D-MARC

Curated by Dr. David Stent over a twelve-week period, this project has involved some thirty artists, writers and musicians from three continents, responding to the theme of Digital Hybridity.

Below can be read their collective posts, in reverse chronology, and in the left-hand column the contributors’ separate projects.

The venture was initiated by Prof. John Goto and supported by D-MARC Digital and Material Arts Research Centre at the University of Derby.  It led up to a conference on the same topic held in the Faculty of Art, Design and Technology on 17^th June 2011.

The final DNA sampling of Digital Hybridity.

·      Hybridity is in the eye of the beholder.  It is a visually organized perception, even if that perception involves that transmitting, translating of, say, acoustic or tactile data.

·      History is written.   It takes the form of a written sentence, moving in one direction, engaging and exaggerating some aspects of spoken language – especially Western languages, a flow of acoustic signals sent and received in time.   It is possible to describe history (writing) as a “hybrid” of acoustic and visual codes, but we cannot perceive it that way.  We perceive it as a flow in time, aligned to hearing rather than to vision.  Or we perceive it as an image—fixed marks in rows on a surface.  There may be a duck-and-rabbit toggling between image and flow, but no meshing. History flows, and sweeps images along with it.  Or it doesn’t, and images flatten history out on to a surface. 

·      Images don’t flow.  

·      The opposite of “hybrid” is “pure” or “natural”.    At one time, “hybrid” was understood to be horrible, monstrous, and above all not-us.  We were pure and natural; hybrids were not.   Now, hybrids seem to be stronger, more flexible, more versatile than anything pure or natural.  Being hybrid, especially cyborg, is OK. 

·      “Digital” is “visual” to the extent that neither digital encoding nor visual perception make any absolute demand for a particular temporal order, any “correct” or even preferable way of linking of one thing to another. 

·      Consciousness takes an object. Phenomenologists and neurophysiologists seem to agree that in order to be conscious at all one must be conscious OF something.

·      Consciousness changes its possibilities and boundaries according to the code through which it is connected to its object.  A consciousness grounded in writing and history cannot think or remember in the same way as one grounded in images.  It is possible to toggle back and forth. 

·      If we accept Searle’s apparently unobjectionable contention that there is no such thing as “hybrid consciousness,” then hybridity appears as a means of expanding consciousness, presenting it with unprecedented perceptual challenges. 

·      Hybrid history is a contradiction in terms; Digital appears as the technical means of clearing away residual limitations on hybridity.   

Hybrids:

day trip / art trip

picnic / laptops

blanket / dongle  

beetle / screen

Location: Bradwell-on-Sea:  field, woodland, mud flats, marsh – became back-drop and materials for the broadcasts. 

We brought to this location:  

Field Broadcast Field Trip Kit List- given to all participants):

Sensible shoes  Warm layers / suncream / general English weather preparedness Laptop (if you can) Camera / video camera/ sound recorder  

Anything that you might want to use in a broadcast

Fritha Jenkins brought a rucksack full of wood.  Adrian Lee a set of colour swatches, Laura Wilson a text.  Sarah Bowker-Jones a set of objects that she has been making in the studio, three blue cylinders and three ‘ribbon painting’ sacks. 

Each artist explored the location and found their own particular situation to begin to test ideas, to construct events for broadcasts, and, in Laura Wilson’s case, to make a whole new work.  

The physical distance from one another within the location was something that I hadn’t quite imagined, but having seen the location on Google Earth I could picture us from above, spaced across the map, each absorbed in their own activity.   We were all in roughly the same geographical place, but each broadcast featured slightly different terrain and vantage point.  As the individual broadcasts were sent out a broken, and yet coherent view of the landscape was constructed, an alternative live map. 

We played in the location, making discoveries, such as the black mud (Laura Wilson) and wind direction (Sarah Bowker-Jones) that were then used with the works.   In the short space of the single day and the haste to send out the broadcasts the moment of play and the moment of presentation became conflated. 

Each broadcasting artist used the physical texture of the landscape as material for their broadcast, the final broadcasted works conflated the digital event with the moment of physical interaction with the substance of the landscape, a fusion of online practice and the sculptural concerns of colour, form and texture. 

Broadcasts were not made alone; the act of sending each broadcast was a collective endeavour, and collective decision-making helped to finalise ideas.  In this way the landscape, and the act of making the broadcast became a trigger for interaction and collaboration, the location of the field a frame for new working relationships to be established.  

This entry has been taken from the website of Sarah Bowker-Jones who joined us on our Field Trip   http://www.bowker-jones.com/Field Trip/sarahbowker-jonr.html

Personal account by Sarah Bowker-Jones, Wednesday 15th June 2011

Broadcasts from:Rebecca Birch, Sarah Bowker-Jones, Fritha Jenkins, Adrian Lee, Rob Smith and Laura Wilson

I was filled with both panic and excitement when I agreed to take part in the Field Trip at Bradwell-on-Sea, organised by the Field Broadcast* duo Rebecca Birch and Rob Smith. It was pretty short notice but my constant desire for the coast, after being in the city for so long, meant saying 'no' was not an option. Great, except in saying 'yes' I now had to think of something to do which could actually be broadcast.

