thing – reacting to its context, structural memory in deformable objects – yesterday I brought in a structure to the meeting that I had already shown – but changing the parameters (making two elements longer) meant that I was able to manipulate it in one plane – in x and y axis – making it perform  in an exaggerated ‘flipping’ motion within a number of ‘other’ axis’s – this was an easy movement that I performed without thinking – I had not taken into account – body memory, variable stiffness or morphological computation - the model was then strapped to a xy table and initially a circle was coded into the movement of the arm – the uneven forces within the structure broke the arm which was attached to the structure – the structures construction meant that when the structure was manipulated it was revealed that the forces within it were distributed unevenly – something that was felt but overlooked and not fully understood when manipulated in the hand - then the movement of the arm was simplified into 4 points in space - a square, even though we had now worked out that the movement was octagonal – the 8 fitting onto the 4 sides each and with corners being taken up by an angle– due to the forces a second arm was broken – (robot war!!! my robots 2 theirs 0) – but with the addition of a spring the forces were subsumed and the structure moved beautifully – a case of passive actuation in practice.

The body makes and compensates for millions of movements continuously without recognising them – a robot which engages with its context has to undergo a similar process but it has to know – the maths involved in the coding is so mind boggling – I get it......actively controlling the passivity.

artandsciencetakingplacesimultaneously

Our 3^rd meeting – what a day as ever so many thoughts and ideas but somehow today everything gelled – some ideas are becoming concluded (for now) – others expanded (later)- the video of swirling data surrounding and swirling around and within one of our structures mapping light levels oooooooooooohhhh – it just looked like SCIENCE- this led to us thinking about mapping and documentation – so we are planning to document  all the structures we have made – reflecting on them and mapping the connections by remembering and creating links between them – thinking around the idea of genetics – the children of the parent structures – this will be undertaken in a number of ways - visually, with the knowledge of what led to what within a linear timeframe and also by applying code to map similarities. Some filming took place – we pretended to look and talk spontaneously – painful but it meant that myself and Naomi got time to discuss and plan for the next sessions (running a workshop for PHD students). Also the lab did look really cool – art and science taking place simultaneously both feeding off each other so that it was difficult to work out when one concluded and the other started. 

thespaceofabookmarkingnegativespace

A day of robotics at Kings – testing and talking – as ever I've come away with a note book full of words I didn't know existed and concepts that I have to reflect on. There was a wonderful moment when a room full of PhD students were fiddling with our creations – you could see their minds making connections and making sense, their sense.

A conversation about testing how the structures we have built affects its environment - (moving them in a tank of floating particles and observing how the particles move) connected with a thought I have had about the space a book inhabits – where does a book begin and end and could one cast that space? This led to the idea of working in negative space and the idea of searching for a place of not knowing. As a strategy I have realised that during this project if I am working on something and its becoming familiar I tend to move away from it into a place of not knowing. Lots of learning is taking place. 

twobecomeone

Received the first package from Naomi today – its interesting to see how others make, the activity makers engage in and the unwritten rules they create such as cutting and folding and curved lines v straight lines. This of course becomes all about how you make your own work. Her starting points have taken me on a journey of inside/outside – thinking about how organs/cogs/internal material will have to move within the confines if an outer case – is this just an old fashioned vision of what a robot should/could be?