Artists

Singing Compost [heap#1], with Harun Morrison

 

Singing Compost [heap#1]

A collaboration between Harun Morrison and Paul Granjon

 

Composting is the natural process of recycling organic matter, such as leaves and food scraps, into a valuable fertilizer that can enrich soil and plants. The compost material contains electrogenic bacteria, microbes that release electrons as part of their metabolic process.

 

The presence of such bacteria (Shewanella Oneidensis, Geobacter…) in most soils has led to the development of microbial fuel cells (MFCs), also known as mud batteries. MFCs capture this electronic flow for powering low-power circuits such as environmental sensors.

 

Research in MFC design has established that growing live plants in the cell benefits the lifespan of the bacteria. These batteries are called Plant MFCs.

 

An array of 16 plant MFCs are integrated into the bed of the Singing Compost, their electrical output channelled to a circuit producing sounds that vary according to the voltage produced.

 

Singing Compost [heap#1] is installed in the Art Research Garden of Goldsmiths University London.

 

Mud batteries saga continues

In 2016-17 I worked with bio-engineer Michka Melo on microbial fuel cells, also known as mud batteries. We conducted various experiments in my studio and in the FabLab at Cardiff Metropolitan University, attempting to make an open source design for use in art and design, education, diy off-grid applications. We presented our result in the V&A’s Digital Design Festival in September 2017.

You can find an account of our experiments here.

 

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In 2018 I was commissioned for a new robotic art installation for the exhibition Y Las Cosas Que Hacemos (and the things we make) in Bilbao, Spain. I made 11 Mudbots, small mobile robots powered by microbial fuel cells (MFCs), loosely inspired by the dung beetle. The MFCs in the Mudbots did not work for long and the installation relied on human power for most of the duration of the exhibition. More info here.

 

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Slightly disgruntled by the experience, I stored the Mudbots and focused on other matters for a couple of years. In 2021 I was contacted by Mexican product designer Tony Gutierrez who had found out about the Mudbots. Toni had developed Mosby, a very elegant design for MFCs that includes living moss. The moss contributes to a healthy bacterial population. We agreed to share best practice of Tony’s long-lasting MFC units and my electronic designs towards an open-source recipe for easy to make and maintain mud batteries.

 

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With my interest in MFCs renewed, I received a small grant from Cardiff School of Art and Design towards further experiments with plant MFCs using bryophytes (moss), taking inspiration from Mosby and from experiments conducted by Paolo Bombelli in Cambridge. The grant was also used for designing an electricity harvesting module with an electronic engineer. I presented the mixed results of this new wave of experiments at the Beyond conference in Cardiff in autumn 2022, see poster here.

 

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I am now working on a new wave of MFCs, using a simpler and easier to maintain design with vertical electrodes, that so far is giving good results. In collaboration with artist Harun Morrison we will implement in March 2023 an installation at Goldsmith University London. Located in a garden on campus, Singing Compost will convert the electrical activity of MFCs embedded in the soil into sound. More details coming soon.

 

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My long time friend and brilliant sci-artist Antony Hall is also working on MFCs at the moment, check his work here, a collaboration is in the pipeline.

e-wasteroïd 2 – Piksel Festival Bergen

A second e-wasteroïd was made in the Piksel Festival XXth edition in Bergen, Norway. I worked with a handful of participants over 2 days, making a new version of the electronic waste kinetic sculpture. Due to small numbers of participants this one had much less electronic bits hanging from the rotating engine than in the first version, but more time was given to the individual additions and the programming of sonic and moving parts. And we found out that it looked good in the dark.

 

 

You can check the festival programme HERE. Highlights:

 

• MTCD- A Visual Anthology of My Machine Life, a live monologue with minimal graphics by my friend Teresa Dillon, tracing back her life year by year in relation to machines she used or encountered. Very engaging and funny yet thoughtful and critical.