I had never been to, or even heard of, Bradwell-on-Sea before last week so I did some research and found out it is one of the villages that makes up part of The Dengie Peninsula, a land 'bounded by the North Sea to the east, The River Crouch to the south and the River Blackwater to the north'**. It used to be part of a tropical sea but the land rose up and declared itself present with roaming dinosaurs whose fossilised bones are still being found. I was also thrilled to discover H. G. Well's inspiration for the alien landing in War of The Worlds came while looking out at the salt marsh landscape of Burnham-on-Crouch, another village making up The Dengie Peninsula.

Bradwell-on-Sea has an amazing landscape which gave my eyes a wonderful far reaching stretch across waving marshland grasses, millions of broken shells, delicious mud flats, and finally the blurry sea-sky horizon. –––Oh yeah... happy eyes, happy mind, it's been too long.––– My conundrum about making, or placing art in this landscape is the impossibility to make anything that is anywhere near as beautiful as the place itself. If I'm honest, I could say it like this: how does my art possibly exist in this landscape so rich with 'stuff' and phenomena? But these thoughts lead to doing nothing, and in my experience doing something is nearly always more fun that doing nothing.

I return to a comforting old thought of recognising myself as a tiny dot among astronomical things. I am a visitor joining an epic line of visitors who have been in this place. There's a collaborative marking on the landscape in terms of people paths along the coast and communities of settlers. Yet these various proofs of existence are shaped by the environment as much as the makers.

*Field Broadcast uses an innovative software that allows artists to make a live broadcast from a field and create a direct link between the place they are broadcasting from and a dispersed audience across the world. www.fieldbroadcast.org

**You can read more about Dengie Peninsula at www.dengie.org.uk

It’s hard to describe the excitement, but an explanation is found in part in the structure of the credit sequence. It was more than familiar to us, splitting itself into two quite distinct segments, taking the same form for both opening and closing credits with the difference that one mirrored and reversed the other. The episode itself was thus ‘bookended’ and rendered to some degree banal by our preference for an introduction and epilogue that, in their different internal orders, we could not always distinguish properly. All this is to say that there was always some doubt as to whether the images of most interest were yet to come or if they had been missed already.

Of the two segments that made up the opening and closing sequences, since one of them was of particular interest (and the source of excitement) it was inevitable that the other should become unbearable, a scandalous denial. But miraculously and despite the fear of life withheld, the keenly sought pictures would appear. Everything about them was compelling; this statement has to be read always for stronger meaning. There was no hand visible. The box revolved on its own. Its lid was of a kind not seen before, inexplicable, ingenious, multiple leaves moving in synchrony, slotting with precision. And from inside, on a platform that ascended into view in time with the rotation, something would appear. It would do so as if materialised from nothing there in the box’s darkness, a character presented not as the character known by his name, but as an irreducible puzzle. So the rotating box with its ascending platform showed what every one of us knows but has forgotten, which is that despite the familiarity of their names, all characters are enigmas.

The character: all the more present in the absence of the name.

Roll forward some years and another platform is found, or something very much like it. In its own way here too it’s the stage mechanism itself that appears and surprises. This time it does not rotate, but the issue of rotation remains the crux: precisely, a still platform, but stillness such that its impetus is rotation. Furthermore, being suspended it radiates the same magic. It is both suspended in a field of gravity and mysteriously stabilised in immunity from gravity’s effects.

There is something on the platform. What’s on the platform is the writer’s thesis – not in actuality but nascent, tangled and weed-like, a skein of desire. We had not noticed the thing there due to an undecidability about the platform and the thing it supports – this a result in turn of the way they have appeared. What’s on the platform is primary but, its appearance being inexplicable, is a question too – a question of the kind that evokes its answer simultaneously, spontaneously, answer as necessity – thing supported and supporting structure there beneath, both held suspended as if by a feat of electro-magnetism. As the thesis is presented in its potentiality, so the platform’s function for multiple angles of viewing is virtual. Important work is done bringing it into consciousness (the theorising of theory) but equally, something important is elided if we become too enamoured with an idea of work. To see what it promises to show from a different angle demands some facility to turn the platform. So where this platform is concerned, as before, there is no hand. But the turning must be enacted. To enact the turning is no insignificant work. Just as the first account is crafted in writing in the picture’s absence, so the second has its occlusion in a work of rotation by which something, a platform’s object, can be seen from a different angle. About the work of rotation, nothing is said.

