Category: Blog

Talk with Natalie Jeremijenko and Kasia Molga

I am privileged to be giving a talk with Natalie Jeremijenko and my friend Kasia Molga tomorrow evening at the Arcola Theatre in Dalston. Please do come if you’re in town!

Here is the press release:

Sky, ants and talking to plants

Invisible Dust invites you to a presentation by New York experimenter, environmental engineer and artist Natalie Jeremijenko together with the ‘Ant Ballet’ artist and designer Ollie Palmer discussing with Invisible dust host and artist Kasia Molga how technology is being driven by artists to explore, conserve and relate to our environment.

Speaker Profile:

Natalie Jeremijenko is an artist whose background includes studies in biochemistry, physics, neuroscience and precision engineering. She was recently named one of the 40 most influential designers by I.D. Magazine and listed in Fast Company’s most influential women in technology. Jeremijenko is the director of the environmental health clinic and associate professor at New York University.

Ollie Palmer is a designer and artist. He is a collaborator with Open H2O and Protei (open source projects developing oceanic technologies) and a tutor in the Interactive Architecture Workshop at the Bartlett School of Architecture UCL.

Host:

Kasia Molga is a media artist who explores changes in our perception and relationship with the planet in the increasingly technologically mediated world. She deals with real time environment and data visualisation – where the data becomes a pretext, motor and platform behind the work. Kasia Molga is one of the artists working on a research proposal for Invisible Heat, Invisible Dust’s new project about climate change and health.

6.30-8.30pm Tuesday 4th June 2013
Arcola Theatre ,
 24 Ashwin St, Dalston, London – E8 3DL.
Train: Dalston Junction overland station.
Tickets: £5 / cons £3

Late at Tate Britain

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

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

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.

GAD Catalogue

[gss ids=”2141,2142,2143,2144,2145,2149,2150,2148,2147,2146,2151,2152″]

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

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!

Ruairi Glynn at Tate Tanks

Recently I’ve been helping out my friend and colleague Ruairi Glynn with his latest installation Fearful Symmetry at the Tate Tanks, as part of the Undercurrent programme. Building upon themes from his earlier projects Performative Ecologies (the piece that got me into this world in the first place) and Motive Colliques, he has built the world’s largest delta robot, with the express intention of investigating our perception of movement.

Video by Ollie Palmer / 3D animation Diony Kypraiou / artist Ruairi Glynn / Camera Ollie Palmer & Ronan Glynn

The piece is currently residing in a warehouse somewhere in the east of London, but will be open to the public in the Tate Tanks between 21-22 August 2012. There’s a private view in the evening of the 22nd – if you’d like to come along, please do drop me an email!

NB – I’ll be updating this page as the project develops with more photos, videos, press clippings, etc.

Video by UCL News.

Press

BBC News, 28 Aug 2012
UCL News, 23 Aug 2012
FastCoDesign, 22 Aug 2012
Wired, 17 Aug 2012