The Institute of Making

image: Institute of Making: silica aerogel, a glass foam whose nano-structure contains up to 99.8% air :  the world's lightest solid

The Institute of Making is a multidisciplinary research club for those interested in the made world: from makers of molecules to makers of buildings, synthetic skin to spacecraft, soup to diamonds, socks to cities. 

They run  programme of symposia, masterclasses and public events to explore the links between academic research and hands-on experience, and to celebrate the sheer joy of stuff.

Its mission is to provide all makers with a creative home in which to innovate, contemplate and understand all aspects of materials and an inspiring place to explore their relationship to making.

At the heart of the Institute of Making is the Materials Library – a growing repository of some of the most extraordinary materials on earth, gathered together for their ability to fire the imagination and advance conceptualisation. A place in which makers from all disciplines can see, touch, research and discuss, so that they can apply the knowledge and experience gained to their own practice.

Alongside the collection is the MakeSpace – a workshop where members and guests can make, break, design and combine both advanced and traditional tools, techniques and materials.

taken from their website

thank you Ingrid for the introduction!

Data Visualisation: Beautiful Science

Beautiful Science: Picturing Data, Inspiring Insight

Exhibition at The British Library

20 February - 26 May 2014

The Folio Society Gallery; admission free

Turning numbers into pictures that tell important stories and reveal the meaning held within is an essential part of what it means to be a scientist. Beautiful Science explores how our understanding of ourselves and our planet has evolved alongside our ability to represent, graph and map the mass data of the time.

The associated events for the exhibition are listed here

http://www.bl.uk/whatson/exhibitions/beautiful-science/events/index.html

Unfortunately  this event….

Andy Kirk, founder of Visualising Data will be holding his renowned Introduction to Data Visualisation course at the British Library to coincide with Beautiful Science: Picturing Data, Inspiring Insight.

…is sold out but fear not you can get to see what Andy is about by looking at his website

http://www.visualisingdata.com/

Students who came to my Visual Literacy workshop last term will already know about the King of Data visualisation  Hans Rosling Professor of Global Health, Karolinska Institutet. Edutainer & co-founder of Gapminder Foundation, Stockholm, Sweden · gapminder.org

Meanwhile as with everything and especially anything that is immensely visually attractive -beware of being misled!! Here is a warning article about taking care to question the veracity of infographics from John Burn-Murdoch of the Guardian

High Resolution Wellcome Images free to download and use

Credit: Wellcome Library, London
Three Navajo men proceeding as war gods.
Silver gelatine print 1904 By: Edward S. Curtis
Published:   1904. 

Cardiff Met Electronic Library>Databases A-Z contains a link to the Wellcome Images  database. Wellcome Images is also available on the internet here.

Wellcome has just announced over 100,000 high resolution images including manuscripts, paintings, etchings, early photography and advertisements are now freely available to be used for commercial or personal purposes under a Creative Commons licence  if accompanied by an acknowledgement of the original source (Wellcome Library, London). The images can be downloaded in high-resolution directly from the Wellcome Images website to be freely copied, distributed, edited, manipulated and built upon for personal or commercial use. The images range from ancient medical manuscripts to etchings by artists such as Vincent Van Gogh and Francisco Goya. Simon Chaplin, Head of the Wellcome Library, says “Together the collection amounts to a dizzying visual record of centuries of human culture, and our attempts to understand our bodies, minds and health through art and observation. Using the advanced search you can search the collection by a huge range of different techniques including etching, ultrasound, silver gelatin print and my all-time favourites;  the exquisitely lovely 300+ transmission electron micrographs.

The Bible of Color Theory now an App

Josef Albers' Interaction of Color, was first conceived of as a handbook and teaching aid for artists, instructors, and students, presenting Albers' ideas of colour experimentation. Originally published by Yale University Press in 1963 as a limited silkscreen edition with 150 color plates, Interaction of Color first appeared in paperback in 1971, featuring ten representative color studies chosen by Albers. The paperback has remained in print ever since and remains one of the most influential resources on colour.

Last week, to commemorate the book’s 50th anniversary, Yale University Press released the Interaction of Color app for the iPad, a modernized, interactive presentation of Albers’ teachings. With fingers instead of paintbrushes and a touch screen instead of paper, users can move and manipulate over 125 color plates in 60 interactive studies. Concepts like colour relativity and vibrating boundaries come to life. The app’s developers used paper, scissors, and glue to complete the exercises, as Albers’s students would have done, in order to experience Albers’ process and methodology. The text was then meticulously translated into app form--they even preserved his original typeface and text columns.
Alongside the book’s full text are two hours of video footage including interviews with noteworthy practitioners such as textile designer Christopher Farr, graphic designer Peter Mendelsund, painters Anoka Faruqee and Brice Marden, product designer Brian Mullan (director of sourcing and production at Fab), quilt and fabric designer Denyse Schmidt, architect Anabelle Seldorf, and cultural historian Nicholas Fox Weber (exec­u­tive direc­tor of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation).
The free download allows you to view Chapter X, including text, commentary, and two interactive plates, and to experiment with all the features, including the color palette tool. The full version of the app includes the complete text, over 125 color plates, over 60 interactive studies, and a wide range of video commentaries, interviews, and additional features. The full version is available as an in-app purchase for $9.99.

