During my week at FoAM I worked on the project Molecular Soundscape which I am developing with chemists at Newcastle University. The aim of the project is to develop sound based work which can accompany visualisations of protein dynamics both to communicate the process of drug design to non-specialists and to aid scientists in analysing the effects of experimental drugs on specific proteins. The scientists I am working with have …
An overview of our Tanglebots workshop, re-developed for autistic young people and their families, together with the Cultural Minds research group from the University of Exeter. What we did to adjust the workshop format, what worked and didn't work, and changes we'd recommend others make if they run similar events.
Today is my final day of my week-long residency with FoAM Kernow. Amber and Dave had already developed a Sonic Kayak system which allows a paddler to listen to underwater sound, and sonified temperature changes, in realtime. I did my PhD on underwater noise in Falmouth Bay assessing the impact of a wave energy converter so when I heard about the Sonic Kayak I was pretty excited! The plan for …
Towards the end of last year we were struggling a bit at FoAM Kernow, a busy year with lots of media exposure and overlapping projects had left us excited and energised but it seemed at times as if the organisation had gained its own momentum and we were being carried along with it.
We had a very timely chat with Jane Sutherland at Krowji in Redruth who told us about …
Some photos of the our citizen science game Dazzlebug being exhibited at the Anchorage Museum in Alaska as part of their Camouflage: In Plain Sight Exhibition running from the 28th October 2016 to the 5th Febuary 2017.
The bugs which have evolved throughout this exhibition and before have already been sent for processing by the researchers - more info on that here soon!
FoAM Kernow is an organisation in one of the most disadvantaged parts of the UK. Many of the gaps in our society are particually obvious in Cornwall, the separation between those whom our social structures benefit and those who they do not are clear to see in the separation between the coastal and inland regions, and in many finer grained distinctions.
We’re prototyping a system for behavioural change for sustainable planting and fertilising in allotments and smallholdings, based on the Farm Crap App.
This autumn we have been developing a new version of the Farm Crap App with the Duchy College and Rothamstead Research. This project is about tackling the difficulties farmers have using natural fertilisers while needing to report realistic figures the government agencies - and understanding the guidance they provide. The original version was a big success, but only contained information on a handful of manures and didn't deal with the …
Working on a NES game you are treading in the footsteps of programmers from the 80's, and going back to modern development feels strangely bloated and inefficient in comparison. This is a log of some of the things I've encountered writing game code for the What Remains project.
Last week we launched our Sonic Kayaks for the first time at the British Science Festival in Swansea. Sonic Kayaks are scientific instruments for citizen-led marine microclimate data collection, as well as musical instruments for expanding our senses allowing exploration of the underwater environment in real-time through sound. The installation ran over two days, and was fully booked with 64 participants. This post forms our documentation of the practical lessons …
A run through of physical models made from voxel data obtained from LiDAR flights through cities.
We have been notified of a particular place of interest within the data, this being in Luton – it feels good to have a central place of significance to work on now. The area is about 520msq, made up of four voxel ’tiles’, so I spent some time bringing other parts of the project up to date with that. Alas, four delicious cross section scans:
After rendering voxel data in Minecraft Pi, the next logical (and exciting) step was to export the blocks as a 3D file ready for 3D printing. Jo is the master of all things 3D and tangible, so I have been very excited to send this off to her – after a day of dallying around, we are definitely closer to that goal.
So far in the ‘play’ stage of the project, I have rendered wonderful little sections of Milton Keynes in Fluxus with both practical and slightly more esoteric outcomes – firstly, we have a script that outputs .OBJ files using small sections of data, which can be used for both digital and tangible modelling (such as 3D printing). That’s the practical part. The latter made the primitive object performance ready, which …
Following on from previous Voxel Debut, it seemed a good idea to visualise the data using Fluxus, as a newbie to live coding visuals. Before this stint, I had never really worked with 3D and animation, so thinking this way has been an entirely new concept to me, alongside learning Fluxus (& Scheme, in general). With a couple of Algoraves coming up this week, an incubated week of intense livecoding …
Recently, we were approached by Dr Karen Anderson of the University of Exeter to visualise voxel data of Bedford, Luton and Milton Keynes. A natural place to start with the data would have been to interpret it in Python and recreate the cities in Minecraft, so of course I became distracted and found myself being led down a different, more Fluxus/3D/performative inspired path. However, the first port of call was …
Here is a bit of a writeup of the gubbins going into the sonic kayaks project. We only have a few weeks to go until the kayaks' maiden voyages at the British Science Festival, so we are ramping things up, with a week of intense testing and production last week with Kirsty Kemp, Kaffe Matthews and Chris Yesson joining us at FoAM Kernow. You can read Amber's report on …
We now have the full system working, with temperature sensors and a hydrophone logging and sonifying underwater data in real-time to the paddler. This lab session was to design the final build and sonification elements.
We're working on two sonification projects at FoAM Kernow - Red King and Sonic Kayaks - so have started looking into how we can get the most out of sonification for citizen science.
Cricket Tales is an ambitious citizen science project. 438 days of CCTV footage from the Wild Crickets Research group - the only record of wild behaviour of insects of it's kind. It turns out that insects have more complex lives and individuality than we thought, and the game is a way of helping uncover this more precisely. For Foam Kernow, this was also a significant project as the biggest …