metal

steel is used in women’s bras.

I’m interested in extraction of metals. I would like to look into metal mining and extraction because it intersects lots of things i am drawn to – wearables (and potentially women’s health and breast politics?), extraction and therefore ecological degradation, resource politics – and creatively it allows me to work with metal, welding, lost wax technique, jewellery/bras/corsets (bodices and wearables made from fabric and metal structures, metallic textures and blender renders…

in what why could lab work come into this? how could metal extraction and context and mythology intersect with biological systems?

the fact silver is antimicrobial is interesting! thinking about where metal and microbe overlap intrigues me!

Stainless steel, originally used in surgical equipment is now prominent fashion product/accessory. The main advantages of it is the high resistance to discolouration, lack of elements that can cause skin allergies, and the durability of the material. Modern surgical stainless steel bracelets are very popular as fashion jewellery.

there is something intriguing about the way metal ores exist amongst geological layers and deep time

next steps:

  • i must look into the temporal contexts of different ores, what is the history of when they were made in earths systems, are they thought to be from different planets and stars
  • how do microorganisms interact with metal? what does a worm or a nematode do if it finds it in the soil?
  • I want to re-read ‘a short history of nearly everything’ by bill bryson
  • the historical context of mining steel (iron+coaking coal?) + the making of stainless steel, silver
  • how do people in the uk’s heritage relate to these material’s extraction?
  • steel is 100% recyclable. copper as well is highly recycled.
  • history of alchemy – to use magic to turn lead into gold!
  • carbon dating can date anything alive within 50,000 years ago

GEORGE MONBOIT – REGNESIS

  • hot spots and hot moments – places and instances of intense biological activity
  • hutchinsonian hyper volume, this describes the multidimentional opportunities that permit the survival of different creatures. the more complex a system is across space and time greater diversity it can support
  • fractal scaling – how the soil structure is consistent regardless of the scale of magnitude you are observing it
  • soil is self regulating and adaptive – explains it’s structural resistance against droughts etc

another book id like to re-read is ‘bitch’, the book about female gender in animals and ecology.

also I have the book ‘critical design in context’ on my phone – I would like to make time to read this as well. It would be good to ground an contextualise the sort of practice I would like going into 2nd year.

sequins are potentially a fun medium / format to make in. craft-able. I feel like I could turn to scar, ella and cordie for help and collaboration in making patterns and ways to attach and finish a wearble.

  • The dress was made from approximately 6,000 ultra-thin steel sequins manufactured by Voestalpine Precision Strip AB in Sweden. Each of the 6,000 blade-thick steel sequins was hand-sewn. Ian Jones, the head of sales and deputy managing director at Voestalpine, emphasises “a complex series of high-precision cold rolling and annealing cycles to achieve these ultra-thin thicknesses.” As a result, the plates are thinner than mulberry silk.
  • The couturier was so passionate about the material that he expanded the concept and decided to use several shades of blue. Through a series of oxidation experiments, the researchers were able to paint a 0.022 millimetre thick steel strip in different shades of blue. This unique dress became the centrepiece of Josefi’s collection at Stockholm Fashion Week.
  • “I want to surprise, create something unexpected, and at the same time, environmental friendliness is also very important for me, and since steel is 100% recyclable, this dress has become exactly what I wanted to show the world,” says Naim Josefi. “All my collections are based on scientific research. Technology helps me implement complex ideas and thoughts,” he says.

Sarah Roseman, soft silica

  • Soft Silica is a new expression for glass that lies on the boundary between textile and glasswork. The material is brought to life and appears to be frozen in time, capturing the way glass melts in a static object through with the tactility of a textile. The project currently consists of glass tapestries and sculptural vessels as well as an extensive and ever growing archive of samples. It is a continuing glass research that evolves and develops with each iteration, to find future possibilities and applications for this exciting new material.
  • OCR-A = the font designed in the 60s to be understood by machines
  • ‘its always about capitalism no technology’
  • Machine Art 1934 at the MoMA
  • the anatomy of an AI system – the planetary cost of an AI system
  • https://anatomyof.ai/
  • it has lots of interesting contextual points eg ‘Marx’s dialectic of subject and object in economy’ and ‘Fractal chains of production and exploitation’ and ‘ Submarine Cable Infrastructure’
  • its also a really engaging diagraming example of a life cycle analysis

SOFIA CRESPO

  • https://sofiacrespo.com
  • interesting projects are ‘beneath the neural waves’ and ‘neural zoo’ and ‘critically extant’

https://cargocollective.com/loekiesmeets/Smart-by-Nature

What is a Field Book?

