Just cant help myself

Yes, yes we know that the Parallel Practice residency is supposed to be over but sometimes you just cant help yourself.

We have been working off plan on our sleeve.  To be honest it is really technical and if it hadn’t been for Brendan’s patience then I might have given up and gone home. It was that complicated.

The top image is a photo of the circuit drawing that I had to stitch out using conductive thread.  It was a tricky balance of as few ‘crossings’ as possible and being as neat and short as possible in our connections.

The second image is Brendan testing the conductive threads for short circuits.

I’ll keep you posted on the progress of the sleeve.

Getting right part 2

Here is a video of my embroidered sensors, using Ali’s programming, circuit boards and muscles driving Alex’s robotic arm. 

Just so you know whats going on…..

Ali is holding a pair of embroidered sensors on his arm.  They are digital embroidery with conductive thread.  They pick up the electrical impulses of the muscle in Ali’s arm.  The conductive thread allows the signal to be transmitted to the robotic arm via a computer and so the robotic arm mirrors the movements of the human arm.

These are the embroidered sensors being held in place......its not very technical BUT it seems to be working.  I need to develop a way of putting the sensors on the skin with just the right amount of pressure.

We are now working to get even better results from even better sensors.

Getting it right

Those of you who follow my blog posts will know that the Parallel Practice residency at King's has been full of ups and downs.
I’ve moaned about how small I have had to work; I am used to working in metres and now I am working in millimetres.  My piece for Cloth and Memory 2 was featured in the December '14 issue of Embroidery magazine in a feature about monumental scale textiles, and I am currently finishing two quilts for the ‘Error in the bone’ project that are each 3msq.
Today I am emailing about whether the PCB is 17 or 20mm; just so you know, a penny is 20.3mm.  I am not complaining about this but using this as a stark illustration of the difference in the way of working for me.  The other challenge I have had is the technical one: that circuits aren’t right or contacts aren’t good enough; that threads have shorted or that work has been just ‘wrong’ and often I have struggled to find the ‘right’ way.
So here is a lovely positive image of getting it right.  The image on the little screen is a wave form of the electrical impulses (or EMG) of Ali’s bicep moving.  The sensors are embroidered; the band making contact is textile.  Result!

The pregnant pause

 Def.: A pause that gives the impression that it will be followed by something significant.
Wiktionary, Open content dictionary

One thing that has been distinctive about this project is the ‘pregnant pause’.  I do programming and stitch out stuff, I revise and stitch again.  I attach PCBs (printed circuit boards) and press studs and at that point I put samples in the post or deliver by hand and then I wait;  I wait for feedback, I wait to find out if the samples work, I wait for success or failure.

Sometimes they work and sometimes I am asking too much of the materials or technique.  For example I’ve spent a month trying to programme the stitch to attach Brendan’s GY-85 chips.  I’ll find out some time next week if we can finally get a pair of them to show movement of the wrist.

It’s a very different way of working for me.  I am used to playing visually to develop work; to have an immediate ‘thing’ that I can reflect on.  I’m not used to having function as the driving force.  And what a cruel mistress she is.  There is no room for error or fudge when you need to make 4 different electrical connections in less than 10mm.  I have frequently had to be precise in my work; that pieces are level and square or an exact size to fit in a site specific space, but the precision in this project has huge implications to an artefact’s success.

This is not a complaint, more a statement of fact.  This has always been a developmental and experimental project.  I am so far out of my comfort zone that I cant see the shore anymore.  But that is good.  I have had to learn about basic circuitry and conductive materials and so in turn learnt a little about the potential of what these materials can do.

So there is a bigger pause going on as well.  I don’t know how much this will affect my future work.  I will have to wait and see.  I don’t know if it will be successful or not.  I don’t know if this is a new direction in my work but I am more aware of the technology that potentially would allow my work to change or interact with its environment or audience.

The Staffordshire Hoard

You might be familiar with the Staffordshire Hoard, the biggest find of Anglo-Saxon gold ever found.  As part of the outreach project for the new Staffordshire Hoard Gallery at Birmingham Museum I worked with fellow artist Zoe Partington and Cerebral Palsy West Midlands.  Zoe also worked with a number of visually impaired residents from Focus Housing to make audio descriptions  The aim of the sessions I worked on was to produce tactile responses to the collection; quite a challenge when the pieces are so small and the detail so tricky to see……but then that was the whole point in the outreach sessions….to make the collection accessible to more people.

We worked on acetate film to draw or trace our versions based on photographs of the pieces underneath.  We also coloured and collaged them.  The sessions were light hearted with people dropping in and out, finishing off each other’s work or concentrating on a single piece over several weeks.  The drawings were all scanned and then I tried to combine work into a series of 11 images that were printed onto cotton velvet or drill.  I then machine embroidered or free motion quilted them to give tactile detail and these pieces of fabric were made into pages for a tactile book incorporating a press button that would allow an audio description to play.  You can see the pages under construction with the electronics in the photo.

Zoe also added tactile stencils so you can ‘feel’ the pieces.  You’ll find the book on the Mead Table in the new Staffordshire Hoard Gallery in Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery

The cunning plan

photo:Tiff Radmore

Dr Matthew Howard at Kings College London has two research students working on stitched electrical components that are designed to either monitor muscle movements or capture the electrical impulses of the muscles themselves.  The plan for the Parallel Practice project is that I design, programme and embroider simple circuits to start with and stitch on the PCBs or chips.  Matthew and his colleagues will have done the programming to make the sensors capture what we hope to capture and so in turn can feed back potential improvements.  We know we won’t get it right first time; we know we will have technical glitches, bugs in the system, broken threads, short circuits and lots of problems that we don’t even know about, but this is a project about experimenting and collaborating and this is what we intend to do