The Royal College of Art Show opened last week with some excellent work which no doubt wmmna will cover in depth. One project I particularly enjoyed was Tom Foulsham, an ex-Bartlett graduate and now graduate of the RCA’s Design Products programme.

In some ways Tom’s work could be compared to Heath Robinson’s imagined machines and certainly he has that mad inventor spirit, but underneath this is a sensitivity that should not be underestimated. His intricate machines are both playful and though provoking.

They are beautifully balanced and responsive objects that play with the forces of nature as well as the forces of information. His work and very much more great work is on display at the RCA this week.

Fly-paper robotic clock

One of the special mentions in the VIDA 11.0 exhibition went to Carnivorous Domestic Entertainment Robots project by James Auger, Jimmy Loizeau, Alex Zivanovic, and Trevor Harvey currently exists as a series of five semi-operational prototypes: Mousetrap coffee table robot, Lampshade robot, Cobweb robot, UV fly killer parasite robot, and Flypaper robotic clock . The robots take the form of beautiful and fashionable furniture and household accessories, which perform functions that range from lighting a room to low-key (and admittedly dark) entertainment. But more primarily, the very process that allows the robots to run by supplying them with power also has the function of ridding the household of pests. Each robot has a microbial fuel cell that converts organic matter, ensnared by the robot, into electrical energy: a mechanized iris built into the top of a table traps mice, a lampshade has holes that allow insects in but not out, a small robotic armature picks flies from cobwebs that spiders build into it.

Mousetrap coffee table robot

The key design metaphor in use here is at once that of a novel energetic recyling machine, and a somewhat cruel spectacle of entrapment that mimics the sophistication of predatorial plants and insects. Although there is a strong element of irony in the project, it nonetheless seems only fitting that our relationships with domestic robots should incorporate some of the darker features that characterize relationships in nature.

The Poème électronique was a unique experience, originated from the request made by Philips to Le Corbusier for the design of the company’s pavilion at the Brussels World Fair in 1958. The whole project was initiated and directed by Le Corbusier, who also created and/or selected the images for the audiovisual show, with the organized sound composed by Edgar Varèse, and the stunning surfaces of the building designed by Iannis Xenakis. The result was a ground breaking immersive environment, since the space of the Pavilion hosted the audio and the visual materials as integral parts of the architectural design.

Unluckily, such a visionary synthesis of innovative ideas could not stand with its times, and the paradigm was never repeated, or even attempted, again: the Pavilion, notwithstanding the incredible number of spectators (2 millions), was turned down a few months after its inauguration, at the end of the Exposition. The disappearance of the Pavilion makes the Poème électronique a destroyed masterpiece.

What we stl have today are only fragments of the various components (i.e. photos and drafts of the architecture, the projected video in videotape from the Philips archives, a stereo reduction of Varèse’s and Xenakis’ musical pieces).

Virtual Electronic Poem (VEP) is a project realized as a virtual reality (VR) environment that reproduces the experience of the dismantled masterpiece through an accurate philological reconstruction of the original installation. The website looks a bit out of date but the first of two films in this post shows the results of the work. The second shows the Poème électronique as a film rather than in its architectural context. Perhaps someone out there would be good enough to bring the building into a public setting on Second Life?

The Hybrid Insect Micro Electro Mechanical Systems project aims to create literal shutterbugs — camera-toting insects whose nerves have grown into their internal silicon chip so that wranglers can control their activities. DARPA researchers are also raising cyborg beetles with power for various instruments to be generated by their muscles. via spatialrobot

Arthur Ganson has been a great inspiration to me. His artistic and engineering skill is articulated with great humour and weightlessness. I just thought I’d put a few videos I found online up here but I recommend the DVD if you really want to see the detail in his work.

Self-described as a cross between a mechanical engineer and a choreographer, Arthur Ganson creates contraptions composed of a range of materials from delicate wire to welded steel and concrete. Most are viewer-activated or driven by electric motors. All are driven by a wry sense of humor or a probing philosophical concept.

“When making a sculpture,” Ganson says, “It’s always a challenge to say enough but not say too much, to coax with some kind of recognizable bait, then leave the viewer to draw his or her own conclusions and thereby find personal meaning.”

Moving objects are playfully linked by intention and subject in A Child and a Ball, which entails an active child mesmerized by a moving ball. In Machine with Wishbone, a real chicken wishbone pulls the very mechanism responsible for its movement. Another sculpture writes the word “Faster” as it is pushed. Other works explore the nature of oiled surfaces, object manipulation, slow explosions, and the organic implications of slow moving roller chain.

In a profile of Ganson in Smithsonian Magazine, David Sims described the sculptor’s work as “retrotechnology with a nineteenth-century quality…. No lasers, no subminiaturized computer wizardry. What you see is what you get,” and, Sims added, ‘People generally get what they see because there are so many different points of entry, an end result of the playful Ganson mind….Kids love Machine with Wishbone because it’s funny, odd, and ingenious. Many adults, on the other hand, see pathos and tragedy as the enslaved little bone drags the clanking contraption behind it. Rube Goldberg meets Jean-Paul Sartre.”

I have an ongoing interest in swarming structures that goes back to my Angels, Flying Reconfigurable Architecture work which I did at the Bartlett a couple of years ago. Going from concept to real truely swarming LTA vehicles is another story but these developments in mobile robotics are interesting glimpses at a possible world made up of ecologies of architectural fragments, whether at a nano or larger scale that. Above is a team of “swarm-bots” negotiating a terrain outside a laboratory in Brussels, Belgium.

