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niamhsnaturelab · 1 year

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Week 9~ Performance Lab and Nature Lab

(tuesday)

I started tuesday with a bit of a fail as i had gotten up earlier to try and email myself the soundtrack so that I could attach it to the HeavyM file and start to play around with timings and sequences. The file however, was too big and my browser would crash at every attempt to attach the file to the email. After a few attempts it had gotten past the time of me needing to leave to be at university on time so I decided to try again tonight when I was back home. The majority of morning was spent finalising the code for the Nanopixels. This was a success in the end, after needing more help from Sarah to have a line of code that would allow the lights to twinkle. We went through many obstacles in this as the lights started to do some unexplainable thing such as adding red and white into the twinkle, when it had not been featured anywhere in the code. I was also able to separate a red section that I only wanted at the beginning to act as a sort of introduction to the character, after the curtains had been pulled to reveal the mannequin. These faded from off to ease into the lighting and then transitioned into the loop that was the starling colours, a mix of the colours fading into one another as well as twinkling. I was very happy with how this turned out and was exactly what I was looking for.

Once the coding had been completed, I used masking tape to put the Nanopixels under the wing's fabric. I made sure to test them to see if they worked in the context as I wanted and I realised I had more lights available so outlined both the top and bottom of the wings to emphasise the shape of the wings. If I was to do this again, I would try and have the twinkle effect use the blue, green and purple at the same time instead of a set blue twinkle, green twinkle and purple twinkle playing one after the other. I would also code the red to stay for a bit longer at the start as in comparison to the looping part of the code, it isn't shown for very long at all and the audience might think it was an error. Here is a snippet of the results:

After i had finished the coding and added it to my mannequin, I continued on with the projection mapping. I imported Hemza's last effects that he had made into the project and kept going until all four costumes had been digitally made. I also started adding transitions to the sequences to make the change between each character look less harsh. There has been a lot of development throughout out project in terms of the projection mapping itself. Originally we had planned on only having one section of the mannequin lit up at one time to portray one character and colour the whole mannequin to show mood. Now, we were using the whole mannequin to show each character so that it seemed more finished and more obvious that there was a distinction between each character. Here are the final designs of each projection mapping sequence:

In terms of background and set, I used a fire effect to reiterate the fact that the fairy was in a separate part of the cathedral to the other group members without having to create an entire new backdrop.

Zoe also tested the tubes that Sarah had given us to see if we could get the desired effect of water trickling out of the tube by distributing small holes throughout. This was a success and we will use this method In our final outcome.

I gave Lee the list of colours we would need for the plain overhead lighting for our final performance. The order would be brown (to match the cathedral setting) , red (to match the wound and panic from the group) , purple and blue (for the sluagh) and a black/off (for the final death scene to match the projection and for drama).

(wednesday)

I focused on finishing the projection mapping on the wednesday and added the final details to each scene. I added Hemza's black feather effect (opting for the dark one over the lighter one as it was more dramatic and blended in with the background more), a green lighting effect to show the worry that was planned from the first projection mapping story board as well as transitions for both of these to black.

Due to the motor pump being significantly more expensive than the IV bag, this is what we opted for and I had it delivered for the Wednesday using amazon prime. In terms of sustainability, while people think that the actual manufacture of products is the most polluting and least sustainable part of the process, transport plays a major part in CO2 emissions which we definitely could've improved on. However finding a local shop that had something extremely similar at such short notice would be very difficult so if we had more time, this could've been something we could explore first instead of jumping straight to having it delivered. We also decided against buying the "t junction" adaptors as we found we could cut holes into where the IV bag attaches to the tube and insert other tubes, sealing them with hot glue. While it may not have been the neatest method, it worked as intended.

