Category: Education

Lundi du Pavillon

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Parisian friends! I will be presenting 24fps Psycho and the wider project that it is part of at the Palais de Tokyo’s Lundi du Pavillon on 18 April 2016.

24fps Psycho is a project that replaces every single frame of the film Psycho with a “similar” frame from historical archival footage. The frames are chosen by an algorithm which studies pixel colour values. The audience then construct their own narrative atop the film’s soundtrack.

This is part of a wider project looking at the technology of cinema. I will present some footage from the next stage of the project, whereby a film-wanderer makes its way through an archive, analysing films and continually making new connections between them.

Also at Lundi du Pavillon will be cellist Gaspar Claus and a screening of Olivier Dollinger‘s film Climate Control and the Summer of Love.

The Facebook-inclined can find more information and RSVP here.

Do Disturb

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I will be showing my film 86400 and performing 24fps Psycho at the Do Disturb Festival at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in a couple of weeks. This is very exciting, as both works have never been shown before.

86400

86400 is a real-time film made from Google Image searches for the time right now. It will be running throughout the festival.

24fps Psycho

24fps Psycho is an experimental performance remixing the film Psycho (1960) with footage from the French National Audiovisual Institute. It will be chaotic and confusing, but also highly enjoyable. I will be performing twice, once on the Saturday and once on the Sunday (9 + 10 April).

There are over 50 artists and performers participating this year, so it looks like a great way to spend a weekend – if I wasn’t performing, I would be in the crowd!

Tickets are avaialble through the Digitick website or at the Palais de Tokyo ticket office.

Tokyo Arts Club

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View from the Tokyo Arts Club balcony

I will be presenting two projects at the Tokyo Arts Club in the Palais de Tokyo on the 25th November as part of the launch of the Pavillon Neuflize OBC artist residency programme.

The projects I will be talking about are the Godot Machine and a new project in development, currently titled Spatial Cinema. Test videos from Spatial Cinema are here:

Spatial Cinema test 1
Spatial Cinema test 2

AA Visiting School, Patras

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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.

Animating Environments

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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.

Talk with Natalie Jeremijenko and Kasia Molga

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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

Plexus talk

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I gave a talk about Ant Ballet at the Bartlett School of Architecture‘s Plexus lecture series.

The entire event was recorded and is available here:

There was an excellent line-up of people who also presented, including:
– Manja Van de Worp
– Vera-Maria Glahn, director of field.io
– Memo Akten – who is one of the best people on Twitter – gave a hilarious, thought-providing talk and run-through of his work to date

Plus the Bartlett’s very own Mollie Claypool as a special guest.

Thank you to Jose Sanchez for the invitation!

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.

GAD Catalogue

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[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.