makingtheimpossible

a great day in Cambridge - the day has seen a number of finished or I should say resolved moments with the work but it also presented a huge number of new possibilities - working with Richard attempting to wire up a bookwork whose structure initially referenced the glovebox, so that the form when manipulated makes contact between two 'probes' which will create a circuit so that we can play sound using graphine printing. We are looking to take this into two directions. The first is to have a spoken word piece around nanotechnology and graphine printing, the second is to work with a 'sound maker' to play a number of them within a sort of 'set'.The 3D printing with David is becoming very strange, we are trying to use the printer to create structures that explore the qualities of the printing. Next we are going to tessellate it to create a grid, exploring how the structure can be manipulated pulling it along different lines. Looking at the idea of impossible structures in our conversation today we realised that we had in fact printed a so called impossible structure. Whilst manipulating the piece we decided that the real work has become the projection or shadow created when a light is thrown onto it. This links with the work I'm doing with Duncan through crystallography, exploring projection symmetry. It was great to show some finished work and get positive feedback about how I have taken our conversations and made art

We had an interesting conversation around how material is categorised at a molecular level most people don't see and linking it to the topology thinking Pitt Rivers used around his work with museology and Darwin informed evolutionary morphology. Which of course led to The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge a fictitious taxonomy of animals described by the writer Jorge Luis Borges in his 1942 essay "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" The list divides all animals into 14 categories:

Those that belong to the emperor

Embalmed ones

Those that are trained

Suckling pigs

Mermaids (or Sirens)

Fabulous ones

Stray dogs

Those that are included in this classification

Those that tremble as if they were mad

Innumerable ones

Those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush

Those that have just broken the flower vase

Et cetera

Those that, at a distance, resemble flies