Let’s not propose that such creative tools have a clear provenance, endeavour once more to find complexity in their origins and remember a pond in Aviemore, a fishing pond by a guesthouse, and in which the proprietor’s daughter was said to have swum. (What kind of woman was she? Who would dare to dive into such blackness? How deep? How soft and hazardous the matter beneath?) It was only while standing on the boards of what had been taken as a jetty on the edges of the pond that the stage was appreciated as something other than fixed foot-boards supported on piles driven into hard ground beneath the water. Great masses of pondweed there gave this body of water its dangerous parameters: such was all the support. Tilting one’s weight a bit the stage would flood – not so much as to wet one’s socks, but enough to reveal that the support was nothing but the buoyancy of watery vegetation. Then again, if it had been possible to step here first in false confidence, was it not possible to remain? Time spent on the boards on the chickweed was unexpected research – proto-research – to yield its results much later (while academies render themselves by steady increments less able to comprehend such trajectories within work) a quality of gravity’s force and resistance to it written into the body, bio-knowing before consciousness. There may be no bubbles of air trapped in the weed, but in the weed, in its cells and vascular bundles there is air all the same, and enough of it that without any bladders visible to the eye, a stage of boards slung carelessly onto the pond’s periphery takes the weight of a boy.

Will we meet up again in a posthuman world?

What is out there? Some theories on ethics in a posthuman world.

Do I want to comment? I hesitate. Please explore and add your own choice of philosophers to your personal list.

Which Ethical Theory Will Prevail in a Posthuman World?

Kris Notaro, Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies

http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/4646

In Defense of Posthuman Dignity

NICK BOSTROM, Faculty
of Philosophy, University of Oxford

http://www.nickbostrom.com/ethics/dignity.html

TOWARD AN ETHICO-POLITICS OF THE POSTHUMAN: FOUCAULT AND MERLEAU-PONTY

http://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia08/parrhesia08_diprose.pdf

The Ethics of Becoming Posthuman

David Roden, The Open University

http://open.academia.edu/DavidRoden/Papers/247591/The_Ethics_of_Becoming_Posthuman

Animal subjects: an ethical reader in a posthuman world 

edited by Jodey Castricano

https://www.ethicshare.org/node/684079

An excerpt from
 How We Became Posthuman
 Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
 by N. Katherine Hayles




http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/321460.html

Want to add a suggestion by Laura Beloff:

Hansell, G. R. & Grassie, W. (Eds.) (2011), H+ Transhumanism and Its Critics, Philadelphia, Metanexus Institute.

HAVE to add
ANDY MIAH, University of the West of Scotland

Gave great talk at Virtual Futures, Warwick

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/knowledge/themes/virtualfutures/andymiah

Great talk by Steve Fuller at Virtual Futures, Univerrsity of Warwick

WHO WILL RECOGNISE HUMANITY 2.0 - AND WILL IT RECOGNISE US?

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/knowledge/themes/virtualfutures/stevefuller

and an enlightening interview with Dan O'Hara, University of Cologne

Understanding the Virtual

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/knowledge/projects/live

Slavoj Zizek: NO SEX, PLEASE, WE'RE POST-HUMAN!

http://www.lacan.com/nosex.htm

 

There is no end to parcours, only a new
beginning. Again and again, like in groundhog day.
Not even a feedback loop can describe this
anymore. No spiral systems, no depictions of DNA
can give a better idea other than showing how
much we are caught in our fantasies and fears, in
our urge to prevail the known and at the same time
to radically change the world into a utopia with
dystopian pockets. At the end, we might be looking
at a gigantic rainbow hologram.

G. Bielz

Vinyl recording of Dvorak's SYNPHONY NO. 5 IN E MINOR, OP. 95 'FROM THE NEW WORLD', London Synphony Orchestra conducted by Leopold Ludvig, an Everest Recording, The World Record Club LTD

Cesário Alves: slide manipulation and projection 

Miguel Pipa: sound creation

Estúdio Fotografia Adriano: portraits (1930-32), Vila do Conde Municipal Archive, Portugal

Brief description of 'Train of Shadows' ('Tren de Sombras', Spain, 1997), by José Luis Guérin, and how it influenced my way of thinking about photography and film

by Cesário Alves

The film can be seen here:

The first seconds of 'Train of Shadows' tell the viewer about the sudden disappearance of amateur film maker Gérard Fleury, a lawyer in Paris, after a stroll to capture the morning light on lake Le Thuit in Normandy, France, November 8, 1930.

A scrolling text continues to explain that before his death, Gérard Fleury had made what was considered his last domestic production. This black and white 'found' footage, faint and scratched, at times reduced to almost transparent film substrate with unrecognizable abstract forms of chemical destruction and silver remnants, irreversibly damaged by humidity and poor conservation, is now restored and presented. The spectator is led to believe that this is a real account and is witnessing a true amateur footage.

After these scenes of family pleasure times, 'Train of Shadows' goes on to show contemporary Normandy in color in a documentary style, slowly bringing to the frame the landscape and the house depicted in Fleury's old footage. The camera leads the viewer through the house, revealing carefully represented details of the architecture, furniture and all sorts of objects, including framed photographs, convincingly aged like the black and white footage that introduced the film. Slowly, characters seen before in black and white come to life in full color and the viewer becomes more aware of the interplay between fictional and documentary reality.

