Baltimore Aquarium: Jellies invasion

Artist research

Pipilotti Rist

Anthony gormley : blind light

rAndom international

Marshmellow lasor feast

Kinetic Art Fair

Science Museum

I decided to go to the Science Museum to get some research on our commission for the Manchester school of Arts 'One night only' which is an evening showcasing the new Art and design building space while having a variety of programs, activities and interaction throughout the evening. 

From what I remembered there were a lot of areas with a lot of interaction particularly for children at the Science Museum so though it would be worth investigating how it had changed since I had last been. What areas where interactive and why? Was there information in the sense? Is the interaction predominately children or do people of all ages get involved? Seeing how the technology has developed since I went as a child. The one element I remember was this Plasma Globe ball that made my hair really static... the colours were so hypnotic and it looked like lightening was occurring in a little round ball, I always though it was a sorcerers power.  

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGbvg0P1RqE

From the visit I was not able to find this amazing ball which the technical name is Plasma globe. However there were quite a few different interactive activities which caught my eye. There was a section in the basement called the Web lab which had a serious of interactive chrome experiments you get your own card at the beginning which you insert into each section. The best part was getting your face drawn by a robot in the sand as shown below. I realised quickly that this was the most popular activity on this floor because it was very personal. 

This was similar with other activities in different areas when it actual involved the audience learning or having something personally tailored to them it was far more popular. The other section which was really good with interaction was 'Who am I?' which makes you discover more about what makes you unique looking at your brain and genetics.


They also had a session of did you know facts which was really interesting and could work with what we want to do because it is quite conceptual having an interactive screen or a section with facts on the different sense etc could be really interesting. Here is a taste of some of the did you know. 

I really liked the visual of the white blood cell we could combine visuals from with in the body such as this one (investigate further how you can get a visual like this contact the science department at Manchester) to be projected around the room looks lava lampesq which remind me of the ferrofuild that we are thinking of developing. These projections could then be interactive similarly to a wall that was at the science museum which is shown below in a clip

add clip of interactive wall ems.  

An interactive wall in the Thailand science museum. It is really cool. 

Exhibition

photo Ursula Rae

Photo David Wright

Evalution

The idea of ‘Blue Sky thinking’ was interesting to me, ‘Uninhibited thinking without a structure, beginning or end’. Throughout this course, I have being driving myself to having more structure by executing my work thinking about the concept, process and context. Trying to think more realistically which area my practice will go into; will it sell, who is the audience, why have I done it. Becoming increasingly aware of the fact that I am in second year and only have one more year left to know what my practice is about and where I see it in the art industry. Therefore, the fact that this college was all about spontaneity, the wackier the idea the better was refreshing and really opened my eyes again to what I have always enjoyed in the art; the process of coming up with a concept without any limitations or boundaries. I did not mean that we did not have to consider the concept, process and context we did, however it focused more on the concept and process at it was for a metaphorical festival so the logistics were not key. In effect, what art is like when you are a child. The sky is the limit and because you are so naïve about the world around you, you feel anything is possible. In addition, the fact that this was the second time doing Unit X, really meant that I wanted benefit from what it is trying to do; encourage collaboration between all the different areas of the Arts. Even though my group VOID had four other textiles students, we also had two from interactive art and one from history of art, which was a nice mix. Working in this group was very successful, there was no one who I felt really let down the group or was not involved in some way. This was probably due to us meeting up on a regular basics to develop ideas, designate different areas for everyone to develop individually and then as a group decided what did work and what did not.  What I learnt from working in a group previously on Unit X last year is that in a group environments you need to be almost ‘cut throat’ with deciding what does and doesn’t work. It is not personal it is just developing the idea that works the best for the outcome to be at its best. Luckily, with our group all of us had a very similar idea of the direction we wanted in; an intangible design festival attached to a daytime festival, being concealed in the light and revealed within the dark, focusing on a sensory experience that develops the more interaction there is within the space. Creating a bioluminescent world, VOID that makes people really reflect on their senses.

