I had a nice conversation with Régine Debatty from We Make Money Not Art on her radio show recently. The show aired on London-based Resonance FM on the 14th and 18th December 2012.
You can also listen to the interview, or even download it for your hard drive’s pleasure, here:
Sarah Lester wrote a particularly lovely article about the Ant Ballet in the brand-new Journal of Wild Culture after we spent a day together dressed in emergency ant invasion clothing. You can read her article here.
Ant Ballet was featured in the October 2012 issue of Wired magazine and its associated iPad app in October 2012. You can read the article online here.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
BBC News, 28 Aug 2012UCL News, 23 Aug 2012FastCoDesign, 22 Aug 2012Wired, 17 Aug 2012
I made these idents for Wired magazine’s October issue, featuring Ant Ballet. The animations use the same pheromone-patch system as I used on the installation version of Ant Ballet, where virtual ants lay and follow each others’ pheromone trails, which fade over time.
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I have been invited to give a talk about dancing ants at the Natures Stage of Wilderness Festival, taking place between 10-12 August 2012 in beautiful Oxfordshire. I can’t wait to get there and take in a wealth of music, talks, food and country air!
More information and tickets available at the Wilderness Festival Website.
UPDATE: I’ll be on the Natures Stage on Saturday at 4pm. There are some other top-notch presentations there too, including Alan Moore and the New Dawn Traders.
I have been helping my friends at Westby Jones and Smout Allen to design and fabricate the Universal Tea Machine in time for the London Olympics.
Installed in Victoria Park for the duration of the Olympics, the Universal Tea Machine is a computer that relies on teamwork and calculation to produce the perfect cup of tea. The Heath-Robinson-esque machine enables the audience to make their ‘perfect’ cup of tea by solving binary calculation maths problems. If their calculation is too high, they might get too many teabags; not high enough, and they may not get a teabag at all.
I designed and fabricated the mechanisms and electronics that enable tea to get made: the ‘kitchen’ unit. Here’s a short video showing the mechanisms in action:
The Universal Tea Machine is a collaboration based at the Bartlett School of Architecture between Smout Allen and You+Pea with Iain Borden. The UTM is fabricated by Westby and Jones and Ollie Palmer. It was commissioned by the Mayor of London for the Cultural Olympiad.
Please note: originally posted on the Smout Allen site). All images © copyright Smout Allen / You & Pea
FutureEverything was featured on Iranian television channel Manoto TV‘s Tech Show this week. There’s a feature on the Ant Ballet about halfway through. My Persian isn’t too hot, but I think the translation came across OK…
You can watch the whole programme here, or jump straight in at the Ant Ballet section here.