The sound design and soundtrack play a very important role in conducting the viewer in this carefully constructed mischief. A solo piano, sounding just like a 30's live performance for a silent movie, conducts the viewer through a melancholic time travel that helps to give the silent black and white footage an intimate feel, then live contemporary sound brings the viewer to a recognizable contemporary reality. Further into the narrative, the technical sounds and images of film manipulation and projection emerge as a kind of attempt to de-construct or re-construct a story in the black and white footage (an attempt at solving the mystery of the lawyer’s death). This helps to create an idea of the film dealing with real life memories. An orchestral soundtrack and silence precisely fit in certain moments also contribute to creating a cinematic atmosphere of expectation and desire, mixed with sounds of film sliding through fingers, film reels, projectors shutters at full speed indicating that 'Train of Shadows' deals with filmmaking, film history and film materials.

 After watching a screening of the film for the first time I let myself be transported into some kind of dimension where fiction and reality intersect, and wanted to keep that thought in mind to suspend disbelief for as long as possible. A careful look though, reveals everything in the film is carefully constructed, acted, framed, masterfully painted with light and sound, and edited like a song, with a deliberate use of repetition. 

I actually had the chance to talk to José Luis Guérin concerning his methods to achieve the look of the old footage in 'Train of Shadows'. He revealed that this footage made to look like it was recovered from an obscure archive was actually shot in contemporary film, destroyed chemically, manually frame by frame. This knowledge and experience of 'Train of Shadows' was seminal in the birth of the Emulsion Soundtrack project, reflected in the method of chemical destruction used in the family portraits, core of the performance's image projection, an appropriation of 1930's photographs from Vila do Conde (Portugal) public archive of the old photography studio Adriano.

As a starting point, Emulsion Soundtrack is intended as an essay on appropriation of found film material and historical archive photographs but the project began only when a few conditions came together coincidently: the focus on historical photographic materials and access to Vila do Conde public Archive; a desire to experiment with the projected image and the relative abundance of 35 mm projectors and still available film and processing labs; the possibility of involving a musician/composer in the creation of a soundtrack for the projection, amplifying the technological and aesthetics scope of a performance/installation of this sort.

In many years of compulsive but dispersed personal photographic activity, driven by a passion for the medium technical and artistic potential, i was compelled to see, study and collect old photographs and related technical artifacts. In the mid 90's i witnessed the oldest photography studio in Vila do Conde come to an end, after Carlos Adriano, the last photographer in the family became old, seriously ill and soon dead. Being close to Carlos Adriano and his studio in their last days allowed me to contact with an extensive estate of photography materials spanning around 100 years of history. This event led to a growth in my awareness of the need to protect and study these historical photographs and a fascination for the signs and marks accumulated superficially by photographic materials, that reflect the inevitable effect of constant chemical change over long periods of time.

For the main sequence of photographs in Emulsion Soundtrack I selected a few of the portraits I found in the oldest albums of printed photographs of Adriano's photographic studio (1930, 1931 and 1932). The selection is quite random and subjective, I kept in mind only that I would like to represent the diversity of people in the portraits by generation and genre and let myself be captivated by any kind of detail in the pictures that appealed to me personally.

After photographic reproduction onto 35 mm positive film, the pictures were submitted manually to a process of chemical destruction which has removed from the positive film most of the layers of dies, leaving only the cyan as a vibrant dominant color with different intensities. The selection of the portraits is an ongoing process, as everything really is in this project. Through successive projection and observation of the material, a narrative is slowly emerging, demanding a certain organization and connection with the other visual elements introduced: leftovers from cinema reels and fragments of rejected film, with a variety of colors to counterpoint with the dominant blue/cyan of the portraits. These framed bits of colored transparencies, already old and eroded, at times subject of montage and/or collage with other materials become film matter, light, color and texture to add and subtract to the portraits.

The sound creation came into play after the decision of experimenting with the projection of these images. Miguel Pipa's musical spectrum is very diverse, blending fully analog instruments of his own creation with found sound devices and modified musical toys but also pure digital processing. To this project he brought digital sounds recorded in audio tapes to be played live in actual vintage tape players, revealing its unique kind of sound. The photographs have also suggested the making of field recordings of a wide range of subjects, from natural climatic events to machines in full motion, even the live capture of fm radio signals is incorporated live, with some risk. The result is a tapestry of sounds with a melancholic tone that results from research, experimentation, intuition and improvisation.

A fragment of a rehearsal of Emulsion Soundtrack can be seen here:

Audio samples from Miguel Pipa's sound can be heard here:

http://emulsion-soundtrack.bandcamp.com/album/emulsion-soundtrack

In their first months of new life, babies cry without weeping. It is as if they were sent out into the sea of life with an empty reservoir of tears.
 
The first generations of cellular phones were a breakthrough in responding to emergencies and saving lives. The present generations are offering such attractive entertainment applications that their expanding usage is becoming more endangering to life.