I have always liked working in a group as I feel the concept part of the project is very effective when in a group environment as you can work off each other and one person can trigger another person to come up with a great idea. We spent a long time discussing the concept and thinking of ways to develop it. Which at the time felt as if we were not actually doing much practical work just thinking. However, with this project the thinking was a huge part, even shown in the name, ‘blue sky thinking’ and worked out as being very beneficial, as we developed majority of our concepts at the beginning giving us a great start. However the fact that there was a lot of thinking involved and not necessarily having a final piece to strive towards did throw me a bit and put me out of my comfort zone. I am a visual person so need to visuals how things are going to look. However, with one of our key themes being intangible design it was hard to visualise something that has no physical presence. We came up with many low fi ways in which to portray what we effectively wanted to happen in our festival. This was hugely successful as we did this through experiments in our group and combined our different research and knowledge to produce very intriguing visuals and clips via sound and light. My area was investigation the visual side of our festival. I struggled with it at the beginning, as we wanted majority of our visuals to be interactive and able to be manipulated and changed by the festivalgoers, the more people that come the more the visuals would change, encouraging interaction. This was hard to create through a 2-D image as I wanted to create the illusion of movement and the image being distorted. I ended up doing it in a very low fi way but filming my images on Photoshop and smudging the images slowly, symbolising movement. Being in a group that worked really well together meant everyone’s work informed my work and my visuals. Some of my visuals interacted with an idea that someone was developing such as Martina’s magnetic wristbands. Coming up with a theoretical festival and having no limits on what we could pitch with our ideas was really eye opening sometimes you just have to take a step back and go back to basics to have a clear perception of everything and you will surprise yourself with how it turns out.

I had my own Strengths and Weaknesses in this project. I found that my strength were mainly in coming up with the concepts for the festival and researching the idea behind it to do with our sense and how you can manipulate them through; colour, sound and touch. How the MRI to a blind person highlights different sense to that of a sighted person. I found all of this research interesting and would like to continue it further by getting into contact with people such as Dr Victoria Henshaw who Tom interview on this project, she is the ‘UK’s leading expert on the interplay of odours and the environment’. Expand my own personal knowledge of the sense and see how we could detach the festivalgoers form everyday distractions, heighten their senses so they would be very aware of which one they were using; an internal experience in an empty space… VOID. One of my weaknesses is I often come up with ideas but do not execute and develop them efficiently which was not always a bad thing as one-persons idea can trigger some else to use elements of it and develop it further themselves. However, I feel I need to work on this so I want to give myself a personal target of not only coming up with loads of ideas and following through with some, put come up with a concise set of ideas and follow through with all of them and see which one is the most successful. The ideas that I did follow through were effective. However, I learnt that you do not always have to change things and edit them a huge amount, often keeping it simple can look the most effective and work the best.

This project has been the best group project I have been a part of because not only did we work well as a group but also I personally found the outcomes, (the pitch and exhibition) visually pleasing and a hugely successful. We got the reaction we wanted, which was to create intrigue and to encourage interaction with one another and our intangible designs, which was particularly shown in our exhibition. We have had such a positive response and been encouraged to develop our ideas further, which I am very keen to do as I feel our project has no real conclusion we can develop it some much further.

Pitch

Book: printing, binding

I really enjoyed doing the layout for the Book/Catalogue, taking everyones images from the different areas of our project; Research, Area, Promotion and Visuals and creating a book of tasters of what our festival would be like. Not giving to much away but almost 'wetting the viewers appetite' of what is to come.

Choosing the images was hard as we had such a strong variety but I wanted the whole book to flow so I was very objective in my decisions. 

This all went very smoothly until it came to printing the book out from InDesign. It wasn't printing the way I intented it to so Tom being the tech master in the group had to re order the whole book and we had to print it off one side at a time. But eventually we managed to print out the book in the right order and the right size. It took a long time but was worth it in the end and I was very pleased with the final result. It is a visual summary of our project.

