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Sonic Kayaks Hacklab
Part one of our two events for British Science Week was the Sonic Kayak open Hacklab with Kaffe Matthews and Dr. Kirsty Kemp. Amber has reported our findings here, this was the first time we successfully trialled the technology and ideas behind the Sonic Kayak, in future we will be refining them into instruments for…
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Artificially evolved camouflage
As the egglab camouflage experiment continues, here are some recent examples after 40 or so generations. If you want to take part in a newer experiment, we are currently seeing if a similar approach can evolving motion dazzle camouflage in Dazzle Bug. Each population of eggs is being evolved against a lot of background images,…
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Sonic Bikes to Sonic Kayaks – using puredata
When I first started working on the Sonic Bikes project with Kaffe Matthews in 2013 I had just moved to Cornwall, and I used the Penryn river for developing “The swamp that was” installation we made for Ghent. We’ve always talked about bringing this project here, but the various limitations of cycling (fast roads, stupid…
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Tanglebots workshop preparation
It’s workshop time again at Foam Kernow. We’re running a Sonic Kayak development open hacklab with Kaffe Matthews (more on this soon) and a series of tanglebots workshops which will be the finale to the weavingcodes project. Instead of using my cobbled together homemade interface board, we’re using the pimoroni explorer hat (pro). This comes…
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How to warp a tablet loom (/neolithic digital computing device)
Tablet looms have some interesting properties. Firstly, they are very very old – our neolithic ancestors invented them. Secondly they are quite straightforward to make and weave but form an extremely complex structure that incorporates both weaving and braiding (and one I haven’t managed to simulate correctly yet) – they are also the only form…
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Red King – listening to coevolution
Scientific models are used by researchers in order to understand interactions that are going on around us all the time. They are like microscopes – but rather than observing objects and structures, they focus on specific processes. Models are built from the ground up from mathematical rules that we infer from studying ecosystems, and they…
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Red King: Host/Parasite co-evolution citizen science
A new project begins, on the subject of ecology and evolution of infectious disease. This one is a little different from a lot of Foam Kernow’s citizen science projects in that the subject is theoretical research – and involves mathematical simulations of populations of co-evolving organisms, rather than the direct study of real ones in…
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A cryptoweaving experiment
Archaeologists can read a woven artifact created thousands of years ago, and from its structure determine the actions performed in the right order by the weaver who created it. They can then recreate the weaving, following in their ancestor’s ‘footsteps’ exactly. This is possible because a woven artifact encodes time digitally, weft by weft. In…
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Pixel Quipu
The graphviz visualisations we’ve been using for quipu have quite a few limitations, as they tend to make very large images, and there is limited control over how they are drawn. It would be better to be able to have more of an overview of the data, also rendering the knots in the right positions…
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Quipu: further experiments in Dusseldorf
A report on further experimentation with Julian Rohrhuber and his students at the Institute for Music and Media in Dusseldorf during our coding with weaves and knots remote seminar this week. As we have so little idea what the Inca are telling us in their Quipu, it seems appropriate to add a cryptanalysis approach to…