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Here’s the presentation I gave in Copenhagen last week regarding my Physical Virus project. The project is an architectural conversation about invasive species; the first step is to create a ballet performance using ants, using a series of modified printers to print pheromones and influence ant behaviour. This presentation shows briefly the main stages involved in the execution of the project, a few influences, and some videos pilfered from various places.

You can also see the first batch of ants on flickr here.

Perhaps we’re too cheap to send real cards. Or maybe we’re freaking eco-warriors, saving on trees.

Open_Sailing is pleased to announce that our own dear Cesar Harada has been made a TED Research Fellow. This means that Open_Sailing will be one of the many glorious ideas being bandied around Long Beach between February 9-13 2010.

Needless to say, the whole team is excited – our large open source project will be open to a truly global audience. The more, the merrier!

Official press release

Oh, and while I’m on the subject, we were interviewed for El Pais, the Spanish national newspaper the other day whilst running a workshop at the CCCB in Barcelona. Click here to see the article – scroll down for English.

Happy sailing!

ants2 short.mov (23602 KB)

I’ve been taking time lapse videos of the first of my new ants. These guys are Lasius niger – common UK garden ants – they hatched the other day – and they’re in a cylindrical tube with some sugar in the bottom.

Posted via email from Unit 14

Posted via email from Unit 14

One of the most commonly accepted RFID systems in operation is the Oyster card. I put mine into a glass full of nail varnish in order to remove the chip inside.

After a few hours, the adhesive holding the components together was degraded to such an extent that the whole thing was a floppy mess, ready to be peeled apart.



This is version 2.6 of the Oyster card – previous versions contained copper wire, but this one uses conductive ink as the arial. The flexible centre is now ready for embedding into anything – e.g. a jacket sleeve – ready for use. The pencil points towards the “ID” part, which contains the chip’s all-important frequency.

It is a privilege to be invited to be part of one of the world’s great photo-libraries. Now a global audience is able to buy photographs that I have taken from around the world to use and re-interpret creatively. It’s fantastic to know that your work could be helping others create.

If you like my photography, click here to see more on my website (hideously unorganised), or here to see more on my Flickr stream (along with lots of other, less pretty pictures).

The following statement is true.
The previous sentence is false.

Mis en Abyme / Strange Loops / Infinity / Voids

Introversion, self-reference and meta-reality abound; the theme I’m working with is the concept of a thing in a thing. Mis en Abyme, literally translated, means ‘into the abyss’. Kind of like a Russian doll – but an infinite one.

Hofstadter investigates this in Gödel, Escher, Bach – the paradoxes that exist within each of these genius’ works are remarkably similar.

Expect an experience that is simultaneously introverted and ethereal; esoteric yet accessible. As I say, development is in progress, but here’s a list of influences so far (by no means exhaustive):

• Douglas Hofstadter
  Meta-physics, presentation of mathematics alongside music and art
  Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid // The Mind’s I // I Am a Strange Loop

• Michel Gondry
  Incredible use of visual effects, warped looping and fractional distortion
  Björk – Bachelorette // Kylie Minogue – Come Into My World // The White Stripes - Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground // Also look at this video for the White Stripes – not Gondry, but Alexandre Courtès

• Charlie Kaufmann
  Screenplays with stories that fold into themselves and each other
  e.g. Synecdoche, New York // Adaptation // Being John Malkovich

• Francis Bacon
  Space frames, foreground and background merging, distorted figures – frankly, I relish any opportunity to browse through Bacon paintings
  See image reel at the end of this post

General points-of-reference

Optical illusions, magic, puppetry…plus other influences include all of the usual suspects, plus music videos, short films, etc, including: this book, this video, of course this group, this video, this one is equally cheesy, these projects, this studio (of course), fractals, ths photographer, these guys, this image is jerky and pixellates badly but a nice idea, you’ll regret this image, this guy, etc etc. (If you’re interested in my influences, check out my delicious stream, or head to Ruairi’s blog at interactivearchitectrue.org)

Click on the images below to be taken to their source. Images are property of their respective copyright holders.

The brief was to work on a motel using an Edward Burtynsky photograph as a site plan, using one of four of Perry’s methods.

Kim Walker and I worked together, and investigated gestural translation. Gestural translation, to explain in one sentence, is a process by which a gesture is translated into an architecture. The gesture can be as meaningful or meaningless as you wish, and it is generally the way in which it is translated that creates the interest.

We chose this photograph of a fragment of a ship being broken down as our site:

The process then underwent four stages:

1. The gesture

Our chosen gesture was bursting a balloon filled with water. This action took place over a scale of milliseconds and was captured using high-speed photography and video.

Finding commonalities

We found commonalities in the site, the gesture and the motel through changing state of being over time: