Its been a strange month, I have moved to Morden (I tell people its Wimbledon) in our 5 bedroom student house slash Granny Mansion so have been somewhat preoccupied with doing grown up things rather than artistic thoughts. There also is a crippling lack of wireless internet and therefore my iphone and 3G dongle have been getting a lot of usage. It also means I have had even more than the usual backlog of witterings to blog about...

BESTIVAL
From the 10th to the 13th of September I went to Bestival on the Isle of Wight. Aside from the music and all the other amazing things that I saw there were a variety of visual delights on offer.

The animations on the screens were more than just accompanying pretty patterns, Roxy Music had live footage interspersed with Kandinsky paintings!

The last video is of the animation from the Flaming Lips performance...

Colourscape Music Festival

The festival was held in Clapham Common in September. I found it on the timeout website and assumed it was some highly respectable art installation but it turned out to be full of small children. Nevertheless it was amazing. It is basically a huge inflatable maze of beautifully lit tunnels, with a music performance in the centre.

The coolest part was when my eyes started going crazy with all the different colours they were trying to adjust to. It is also a brilliant place to take photos because everything is so smooth and you get interesting lighting effects depending on where you stand.


Under the Sea

We held an underwater themed party for our housewarming / my birthday. As the conservatory has a glass wall facing the garden we decided to go with an aquarium feel, using the cheapest materials available to create coral, seaweed and fish. Along with the fairy lights and the soundtrack to The Little Mermaid, the overall effect was beautiful.
We had sainsbury’s coral, tesco’s wine box fish with ink and acrylic, and Budgens bags with bin bags for seaweed. There were hanging bubbles made of various findings from Holly’s art box, and a ‘pin the tail on the whale’ made from one particularly large piece of cardboard. I also painted some acetate coral reef style for the OHP over the food table. (I wanted a digital projector to play my aquarium screensaver, alas)
(Unfortunately my phone went awol for the entire party so I couldn’t get any photos, what I have is what I could find or take afterwards. Will update as soon as I can)


College
I’ve got to come up with a piece for a start of term exhibition on Tuesday. The way I see it, a final piece is the last thing on anyone’s mind when they start back at college, but hey. Of course I have plenty of ideas but I haven’t made anything all summer except silly iphone doodles, so I’m either going to present them or cobble together something inspired by my planesphere and constellations. Here are the things I’m currently working with, hoping to turn into something this weekend.

I’ve had a few more project ideas as I continue to be a science geek..

Time and Space
The concept that time passes slower nearer larger objects is something that I’m still trying to get my head around.

If you watch this from roughly 4 minutes in it explains how gravity warps time and that although on Earth we barely detect it, around massive objects time slows down much more.. So time ticks slower near the sun than it does here.
When I was at the recording of BBC4’s infinite monkey cage, Alan Moore joked that he had once written the most implausible piece of fiction...
“I remember in Halo Jones I’ve got a planet of such mass that time was actually being bent – as a function of gravity.” - Moore
“-That’s absolutely correct! And if you wrote that before 1915 you’re a genius!” - Cox
Another time related concept I’m grappling with is that of time dilation. I first heard about it at the Q&A session after the showing of Wonders at Clapham Picture House, and was reeling from it for days – then I heard Carl Sagan talking about the same thing decades earlier, so it is by no means a new idea.

Here Sagan explains how when you travel near to the speed of light, time slows down for you. This means that if you could go fast enough, you could reach distant stars within your own lifetime. But if you wanted to come home, hundreds or thousands of years may have passed. The possibilities of involving this idea in an art project are vast, because you could concentrate on the very small – it is due to atoms that they developed this theory, or the very large as it concerns massive distances, or even possibly the human perspective, the idea of everyone you know being long dead when you return from the stars.

Curved Light

Light trapped on curved surfaces
17 September 2010 by Rachel Courtland, New Scientist
LIGHT, which in everyday experience travels in straight beams, has been trapped on complex curved surfaces. The feat is not just a parlour trick - it could help people visualise how light travels in the curved fabric of space.
According to Einstein's general theory of relativity, gravity is the result of an object's mass deforming space itself, like a bowling ball on a trampoline. To model how light's path would change in space curved by gravity, Ulf Peschel of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany and colleagues constructed smooth 3D objects and sent laser beams shooting along their surfaces (Physical Review Letters, in press).
They took advantage of the fact that light bends, or refracts, when it moves from one medium to another. In their simplest experiment, they shot laser light at the edge of a solid glass sphere. The angle of the beam was chosen so that the light - initially travelling in air - would be bent just enough when it entered the glass that it would keep reflecting off the inside surface of the sphere, and so travel along it. When the light inside the sphere reflected off its inner surface, some was also transmitted through the glass, creating a glowing ring on the outside surface.
The team also constructed an object shaped like two trumpet bells stuck end to end - called a hyperbolic surface. The object was made out of aluminium and then coated with oil. Light sent into the oil layer was confined there, bouncing between the metal and air boundaries. The beam spread out ever more quickly, generating a trumpet-shaped glow.
For the light to be trapped in two dimensions, the object's surface needed to be smooth enough to cleanly reflect most of the light into the oil layer rather than scattering it at all angles. That required diamond polishing machines that have only become available in the last 10 years or so, Peschel says.
The experiments help visualise how light travels in space warped by gravity. The sphere, for instance, represents how space is bent around a star or other mass - light passing through this warped space bends in an effect called gravitational lensing. The hyperbolic surface, which has so-called negative curvature because its surface curves up and down at the same time, like a saddle, just might represent the shape of the universe.
"It's a beautiful fundamental experiment," says Ulf Leonhardt of the University of St Andrews in the UK, who was not involved in the work. "It's just fun, good physics."

The idea of the sphere attracting light interests me, because it can be beautiful while also relating to a complicated scientific discovery.
My idea for this would involve glass spheres, possibly hanging by fishing wire, and I’d like to test different lights on them. I know that it would definitely be a good starting point for some interesting photography but not sure where it would lead on from there.

Horizon
I’ve applied for work experience at the BBC with Horizon over December, I’m not yet sure if this would be okay with college but I think it would be ideal for me. At the moment I can see my ideal job as being a film editor, and if I continue to enjoy science this much I could end up being perfect for a very specialised job.
They asked in the application for an idea for a show that they haven’t done yet. I couldn’t decide on one idea so I told them these two:

The way the internet is affecting our brains
A very current issue which was written about only recently in New Scientist by Nicholas Carr in his article 'Surfing Our Way To Stupid'. He is also the author of The 'Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember' which could provide the basis for many of the topics covered. The program could investigate how the internet affects people of different ages - it seemed to improve brainpower in old people for example, how it affects productivity, and weigh up its pros and cons.

Synaesthesia
A fascinating neurological condition which affects around 1 in 23 people where the senses are mixed up, for example some can 'see sound'. The programme could investigate how and why it occurs, and could show an on screen test for the viewers to see whether they hear anything as they watch the silent animation. The audience would be interested because most people have some sort of letter / colour association. The programme could investigate the work of famous synaesthetes, including Kandinsky, Richard Feynman and Duke Ellington.


Visualising information

I’ve realised recently that I often find myself thinking in terms of visualising information.. Just the other night I was working out how much I had of my loan left after paying rent and wondered how my bank account over the year would look in a graph, with the three highest points just as my loan goes in.
I have an obsession with dodging crowds on the street, it really gets to me, and I honestly usually imagine the street from above with each person represented by a dot. How ridiculous some of our movements would look if you could see it like that, you could watch people wildly bending their paths to avoid others or you could see my speedy dot get stuck behind two slow moving dots etc. Etc....
Finally what made me notice this strange obsession was when I caught myself imagining my house and housemates in terms of glowing circles, like this:

So each person is represented by a colour, and when they first move in they keep to themselves and establish their place in their rooms. Over time as they get to know each other better the colours spread into each other and overlap, and in the end the house is just one big colourful glow......Yep.
Anyway fingers crossed for Horizon! I’ve decided to leave some things out of this blog post for another one which should be sooner than usual. Until next time...