(thursday)

Thursday saw our closest thing to a full run through of the performance lab. I ran the soundtrack side by side to the projection mapping and went through the first draft of the script that Zoe had put together. We soon realised that the narration wasn't nearly as long as the other elements and wouldn't take 10 minutes to read. We started padding different sections out and deciding where to put "dramatic" pauses to pace out the reading. With these alterations, I also put in stage directions such as lighting, when to press play on the soundtrack/mapping, and when to open the curtain. This was mainly for Liz and Hemza's benefit as they weren't there on the Thursday for a run through and would need to know what they were doing on the day. Here is the final script that we used on the day:

While I was working on finalising everything for the performance, Zoe was joining all of the leaves back up to be fixed to the mycelium frame. This was a very tedious task as some of the leaves were hard to interpret what they were meant to be. Apart from this difficulty, I thought it came together just as we had planned for it to (in terms of being a mixed style collage). Once Zoe had finished putting it together, we decided to go over the main image lines in posca pen as the piece was so busy, the overall image was getting lost. Once we had done that, we hung the finished piece up on a plain background and Zoe poured water into the IV bag. Here is the final outcome for our Nature Lab:

^before water

^after water

Personally, I thought our outcome displayed most of the things we wanted it to. The way it was built mimicked mycelium and the collage came together as intended. the only way this outcome failed was in the "reveal" sense. While there was some destructive implications from the water, it wasn't as severe as we had hoped for. Perhaps if we had left the installation going for longer, perhaps even for days, we would've seen the results that we were looking for. Due to time and selecting the IV bag over the water pump, we were unable to create a circuit that I had in mind early on in this project to recycle the water being used and have it go through the piece over and over again instead of having to refill the IV bag and letting it drip onto the plastic we were using on the floor to collect the water. If we were to do this on a larger scale with more time this is definitely one of the changes I would make to the piece.

(friday)

Friday morning, Me and Zoe were up early. I was up at 6am to start on the written aspect of the presentation. We then met at the school of art at 8:30am hoping Liz and Hemza would be in shortly (we had let them know the night before that we would be getting in for this time to hopefully have a debrief and a run through of the presentation/ performance.) We worked on putting all the relevant information/ images in and getting the scripts printed off. This was all completed by 9:30am.

In my opinion, I felt our performance could have gone better. The projection mapping wasn't as effective as the mannequin had been moved so many times throughout the weeks, the mapping didn't quite line up. Sarah assured us that this wasn't too much of an issue as they had seen what it was meant to be. Liz and Hemza did a good job with the technology aspect of the performance. While I did make a significant mistake with reading the script, I hope it wasn't too noticeable. Considering we had not done a full run though, I feel as though we created as much of an immersive environment as possible for our audience.

While I was happy with what we were able to achieve considering the difficulties we had faced throughout the semester, I found that the atmosphere in the studio was not as supportive as I had hoped. there was a lot of negative energy and unnecessary comments made by other students that really caused me to stress over our project even after the day had finished, to the point where I was rather upset with how things had panned out. I put a lot of pressure on myself to do as well as I did last semester, if not better and put in a lot of hard work into these two modules. This definitely got to me and I need to remember that working collaboratively means that some things will be out of my own hands and won't turn out how I had hoped.

As our presentation was also done last minute we felt as though we had left some points out that were important but couldn't pinpoint at the time what those points were. It may just have been due to running out of time while presenting (we had a lot to say haha).

Overall I was somewhat happy with our outcomes and hope our difficulties will be taken into consideration.

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niamhsnaturelab · 1 year

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Week 6~ Nature Lab

I started my week off with a visit to Birmingham's botanical gardens. I had been wanting to visit the gardens since moving to Birmingham and finally had the opportunity to go. There were lots of different varieties of plants that need different types of environments to survive. The conservation work being done by the gardens was very impressive and was a great way of gathering inspiration and motivation for our own project. Here are some of my favourite images that I took over the day:

and ones that reminded me of mycelium:

(Tuesday)

Starting our day off with "my octopus teacher" caused me to think a lot about our relationship with nature. I feel as though we have a detachment from other animals that made this film seem odd to me. I found Craig's relationship with the octopus to be a bit extreme and almost too intense. I could imagine his commitment to this octopus would take away from his other relationships and it was no surprise to me that he did not have a wife at the time. I think he could have been substituting this relationship for the one he had with the octopus. The morality and ethical implications of this experiment were something the entire group questioned after watching and we all had a similar mindset when it came to this relationship.