Read more at

http://yupnet.org/interactionofcolor/

sonic experimentation

 

 

On Thursday 11 APRIL 2013 at  8PM  Russian author Andrey Smirnov will be giving an illustrated talk entitled
'The WIRE Salon: Synthesized Voices of the Revolutionary Utopia:Early Sonic Experiments in the Soviet Union'.

 The talk will mark the official launch of Andrey Smirnov’s book
‘Sound In Z: Experiments In Sound And Electronic Music In Early20th Century Russia’

This publication offers an introduction to Russia’s contribution to the birth of electronic music, sound synthesis and audio technology in the early 20th Century. It is a story of politics and power, of the institution and the avant-garde, of collaboration and personal achievement, of ambition, opportunity and oppression. It is a story of remarkable personalities, curious inventions, astonishing performances, radical ideas, complex mathematics, pioneering electronics, engineering, design and experimentation. It is also a story of patents and funding applications, of success and failure, support and rejection, optimism and disillusionment, hunger and poverty.

The book produced in partnership between Sound & Music, London and Verlag de Buchhandlung Walther Konig, Cologne is currently on order and when received will be added to Howard Gardens Library .
More of Smirnov's projects here including the Laptop Cyber Orchestra (2006), Sound out of Paper (2005) and Brain JAZZ (1985/2001)

The talk and book launch will be at

 Cafe Oto
22 Ashwin Street
London E8 3DL
020 7923 1231
cafeoto.co.uk

Cafe OTO opened in April 2008 with the aim of providing a home for creative new music that exists outside of the mainstream. Cafe OTO is comprised of one large cafe/performance space open during the day as a cafe and hosting an evening programme of adventurous live music almost seven nights a week.

 

water paper scissors film

Nearly a year in the making and shot in a continuous take, Revolution follows the cyclical journey of a single water droplet.

Photography - Chris Turner
Paper Engineering - Helen Friel
Animation - Jess Deacon
Post Production - Neil Cunningham
Music - Joe Shetcliffe

 

Culture Grid and Porphyry

This is porphyry. Stephen Cox sculpts in this stuff because he likes a challenge-its very hard (literally). In 1988, he was commissioned to carve sculpture for the new Cairo Opera House, Egypt, and was allowed to quarry Imperial porphyry at Mons Porphyrytes in the Eastern Desert, which had not been used since the end of Roman Empire.  Below is 'Chrysalis' a work from 1991, the  image is  from the Tate website . The artist describes this work as having to do with transition and reincarnation. It suggests a recumbant Egyptian funerary figure in the process of changing and mutating

Marble Roman emporers used to be dressed in porphyry togas because it is the colour of Roman Imperial Purple.

The first image of  porphyry in this blog entry  is not from an art image database  but from a geological one which I found by searching The Culture Grid. If you are after images from Ethnography, Geology and other non art and design objects then have a look at the Culture Grid.

Culture Grid opens up a wealth of information from museums, galleries, libraries and archives: giving greater access to UK culture, arts and heritage. It contains approximately  3 million items from hundreds of collections on all topics.

University College London (UCL) and University of Reading have just added 6,500 images of objects from their museum collections to Culture Grid. The images can be freely viewed, downloaded and used under a Creative Commons licence.The objects include rare Ancient Egyptian artefacts brought to life in twenty-first-century 3D; digital images of zoological specimens in glass jars, strange and beautiful anatomical prints, sixteenth-century portraits, and intriguing nineteenth-century scientific gadgets.

 Preserved infant lemur Grant Museum of Zoology UCL. Image from the Culture Grid

 

 

A cheery start

Here at Cardiff Met we offer an MA in Death and Visual Culture and for staff and students of that course and all others interested in the subject here is a link to the wonderful Wellcome Institute Collection covering  their current exhibition 'Death: A self-portrait' which runs until 24 February 2013. Events associated with the exhibition including discussion days and a day of films about death are listed here

'(The) exhibition showcases some 300 works from a unique collection devoted to the iconography of death and our complex and contradictory attitudes towards it...  including art works, historical artefacts, scientific specimens and ephemera from across the world. '

On show are rare prints by Rembrandt, Dürer and Goya , anatomical drawings, war art and antique metamorphic postcards; human remains , Renaissance vanitas paintings and twentieth century installations celebrating Mexico’s Day of the Dead, ancient Incan skulls and a chandelier made of 3000 plaster-cast bones by British artist Jodie Carey.