Field books are original records of scientific discovery. As such, they are primary source material that describe a range of information including the activities performed during the observation and collecting of specimens, the native environment for those specimens or events surrounding or related to the field collection of specimens or observations during field research.

The traditionally handwritten field documentation in the nineteenth century began to include other forms as technology advanced. As photography equipment became easier to transport, for example, the documentary value of photography became a useful form of field documentation. The Field Book Project catalog a variety of field note formats include photography, film and audio materials.

  • a technology – as James bridle describes it
  • documenting data
  • making sense and connecting, multicellular formations that make up a picture or a state
  • botanical drawings and scribbles becoming a

THE MUSEUM

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/inside-las-strangest-museum-180954803

Wilson knows that the Museum of Jurassic Technology doesn’t appeal to all. “Not everyone, by any stretch of the imagination, finds what we do to be of interest. A lot of people actually dislike what we do and think we shouldn’t be doing it.” (An example of a Yelp review: “Museums should offer something besides confusion … I guess a lot of people enjoy learning nothing at a museum?”) Those who call it an art project also constantly baffle Wilson: “People have on occasion said ‘Oh, this is like an art project.’ That is always so confusing. I don’t understand what that distinction is. When is something artistic?”

WEBSITE OF BEASTE

https://bestiary.ca/index.html

Thinking about volcanoes.

the de-glaciation of the planets could impact the degree of volcanic eruptions.

what percentage of the world experience an eruption? how could this experiences be eminated?

how could we amplify and recreate microseismicity increases?

https://science.nasa.gov/earth/climate-change/can-climate-affect-earthquakes-or-are-the-connections-shaky

Weighing the Seismic Consequences of Water

In order to make any connection between climate and earthquakes, says Lundgren, you first have to determine what kinds of tectonic processes might be related to climate phenomena. Scientists know earthquakes can be triggered or inhibited by changes in the amount of stress on a fault. The largest climate variable that could change fault stress loads is surface water in the form of rain and snow. Lundgren says several studies have supported such correlations. But there’s a catch.

“Typically, where we’ve seen these types of correlations is in microseismicity — tiny earthquakes with magnitudes less than zero, far smaller than humans can feel,” he said. “Those occur quite frequently.”

Lundgren cited work by his colleague Jean-Philippe Avouac at Caltech and others, who’ve found a correlation between the amount of microseismicity in the Himalaya and the annual monsoon season. During the summer months, large amounts of precipitation fall on the Indo-Gangetic Plain, which encompasses the northern regions of the Indian subcontinent. This increases stress loads on Earth’s crust there and decreases levels of microseismicity in the adjacent Himalaya. During the winter dry season, when there’s less water weight on Earth’s crust in the plain, Himalayan microseismicity peaks.

Fire and Ice: Glaciers and Tectonic Processes

Another climate-related phenomenon that’s believed to have connections to tectonic processes is glaciation. The retreat of a glacier can reduce stress loads on Earth’s crust underneath, impacting the movement of subsurface magma. A recent study in the journal Geology on volcanic activity in Iceland between 4,500 and 5,500 years ago, when Earth was much cooler than today, found a link between deglaciation and increased volcanic activity. Conversely, when glacial cover increased, eruptions declined.

The rapid movement of glaciers has also been shown to cause what are known as glacial earthquakes. Glacial earthquakes in Greenland peak in frequency in the summer months and have been steadily increasing over time, possibly in response to global warming.

Human Uses of Water and Induced Seismicity

In addition to climate-related impacts of water on seismicity, human management and applications of water can also affect earthquakes through a phenomenon known as induced seismicity.

For example, water stored in large dams has been linked to earthquake activity in various locations around the world, though the impact is localized in nature. In 1975, approximately eight years after Northern California’s Lake Oroville, the state’s second-largest human-built reservoir, was created behind the Oroville Dam, a series of earthquakes occurred nearby, the largest registering magnitude 5.7. Shortly after the water in the reservoir was drawn down to its lowest level since it was originally filled in order to repair intakes to the dam’s power plant and then refilled, the earthquakes occurred.