"I don't think any of us can do much about the rapid growth of new technology. A new technology helps to fuel the economy, and any discussion of slowing its growth has to take account of economic consequences. However, it is possible for us to learn how to control our own uses of technology. The "forum" that I think is best suited for this is our educational system. If students get a sound education in the history, social effects and psychological biases of technology, they may grow to be adults who use technology rather than be used by it."

Prof. Neil Postman (1931-2003), author of 'Technopoly', 'Amusing Ourselves to Death' and 'The End of Education' on the value of new technology. He was Head of Culture and Communications at New York University. He saw a limit to the promise of new technology, suggesting that it cannot be a substitute for human values.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/forum/january96/postman_1-17.html

Anneli ; a wearable robot.

A project in progress by laura beloff and niki passath 2011 > -current state of the project and further projections.

STARTING POINT and CONTEXT.

Anneli is compilation of 1) a human whose 2) jacket provides a habitat for 3) a (wearable) robot. These three components form a unified entity, which is founded on the created and evolving relations between these components. The project deals with an evolving relationship between a non-human and a human; an artificial creature and a human “host”.

Humans have a long-term fascination with artificially constructed things that seem to be alive and/or have human-like traits. Our history has many infamous examples and attempts to build “living” things. For example, the 18^th century inventor Jacques de Vaucanson is famous for his mechanical automatons The Flute Player and The Digesting Duck, which had hundreds of moving parts. The Duck could flap its wings, drink water, digest a grain and defecate. A fascinating fact, that this kind of artificial lifelikeness through mechanical constructs almost vanished by the end of the 18th century due to the redirected interests of inventor-engineers to work on the new development of industrial machinery, such as the automated loom. However, this tendency for the commercialization of industrial machinery had its counter part in the playful inventions that evolved e.g. optical illusions, visual effects or other “magical” qualities; small-scale inventions that were commonly categorized under “toys”.

Currently, the legacy of the interests in lifelike artifacts is visible e.g. on the area of robotics and computer sciences. The developments in AL (artificial life) and AI (artificial intelligence) have enabled a creation of increasingly sophisticated applications and robots that are developed in large varieties for different purposes; from automated industrial robots to caretaker robots and to robotic exoskeletons designed to aid humans in physically straining tasks. One of the recent developments is a geminoid, which is a robotic human-twin made to look like its "master" who can control and speak through the robot-twin remotely.

During the last decades it has become obvious that robots are here to stay, and we are looking at future infused with robots and life merged with technology.

The project  “Anneli” emphasizes the connection between the human body and the robotic; it forms a symbiotic nexus between human body and clothes as the second skin that also forms the landscape and the habitat for the robot. The robot is acting and reacting on this surface, which is simultaneously a border and a connection between the human and the machine.

Interests of two artists

The project is initiated as collaboration between two artists: Laura Beloff and Niki Passath.

Beloff’s artistic production during the last years has been primarily focused on technologically enhanced wearable- and mobile–structures and on techno-organic compilations, which have been often realized as wearable or portable artifacts. She is specifically interested in the connections and formed relations between technology and human within hybrid environment (merger of physical and networked space).

In the Anneli-project the interest is in the relation between the “user” (jacket wearer) and the independent robot. Question is; if the creature will be experienced as “the other”, as semi-autonomous part of the user, as a pet, as a servant of the human, or can it have another meaning?

Passath’s work and artistic production has been engaged in the sculptural conditions of robots and the idea of artificial intelligence, often resulting in robotic and evolving structures. In his works the technologically constructed artifact takes an independent role and evolves according to its rules.

In the Anneli-project the focus is in finding a method to create a robotic motion with the least amount of energy possible. The lifelikeness, in Passath’s understanding, is created by a combination of freedom of mechanical artifacts through mistakes and errors combined with randomness. This is achieved through a special method of construction of a mechanical body and programming of the mind, which allows mistakes and randomness, to create unpredictable robotic behavior.

On wearability and on robots

Wearable technology suggests that humans and our environment will be increasingly merged with (human-invented) technology in the future.

Commonly, in wearable technology projects the focus is in the user and his abilities that are extended. Similarly, robots are commonly created and used to fulfill some specified tasks; be it creating automobiles or defusing of landmines or acting as a weapon. However, in this project the robot is created as an autonomous creature, which acts by itself without any clear function or goal. The technological creature is utilizing, or invading, the user’s personal area in intimate proximity. The user is pushed to decide of his relation to the creature; if he accepts it and on what extent? Does he see it as a part of him and his world, as an external other, or are there possibilities to develop new kinds of relations in this situation?

Additionally, the project treats wearable technology from an unusual point of view: instead of typically considering it to be an aid for the user or an extension of his abilities, the user becomes a host for a parasitic creature, which needs him as living environment.

The project creates dependencies between the human host, the wearable habitat (jacket) of the robot and the robot itself. Simultaneously as the robot has to adapt its behavior and movement according to its forces, also the human has to adapt his movements to the robot’s movements to avoid possible interference between the position of the robot and human agility.

PRACTICE - problems and (anticipated) solutions or further thoughts.

Power

Currently, one of the main problems in projects dealing with independent (cordless) entities is the power consumption; battery-life, recharging and minimizing the consumption. Additionally, when dealing with wearable technology that is expected to be worn by people, the weight and size of the battery plays a major role and often directs the design choices.

Also, in this project we encountered this problem. First of all when the aim is to have a robot that moves on vertical and non-even surfaces, the robot itself needs to be extremely lightweight. At the same time the motors that make the robot moving consume fair amounts of power.

One of the goals in this project is to create a system, which gets the energy from human kinetic movements or from another renewable energy source. This energy would then be used to power the recharging station, which is constructed within the jacket and which serves as nourishment for the robot-creature.

List of things to take care:

-finding a compromise between durable / powerful batteries and their gross-weight, or finding a smart motion-creating structure that consumes less power than a typical motorized movement, or finding mechanical solutions, which produce high forces with small motors.

-finding a sticking solution for the robot on the wearable surface, which doesn’t consume a lot of power or, optimally, no power at all.

-designing an easy (and quick) recharging system that is in the line with the design and nature of the project.

-note: if the robot is added with other features (e.g. network) it will increase the power-consumption.

Weight – gravity

Like already mentioned in the paragraph above, we realized that the weight of the robot is a crucial factor in this project. This is mainly due to the vertical surface where the robot is moving. We are aiming at eliminating the most of the heavy components.

For example, the basic arduino microcontroller will be replaced by flexible and lightweight Seeeduino-version http://www.seeedstudio.com/blog/2010/06/29/seeeduino-film-maybe-the-first-arduino-board-on-fpc/

Attachment

In this project, one of the challenges is the attachment between the robot and the jacket. In other words how to create an attachment, which simultaneously gives a good hold but is also easily detachable when the robot moves.

We realized that there would be several options to do this if we would use electro-magnetic attachment. However this would consume fairly large amounts of power and require quite an extensive matrix to be constructed on the jacket.

We have also considered of having the robot attached with a kind of claws that would close and release when it moves. This requires the jacket-material to have “grabbable” surface, e.g. loops or fringes. It could also cause problems that the robot would get entangled into the structure.

Another “sticking” idea was the use of permanent neodynium magnets which create magnetic gravity over the surface of the jacket that would attach the robot to the surface. The permanent neodynium magnets could be placed on the legs or wheels or one strong magnet on the body of the robot. However with this magnetic jacket solution, the question is: Is this kind of magnetic field harmful for the human host?

All the various options are still open for experimentation. However, we decided to start the experimentation with a “passive”-system; using Velcro for the robot and having the surface of the jacket as the counter part. We have realized that with this system we need to find exactly the right combination; that the attachment is not too tight for the robot to detach and good enough to hold the lightweight robot. Some tests are done with “legged” and “wheeled” robots. http://www2.derby.ac.uk/openstudio/digital-hybridity/tags/121/

Overall construction of the robot

The idea is to have a 4-legged robot, which can run around and find its induction charging station. An evolutionary method for the form and function finding process has been chosen.

In the first experiments we used polystyrene as basic material for the mechanical parts and the body. Because of the surface of the upper body, which is the habitat of the robot, a certain size of the robot must not be exceeded. In the first experiments the idea was to create a small-wheeled robot, which can drive around on the ground to be a test platform for sticking tests with Velcro. We used an induction power-charging module which determined the smallest possible size of the robot.

Wireless power charger:

http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/wireless-power-supply-p- 701.html?cPath=155&zenid=f9be82e44c8fcc66eb986f3ca47e91d6

The rest of the power supply consists of the following items (without solar panel. solar panels could be part of the jacket to power the battery which powers the induction)

Li-Po Rider (power charger and power converter) and LIPO accu

http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/lipo-rider-p- 710.html?cPath=155&zenid=f9be82e44c8fcc66eb986f3ca47e91d6

Two very small geared DC motors where used on two big wheels to move and steer around. Cables used as stabilizers ensure the stability when driving to a certain direction. As vehicle, which is driving around on the ground, this prototype works well, but with Velcro attached and in a vertical position, the power of the motors is not high enough to move the motor a bit. Ideas for the next experiments are: Using some kind of chain drives could be an option to create a good detaching ability, because in the previous tests this problem seemed to be the one needing the most to be solved. Another approach could be to use an existing 6 legged robot (http://niki.xarch.at/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/zoe_basel_2_0011.jpg) which is equipped with an neodynium permanent magnet system as mentioned above. Maybe small pieces of Velcro on each of the six legs of the robot are a better system than wheels?

Jacket as a habitat

Additionally to finding a material, which would support and function well for the robot-attachment, the jacket needs also to be able to direct the robot that it stays within the borders of the jacket. This could, for example, be done with colored stripes that mark the area for the robot to move. The robot would be equipped with color sensor that detects the color-change and moves to another direction.

Another big question is if the robot has legs or wheels, which would require smooth surface of the jacket structure and material. This aspect influences the design/structure of the jacket, the area where the robot can move and the actual material used in the jacket.

