Tag: falmouth

Robot nightjar eggshibition at the Poly, Falmouth

As part of this year’s Fascinate festival we took over the bar at Falmouth’s Poly with visualisations of the camouflage pattern evolution process from the egglab game.

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This was a chance to do some detective work on the massive amount of genetic programming data we’ve amassed over the last few months, figure out ways to visualise it and create large prints of the egg pattern generation process. I selected family trees of eggs where mutations caused new features that made them difficult for people to spot, and thus resulted in large numbers of descendants. Then I printed examples of the eggs at different stages to see how they progressed through the generations.

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We also ran the egglab game in the gallery on a touch screen which accidentally coincided with some great coverage in the Guardian and Popular Science, but the game kept running (most of the time) despite this.

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The Poly (or Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society) was really the perfect place for this exhibition, with its 175 year history of promoting scientists, engineers and artists and encouraging innovation by getting them together in different ways. Today this seems very modern (and would be given one of our grand titles like ‘cross-displinary’) but it’s quite something to see that in a lot of ways the separation between these areas is currently bigger than it ever has been, and all the more urgent because of this. The Poly has some good claims to fame, being the first place Alfred Nobel demonstrated nitro‐glycerine in 1865! Here are some pages from the 1914 report, a feel for what was going on a century ago amongst other radical world changes:

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Fascinate Falmouth

It’s not often that you get to go to the first edition of a festival or conference, but last week was the first ever Fascinate Conference, in Falmouth – a varied collection of artists, performers, musicians and experimenters with technology, some from far away on their first visit to Cornwall, others were local – both researchers from Falmouth University, as well as artists picking up inspiration.

For me the keynote presentations provided some powerful concepts, Atau Tanaka, opening the event presented an thought provoking timeline in terms of his extensive performance experience. Moving from laptop computers, to mobile computing, and onwards to “post-computers”, including Beagle Boards and Raspberry Pi – as more hackable, extendible and open than more restricted mobile platforms but providing largely the same needs.

Another idea running through a moving presentation from Seth Honnor regarded the 4 degree climate change ‘elephant in the room’. While it represents such a huge un-graspable problem, he points out that everything we do needs to take it into account. It doesn’t necessarily need to be centre stage, but it has to be there – as a background future reality. If we do this we can start to build up the necessary imagination that’s going to be needed in the future.

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My presence at the conference was somewhat fragmentary (I had other duties to attend to) sadly missing many of the workshops, presentations and performances – it was however a chance for me to perform for the first time in Cornwall, as well as get to see first hand some of the research that’s happening in Falmouth. The event itself was just the right size, and while at times slightly chaotic and problematic in terms of gender representation – they are things that take time to get right, and it’s freshness and interdisciplinary nature was very welcome indeed. Looking forward to next year’s event!

Update: Since writing this post, the organisers have contacted me to clarify that considerable effort was put into gender representation for the conference, there was a good balance on other presentation tracks and in terms of the keynotes it was more a case of unfortunate last minute changes and other unavoidable factors.