Kat and I chatted this evening with Evan Raskob, Designer in Residence and Senior Lecturer at Ravensbourne and part of Technology Will Save Us, the “haberdashery for technology and alternative education” based in London.
Evan is a hive of inspiration - a designer, machine-maker, artist and tinkerer, he sent us in some exciting new directions as we contemplated working together on fabricating the Serendipity Engine. It was a timely conversation, as Kat and I are heading into the Royal Institution’s workshop tomorrow to start making.
We talked about Fluxus and Experiments in Art and Technology - groups that embody the LuvviesBoffins sentiments that Google Chairman Eric Schmidt recently voiced at the Edinburgh TV Festival, and fit with the aesthetic and function of the Serendipity Engine. I particularly like Jean Tinguely’s self-destroying machine, Homage to New York (1960) (he was “an artist, an inventor or a philosopher,” according to this newsreel):
We also talked about Jonathan Harris’ & Sep Kamvar’s We Feel Fine, the 2005 adventure in emotional sentiment mapping across the blogosphere, or “an exploration of human emotion on a global scale”. This may inspire a solution to a conundrum: Kat and I have been thinking about what content we might incorporate into the machine after speaking with Will Pearson, Ravensbourne’s Director of Technology (who kindly connected us with Evan), who reminded us that Arduinos can do inputs from all kinds of sources. Maybe crawling the web for the word “serendipity” might make use of the the technology’s cybernetic networked brain in an interesting way…
Evan’s offered to show us the guts of one of his wired up creatures on Thursday and to proffer his talents in our direction. After thinking about the connections between different objects and people, and how we might gain inspiration from synesthesia (yep, we did go there), we were overwhelmed with possibilities: Sound! Colour! Wired up tamagotchis in a suitcase!
Before then, I have a shopping list: home-made amplifiers and DIY speakers (via Technology Will Save Us - the “music” problem solved), bits of bicycles, wires, LED lights and scavenged pieces of my now-dismantled flat.
And Kat’s just learned how to make a circuit:
This is totally going to work.
