As soon as I arrived to Dinacon, we had to set up a special outside Lab that we called The Cabana Lab. It was a very nice working space surrounded by trees and next to the lagoon. Pure Dinacon style!
We managed to organize a very nice space to work in some mechanical things and robots that mixed artificial and natural components. We also set up the recycled plastic PLA maker and the 3D printer.
I brought with me some 3D printed stuff to work with and make some robot experiments. One of them was a skeleton of an animatronic heart and Leonie helped me to put it together. We added a very nice coconut shell cover (inspired by Andy’s proposal) to create what we called Dinaheart, a Coconut robot heart that merges with nature and seems alive!
He had some other experiments happening around robot jamming all week at the Cabana Lab and at the Dreamspace Collective space.
It is so nice to be sharing electronics experiments with a lot of people with this fantastic views 🙂
investigating the secret lives of wild animals around Dreamspace
As part of Dinacon, I put together two classes at Dreamspace about finding, understanding, and telling stories about the lives of wild animals that live right outside the door. These are entry-level classes designed to introduce students to their local ecosystem and give a sampling of tools and techniques for how they can investigate and interact with their neighboring natural world.
I co-taught the classes with a longtime collaborator and fellow Dinasaur, Jasmine Gutbrod, and two volunteers from Dreamspace, Sayu Ambiharathinam and Gabi Mohanalingam. One class was an adult class, for Dreamspace members who were interested, and the other was a class for gradeschool-aged children from a nearby orphanage. Both classes had about twenty students and met for about an hour each day, for six days. We also ran a 3-day intensive workshop for Dinacon participants that was a condensed version of the class, as a prototype for how to train teachers to run classes like this with their own students.
The big idea behind these classes is that, wherever you may live in the world and whatever animals live near you, you can use the same process to find animals and follow stories about their lives. That process begins with going outside, looking around and asking yourself a simple question: if I were a wild animal, where would I go when humans aren’t around? The answer is different, of course, for different species, environments, seasons, and hundreds of other variables, but the way you figure it out is always the same: by empathetically watching the world around you.
In the middle of the Dinacon month I went with some of the Dinosaurs and ventured onto the beautiful Batticaloa lagoon to listen to and record the famous singing fish.
It was a full moon and a super moon, so the conditions were ideal. The ‘singing’ comes from plainfin midshipman, a species of toadfish that glow green during mating times. The fish produce an aquatic frog-like mating call. They are best heard at about 10 PM on a full moon.
Here are some of the recordings, I’ve made these recordings into a kind of greatest hits compilation of the audio that I captured over two nights of the full moon. The recording is highly recommended as an insomniac’s sleeping aid.
To record I used a Zoom recorder and a custom made hydrophone that was submerged to about 6 meters into various parts of the lagoon at night.
I also ventured out to the end of the Batticaloa peninsular before dawn to collect audio and video footage. The casuarina pine forest at the end of the peninsular was well worth the 1-hour bike ride through sand tracks. The forest was planted post-tsunami. The trees are organised in unnatural rows, creating uncanny organic order.
During Dinacon I drew on a variety of audio-visual footage, that I collected over my Dinacon time, to make a series of trash-bag video art experiments. These video works are a commentary on the impact of hyper-consumerism on our natural ecosystems. The image below is a screen grab from one of the video works. It features drone footage from the end of the Batticaloa peninsular, whale baleen (we found on the Batticaloa beach), graphic design, trash typeface design and singing fish audio.
Tali was kind enough to provide video feedback on my Dinacon project.
My Dinacon experiments are being developed into an immersive art installation called DISCO APOCALYPSE. This artwork will have its premier at the 2022 Karachi Biennale (Pakistan). For more project details visit: https://pluginhuman.com/arts/disco-apocalypse/ and @PluginHUMAN.
My initial project idea for Dinacon this year was based on wanting to play with ideas of a monster that is controlled by a brain fungus. I thought this would exist as a game of sorts or involved working with Dinasaurs to build different visual experiences with how the monster would look however due to some constraints I ended up being the solo subject.
I was inspired by Madeline Schwartzman Face Nature projects, seeing all the ways that she uses plants to change her face and express herself has been one of my favourite things.
Batticaloa is full of the most incredible plants, growing all over in a beautiful chaos. The way we were surrounded by unkempt growth around Batticaloa and maintained growth at Riviera was inspiring.
Wandering through the area I found these bright pink petals that had a soft, paper lantern like texture. I knew I wanted to use them immediately. They maintain their colour so wonderfully as they die, becoming lighter pink but still more vibrant than I’ve seen other flowers. Their paper-like qualities become more obvious as they dry out, instead of rotting like other flowers do.
I also utilized turkey tail mushrooms I was able to find near petrified on branches used as fencing outside of some of the homes. I searched for branching pieces of coral on the beach to add further texture and ambiguous origins to the monster. I gathered all the plants, flowers, leaves and coral that I liked the aesthetics of and proceeded to design a headpiece that was the majority of the costume. After that I experimented with a couple iterations of how the monster could look, and found that I really enjoyed using petals to make a scale-like situation down the face that grew with each version.
Making a monster is many things, but especially knowing that monsters are not always monstrous. Monsters can be beautiful.
This was something I wanted to utilize, I wanted to show all the beautiful plants and colours that can be found in Batticaloa. Creating tiers of leaves and flowers combined to look like a kind of rippling outer skin. Vines and tendrils swooping down, around the face and body.
My monster is dripping with layers, flowing down the face, on to the neck and down the body. The leaves, petals and mushrooms work together to create a beautiful, monstrous being that is being taken over by the plants around them.
Once I had assembled the monster’s look I got photos taken by Luci Dayhew (thanks Luci!!) that I was able to use as the base of the collages. After that I spent time combing through my photos from Batticaloa and pulled elements that spoke to me and arranged them with the monster pictures. The final digital collages can be read as three panels of a story showing the progression of the fungus monster taking over the human brain.
The Cotton Cocoons are a product of strolls around the Riviera Resort area and a tour to a local handloom manufacturer. During the strolls we came across some mystical already hatched cocoons and started wondering what metamorphosis took place in there. Speculation for me always has to do with a haptic understanding of what’s happening, so I decided to harvest some cotton from the bushes around and make my own cocoon.
The process involved getting to know the material, spinning yarn and trying out different cocoon shapes with crochet.
Speculative thoughts coming up throughout the process circled around making a human sized cocoon for myself and others, and the necessities involved in such a lifeform. Imagining water pipe systems and air flow tunnels integrated in the cocoons skin, but also questions of comfort like “What are the acoustics like in a cocoon?” and in contrast to beehive structures like sleeping capsules, thinking of expandable, stretchy cocoon walls, that adjust to any size of group, who wants to share a space.
The idea of building a shell out of saliva or sticky webs your body can produce as waste also combined really well with the plastic-bottle-3D-printing-project, since it’s sticking together waste we produce into new shapes.
I also found it to be very interesting to think about the stages of human life, in which we would move into such a cocoon to allow ourselves to change form. Thinking of transitions as a very conscious process, that take time and a specific space.
Over two weeks of Dinacon resulted in a lot of sketches and abstracts for some comic strips about the adventures of Rowolfo and Brambutan (two completely fictional characters). Two short adventures actually made it into existence. One about daily encounters with a bunch of very mean crows. And the second one capturing a magical bike ride at night, where Brambutan and Rowolfo see bioluminescence for the first time.