Placenta

Three couples that I know have all recently had babies approximately within a month of each other! Today my friend's beautiful Baby Girl arrived into this world :-) Her partner brought the placenta home while mum & baby were still recovering in hospital. He asked me if I wanted to see the placenta. Wow, I never seen a placenta before, well not in the real world. It looked so amazing that I just had to make them a card using a photo. I couldn't believe how tree/plant like it was. This placenta seemed like a perfect example of what I had been learning previously while researching my paper in connection with exploring chaos theory and nature.

Postmodernism Exhibition at the V&A

Recently I visited the Postmodernism Exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. I had previously been to Robotville Festival on the same day, so I didn't expect it to compete with seeing lots of cool robots, which it didn't :-) But having said that I did enjoy this exhibition too, as there were aspects of the show that I loved.

Initially the first thing that I found fascinating to watch was actually a projection which was used simply as an effect to show off some of the sculptures. I don't think it was part of any of the work itself. I found this to be quite mesmerizing, which was reminiscent of watching gently moving ocean waves lit by moonlight. This also reflected onto a mirrored sculpture which was wonderful to watch. I was also puzzled by this as I couldn't work out where the projection was coming from! I ended up having to ask an assistant, which was quite weird as he said that this was the first thing that he found fascinating too, and it also took him ages to figure out where the projection was coming from.

My next favourite part of this exhibition was watching a film clip from the film Blade Runner. While I've seen this film so many times in the past it was brilliant seeing this clip as it stirred my memory to re-watch the film again.

Another video which I found absolutely amazing to view was a clip from the documentary Koyannisquatsi directed by Godfrey Reggio with music by Philip Glass. This was projected onto a large screen, and I watched this video loop several times while I was there. At one point one of the assistants walked through a nearby door which made the screen move. This happened just as the focus of the video was on an image of a tower block which made the building appear as if it was breathing. This was totally accidental but it looked so effective and gave me ideas for doing a video projection onto a moving screen.

Even though there were underlying dystopian messages in this video extract, I found it so beautiful to watch too. I came away wanting/needing to see all of this film, which I now have :-)

Click here  for link to the Postmodernism Exhibition at the V&A.

Robotville Festival

The Robotville Festival will celebrate the most cutting-edge in European robot design and innovation – and explore the cultural significance of robots. You can meet over 20 unique robots and their makers, who will be on hand to demonstrate their work and talk to visitors.  Robotville

At the weekend I visited Robotville held at the Science Museum in London. See video from the New Scientist Blog. While there were so many amazing robots, I found the Swarm Robots particularly fascinating. Click here for photo. The Swarm Robots can be found on the left hand side second from the bottom. I was totally gutted that I didn't take my camera. I didn't think they would allow photography, but little children were there happily snapping away :-)

The Swarm Robots had behaviour traits similar to flocking; their intention was to stay within the group even though they would sometimes get lost. Since roboticist Alan Winfield was on hand to answer questions, I asked him why were some of them getting lost? He mentioned how this group of little robots relied on light sensors as a way of communicating to keep the group together. However due to any external surrounding light they will sometimes go off track and get lost by following another light source, but they will eventually find their way back to the group.

Here's an interview with Alan Winfield about the Swarm Robots click here for link.

Also click here to view Alan's blog.

New Ideas

This week my new great nephew arrived into this world :-) I made a cast of his little feet and took some photos.



While this photo isn't part of my studio practise as such, the shadows made me think about previous family generations and how different and unique people are.

The same day I also began recording sounds of people breathing. I  previously had been having ideas for an installation whilst writing my research paper, but I had to put this on hold until now. I began by asking a few friends and family members if I could record their breathing. This was quite fun and it was so tricky for people to breath into a recording device without me making them laugh, so I had to disappear while they did this :-)

This will be an ongoing process for a while. I will be gathering the breathing sounds of people and also collecting some of their breathe in balloons.