We then continued on with our nature lab developments and I came into the session with the final concept drawing of what our outcome will look like:

Zoe then created a deconstructed view of the outcome to make it more clear to ourselves (and others) how it will be structured:

As a group, we then started to experiment with textures and different effects we could use to show the mushroom/tree image. Here is my outcome from the day:

we used regular card for our experiments as it was more available to us and we could then save the thinner paper for the real thing. I tried lots of different methods of creating texture including layering up scraps of the thinner paper and then overlaying string both wound and unwound to make the affect of tree roots. I liked the string over the top most from this part of the experiment and I think if it were to be painted over in a brown colour it would be even more effective. other sections involved pipe cleaners (another resource found in the studio) I used a small amount in order to not waste more than necessary and created what reminded me slightly of pollen spores. this was achieved by cutting the pipe cleaner into smaller sections then inserting them randomly into some hot glue. the other way I used the pipe cleaners was to cut all of the "fur" off of the stem and then use PVA glue to stick it onto the card. I found this texture to be the most interesting as I didn't expect that the be the outcome.

I used string and compressed it by holding one strand and pushing the rest down on itself to create contortions and knots. I also thought this was really effective mimicking how trees knot and form.

Lastly, I used hot glue by itself to create the overlapping blobs that remind me a lot of natural forms and moss found at the botanical gardens. (see below)

Last thing on Tuesday we had a creative technology workshop on Touch designer and the possibilities with body tracking. I was less interested in this workshop as I didn't feel that it linked enough with our plans for our outcome so we wouldn't use it this semester. Nonetheless it was still interesting to see how it worked and also reminded me of the Playstation 2's Eyetoy which I had many hours of fun using growing up. This link for me also reminded me of one of the Eyetoy's mini games where you could use the camera's motion sensor to play a theremin.

Between the Tuesday and Friday session, our group had an issue arise. This meant me and Zoe had to come in early on the Friday to discuss it with Lara and Sarah. As it was unable to be resolved on the spot, it meant our projects were very up in the air with how we were to continue and get them finished. Especially since we were a day before Grad+ week, it meant we had to wait to have a meeting with the head of the school of art after the break. The only thing we could do is continue to attempt to proceed and finish everything to the best standard that we could considering we were unsure of how our group will be structured further on. At this point I was very exhausted from the situation. I haven't had any conflict such as this in many years however I thought I dealt with it well and i have displayed high levels of resilience.

(Friday)

This week's text was very relevant to our project as it had a focus on the wood wide web, fungus and mycelium. The emphasis on the forest's ecosystem and cohabitation was a key theme throughout. The level of intelligence these different species have is very impressive to see how they interact in different environments/ with different variables. Learning that mycelium can be bioluminescent was also very interesting and could be something to consider with our project.

As far as the wood wide web, it was shocking for me to discover that the internet's network (unintentionally?) mimics nature and ecological systems.

Details on fungal connections coincidentally link really well with our concept. the extract mentions sugars leaking from the plant's roots, passing into open soil, and being taken up by the other plant's roots. This is exactly what we plan to have our outcome do as there will be holes in the tubing that allow the water to spread into the outcome and be absorbed by the paper leaves. In a sense, the water will be acting as the carbon dioxide in real fungal connections.

We also had a 10 minute presentation to show to Lara, Sarah and the group to display how far along we were in our nature lab. As we were still in our research phase and had a few different ideas of how to put everything together, this uncertainty definitely came across in our presentation as we found it slightly more difficult to articulate our concept. We were advised to make sure we could describe our concept within a singular sentence. I think this would be beneficial to us as a group as well as the audience to give the outcome a clear concept and narrative. I think the main thing that is causing confusion is having both mycelium and decay as a focus. in terms of ideology, these two things are very different, however in terms of our piece, the decay aspect is needed in order to reveal the mycelium network below.

Jon Biddulph arrived in the afternoon to deliver a presentation to us. He was Sarah's lecturer from Manchester and had an interest in microbes and bacteria. Jon disregards a lot of his work being art which is rather different to what we have been taught this far in the course. With the world being so interdisciplinary, everything can be considered art, especially since art is now being recognised as a part of STEM. His attitude was very much to take yourself out of your comfort zone and try something different, especially if things aren't going your way.

I found his point on ethical and cultural implications of eating your own skin and your bodily rights very interesting. I thought of how this could link with how it was illegal to kill yourself up until the 1960s.