The website also offers links including one to  'Stories from the Day hospice' a blog by Chrissie Giles who throughout the summer of 2012, spent time at the day hospice at Princess Alice Hospice, Esher, running a creative writing group. In a series of posts she reflects on her experiences there and showcases some of the writing produced by group members.

  You can also view three extraordinary skulls (two Mexican, one Japanese) from every angle as they revolve on screen.

A book 'Death a Picture Album' accompanies the exhibition.

Ten Environment Books that Changed the World

Friends of the Earth in their print journal 'EarthMatters'  (July 2012)  published a list of ten books that  they believe changed the Earth. Actually there are plenty of other Top Ten Environment Booklists just try Googling it!
There is a Cardiff based slant to this blog entry...I thought I'd check the list against Cardiff Met Library and Cardiff Public Library catalogues-here's the result . Information about how to join Cardiff Public Library is here. Follow the links from the book titles  for more information.

Small is Beautiful by E F Schumacher

book on order at Cardiff Met Library

 The Complete Book of Self Sufficiency by John Seymour

book available from Cardiff Public Library

Earth from the Air by Yann Arthus-Bertrand

book available from Howard Gardens Library check the catalogue here

No Logo by Naomi Klein

book available from Cardiff Met Library check the catalogue here

The Ages of Gaia by James Lovelock

Books by Lovelock are available from Cardiff Met Library check the catalogue here

 Living Downstream by Sandra Steingraber

  the one book neither Library Service stocked

Cod: a biography of the fish that changed the world by MarkKurlansky

book available from Cardiff Public Library

Food for Free by Richard Mabey

book available from Cardiff Public Library

Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed by JaredDiamond

book available from Cardiff Met Library check the catalogue here

The Animals of Farthing Wood by Colin Dann

Farthing Wood books available from Cardiff Public Library

 

A Materials Library for the 21st Century

This video, by The Economist, features Andrew Dent, vice-president of Material ConneXion,sharing his thoughts on the evolution of material science.
Material ConneXion's online archive and material libraries, based in seven cities world-wide, feature over 6,500 of the world’s most cutting-edge materials all of them commercially available for use.
Andrew Dent believes Material ConneXion will help bridge the gap between science and design as we move from the “synthetic century” into a “biological century”, where intelligent, nature-inspired materials consume less resources and less energy.
 An international panel of experts review 50 to 60 new materials for the library every month, adding  only the best.
The archive is organized in eight categories (see below)  comprising the largest selection of sustainable materials and the only Cradle to Cradle materials library in the world:
the 8 categories: Polymers, Ceramics, Glass, Metals, Cement-based materials, Natural Materials, Carbon-based materials, Processes
An online Materials Database is available at a price to Universities (not available at Cardiff Met).

NewYork, Bangkok, Beijing, Cologne, Daegu, Istanbul, Milan, Seoul, Shanghai all have physical Material Connexions libraries

Feature articles from Matter magazine (published quarterly by Material Connexions) are available to read online . Each edition of the  journal  follows a specific  theme  like the special issues on  'Wellness' and 'Technology' and  all contain a wealth of information and images relating to innovative materials and their uses.

Materials are Poetic: Mtrl

holographic glass

In order to reach out to the design community, ASM, a US-based Materials Information Society, has set up /MTRL. Chris Lefteri Design was commissioned to provide a range of materials from the ASM collection, complete with extensive information and images, as a free on-line material database . So far, the database consists of 250 materials presented in a way that specifically targets designers and their needs.

I've seen many image databases in my time and  this one is a real find and especially useful as all our courses at Cardiff become  increasingly concerned with the physical  experiences of Materials and Making.

Mtrl is great fun and at the same time hugely informative. It is  crammed with well organised images and facts about materials and their properties. Here you can choose to search for images and information about materials by their 'form' (eg firm, powder, resin) 'personality' (eg dynamic , extreme, honest ), different types of ceramic, glass, plastic etc etc etc. It includes a section listing an unbelievable amount of 'additives and ingredients' (Floam anyone?).

Lightben transparent honeycomb core panel

It is  a lot more entrancing and unusual than you might expect of a materials database and is  at the same time of immense practical use. The database offers links from each type of material in the database to suppliers and also  gives  its eco standing (biodegradable/recyclable/renewable?)), its key features, all physical features,  its price range, major applications for use and  engineering properties. A veritable  alchemists shopping list..........

Smithsonian Folkways

For access to a virtual encyclopedia of the world's musical and aural traditions comprised of an unprecedented variety of online resources go to the Smithsonian Folkways website here. From this webpage you will be able to search and identify recordings of all types of music , or search for recordings of a particular artist or for music using particular instruments. Links from these search results allow you to sample and  if you wish purchase the recordings as digital downloads. The database also includes recordings featuring the spoken word: humour, scientific and historical topics, poetry, birdsong and much more.

For UWIC staff and students: there is a link to this website on  the Subject Guide for  Music Technology