In Particular – online journal

Art & Science Talks

I’ve finally got confirmations from speakers on 4 talks I’m organising at Cranfield. This part of the residency ‘deal’ was such an easy thing to write on an application form but it actually takes a lot of time and effort to find a good balance of interesting people to come and speak. Let alone the admin – book a room, get permission, talk to security, figure out who to ask to move a table, get a risk assessment on blu-tack, and so on…

My aim is to attract people from science, engineering and business to come and hear artists talking about their collaborative work in various disciplines, and maybe get inspired to work with artists themselves, or just to consider opening up research strands to include lateral subjects. I think I’ve got a great line-up:

1st October 2008 -  Professor Paul Brown – artist

Subject: Can a robot evolve to demonstrate creative drawing behaviour?

15th October 2008 – Francesca Galeazzi – artist & architectural engineer

Subject: A recent expedition to the Arctic with Cape Farewell; preventing creativity freeze in the name of climate change awareness

29th October 2008 – Dr Emma Lawrence – experimental psychologist & Julie Freeman – me

Subject: Tricks of the Psych Trade: an artist/scientist collaborative event unraveled. How did a public understanding of science event get helped by art?

12 November 2008 – Anna Dimitriu – artist, founder of The Institute of Unnecessary Research

Subject: Talking to bacteria – our relationship to the everyday microbial world in which we co-exist, plus the importance of Unnecessary Research

The talks are free, and open to all, and are at 6pm, Building 52a Cranfield University. More info: http://www.in-particular.net/talk-series

I’m intrigued to see what kind of response I get – there are very few activities on campus that involve art (OK, well none) yet I speak to people here regularly who have a keen interest in art or who are artists ‘on the side’ as well as scientists.

Now to get the audience to come in the first place…

Looking closer, seeing less

Yesterday I had a 2 hour session with Matt Kershaw and TP with an Environmental Scanning Electron Microscope (ESEM) which can enable us to view up to x5000.

ESEMs focus a beam of electrons in a scanning motion over a sample placed in a sealed chamber. A vacuum is created in the chamber and water vapour is added. The electrons penetrate the sample (a tiny amount, say 10 micrometers) and stimulate the ejection of other electrons (Secondary Electrons) from the sample, which are amplified in the water vapour environment. The secondary electrons are counted by an electron detector and this information is converted into an image viewed on a display. It’s complicated and I barely understood, but that’s the gist. The most important thing is that what we see on the screen is a combination of a hardware sensor and a software translation of moving electrons into a black and white image.

In preparation I made 8 cardboard slides each with pencil marks from the entire range of Faber-Castell pencils and then some. From 6H to 9B, plus charcoal and wax pencil used for writing on glass. Each slide was a different quality paper ranging from very smooth (professional tracing paper) to super rough (crepe paper). So 8 different papers, 20 different pencils, 3 different marks per pencil = 480 samples. In 2 hours. I didn’t really think that through and we managed to look at about ten, plus some marks made ad hoc on a little aluminium stub (so we could tilt the sample – my slides were too big).

I was hoping that the equipment would reveal landscapes of graphite and clay, boulders of charcoal, great crevices formed torn by the hardest pencils, sprinklings of dusty rubble at the edges of lines, mountains made by single dots.

Mostly when we mark with pencil on paper it’s a purposeful action, a dynamic set of movements that build a bigger picture. In using the equipment I was interested in looking closer at the pencil mark to see how complex the simplest of artistic processes is from a very close-up perspective, whether the dynamic nature of making the mark was clearly apparent in the debris left behind, and if it would even be recognisable as a pencil mark.

I hadn’t considered the interaction between pencil and paper, or the elemental ingredients of the samples.

More following…

“As I prepared my samples thoughts nudged at me, what would they look like, what would we see, what if we discover, something new, something free from the norm, something quite beautifully strange? What if this pseudo-experiment is so out of the range that the magic we find is the first of it’s kind? And the thoughts they went on and I let them, I let them push the excitement along. I wondered if the scientists feel this, if this is what they get, when they prep for the next most amazing experiment yet…”

Hacking printers, losing brain

It occurred to me today that I think it would be possible to misuse the networked printing system across the campus by outputting statements from the printers to the people that use them. Most people always look at what comes out as they wait for their print.