Each Swarm-bot is 19 centimetres high, has a rotating turret, a claw-like gripper and moves using a combination of caterpillar tracks and wheels. Each also has a basic computer and is loaded with the same software.

The simple rules laid out in this software allow the robots to perform complex actions as a group. A swarm of ants uses a similar strategy to tackle difficult jobs like carrying a large object. See Film

A red color ring tells others, “Grab me;” blue means “stay away.” Scientists study ant colonies, bird flocks, mammal herds, and fish schools to understand the simple genius of such animal swarms.

Exploded Axonometric of his most recent electro-acoustic system

Architect Richard Roberts electro-acoustic systems have been developed to explore the sonic properties of environments, and reveal the way in which sound and space co-habit one another. The system uses speakers and panels of resonating metal and gains its input and mode of operation through the cyclical feedback of sound waves from the environment in which it is placed. It is extremely reactive and capable of changing in real-time to anything that alters the acoustic properties of the environment that it exists within.

Richard using one of his electro-acoustic systems to explore the sonic properties of Fort Brockhurst, Portsmouth

Through this work Richard describes how he “discovered that sound is an effective method with which one can explore first and second order cybernetic principles, and that any observer is an integral and inescapable part of their own acoustic space.” Richard explorative works are refined through iterative processes involving prototypes, experimental models, digital animations and drawings. His work is currently being presented at the Pask Present exhibition being held in Vienna from 26th March to 4th April 2008.

Static Machine

Between 1995 and 2001 Richard was a Research Fellow at the Royal College of Art where he created and exhibited three major interactive works Alembic (ICA 1998), Biotica (Siggraph 2000) and the Neural Net Starfish (Millennium Dome 2000). Whist at the RCA Richard also published the book “Biotica: Art, Emergence and Artificial- Life“. He has been an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Victorian College of Art, Melbourne University, and artist-in-residence at CEMA (Centre for Electronic Media Arts), Monash University.In 2006 Richard was invited by Edinburgh Informatics to be their first Research Artist in Residence. In this role, he has developed projects combining art, informatics and communications research.

Here are a selection of projects of his but you can see many more at the Pask Present Exhibition.

Electromagnetic Time Machine 1983

An electromagnetic kinetic sculpture using the cybernetic principle of regulatory feedback to generate complex oscillatory behaviour. Each electromagnetic relay is physically coupled to a vertical pendulum and electrically influenced by its immediate neighbour. When a relay closes it causes the relay in front to close only if the relay behind is open, thus creating a regulatory feedback loop with unstable oscillations due to the differing physical weightings of the vertical pendulums. A simple PIR sensor activates the work, the pulsing lights indicating the closing and opening of each relay.

Cybernetics concerns itself with any type of system that involves sensing and feedback, biological, ecological, mechanical and chemical. Gordon Pask created cybernetic feedback mechanisms using electromechanical and analogue components in his works, such as “Colloquy of mobiles” in the same vein, Time Machine represents an alternative paradigm to the digital.

Dendritics I, II and III

The Electrochemical System is inspired by Gordon Pask’s early experiments with electrochemistry. The central negatively charged copper electrode of each glass is surrounded by four positively charged copper electrodes. Copper dendrites grow from the central electrode reaching out to the outer electrodes. The plates are connected so that each glass is in competition with the other, more charge being consumed by the fastest growing dendrite. Each outer electrode is connected via an LED whose brightness indicates the voltage difference.

This work represents an experiment in using dendritic growth as self regulating switching mechanisms, as a dendrite grows, it consumes more potential in competition with other dendrites trying to grow from the same power source. Pask describes the possibilities of chemical computing, the energy systems involved and illustrates a number of circuit possibilities for dendritic circuits on pp 105–108 in his book “An approach to Cybernetics”, Pask 1961.

Here’s an interesting wind powered streetlight from the Panasonic Center in Tokyo that I found on hyperexperience blog run by Leonardo Bonanni of MediaLab. I’m a big fan of using these Vertical Axis Wind Turbines for integrating into urban skylines when traditional propellers often seem too dramatic.

Michael Wihart explored how ecologies of small machines made of nanotechnological and biotechnological elements might be able to swarm together to create architectural space and developed notions of how these spaces might reconfigure over time. Here’s some images of his work and some thoughts of his on the issues he raises.

“The decadence and redundancy of the integrity of architectural thinking needs to be constantly questioned in order to reveal if architecture can be a source for the sentimental titillation. The embarrassing meanders of architecture into the challenge of the feasibility must be extended into the poetry of spatial mediation. the process of designing can no longer be solely functional and operational. The creation of an architecture which is embedded in the mythical knowledge of the future enables us to extend the sentiment of in-habitation into the realm of co-existence.”

“Certainly this vision can be engaged to fulfil the concupiscence of a few heroic models but the question if this architecture can establish a casing of affirmative cultural emergence which is the source and site for the engagement of individuals with the fate of their co-habitants, is a different one. Architecture therefore stands for the manifestation of the ambivalence of the transience and the after-effect of the notion of co-existence. But when architects by themselves abandon and forget to realise fantasies which have always already been lost in the dawn of the socialisation, where then will we find the sites for the staging of our sentiments?”