Hummingbird Watching

The view from our window at Peter's house.

It's a miracle!

Quiet time to bring together our scientific interests while we've been here. Made some surprising connections which developed into potential art pieces. Starting to explore ideas of animation beyond the screen, as installations. Very excited about the potential of these and the new direction it would push our current practice but needs more consideration as we will need a studio to experiment with them and we don't even know where we're going to live yet. Will continue over the next few days to document and develop these ideas. Great time for thinking.
Ideal scenario to follow being here would be, go back to the U.K. and make the work which has come about as a result of being here, and then maybe to organise coming back to show or exhibit the work at some point. First things first, where do we go?!

Road trip

Back from a road trip over Christmas with Wobbly; taking in Death Valley and Las Vegas.

a spot of dawn dune walking in Death Valley

a trek through Mosaic Canyon

some music references are at the end of each Blog for our road trip considering the important role it played in our experiences of these places. Johns attention to detail and extensive music knowledge made sure of that!

Start: Katamari Fortissimo Damacy Les Rallizes Dénudés - Live 1977 Nadja - Truth Becomes Death Jim Fassett - Symphony of the Birds Bernard Parmegiani - La Création du Monde

Zabriskie Point

Death Valley: Günter Schickert - Überfällig Stuart Dempster - Underground Overlays from the Cistern Chapel (x2) David Hykes and the Harmonic Choir - Hearing Solar Winds (x2) (kicking in just as we hit 200 ft below sea level) Popul Vuh - Coeur de Verre Amalgamated Suns of Rest Eyvind Kang - The Story of Iceland

Salt Plains and Artists Drive

Las Vegas

Las Vegas:Yma Sumac - Mambo Emil Richards - Stones / New Sound Element Negativland - Dick Vaughn's Moribund Music of the 70's Phoenecia - Brownout Eats Tapes - Sticky Buttons Bach - Goldberg Variations - Gould 1955 Raymond Scott - Manhattan Research (this for the Hoover Dam trip) Free Design - Best ofVokokesh - Smile! And Point At The Mountain?Brainticket - Cottonwood Hill

Hoover Dam

What a fascinating place. You really feel aspirations for the future here. The beautiful concrete modern architecture integrated into the landscape, would love to do some documenting here. The alternative was to go to Prelinger Archives and download two parts of a movie on the making of Hoover Dam: http://www.archive.org/details/BoulderD1931
http://www.archive.org/details/BoulderD1931_2

On The Road

Back: Sunn 0)) - Black One Coh -0397Postpop Arnold Dreyblatt - Animal Magnetism Burning Star Core - Mes Soldats Stupides (parts) Y. Bhekhirst - Hot in the Airport Iancu Dumitrescu - Medium III / ED MN 1001 Asmus Tietchens - Biotop (parts) Kraftwerk - 1Moebius/Plank/Neumeier - Zero Set Jim O'Rourke - Bad Timing (side 2) Jamie Lidell - Multiply (parts) Hugo Keesing's Chartsweep

tinkering with more editing...

some stills....

seasonal joy Berkeley style

Earthquake

Felt our first earthquake this morning! http://neic.usgs.gov/neis/states/last_event/states_california.html
this link will remain until the next one...
SSL Christmas party this afternoon - we get to see Ilan play his violin.

Animated Scientists

Have been working on bringing interviews together to make an artwork that explores the Scientists discussing science as a language; The way we gain knowledge and represent it. It's edited so that it asks more questions than it answers and is turning out to be quite poetic.
The Sun footage is taking some form now too.

Talk

Gave a talk at the San Francisco Art Institute. An amazing location; on a hill looking out across the bay.

Ephemera sorting at the Prelinger Library

A backlog of ephemera for the Prelinger library meant hands on deck to do some sorting today:

Forty Winks and Eat Tapes

Spent the day writing text on our work Mini-Epochs for an MIT book titled, Programming Media.
Forty Winks exhibition opened in Oakland this evening, showing our work 200 Nanowebbers. Met lots more interesting people of the bay area. You can make out legs below the white cubes in the image above - their heads are inside watching art works.

Eat Tapes played:

Lab day

Lab day editing and IDL script implementing. Working with Steven Christie still to organise formats for downloaded Sun archives.
Last Colloqium of year today. Rousing presentation on the expansion of the universe.
We've officially extended our stay for another month, making the most of our Visa, giving us a chance to collect all the data we need to make specific projects on our return and a few more screenings of work.

Our final AGU day

Magnetism talks / X sonify software and more documentation. Thankyou to all our participating scientists.

AGU day 3

Caught up with some things at the Lab then headed back to the AGU. More portraits and more interesting 'reconnection' scientists.

conference life


Had a San Francisco evening with John and Drew.

AGU day 2

We were planning a half day at the AGU and the rest at the Lab but things were too interesting. We stayed for a series of talks met up with scientists from recent excursions and did some networking around the various 'posters' . Thankyou to all our willing portrait participants. Here's a selection;

Mr Sun himself! An example of one of the many scientists we have met who have decided their area of interest according to their family name...

trying on the latest magnetometer fashion in magnetic field detection;

AGU meeting

Change of plan for this week. We were due to give a presentation of our research on Thursday, but it clashes with the AGU [American Geophysical Union] meeting and have re-scheduled it. So we've joined the scientists and are having a week in San Francisco listening to talks on the latest hot topics, scientist spotting and doing a spot of photography.

Fuel

Every now and then we get a chance to recharge at SSL and pass some time hanging out at the lab; seeing whats happening [which is quite alot at the moment with THEMIS activivty and Stardust conference] , and re-engage with people mainly by hanging about filming and photographing. We find ourselves involved in life at the Lab. These times really bring home the richness of our experiences here, constant inspiration and reflection. Also went to a colloquium today, and gained the normal abstract constructs and edited a short clip for the THEMIS website documenting it's arrival on Monday.
It's a good job we've got alot of projects in mind to get on with when we get back to the UK as it's going to be hard to leave all this behind.

THEMIS excitement...

THEMIS safely arrived on Monday and is now being put through its paces....

some dedicated testing hardware for THEMIS

Getting progressively familiar with our interview footage and have been doing some more shuffling and processing.