Author: Ollie Palmer

Late at Tate Britain

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I am building a machine with Krieder + O’Leary for the next Late at Tate Britain on the 1 February 2013.

sentinel_web

It’s a 2.5m-long camera which scans the border between the public and hidden spaces of the gallery, and will be whirring away creating large photographs all evening. It is an homage to Kubrick and Tarkovsky, and a prototype for a system that I’ll be using in Norway over the coming weeks.

Date: 1 February 2013, 18:00-22:00
Location: Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1P 4RG
More information here

Material Matters Talk

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I am giving a lecture on Thursday evening at the Bartlett School of Architecture as part of Ruairi Glynn and Xavier de Kestelier‘s Material Matters series.

Ant Ballet

An entymological adventure coaxing choreography from a company of obstinate insects

As humans, we are used to hierarchical control systems. Ants are different – they use pheromones to communicate and connect with each other, building complex networks from simple feedback loops.

Working with a team of chemical scientists and entomologists, Ant Ballet is an attempt to ‘hack’ the communication protocols of ants. Witness the trials and tribulations of the first attempts to create choreography, and intercontinental ant colony communication through the use of synthesised chemical compounds.

The Bartlett School of Architecture
Royal Ear Hospital
21 Capper Street
London WC1E 6AP
Thursday 17 January 2013, 7pm

Bio
Ollie Palmer is an artist and designer. Based at the Bartlett School of Architecture, he is a tutor in RC3 on the Graduate Architectural Design course. He has travelled around the world, hitchhiked across Iceland and taught IT skills in the heart of the Amazon. He is a collaborator with Open_H20 (developing open source oceanic technologies) and a Getty Images contributing photographer.
www.olliepalmer.com

Demystify Remystify

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I taught a workshop with Ruairi Glynn for the Adaptive Architectural Computation and our very own Interactive Architecture Lab at the Bartlett School of Architecture. Over the course of 9 days, students learnt to prototype and build small interactive electronic systems. Among the machines were a candy floss thrower, an Aurora Borealis emulator, and a three-person ping-pong ball game.

IMG_0440 DemystifyRemystifyLogo

More details, and student projects to follow.

New Scientist Christmas Special

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Ant Ballet is featured, albeit very briefly, in this weeks’ issue of New Scientist (22 Dec 2012).

Here is the article:

New Scientist, 22 Dec 2012, page 54

It is a side note in an article about Tim Cockerill‘s brand new Flea Circus – which uses real fleas to revive this old tradition. Here’s a video with slightly more information about Tim’s flea circus:

For more information about the Flea Circus, see Tim’s website. For more from New Scientist, visit their website.

GAD Catalogue

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The new Bartlett GAD catalogue is out, featuring the work of fifteen of our RC3 students.

Congratulations to all of our students, and welcome to the new set who have just joined us.

Many thanks to Simon Kennedy for his ongoing support and photography throughout the year, and Sam McElhinney for painstaking attention to detail with theses. It has been a pleasure and a privilege to work with Professor Stephen Gage and Ruairi Glynn teaching in this cluster.

The GAD catalogue is available to buy from the Bartlett front desk, or online from Amazon.

Ant Ballet at FutureEverything: Video

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Here’s a video that FutureEverything made explaining a little about the Ant Ballet project, as installed at FutureEverything’s art exhibition earlier this year. It shows the simulation-version of the Ant Ballet machine in the spectacular setting of Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI).

And speaking of MOSI, Here’s Jean Franczyk, its Director, talking through the exhibition, its links with FutureEverything, and some of the artworks on show:

There are more videos from FutureEverything’s exhibition and conference here.
Read a little more about Ant Ballet here.

Thanks to Heechan Park for the huge role he played in the assembly of the machine!

Phase IV. Destruction (Undetermined)

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Katya Ganyushina interviewed me last month for an article in Christies Education’s magazine C#12. It was a really fun interview – and as a bonus, there’s a Russian translation too!

Read the article online here (pages 24-29), or download a pdf here.