Material challenges:

-material that supports the robot attachment

-material that supports the weight of electronic components

-material that is not too flexible, but still soft and textile-like

-material that does not wrinkle too much           

-material that looks interesting/good

List of things to be done or to be tested with the project (for the future):

The project is still in its initial state, many things needs to be done, tested and constructed. Also the practical side of the project work requires planning: funding and possibility for intense collaborative work periods.

Next steps to do:

-experimenting with jacket-robot attachment

-construction of super lightweight robot

-design and creation of jacket prototype: structure, material, design, marks for the area of the robot’s habitat

-issues: recharging of the robot, possible recharging of the jacket: technical structure of the whole project

-applications for funding and finding possibilities to work together

COMMENTS / NOTES

On of the things, which will need some thinking, is how the project will be exhibited. Will it be possible that the audience can actually wear the jacket, or will it be too fragile/sensitive for that?

Alternatively: Should it be worn by “a performer” that the audience can see it in use?

Or is it designed more as a reference of the idea, and in the exhibition it is displayed as an installation setup with a moving robot? And a video that presents the jacket in use?

********

15.06.2011

We would like to thank you ! for the possibility to be part of this project.

For us DigitalHybridity-project/blog worked out quite well as a gentle pressure to develop further our idea in its initial stages of development.

This short summary is for now the closure for the Digital Hybridity-participation. However the project continues and in the future some results will be seen. Meanwhile, you can follow our activities on the websites:

http://www.realitydisfunction.org  - laura

http://niki.xarch.at/ - niki

I have just returned from Obrestad Lighthouse about 20 miles South of Stavanger in Norway where I have installed a new work titled Radiometer. It is a work that has a lot of crossovers with Field Broadcast in creating live links to remote sites, so I will post a link to where you can view the work here: www.robsmith.me.uk/radiometer.html

In this work the vanes of a Crookes Radiometer turn in the sunlight activating a camera that captures images of itself installed in the Obrestad Lighthouse and adds them to an animation sequence. More frames accumulate in the sequence throughout the day. When there is no longer enough light to turn the vanes frames are removed from the animation until the work displays a static image and the apparatus waits for the sun to return. In this way the work becomes a record of its exposure to light.

Each day the sequence of images will change with local conditions at the lighthouse, and throughout the day the animation will constantly be evolving as the light levels change. This is a live work in which the viewer is presented with a constantly changing view from the lighthouse, which might be a time-lapse sequence of a day's light passing or just a static image of a radiometer.

This is maybe as close as we will get to a completed version of AR Gilt City. Short of taking the tube to Bank and experiencing it yourself firsthand, this documentation is the best we can offer.

“Sonny Boy, such a Sonny Boy, there's a song in the air,
Curare! Curare! Curare!
But the fair senorita don't seem to care,
Curare! Curare! Curare!”

Approaching the end, we begin again, this time attempting to depart from references to ‘driving forces’ and images crystallised into ‘cribs’. For it is acknowledged, however obliquely, that this trail is nothing other than the constant renewal of a questioning spirit, set as and against persistence, a sustained return to a field of enquiry… all the while being led around the arena by a Mascot Müle. Yet what is ‘persistence’ here, other than a form of suspension? Absentmindedly re-pressing the bruise, we consider that, at heart, all our evoked scenarios are placed artificially on their viewing platforms, as if set upon revolving tables that allow them to turn and be seen from all sides. The approach indeed makes its contribution to a broader project of affirmative immanence – “Look no further…” – but does so by continuing to return to details, to re-state blandishments of surface pattern, goading them to be reassessed once more, once more. To this end, perhaps, we find ourselves hatching a brood of obsessives, these Müleskinders, charging them to stare at blank walls, waiting for them to speak; to persevere with what appears to offer nothing but resistance, in case the conditions arise that provoke the faculties to turn themselves inside out.

Our concern for details resurfaces in light of noted discrepancies of intensity between reading and listening. Differing speeds of resistance. We think of surveying processes always on the look out for flaws, perforations, orienting pieces. But before anything else, we jest, it is necessary to illustrate (there is no other word for it…) a tiny increment from a film. The sequence is artificially isolated, two stills placed next to one another. The subtitles stitch themselves through our occupations, it seems, as a character’s solitary remark to himself – about thinking about speaking about listening as thinking about (…), or some other regress into which it is possible to spiral – accompanies a flip from third-person to first-person viewpoints.

Nothing else will be mentioned about this pair of images, their seared lines of text, let alone the film they come from. But the threat of infinite regress does seem worthy of mention – it feels as an important emphasis to make, the implication being that it is what should be guarded against at all costs. Our so-called viewing platforms should always keep rotating. Remaining in flux is what is necessary to this marshalling of thought – irrespective of which precise pacing keeps things afloat at any given moment (reading-rates, listening-rates…), we should always keep moving. It is at this point that the song enters and interrupts, its organ blast tied into some unknown spinning mechanism:

The song details a pair of washed up crooners, Jolson and Jones, in a fetid, hellish Spring locale; two outcasts artificially held in suspension, perhaps through a paralytic toxin. First up then, we take Allan Jones, a classically trained singer who played the lead tenor in the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera, who could never shake the burden of his one big hit: a ‘Serenade’. The song documents the obsessive persistence of a figure in love with a mule, hearing only the sweetest sounds through the braying. Long after the hit has faded, Jones continues to make cameo appearances, dragging the song up again and again.