 

 

• Process Pages by Nick Montfort. The MIT professor of digital media showed a minimal generative piece where 3 monitors display the result of extremely compact javascripts that explore Unicode. The code is up for grabs on A4 printouts placed in front of each monitor. Very frugal and elegant, strong aesthetics, reflection on languages and code. Nick Montfort also presented a talk about the online poetry magazine Taper, an Online Magazine for Tiny Computational Poems. Contributors are invited to submit coded poems no bigger than 2KB, check it out!

 

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Woods on Mount Fløyen above Bergen

 

 

Flying in 2022, my first flight since June 2019… Eco-guilt was felt at the idea of flying several thousand kilometers for an electronic arts festival, but didn’t prevail. Not sure how I will handle this in the future, looking into emissions compensation and/or limiting participation to venues accessible by trains (for Bergen it was 18 trains over 3 days each way).

Pony Express

A pretty radical take on environmentally friendly art from the Pony Express collective.
Their Epoch Wars is an attempt to challenge and re-invent the notion of Anthropocene, just in time when Symbiocene is making a comeback.

 

 

Check also their Ecosexual Bathhouse project, pushing the love of nature to sensual heights!

 

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The Clearing, a report from the future

I found out recently about an excellent project: The Clearing, A Report From The Future by Alex Hartley and Tom James. They “set out to build a living, breathing encampment where people could learn how to live in the collapsing world coming our way.”

 

In 2017 they constructed with the help of volunteers a geodesic dome from scavenged materials and for several months invited people to workshops on skills that might be useful in the future (fire making, bread oven, democracy, radio, loo…).

 

 

Public engagement was very rich and a temporary community of sorts emerged. The artists have published a full report on the experience, photocopied by hand, with a cover made from used cardboard boxes. I recommend this informative and inspiring read.

 

The report is available at https://drive.google.com/open?id=1FrdLTkW8bA8OITUCHrqHqcG-wA496G0Y

 

 

A year after the end of the clearing, Hartley and James wrote that “the more time we spent at The Clearing, the better we felt. The Clearing made us feel hopeful, and confident, and capable, and even happy. Perhaps this is how it could be in the future> Softer and simpler and slower. Perhaps the end of this world, and the beginning of a new one, could even be good?”

 

Carolin Liebl and Nikolas Schmid-Pfähler residency

 

I have had the pleasure of inviting artists duo Carolin Liebl and Nikolas Schmid-Pfähler for a 3 weeks residency in the FabLab at Cardiff School of Art and Design, as part of the EASTN-DC European research project in digital creativity. Carolin and Nikolas have now returned to their hometown Offenbach, Germany, after 3 weeks  in the FabLab and my studio. They have been busy, started experimenting with the Formlabs 3D printers and 3D scanners. They started by making charging pods for their Sibling robots and printed nature-inspired shapes.

 

They gradually realised that they were not interested so much in printing 3D sculptural forms as they were in inventing their own way of printing objects with plastic, preferably recycled from faulty prints or plastic bottles. They came up with the idea of making a mobile robot that would at times extrude rough plastic shapes in its environment. They started by removing the printhead from a discarded Makerbot Replicator, drilled new holes in the extrusion nozzle and designed a control circuit. After successful testing they put the assembly on a custom mobile chassis with vibrating legs.

 

In parallel they also made from scratch a prototype extruder, a precursor for the printing engine of their larger robot. They got inspiration from the great plastic recycling instructions provided by Precious Plastics. After a couple of days working in the metal shop at CSAD the extruder was ready to go. It is a heated tube inside which an endless screw rotates slowly, pushing melting plastic towards the extruding end. Early tests took place on the last evening of their residency, where the screw spun, the heaters heated and pieces of plastic bottles melted, a promising start!!

 

 

Image above: the first “print” from the extruder, made of recycled PET bottles.

Carolin and Nikolas will continue working on the plastic sculptor robot in their studio, ready for exhibition for the Cardiff EASTN-DC Festival in March 2021. We are really looking forward to see them back with their robot!

Kikk Festival 2018

 

I presented on 1st November a lecture for the forthcoming Kikk Festival in Namur, Belgium. I talked about machinic life and mudpies (en Français).

