My friend Fiona Williams (who kindly helped me film the Nybble video) made a lovely stop-motion film about the now-probably-obsolete method of learning Italian by cassette. She filmed it in a Christopher Wren tower in London, using a cassette that she found in an attic. The result is charming, hilarious, bewildering and highly enjoyable.
Note: I feature as a technical advisor in the credits, but Fiona really deserves all the credit!
I recorded this video of waves lapping on a beach in southern Italy recently. There was something mesmerising about this patch of water, which is far thicker than most. And a nice thud as it hit the shore. Was it adding to the shore each time, or taking away?
I gave a talk at the University of Innsbruck the other day, and on my day off I went to see the Thomas Feuerstein exhibition Psychoprosa. Unfortunately the show has now finished, but I made this video for future posterity:
The show was great. Lots of things that bubbled and wobbled, strange machines and pipes. Missing from the video is the room full of phantom fridges and ghosted CCTV footage. I’d love to see his studio.
This exhibition was on at Galerie im Taxipalais, Innstruck, Austria, 7 March – 10 May 2015. For more on Thomas Feuerstein, see his website.
I taught at the Architectural Association’s Visiting School in Patras, Greece, this year. Working with Alexandros Kallegias, Stella Dourtme, Omar Ibraz, Maria Brewster and a fantastic team of keen students from the Architecture Department at the University of Patras, we constructed an 8m x 4m inflatable structure to adorn the main lecture hall.
The installation is sited in a mixed-use university building; the ground floor is a lecture hall, often used for social events, and the floor above is the architecture library. Consequently the space goes from empty to full, quiet to loud, in a matter of minutes. The students conceoved an installation which is a ‘lonely cloud’, becoming more excitable when there are more people in the hall. When it is quiet, the cloud amuses itself dreaming of people.
I taught electronics and coding in Arduino to enable this proejct to come together.
Here is a video that Maria and some of the students put together of the workshop. (Please note, not my video!)
I was very impressed with the efforts of the electronics team. Day after day, they worked together to solve problems, design and build systems and components, and learn about the world of interactive architecture late into the evening (and sometimes mornings!) – all the time whilst smiling. Well done, team!
Thank you to the AA for inviting me to teach, and thank you to the excellent teaching team and highly motivated students for helping make the project happen!
The Architectural Association has a more in-depth article on the project on their Conversations website. There is also a gallery of images here.
I love it when the sun is low. Here’s some shadow chasing on Tottenham Court Road.
Video is on Vimeo.
This is the video which explains how the code-base within my Nybble project works. Each symbol represents a dancer in the performance, and the combination of four dancers creates a letter.
For more information, see the Nybble page.
A love story between a boxer and a toy pig.
Music by Barry White (of course).
I passed through what must be the longest station in the world the other day.
Ant Ballet is featured in the upcoming exhibition Big Data: Designing with the Materials of Life at Central St Martins. In addition to the static exhibition, I will be working with students to facilitate the design process during the live design-science project.
The exhibition is curated in two parallel formats:
– A static design exhibition which will present biologically-driven design narratives, including work from Ann Kristin Abel, William Bondin, Natsai Chieza, Rob Kesseler, Amy Congdon, Ruairi Glynn and Ollie Palmer
– A live design-science project in collaboration with the Medical Research Council as part of the ‘Fabrics of Life’ series. For three weeks, the Lethaby gallery becomes an incubator studio where emerging designers and architects will create new design proposals in response to the research of leading biological science labs.
23 January – 13 February 2014
Tuesdays to Fridays, 12–5pm
Work In Progress Presentation: Wednesday 5 February 2014, 2-5pm
Final Design Presentation: Wednesday 12 February 2014, 2-5pm
For more information, see the University of the Arts London website.
Thanks to Carole Collet and Ruairi Glynn for the invitation.
I was asked to give a lecture for UCL’s Lunch Hour Lecture series, during which I talked about the work of the Interactive Architecture Lab as well as my own artwork.
The lecture I gave is really a slightly modified version of my PhD upgrade presentation. During the talk, I briefly mention mental modelling and space neurons – which refers back to the incredible work of the eminent neuroscientist Professor John O’Keefe, with regards to the way that the human mind models the world. I was both surprised and humbled to see Professor O’Keefe in the audience. I hope I did not bore him, or over-simplify his ideas too much.