He is spotted in a theatre audience and, when his back is turned, word is given to the orchestra: “Go into the Serenade!”, pulling him centre stage. We gleefully watch his teeth and hands as he pouts out the words: “So I'll sing to the mule, if you're sure she won't think that I am but a fool serenading a mule.” This is a mad lover’s persistence, waiting for the mule to break from its limits, as his conviction soon starts to persuade those around him to join in with the pretence and sign up to madness: “She’d love to sing it too, if only she knew the way, but try as she may, in her voice there’s a flaw and all that the lady can say is hee-hawwwwwwwwww!”

Jolson too, it turns out, appeared with the Marx Brothers during a radio broadcast on 11th June 1937, but by the late thirties he was a washed up has-been in the American theatre. But what of his own serenade to persistence, should we care to artificially isolate it? Following on from the success of The Jazz Singer, Jolson appeared in The Singing Fool (1928), in which he played an ambitious entertainer who continued to perform even as his young son lay dying. The film’s signature tune, ‘Sonny Boy’, became a hit for Jolson: “And the angels grew lonely, took you because they were lonely, I'm lonely too, Sonny Boy.”

But what do they do, these two spectres, listening to the hawkers announcing the availability of paralysing toxin on the streets? The cry is “Curare!”, the common name for various arrow poisons originating in South America, the most potent being Macushi wourali. In the early nineteenth century, Sir Benjamin Brodie showed that curare did not kill but holds its victims in a form of suspended animation. Recovery is usually complete if the subject’s respiration is maintained artificially. In 1813, Charles Waterton, often credited with bringing curare back to Europe following expeditions to British Guiana [Guyana], conducted a series of experiments on large mammals at the Royal Veterinary College, where he worked with Brodie, Sir Joesph Banks and Professor William Sewell. Accordingly, three mules were procured for experiments into artificial respiration as a treatment or defence against the effects of poisons, with possible applications in the management of other convulsive disorders. As part of the experiment, one mule was inoculated in the shoulder and died within twelve minutes. A tourniquet was applied to the upper foreleg of the second mule and inoculated against wourali below it. The animal walked about as usual, ate its food, until, after an hour or so, the tourniquet was released. The mule died within ten minutes, showing that the poison needed to gain access to the general circulation to be effective. Waterton's own account of the fate of the third mule is as follows:

"(The animal) received the wourali poison in the shoulder and died apparently in ten minutes. An incision was made in its windpipe, and through it the lungs were regularly inflated for two hours with a pair of bellows. Suspended animation returned. The mule held up its head and looked around; but the inflating being discontinued, it sank once more in apparent death. The artificial breathing was immediately recommenced and continued without intermission for two hours more. This saved the mule from final dissolution; it rose up, and walked about; it seemed neither in agitation nor in pain. The wound, through which the poison entered, was healed without difficulty. Its constitution, however, was so severely affected, that it was long a doubt if ever it would be well again. It looked lean and sickly for above a year, but began to mend the spring after, and by Midsummer became fat and frisky … the kind hearted reader will rejoice on learning that Earl Percy, pitying the mule's misfortunes, sent it down from London to Walton Hall, near Wakefield. There it goes by the name of Wouralia. Wouralia shall be sheltered from the wintry storm; and when the summer comes it shall feed in the finest pasture. No burden shall be placed on it and it shall end its days in peace."*

[*Wouralia lived another 25 years, dying on 15th February 1839]

What are we to make of this? The interrupting song, Scott Walker’s Jolson and Jones, is seared with mule braying. The persistence it indicates is manifold. It is purgatorial suspension. It is the inevitability of death shovelled in with career decline; the isolation of madness in songs you are condemned to repeat. It is a hybrid lyric too, composed from fragments sent spinning from these old time hits – paeans to waiting, to all that is impending, whether it be the death of a child or the singing of a mule. Breathing must be maintained and movement must be upheld. In order to persist we must ask again.

“Sonny Boy, such a Sonny Boy, in her voice there's a flaw,
Curare! Curare! Curare!
Sonny Boy, Bye Bye Sonny Boy,
E-e-aw and e-e-aw!”

Field Broadcast's Field Trip will take place on Tuesday 14th June 

www.fieldbroadcast.org/fieldtrip.html

Two car loads of artists will be going to Bradwell-on-Sea. From this remote location on the Essex Coast we will send live broadcasts to the Field Broadcast website during the day.  The Field Broadcast application is embedded into the webpage so that it will alert you to a live broadcast coming in.

Broadcasting artists include:  Adrian Lee, Fritha Jenkins, Rob Smith, Rebecca Birch, Laura Wilson, Dan Coopey , Sarah Bowker-Jones