How can we dream up new ecosystems? Can doing so help us understand the concept of existing always in relationship to others?

this work really resonates with – its creating art that hopes to reflect and reinterpret relationships between

  • Beneath the Neural Waves explores biodiversity through an attempt at creating (digitally) an aquatic ecosystem as a means of attempting to engage with the very abstract concept of relationship. These dioramas of artificial life, together with the various sculptural fragments, imagery, and text, reach out towards the complex entanglement of natural life, both with itself and others.
  • The choice of the aquatic, specifically the coral reef, was due to our belief that these reefs ecosystems are the perfect example of how the interconnectedness occurs in the natural world between life, no one creature is the core component of the reef, rather it emerges from the interwoven whole of all the individual component species.
  • Deep learning allows us to take a contemporary approach to pattern extraction. It facilitates extracting three-dimensional patterns from nature and rearranging them to envision new speculative worlds. By choosing this workflow we were faced with the challenge of creating datasets, teaching us how the available data and the way it represents marine life reflects how humans look at the natural world. Neural networks trained on coral reefs and their many inhabitants produce a large variety of 3D models which are then brought together to form new, speculative reefs from beneath the neural waves.

also her critically extent project!

  • A project exploring the limits of available data as a means of engaging with critically endangered species. By only using open, publicly available data, representations are generated that reflect upon how little (or much) they are present in our everyday, digital lives.

Ursula K. Le Guin ~ Deep in admiration

  • this pieces make me think about Graham Harmen and OOO – poetry as a way to break into the ‘real object’. metaphors and art as a way to relate to the more-than what ever it was.

I HEARD THE POET BILL SIVERLY this week say that the essence of modern high technology is to consider the world as disposable: use it and throw it away. The people at this conference are here to think about how to get outside the mind-set that sees the technofix as the answer to all problems. It’s easy to say we don’t need more “high” technologies inescapably dependent on despoliation of the earth. It’s easy to say we need recyclable, sustainable technologies, old a new—pottery making, bricklaying, sewing, weaving, carpentry, plumbing, solar power, farming, IT devices, whatever. But here, in the midst of our orgy of being lords of creation, texting as we drive, it’s hard to put down the smartphone and stop looking for the next technofix. Changing our minds is going to be a big change. To use the world well, to be able to stop wasting it and our time in it, we need to relearn our being in it. Skill in living awareness of belonging to the world, delight in being part of the world, always tends to involve knowing our kinship as animals with animals. Darwin first gave that knowledge a scientific basis. And now, both poets and scientists are extending the rational aspect of our sense of relationship to creatures without nervous systems and nonliving beings—our fellowship as creatures with other creatures, things with other things. Relationship among all things appears to be complex and reciprocal—always at least two-way, back and forth. It seems that nothing is single in this universe, and nothing goes one way.

In this view, we humans appear as particularly lively, intense, aware nodes, of relation in an infinite network of connections, simple or complicated, direct or hidden, strong or delicate, temporary or very long-lasting. A web of connections, infinite but locally fragile, with and among everything—all beings—including what we generally class as things, objects. Descartes and the behaviorist willfully saw dogs as machines, without feeling. Is seeing plants as without feeling a similar arrogance?

One way to stop seeing trees, or rivers, or hills, only as “natural resources” is to class them as fellow beings—kinfolk.

I guess I’m trying to subjectify the universe, because look where objectifying it has gotten us. To subjectify is not necessarily to co-opt, colonize, exploit. Rather, it may involve a great reach outward of the mind and imagination.

What tools have we got to help us make that reach?

In Romantic Things, Mary Jacobus writes, “The regulated speech of poetry may be as close as we can get to such thing—to the stilled voice of the inanimate object or the insentient standing of trees.”1

Poetry is the human language that we can try to say what a tree or a rock or a river is, that is, to speak humanly for it, in both senses of the word “for”. A poem can do so by relating the quality of an individual human relationship to a thing, a rock or river or tree, or simply by describing the thing as truthfully as possible.

