It works!

Well after a lot of sampling and a lot of help from the team at the Centre for Robotics Research at KCL we have embroidered speakers that are triggered when the quilt is touched.  A very big thanks must go to Brendan Michael for all his fantastic help on this.

There is still a lot of behind the scenes stuff to sort but in the meantime you might like to see this film of one of the test samples working.

Just so you know whats going on, I deliberately made the connections long (the circuit is about 2.5m in total) to test off the resistance of the thread.  The spiral and part of the wiggly line has been digitally embroidered on my lovely Pfaff Sensation.  The rest is couched by hand.  At the beginning of the film you will see me trigger the sound file to play by touching a wire to a trigger point on a Lilypad.  The camera then shows the length of the circuit before zooming in on the speaker and showing the back with a powerful magnet.  The sound file is cutey Diogo Mello and his Dad singing as I have yet to get the boys sound file sorted.

The thread has been kindly supplied by UK based Benton and Johnson and I will tell you about that amazing company in a future blog.  In the film it’s their silver super twist.  There are a couple of adaptations that I make to both the thread and my machine to be able to embroider with it but I am afraid that at the moment that’s all top secret!

This is their website  https://www.thetoyeshop.com/benton-johnson.html

This project is made possible with the support of The Cultural Institute at King’s College London, premiering as part of Utopia 2016.

Thanks Dad

Experimentation and sampling are well underway.  This is what my desk looks like this morning.

What you can see are some speakers that I hope will be the size of the ones that we use on fabric the type and size of the final piece.  If you look carefully to can see my old hifi system which I am using the speaker outlets for an amplified signal.  The result is a lovely stereo quilt!  A big thanks to my lovely Dad for that suggestion!  He also came up with a couple of other suggestions that seem to have made a big difference behind the scenes as well.  50 years as an electrical engineer are still paying off.

This project is made possible with the support of The Cultural Institute at King’s College London, premiering as part of Utopia 2016.

Meet the boys

October 2013: a young woman leans over a medical technician and takes a photograph of a computer monitor with her mobile phone. On the screen are images of the two bundles of cells that the technician is about to implant in her womb. The woman was my partner’s sister, Lynsey Mogg, and the cells go on to grow into her two sons, Rufus and Rafe.

I think this image is one of the most remarkable photos I have ever seen in my life.  

 It’s the starting point for the Paths to Utopia project that will be at Somerset House this summer.  The plan is that  the image will be printed onto fabric and then embroider speakers into it to make a ‘singing quilt’.  The quilt will then play a sound file of the boys when you are in front of the piece.

Oh yes, and this is how they looked when they had a very exciting afternoon out at the park near our house.

This project is made possible with the support of The Cultural Institute at King’s College London, premiering as part of Utopia 2016.

will hum about mine ears

I have been working on a commission for the Royal Shakespeare Company.  As part of the events to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death the RSC have asked artists to make work in response to cast and creative’s favourite quotes.  I have been working with composer Isobel Waller-Bridge’s choice of Caliban’s speech from ‘The Tempest’.  I focussed on two elements of the speech; firstly the part where Caliban likens noises on the island to ‘a thousand twangling instruments’ and secondly the part where Caliban speaks of dreaming and clouds.
The work will be on show 19 March - 18 September 2016, PACCAR Room, Level 2, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford upon Avon
https://www.rsc.org.uk/exhibitions/well-said
http://www.isobelwaller-bridge.com/

On damage and repair

Karina Thompson's '60 Beats a Minute' (left) and Dorothy Caldwell's 'Comfort of Fog'
Photo credit: Liz Cooper

'What have I got to do to make it okay' has opened at the Crafts Study centre at UCA in Farnham.  I have yet to see the show at that venue but a couple of people who have said that it looks great it the space.  Liz Cooper sent me this photo she took of my piece ‘60 beats a minute’ alongside Dorothy Caldwell’s ‘Comfort of fog’. 

http://www.csc.ucreative.ac.uk/

As part of the exhibitions there is a symposium on the 2^nd March picking up on some of the themes within the exhibition.  I cant wait!

You can find out more details here

http://crest.ac.uk/events/uca-conference-symposium-on-damage-repair/