Pitch prep

Pitch:

Roles:

• Speaking: Tom introduction up until promo and background to the research film at the end, Ursula and Martina speaking the rest
• Lighting: Emily
• Control of the PowerPoint: Hannah G
• Equipment: Tom experiment doing a live feed
• Demonstrating: Danusha, Lara, Hannah S: the paint preferably with someone in the panel and with Ursula's cable tyres hand out resin squares

Tom introduction to our ideas:

Slide 1: VOID

Slide 2:

• Our initial ideas
• Creating a sensory experience in Manchester
• Organic growth
• Bringing people together through a collective experience
• Temporary and intangible design
• See the festival as a stimulus is actualised by the viewer
• Changing the city at night
• Our night walk exploring a space manipulating through glow sticks and bubbles

Slide 3:

• Leading on to the experiment (live feed?) with ink the which bridges gaps between different sensory stimule which is evolving our concept as well as developing the content of design festival.

Slide 4:

• This is our promo video, which is an example of how these experiments can be generated in to our content.
• Leading on to the manifesto
• From these organically concepts and experiments in informed our manifesto

Slide 5:

• Read out points of the manifesto

Slide 6:

 introduction to the festival

• Explain night festival idea
• We are VOID a night festival an additional layer to the day time.
• Promo: quote 'concealed within the light, revealed within the dark.'
• The intrigue and enigma are the selling point so we don't need to promo the content what we are promoting is empty space hence the name VOID .

Slide 7: 

• We have social media sites with updates of intriguing visuals bit no set program

• Social media hype

 Slide 8:

Location

• What where are why?

• Cathedral garden recently been regenerating (light fountains) still not particularly busy area. The regeneration through public experience rather than the tangible regeneration. The area in the tunnel and the car parks are space that we have mainly been looking at. However we have not been restrictive within our space so there is the potential of growth.

 Slide 9:

Hannah's Map:

• Highlighting the area we will be using but not pin pointing specific events

• Our map implanted into the day time festival map illuminating our space at night.

 Slide 10:

• Including having glow way markers to direct people to our space…' following the glow brick road'

 Slide 11:

Peep holes:

• Boxes dotted around the day festival with people looking in and getting a taste of what is to come

Slide 12:

Magic Eye/ Mirror

• Flyers that involve your interaction to find the message within

Slide 13:

Resin promo:

• To be handed out in the day festival to encourage people to be a part of it and create their own installation with in our festival.

Slide 14:

• Wristband - when people reach the Victoria bridge, which is the entrance to the festival they will collect a wrist band which will have some sort of device enabling them to interactive with the intangibles spaces throughout the festival and manipulate the visual experience.

 Slide 15:

• The visuals reacting to the public’s movement and even more so when interacting one another which encouraging audience participation throughout out the festival.

Slide 16:

Clapping

• Further to the interactive floor we have considered other sensory experiences such as sound.. Play clip

• this would be a blank black wall which went the public claps the wall pixelates, the more participation the more the wall pixelates

Slide 17:

smell/light/dark/sound:

• We will have other space that will disorientate the sense for example disassociation of smell. A really really light room contrasting with a really really dark room. Even possible incorporating sound and lasers which will create a visuals and divide them (lazer) all of this links back to our original concept.

 Slide 18:

River and Victorian arches

 • River that runs at the beginning of our site it is something we want to regenerate. The arches will be replaced with glass so people can look out on to the river but also look down from the bridge to see the glowing flowing lights on the river which will change the aesthetics to the grimy river.

Slide 19:

Practical spaces

 • Exploring interaction within areas that are crucial to the workings of the festival ie information points, bar areas, covered spaces maybe even the toilet. Reaction to people moving past

 Slide 20:

Pods and pouches

 • Isolated pods dotted around different areas of the festival for people to be at one with themselves and chill out/ reflect on what they have experienced. Also the glow in the dark panels creating spaces

 Slide 21:

• Small-scale experience through sensory touch to neutralise your senses e.g coffee in perfume shops

Theory side behind our ideas - Tom

 

This all has to be 30 mins

 

Lighting: spotlight on, when people are talking but off for clips such as; live feed experiment, promo video and clapping

Final touches

Final things:

Toms final Promo video:

http://vimeo.com/66018723

Ursula finished the final version of the, manifesto:

photo Ursual

Book/ Catalogue

Final book and poster just before the exhibition

Example of one of the visual pages how it is layout

My priority in this week was is to finish the book and make sure it is bound and ready for the exhibition on the 17^th



Plan:

Interation with the visuals

A clip of my own visual from the inside of a bus which I had edited on photoshop. I wanted to try and show interaction that could occur with the wall. Through using the smudging tool on photoshop. It is a low fi experiement which I feel works and would like to try on a bigger scale for the actual festival.