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niamhsnaturelab · 1 year

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Week 5~ Nature Lab

(Tuesday)

So far, working with our group has been a challenge. With Ash leaving the course, Amie joining late and the lack of engagement from the majority of the group has started to create an impact on the group. Personally, a level of frustration has started to arise as not having a gap/ break of sorts between each module meant I went into the nature lab already feeling a bit beaten down and tired from having to manage the members in my group as well as complete the work. I feel as though me and Zoe are having to delegate small tasks to the others and then take on the majority of the work to ensure that it all gets done as the others are unreliable and don't have the same amount of motivation to achieve the higher level of results me and Zoe are looking for. Heading into this module with the knowledge of how my group has been engaging with the course definitely impacted my own motivation to strive for something as ambitious as our performance lab concept.

(late) powerpoint sustainability

as a group we began brainstorming ideas for our nature lab outcome. we showed each other the objects and resources we had gathered from Wyre forest to see if they gave us any inspiration. The two objects that sparked the most interest were Liz's small twig that had a complex structure and the mushroom that me and Zoe had gathered. From that, upon other ideas we had as a group, Zoe had the idea of basing our piece off of mycelium networks. I had never heard of mycelium before so was intrigued to find out how they work. Below is our thought process to how we landed on the mycelium idea. Next we started to think of ways of incorporating mycelium into a piece of art. We discussed a collaged group painting/ traditional art piece that would work as an exhibition installation. We also thought that we could use projection (taking inspiration from our last module) to add an element of creative tech to the piece.

Upon further research I found a definition for mycelium that matches what we will be basing this project around. "mycelium facilitate the transfer of nutrients from the soil into plant roots, and in turn receive carbon from the plant."

I also drew some very early concept ideas to visualise our thought process:

(Friday)

We had two texts to read for this week's discussion: the future with trees and why be a tree. I read why be a tree first and learnt quite a bit about trees and their way of living. I was surprised at how similar we are to trees in their way of sustaining their lives and the different ways/ styles of how they reproduce. Each tree has to take into their characteristics and adapt accordingly in order to survive. The mention of smaller plants occupying any blank area between trees was also peaked my interest as this relates to our nature lab concept of mycelium and how they aid in the tree's ecosystems.

The second extract "The future with trees" was more difficult for me to engage with. I find that articles on climate change can be exhausting in terms of content as, in my opinion, there isn't much you can do as an average person to create the change needed to stop or reverse climate change. I think for a meaningful change to happen, it needs to be the business men, CEOs and governments that produce the most CO2 and run down finite resources that need to be making changes. For this reason, I ended up just skimming the text and only making a few notes in the margin. A thought I had while reading this extract was in terms of how developed we are scientifically. If it is possible to grow a hamburger, why aren't we researching a way of altering trees genetically so that they are able to thrive in the environment we are headed towards?

Another important point I took from this chapter was the author's definition of progress. They say it should be measured by quality of life and not for example how advanced our technology is. While I agree with this, I also feel that the two go hand in hand, as long as the detriment to other factors do not outweigh the benefits.

For the Friday, my task was to create initial ideas for what the image on our collage will be. I got a little bit of feedback from Zoe and Amie on these but I was really looking for a bit more critique in order to make a final design. Here are my initial drawings:

This day had many difficulties in terms of working within our group. Liz and Zoe were unable to attend the session, Hemza arrived after lunch time and Amie left just before lunch. This meant it was difficult to make any progress within the project. I kept in contact with Zoe throughout the day as she was available to help make decisions and she had the idea to include the idea of decay into our project. She suggested we could use the water element to the piece to have a reveal to show a mycelium structure behind the painting. I had to initiate updating Amie on what we were doing as she had not been to the previous few sessions where we had been brainstorming. I attempted to suggest things for her to do to contribute to the project which was unsuccessful and I ended up completing myself (picking an organic shape for each collage piece instead of just having a5 pieces of paper).

I had my 1-1 with Sarah next and communicated my difficulties with her in terms of how my group was interacting with each other (lack thereof). She advised to just push on regardless so that is what I did. She also had a brief look at my blog to make sure I was on the right track and there didn't seem to be any issues there.

I then had a look through the images I had gathered from Wyre forest to look for inspiration for what to replace the A5 rectangles and settled on Ivy leaves as they have powerful creeping vines and is classed as a weed. I thought this would relate to fungi and the whole idea of mycelium and would make the overall piece look more connected. I then confirmed this with Zoe so moved forward and traced the image to get uniform shapes for all of the leaves.