I wonder if I could access all the printers on the network – my mac seems to sit outside of the PaperCut system anyway so it might be possible. Wouldn’t it be nice if you found a bit of paper and it had a special message on it?

500 pages that all say “I want to but I can’t”

“No one asks me about the weather”

Pictures of other photocopiers with their doors open. CopierPorn.

Or maybe I will use this to promote the work when it gets exhibited. After a little test or two…

Sheesh. What am I up to? Is this what happens when your studio is an open-plan office. You start making photocopier jokes? From a storage cupboard to a Tatiesque workers greenhouse. I think I am missing my old studio. A lot.

Building 52a, Zone A1, Position 068

I have just moved to a new desk space on Cranfield campus. The new building is a glass addition to an old hanger style building, which there are a few of here as there is a private airport on-site. It’s very light and airy, standard grays with flashes of lime green, pink and yellow. I like it, even it’s corporateness, as it’s novel for me to be in a place like this. On the outside it’s impressive to visitors but inside is pretty inflexible in terms of workspace – a small desk and a tiny cabinet each – but it’s not to house artists, it’s for academics so maybe that’s all they need, and there are the labs upstairs which are ace and slightly sci-fi and smell just right. I doubt some of the format meets their needs but will have to remember to ask around. The great thing is that it is populated with people and that is what I need. People. Yip.

My old desk space was in an office halfway up the stairs. I had two desks, some shelves, a white board, lots of light, walls to put things on, spare tables BUT it was empty (and it smelled). SamNewPhD joined me in the room after a few months but the isolation was still there as we were cut off from the rest of the people in the building – we couldn’t see them and they couldn’t see us. I didn’t spend much time there and came up with lots of reasons – TP wasn’t in, I need to save fuel, I’m wasting 40 mins due to the drive, I work better at home, my dog chewed the front door handle off with me inside…

I realise now that when I was in there I felt like an item of storage stuck halfway up the stairs – like your Grandma’s corner cabinet that is potentially valuable but doesn’t fit anywhere.

So today I am feeling excited as I have witnesses (even though they don’t know it). Does everyone need an involuntary audience for their life?

In front of me...

Behind me...

Secrets

There was a big gap between the eager start of this blog and then any further entries as I stumbled on the unexpected and the unwanted – the monsters of confidentiality and censorship. Breathe, two, three…

What happened was that it occurred to me whilst writing an entry about some VERY EXCITING and VERY EDGY and POTENTIALLY GROUNDBREAKING ideas TP (The Prof) had been discussing with me, that he may not want them published publicly, as it were, as they were so new and shiny. I was right and we agreed I should show him posts before I publish them. It seemed like a good idea at the time but I think it closed a mental door. Having my blog entries checked before publication removes the instantaneousness of the medium – the key thing about blogging – so instead I simply didn’t write anything. It was a bit of a crippler. Now I am simply not including any potentially confidential info, but the experience made me wonder about protection of ideas in art and science. How limiting is it? Aren’t we all about sharing, openness, swapping and inspiring? Open-source open-mind?

Well on the surface I suspect the answer for artists is yes, always, for sure, but underneath – what about those really great ideas, the ones that make you shake like a little pekingese dog? The ones that if you were driving (or operating machinery) you may cause an accident because you lapsed so deeply into your own head that you forgot you had limbs? The ones that snatch you from reality and ram you down a chute into Fantasyville where you are EL FROMAGE and creator of THE BEST ART EVER and the ideas are so amazing you can hardly think them. Should we publish and share this stuff?

When do we stop writing what we are thinking about and simply allude to it? And do you ever say upfront what you intend to do? Apparently Henry Wellcome once said “Never tell anyone what you are doing until you have done it” (check the ladies toilets at the Wellcome Collection building). But I am always telling people what I’m up to – what i want to do – what I’m thinking of doing. I can’t help it, it’s Artist Tourette’s (or verbal diarrhoea, but I can never spell that). It’s great to get feedback, but sometimes it backfires and you notice your ideas feeding others with no citation, reference or even casual acknowledgment. In art so what?

Hmmm.