Further research on creating a sensory experience

Taste:

Heston Blumenthal is know for confusing his dinner through changing the colour and even the look of food to force the dinner to think they are eatting one think and actually be eatting the opposite.

''Charles Spence, the Oxford experimental psychologist who helped Heston Blumenthal develop some of his playful multisensory signature dishes, places vision right up there with smell, in flavour's "premier league", if you will. Taste sits far below with sound and texture and touch. "Half the brain is visual in some sense," says Spence, "versus just a few per cent for overall taste senses. So in cortical real estate, vision is always going to win." This is in part why the colour of our food and drink can not only determine whether it is appetising, but its flavour, too.''

Heston's Tudor inspired meat fruit

Smell:

Victoria Henshaw research associate (architecture & Urbanism) she organised a smell walk around Manchester in 2012.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/manchester-scents--the-city-7665919.html

'My reasearch interests centre upon the design, management and regeneration of towns and cities with a particular emphasis on sensory experience, and my PhD examined the role of smell in urban design. I am keen to work with both academics and practitioners exploring innovative and experimental ways of improving the design and experience of urban enviroments.'

Tom got in contact with her and interviewed her for our research film.

Photo Emily Jackson

Could we try and create a smell which has no associations with the past?

You can not create a smell that has no associations whatsoever however you can mask the context of a person surrounding as shown in the febreze advert.

Febreze advert

Sight/Colour:

I found a paper on Sense of Colour by Boryana Gerorgieva and feel this section really related to what we are trying to do with VOID.

'In addition to the optical centre in the brain, the red colour and its derivative – the orange colour also arouse the auditory centre, thus provoking a sense of increased volume of the sound. That’s why, there are grounds those colours to be frequently determined as “loud”. Green and blue are emollient; they reduce tension in the auditory centre and create a sense of falling off or compensation of the intensity of the noise.' 

I'm visuallising that as my visuals are projected and are moving.. as it turns red the sound is the room could increase to complement the atmopshere, with blue vice versa etc

Magnetic jelly experiment

Martina and I did a Magnetic jelly experiment hoping that the iron filings that Martina has put in the mould would encourage movement with the jelly. As the Ferrofluid had not arrived and so we wanted to create a similar movement.  However, this was not very successful as the fillings all clumped together and did not move the jelly at all. Nevertheless, it did create some interesting visuals, the jelly looking almost diamond like. It was a really fun experiment though and who doesn’t love a bit of jelly fun!  

clips

Noisy Jelly and Squid soup

Noisy Jelly; This concept is so clever; A box arriving, with all the ingredients to create a DIY ‘jelly band’. I do not know how it works as when your touch the jelly at different points it creates did not sounds. It is something that is so simple yet so fun and is a great feature for child who we would want at our festival as it is an event for ever one.  Even something, like this though I would spend hours playing with, brings out everyone’s childish side.

http://vimeo.com/38796545

Squid soup; a company that does very similar things to what we are trying to active but half away across the world in Australia. They encourage interaction with people and lights through touch. 

http://www.squidsoup.org/blog/

Visual board...logo?

Visual board

 

 

Possible logo ideas, however are a bit too jellyfish like

 

 

 

The birth of..... VOID

I was ill for the presentation on Tuesday and heard from my group that they had a positive response and we had gained two more members to our group; Emily Jackson and Hannah Green. From both different areas Emily interactive arts and Hannah History of Art, It will be good to see what skills they can bring to the group.

this is a jellyfish image that has been warped in photoshop, this is the visual that I feel best describes VOID

 

List

The Promotional aspect: 
Social media : Facebook, website and twitter...hinted at during the day festival which will create intrigue…

Peepholes with visual dotted around different areas with writing above saying something like… have a peep/ look inside