Kikk, of which this was the 8th edition, is an excellent festival of “Digital and creative cultures” mixing designers, artists start-ups, thinkers, talks, exhibitions, workshop, market in a very dense weekend programme.

 

Highlights – from left to right:

 

 

Superbe, an interactive installation by Belgian collective SMing, really playable musical vocal artwork where you conduct a choir made of your voice and face, in a full size church.

 

Talk by Nelly Ben Hayoun, self-described as a Bombardment, it was indeed one of sorts. Ben Hayoun is a highly energetic experience designer / activist determined to change the world, and having a good go at it working with NASA, Seti, Noam Chomsky, WeTransfer… She is releasing soon I am (not) a monster, a documentary film about her quest for the origin of knowledge. She also runs the ambitious and alternative University of the Underground.

 

Amulet Incubator by Matthieu Zurstrassen: a machine exposes fortune cookies for 48 hours to the healing frequency of 528Hz. The cookies are then beautifully packaged and offered for sale or sent out as corporate gifts. Zurstrassen presented a talk titled “I used to be an architect, now I am feeling much better”. Apart from his magic cookies he also mentioned a self lobotomising kit aiming at defeating the predictive algorithms that increasingly spy on us by making the users unpredictable even to themselves.

 

And I must mention the final party with its totally Belgian theme Boudin Room, like a boiler room but with a butcher sharing the stage with the DJ, making and cooking sausages for the audience during the set.

 

“KIKK is an international festival of digital and creative cultures. Its interest lies in the artistic and economic implications of new technologies.” It has been running since 2011, presenting a mix of lectures, live events and installations. This year the theme was Species and Beyond.

 

Dessus de porte floral by Jean-Baptiste Robie, Musée des Arts Décoratifs de Namur

We are the robots 1978

This is the original in German, “Wir sind die roboter”. A nice bit of vintage pop video by Kraftwerk. Love the LED ties, still geeky cool 40 years on!!

LAUREN – Smart (human) intelligence for the home assistant

LAUREN is a project by new media artist Lauren McCarthy. She will impersonate a home automation assistant not unlike Amazon’s Alexia, responding to users’ vocal commands and acting on their connected domestic environment. Project Lauren will last 3 days.

 

 

“Lauren will control your home for you, attempting to get better than an AI, understanding you as a person”.

I reckon it is a no brainer for Lauren the HI (human intelligence) to be better than Alexa or Siri, examples mentioned by the artist on the project’s website.

Volunteers might feel more morally observed than by an artificial assistant, and may have to deal with interruptions of service due to naps or other very human breaks.

You can apply here if you are interested in hosting Lauren in your home.

 

— Why do I blog about that?

 

I have an ongoing interest in the way machines and humans roles overlap or shift, takeover, resistance, harmony, symbiosis. Power, delegation, cyber-isation. Lauren is an interesting gesture that reminds us about the unique -as yet- touch humans can bring to other humans in a way machines cannot. My own Am I Robot installation works on a similar principle of injecting HI in a system normally driven by AI or simpler algorithms.

 

The Wizard of Oz, HI trickster, exposed by Toto's down to earth DI (dog intelligence)

Eppur si Muove exhibition

Last week the exhibition Eppur Si Muove opened in MUDAM museum, Luxemburg. Lots of good stuff in there. The exhibition is a combination of historical scientific and technical artefacts from Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris and contemporary artworks related to similar techniques and science. Until February 2016.

 

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The exhibition features many excellent works, including Tinguely’s Fata Morgana, Eliasson’s Trust Compass, Kowalski’s Arc en Ciel, Stelarc’s Third Hand and many more. My own Smartbot has been uncrated for living another segment of its limited existence on one square metre.

The MUDAM commissioned me and a team of artists, engineers and business students from Université de Lorraine, Nancy, France, to develop a robot guide for Eppur Si Muove. Guido the Robot Guide started its visits the day after the opening. There is a fair bit of work to be done before it can take over the human guides (phew) but Guido is popular with visitors, especially young ones. It talks about a selection of artworks and inventions from a robotic perspective, only in French for the moment. Two engineering students are working on Guido’s navigation and telepresence until end August.

 

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