M.A.R.I.N. camp forum

The huge amount of spiders around the art colony inspired me to work on this three spiderweb structures. Because the spiders immediately populate the artificial web, the structure of the network changes continuosly and introduces a different point of view to those omnipresent creatures and engages a coexistence between insects and art.

on site at
nida art colony, Curonian Spit, Lithuania

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populated spidernetworks

During the 1 month residency I took around 400 different photos. Out of this pool emerges an hand drawn emotional and subjective map of the three different locations in Norway, Sweden and Lithuania.

at
nida art colony, Curonian Spit, Lithuania

Here we were encouraged to show our works in progress during the open studio event on the 27.8.2011 and the cartography of everyday at sea, as it´s a very long drawing was used as a link between the main community space in the ground floor and the more private first floor area where M.A.R.I.N. residents presented the artpieces.

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Atmers are kinetic inflatable objects which try to reflect on the surrounding environment and its health state through repetitive movements which resemble breathing.

at
kultivator, art and agriculture, Öland, Sweden

As we were at a farm, the first step was to create a working space. What would be a better place for some artistic-scientific research than a kitchen ? Fortunately Kultivator has a so called Outdoor-Kitchen, which was not in permanent use, so this approved to be the perfect place to feel the environment and to create art. When the weather was bad, or it was to cold, we changed to a not yet finished residency space, where a bed had to take the function of a table.

In a future version of the project, the health state of the inflatable objects will be triggered by sensoric input. In this case I used myself as a sensor, trying to feel the environement and transfer this emotions in the breathing algorithms.

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at
nida art colony , Curonian Spit, Lithuania

Here we were encouraged to show our works in progress during the open studio event on the 27.8.2011 as this was generally an indoor event I placed the Atmers next to one of our sleeping rooms which we converted into studiospaces.

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Flørli, Lysefjord, Norway

together with Tapio Mäkelä

Already before we arrived to Flörli, there where rumors about the so called “Stairway to heaven”, 4444 wooden stairs, which belong to the old Powerplant.

We had the idea to create some device, which has a camera mounted on it to ride those tracks, next to the wooden stairs, down.

When we climbed those stairs up, which took about two to three hours we were far to exhausted to modify the not really working first prototype, so we came back without success. But after some days the motivation came back and just before we left the beautiful Lysefjord Tapio and I created a second version which actually was kind of successful. Absollutly fun included.

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During our stay in Stavanger with iolab, we were luck enough to visit IRIS (International Research Institute Stavanger), a marine-centered research institute working in environmental sensing, data collection, and applied research. We were received by Jan-Borsth, the research director, and were given an extensive tour, as well as a chance to participate in a roundtable discussion where we explored the possibilities of artistic investigation to sit alongside scientific research.

The largest takeaway for me was the idea of ‘sense-making’ – i.e. techniques for artists to present data in different ways – such as sonification – that would allow for the ‘viewer’ to experience more immediate impressions, diverse readings, and/or allow for different faculties and intelligences to be engaged when taking in scientific datasets.

Tapio mentioned a previous prototype from a previous Marin residency where environmental conditions were monitored on a small island in Finland, and the Arduino controller directly controlled various flag positions that would arrange themselves depending upon the data collected, allowing a longer range visual recognition of the data (and not requiring the user to even embark onto the island itself). Niki’s current project is another example of this, where his ‘auqalung‘ , if I can use that phrase, will organize it’s breath according to realtime Ph-balance readings of the water environment where it sits.

Coming from my paradigm and experience, I thought of a more extreme, aestheticized example; the Marin team could collaborate with IRIS and iolab to produce a concert event, where the IRIS personnel would be responsible for installing a mussel tank where each specimen would be monitored for how often they open and close their shell (apparently an indicator of stress, based upon the water quality), and we could be fed the data stream in realtime. The data could then be used to control a software patch, perhaps in Pure Data, where the opening and closing of the shells could individually control the playback of audio samples. Over the course of the event, the IRIS staff could slowly induce the tank environment with ‘pollutants’ that would effect the water quality and thus increase stress in the mussels, prompting them to change the pace of their activity. A separate sensor could feed us the level of pollutants, which could be used to effect realtime filtering and effects, or to shift through different sample sets in Pure Data.

The resulting event could produce a scientifically-relevant experience where the audience has the chance to use several senses – visual, auditory, and cognitive – to make a clear connection between environmental factors and the health of our natural world, allowing for a vastly different experience of science to emerge. Just a thought…

DIY tool for measuring and communicating radiation in fish.

I had been thinking very hard about the scientific process of collecting samples for radiation measuring. I broke down the areas concerned and tried to figure out the relationships between them – the science – the samples – the public. Who are these elements I wondered, what is their character?

I found myself thinking as scientist, interpreter and citizen. I incorporated all roles in the process of figuring out how to respond to this very small activity in the hugely important and massive activity of radiation as a phenomenon overall: what of the radiation in fish in the Baltic Sea?

And so, as citizen first, I decided to become a scientist and engage in the process, however flawed my attempt, and would then try and communicate my findings, however flawed the effort. So I built my own measuring station where fish are lured into an escapable cage, measured for radiation, and the radiation is stored in a publicly accessible data transmission house above water. The last idea is an attempt to create a ‘seamark’ or ‘beacon’ that communicates both the data, and the act of collecting data.

The last 10 days, I spend on an island in the Naantali region. This was part of the MARIN residency program “Sensing the Baltic Sea”. During this beautiful and inspiring stay, I worked on Anemos Sonore, a piece that looks at a hypothetical place where sound is the primary medium to convey information. In such a world not only the displays’ design would’ve been taken a different way, but also the very basic sensory elements themself since it is of no use to first turn a signal into values (frequency, phase, amplitude, etc.), in order to convert those again into a signal needed to monitor them auditorily. To investigate this further, I devised two different scenarios, both incorporating the sensing of wind.

I wrote about my observations and insights on this page and in these blog entries.

For more information, see also the pages tai-studio and tangibleauditoryinterfaces.

The island in the Naantali archipelago where I spent the last 10 days is populated by at least 5 different ant species. One of them has an ant hill right next to the open air kitchen in which we used to cook and work. I was interested in the sound ants make when they’re running around so I recorded them.

Maybe I can use it in a setup where several pickups build into an anthill catch the sound of the crawling ants.

Anthill probing

Ants are highly social, sometimes people (e.g. Douglas Hofstadter) speak of an anthill as one distributed organism (Aunt Hill). It might be interesting to set up a telephone that connects several aunts? But actually that would be a bit too much intervention into functioning nature, possibly ruining a fluctuating biological environment. Other ideas include anthill resp. ant street listening devices.

Setup

I first tried to attach the pickup to a piece of birch bark (five by ten centimeters). Audio quality was great, though the ants where not convinced to walk on it. As shown on the photo, I eventually settled on a piezo audio transducer with attached pine tree needles (by help of a small amount of plasticine). A small piece of pine bark covered the bottom such that the ants don’t get in touch with the plasticine. Below, you find cuts from the recordings. Some people found it pretty scary when listened to them with headphones.

Ants by LFSaw

For more information, see also the pages tai-studio and tangibleauditoryinterfaces.