Mirror writing posters

Magic eyes being handed out and put up around the day festival

Resin blocked handed out with a combination of visuals and the logo in them. Resin glowing in the dark as location marks… ' follow the glowing brick road'

Maps: handed out with the area of the festival black out and VOID and the logo beside it. Also working with the idea of concealed during the day and revealed at night Maps of the day festival shown in bus stops and then at night the area of the festival glowing in the dark

Wrist band handed out around the bridge area leading to the festival for these and the resin blocks which have the visual within them to create mini sculptures to how the audience would like to manipulate them/ arrange them

VOID itself: Different sections for different areas

A blank black wall when clapping occurs the wall become pixelated.

Toner (Ferrofluid)room, interaction with the magnets - possible music in this area could be near the DJ as could have black ink of the speaks moving with the music

Neon writing room concealed graffit

Really light and pitch black room disorienting the sense

outside area cable tyres around a Hub / bar area creating an interactive experience....

Isolated pods dotted around different areas of the festival for people to be at one with themselves and chill out/ reflect on what they have experienced. Also the glow in the dark panels creating spaces. Almost like a sensory neutraliser.

River; night lights

3-D mapping

Arches projections with intriguing visuals

smell disassociated with a space

Interactive floor with hypnotic visuals that dodge the festival goers due to their magnetic wristbands creating a wripple effect.
Artist and Music:

Manchester based eg Noise Toys

seminars areas for people to discuss elements linked to the their sensory experience example Victoria Henshaw.

Jellyfish

It has such an organic move creating a ripple effect within it. They are one of the most hypnotic creature with the fact that they glow in the dark and have intriguing shapes within them….. They are a VOID in themselves.  ‘They are typified as free-swimming marine animals consisting of a gelatinous umbrella -shaped bell and trailing tentacles’

http://vimeo.com/8889015

 

'Most jellyfish do not have specialized digestive, osmoregulatory, central nervous, respiratory, or circulatory systems. Jellyfish do not need a respiratory system since their skin is thin enough that the body is oxygenated by diffusion. They have limited control over movement, but can use their hydrostatic skeleton to navigate through contraction-pulsations of the bell-like body; some species actively swim most of the time, while others are mostly passive. The body is composed of over 95% water; most of the umbrella mass is a gelatinous material — the jelly — called mesoglea which is surrounded by two layers of protective skin.'

'You can even get an immortal jellyfish; Turritopsis nutricula is jellyfish form can revert to polp stage after becoming sexually mature.'

my own drawing from a jellyfish mirrored on photoshop

Ferrofluid

Hannah S found this magnetic liquid called Ferrofluid. This amazing solution reacts with magnets in a really interesting way.  When we saw the clips on youtube we thought this would be perfect as one of the elements to our festival an interactive element that is intriguing and hypnotic.

 

 

Interaction

Interactive art- A key element to our festival is that we want to encourage human interaction with the space and each other so having walls/ floor that manipulated by human movement from creating sounds and visuals; here are some examples of natural and fictious interaction

The fictious world pandora in Avator how touching certain things create different reaction: light, movement

Avatar a Bioluminescent world, where organsims connect and interact with sensory touch.

Venus fly trapper; sense with in the plant to trap its prey

Vintage Fibreoptic lamp. the colours change but it is that just something as simple as someone blowing on the lamp it creates bends and moves creating intriuging shapes with light

blue planet; fish that lure their pray in with a glowing light

Fish Visuals

I wanted to try to create similar shapes shown in an MRI scan as I tough the imagery in the vimeo video was really intriguing and hypnotic so I decided to do some ink print with different types of fish; prawns, calamari and fish sticks. The prawn prints were the most effective but were still quite ridged and not as fluid as I hoped. I am finding it quite hard to create movement within my visuals, as they are 2-D. I feel I need to manipulate them in Photoshop and film moving the paint around.

Group Experiment

We did a little experiment with different solutions to create intriguing visuals for a promo video. We used different coloured inks , dye powder and baby oil.

 

Which Tom then combined with his footage of the black oil on the speakers creating a ripple effect reflecting the sound through a liquid substance (sound art).  I am intrigued to see how he edits all the different footage.