Ursula K. Le Guin ~ Deep in admiration

Ursula K. Le Guin ~ Being taken for granite

Sometimes I am taken for granite [1]. Everybody is taken for granite sometimes but I am not in a mood for being fair to everybody. I am in a mood for being fair to me. I am taken for granite quite often, and this troubles and distresses me, because I am not granite. I am not sure what I am but I know it isn’t granite. I have known some granite types, we all do: characters of stone, upright, immovable, unchangeable, opinions the general size shape and pliability of the Rocky Mountains, you have to quarry five years to chip out one little stony smile. That’s fine, that’s admirable, but it has nothing to do with me. Upright is fine, but downright is where I am, or downwrong.
I am not granite and should not be taken for it. I am not flint or diamond or any of that great hard stuff. If I am stone, I am some kind of shoddy crumbly stuff like sandstone or serpentine, or maybe schist. Or not even stone but clay, or not even clay but mud. And I wish that those who take me for granite would once in a while treat me like mud.
Being mud is really different from being granite and should be treated differently. Mud lies around being wet and heavy and oozy and generative. Mud is underfoot. People make footprints in mud. As mud I accept feet. I accept weight. I try to be supportive, I like to be obliging. Those who take me for granite say this is not so but they haven’t been looking where they put their feet. That’s why the house is all dirty and tracked up.
Granite does not accept footprints. It refuses them. Granite makes pinnacles, and then people rope themselves together and put pins on their shoes and climb the pinnacles at great trouble, expense, and risk, and maybe they experience a great thrill, but the granite does not. Nothing whatever results and nothing whatever is changed.
Huge heavy things come and stand on granite and the granite just stays there and doesn’t react and doesn’t give way and doesn’t adapt and doesn’t oblige and when the huge heavy things walk away the granite is there just the same as it was before, just exactly the same, admirably. To change granite you have to blow it up.
But when people walk on me you can see exactly where they put their feet, and when huge heavy things come and stand on me I yield and react and respond and give way and adapt and accept. No explosives are called for. No admiration is called for. I have my own nature and am true to it just as much as granite or even diamond is, but it is not a hard nature, or upstanding, or gemlike. You can’t chip it. It’s deeply impressionable. It’s squashy.

Maybe the people who rope themselves together and the huge heavy things resent such adaptable and uncertain footing because it makes them feel insecure. Maybe they fear they might be sucked in and swallowed. But I am not interested in sucking and am not hungry. I am just mud. I yield. I do try to oblige. And so when the people and the huge heavy things walk away they are not changed, except their feet are muddy, but I am changed. I am still here and still mud, but all full of footprints and deep, deep holes and tracks and traces and changes. I have been changed. You change me. Do not take me for granite.

[1] Take for granite is an expression that is the result of mishearing or misinterpreting the phrase take for granted

useful article about the environmental monitoring

Data collection and monitoring

During this baseline monitoring period, the University’s Lake Maurepas Monitoring Project (LMMP) team deployed four monitoring buoys that will collect data on water quality and health, including water temperature, dissolved oxygen, pH, carbon dioxide, and water turbidity (cloudiness of the water), among other parameters. The LMMP team will also collect data on aquatic wildlife including shrimp, blue crabs, and Rangia clam populations, lengths and weights of each species, alligator nesting and egg viability, and environmental DNA samples to comprehensively assess fish species diversity.

Researching VOCs – (Volatile organic compounds)

For monitoring and measuring plants volatiles….

How to Measure Volatile Organic Compounds In the Air

What types of sensors are used to detect VOCs concentration?

VOC measurements can be made with a variety of sensors for different purposes and chemicals.

Photoionization detector (PID)

A photoionization detector can analyze a wide range of chemicals, including aromatic hydrocarbons, but excluding low molecular weight hydrocarbons. PID works by using ultraviolet light to break down airborne VOCs into either positive or negative ions. Once broken down, the detector can then measure or detect the charge of the ionized gas. It should be mentioned that PID only temporarily changes the VOC sample it detects and does not permanently change them. Methylene chloride is an example of a dangerous VOC PID is useful in detecting.

Flame ionization detector (FID)

Flame ionization detection is used largely in the automotive industry and is used as the standard in measuring hydrocarbons emission. It works by introducing a sample gas to a hydrogen flame which makes any hydrocarbons within the sample start to produce ions. These ions can then be detected with a metal detector.

Metal oxide semiconductor sensors (MOS)

Metal oxide semiconductor sensors can detect a large number of gases, including benzene, ethanol, and toluene. They use a sensitive film that reacts with gases and can trigger a signal when they reach toxic levels. Because MOS sensors can work in low humidity, they are considered quite effective.