when an animal enters into things

An escape for language, for music, for writing. What we call pop—pop music, pop philosophy, pop writing—Wörterflucht [word flight]. To make use of the polylingualism of one’s own language, to make a minor or intensive use of it, to oppose the oppressed quality of this language to its oppressive quality, to find points of nonculture or underdevelopment, linguistic zones by which a language can escape, an animal enters into things, an assemblage comes into play.

— Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka:  Towards a Minor Literature 1986 26-27

Lemonade Making

Image:Lemonade Float discovered by Hector & Helen on Dixie Freeway

Quite a few months back I was commissioned by the public-funded contemporary art space Spacex to make a collaborative project with communities in the villages which surround Exeter. Things are really starting to come together now and on Saturday 6th November I will be launching  The Recipe Exchange project in Farringdon.  The Recipe Exchange will offer an online and offline sharing space for community know-how. The project will begin by co-designing online and offline spaces together with the residents in Farringdon and and continue throughout the next few months with the process of gathering recipes. These recipes might be food recipes but they might also be procedures for making something else such as village walks, hats, playing basketball, dancing, collecting bio data. The aim is to create a bank of instructions and recipes to exchange knowledge and I hope that some of these recipes will lead to community events.

The project has grown out of my current research into the social dimension of verbal scores and instructions. It explores the potential of sharing, performing and modifying instructions as a tool to create community dialogue and social capital - or communities of practice. The Recipe Project explores how public assembly has the potential to develop technology to augment and enhance collective human participation in different kinds of activities and to engage diverse groups of people in discussions and further developments of technologies.

I am going to launch the project and first co-design session with a instruction to make & modification session of Farringdon Lemonade as the village hall taps flow with Farringdon Spring Water .

KickStarting: Bio Curious and DIY POP Biotech

I’ve been interested in  Citizen Science projects such as the International Hydraphone Network Stream(which I love to listen too) and data sharing projects such as open wetware for a while and so now as part of my global challenge project at Highwire. I’ve been digging deeper into citizen led science approaches to designing for sustainability such as the Bio Curious project, (a the parallel movement within science to colabs/fablabs/democratic design within in Design) Community Labs for Citizen Science. Bio Curious is a hackerspace in San Francisco set up for people to come together and experiment with bioart. Whats fascinating about this project is that has also been funded through social philanthropy on Kickstart  and the founders raised over $35,000 to move the project from a garage into a  6,000sf industrial facility outfitted as a co-working space for biotech

Partly led by the garage science movement and partly by the availability of enabling technologies it offers an alternative to university or corporate research as the founders explain:

“Science was once a cultural activity, carried out by wealthy “gentlemen scholars” who had the leisure and material resources to experiment. The 20th century saw an unprecedented centralization of science around an industrial model. The plummeting costs of enabling technologies has brought meaningful biological research back within reach of the independent citizen scientist”  (Bio Curious 18 July 2010, at 19:14.)

As well as providing a space for people to work on biotech projects Bio Curious also run events such as Making Algae, Extracting DNA from Strawberries, The art and science of wine and The material aesthetic of biotechnology. 

The Bio Curious bring a social dimension to science as Tito Jankowski explains in an interview on the kick starter blog

“We hope our efforts will inspire individuals to pursue careers in the life sciences, create new avenues for participation, and enable citizens to be better informed about the many opportunities and challenges posed by advancements in the life sciences.” (Jankowski 2010)

Through the active participation in experimenting and testing out biotech, citizens have a hands on tactit knowledge which can provide the basis for making choices and decisions.

Tito and the others who set Bio Curious also created the OpenPCR a project to build an open source machine capable of copying DNA.

Again the project was funded on kickstart through gifting and they raised themselves over $10,500 to launch an open source PCR thermal cycler which would make it much more financially plausible for individuals to construct their own instrument. Funders received gifts depending on their level of funding starting with stickers for the lower levels!

CARDBOARD STUDIO

So my temporary office (pics to come) cardboard docking station is gaining quite a bit of attention in the new Highwire Lab, LICA building, Lancaster. Mainly because its completely crap and ridiculous and a stark contrast to the new building which has been designed with lots of attention and thought. So tonight I was thinking that perhaps I should modify it perhaps adding draws,keyboard support, lipgloss holder (think petticoat 5) and something mechanical which would move continuously to stop the movement sensing lights turning off all the time (post to come on this later). However my DIY skills are limited, I am better at flat pack and I was reminded of my one of my favourite projects the Instructables Restaurant initiated by Waag Society, the worlds first entirely open sourced eatery based on instructions from instructables.com Perhaps a re-iteration of this code was due in the form of an Instructables office. Its funny because tonight I was planning a business model for a innovation space for 11-16 years olds, perhaps using rapid prototyping technology, however the instructables site is also such a great resource and I am really inspired by the notions of sharing, open source, repeatable, designs which can be compiled by expert or amateur. Perhaps It doesn’t matter if something is made out of cardboard by hand or machine it is the code/software/instructions which give it the potential to be a representational design process.

Deviations from the idealized , abstract forms are not exceptions but the noise that constitutes the world
Michel Serres, Hermes (1982).

— 

OUTSIDE TEXTS: BOUNDARIES & FLUX

Theories of a computational universe within physics (Wolfram etc) have re-invigorated the importance of language within philosophical debate. For techno-literary theorists such as Katherine Hayles it also offer an opportunity for literary discourse to go beyond that of a static mirroring of observation and narrative and become somewhat more of a dynamic process. (1)

Hayles proposes that a shift from Social Construtionism to Constrained Constructivism is vital in order for the dynamic way way we interact with real world constraints - enter the debate. (2)

In the world of Constrained Constructivism the reality is OUT THERE and interacts with and comes in to consciousness with/through self organizing processes that include sensory and cognitive components which Hayles describes as the ‘cusp’.

“the hardest thing in the world is to ride the cusp, to keep in the foreground of consciousness both in the active transformations through which we experience the world and the flux that interacts with and helps to shape those transformations”

Constrained Constructivism offers a model of representation that declines abstraction figures,  as  species-specific, culturally determined and context dependent. It re writes Derrida’s claim that “There is no outside to the text” (3)  and instead suggests that there is a boundary or a cusp between text and the real world - a world which  we do not have unmediated access too.

It emphasizes instrumental effiacy rather than precision

it assumes local interactions rather than positive correspondences

It recognizes consistency which differs it from Social Constructionisim

These consistencys are the constraints, they are real world physics, materials and properties.

It is the active engagement between reality and human beings

It is a flux space

1.  Hayles, K.N (2005) My Mother was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005.

2.Hayles K. N. (1991) Constrained Constructivism: Locating Scientific Inquiry in the Theater of Representation(New Orleans Review, 18 ,

3.Derrida, J (1981) Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press,