Before Amie left, I mentioned grad+ week and she let me know that she wouldn't be able to attend due to her plans to go home. This was something that would've been useful to know as soon as she had made the arrangements but I was thankful to at least know now. She assured me that she will still be able to make the masks for our performance module while she was away. I ensured she didn't feel any pressure to take on this task as I wouldn't want her to take on a task that would take away from her time at home and is something that the group is able to complete.

After Hemza's arrival, I suggested that he should experiment with different types of paper to see which would be most suitable for having a water reveal (the paper would have to go transparent). We trialed paper towels, the thinnest paper we had access to in the studio, as well as blue roll tissue paper. while the paper towels and blue roll were more transparent after coming into contact with the water, we knew that we would be painting images over the top of these materials and found that the paint would bleed very easily. due to this, we decided to go for the thinner paper.

After Hemza had left, I had a group tutorial with both Lara and Sarah to help with idea generation for our project. The suggestions they gave on how to incorporate water into our outcome were a great starting point and we considered using real plants in our outcome, hydrochromic paint and toy water activated mats. I had the idea of having water monitors to detect water levels and potentially creating a circuit to pump the water around the piece. Sarah is working on a similar project at the minute so will have tubes and valves that we might be able to use as well.

I definitely left this session feeling defeated and frustrated as I want to be able to create the best outcome possible.

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niamhsnaturelab · 1 year

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Week 4~ Nature Lab

(Tuesday)

Tuesday saw the launch of the nature lab. I was unfortunately late to the session as I had to travel from home on the day. From what i learnt from reading the PowerPoint, reflecting on the self assessment throughout the project will be a great way to generate ideas. The main themes we should explore throughout the nature lab are maps, trails, and networks. This can link to many things to do with nature and I’m sure we can find a way to incorporate these themes into our outcome. A group challenge was also outlined for our trip to Wyre Forest, stating to gather resources such as sound, film, photographs, illustrations and physical materials

After this presentation, we began the natural dye workshop. Many different outcomes were made using different natural components such as avocado, onion skin and weld. The three outcomes had the option of everything, alum only, or no mordant. Mordant is a substance, typically an inorganic oxide that allows dyes to be fixed to a material as it combines with the dye. Alum was mainly used before the modern textile industry with chemical dyes came around in the 1850s and is a type of mordant. It was interesting to see the different variations between the use of mordants and iron sulphates. I have included the results below. While these were just a select few dye combinations, there are many more possibilities that can be created using natural components.

(Friday)

We met at the school of art at 9:30am on Friday to ensure we were there on time to take the coach to Wyre forest. I was very excited to spend some time in nature and see what we could find that could benefit our project. I spent the day with Zoe and Meg which was a good dynamic as we all enjoy being around nature and the outdoors but also, Meg is in a different group so having a different perspective/ someone looking for different things for their group to build upon was good to brainstorm. I found that the contents of Wyre forrest were rather similar throughout. It had a few different types of trees that dominated the woods within their "grouped areas".

in terms of looking for materials to take away, I ended up gathering a variety of objects, such as a pine cone, an acorn, a white leaf, a thicker branch with more texture, a piece of bark, a fern leaf and an interesting mushroom that had been attached to a fallen tree trunk. while foraging I was extremely aware of the ethical principles and the morality of taking materials away from the forest. I personally didn't really agree with it as nature areas such as this should not be impacted by our presence. in order to soften this impact, we only took materials that were on the floor/ had already detached themselves from any living thing.

Again, to try and prevent creating an impact on the forest, I brought my camera with me to take some pictures and videos of the surroundings to get potential inspiration of composition and atmosphere (including sound). Some of the images turned out better than others, most likely due to my inexperience with DSLR cameras. here are a few pictures I took on both my phone and my camera.

(Friday)

While on this trip, there were a few options of trails to pick from, varying in length. We originally aimed to visit the lake/pond featured on the map which was close to where the two trails split from one another. After we began to walk in the direction instructed, we couldn't seem to find the lake so decided to keep on going on the path we were already on. It seemed to be a longer path so we decided to take a shortcut through the trees which resulted in us becoming slightly lost. this was because there wasn't a natural path made by humans to indicate the direction in which we should be going. instead, we used our instincts and made it back to the cafe where we started. In a way, we had to collaborate and work as a team here as some times we had differing opinions of which direction to go in.

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