December 7, 2011
Inventing The Universe
Highlights from our summer 2011 festival antics with engineers, chemists, and physicists at the Secret Garden Party and Bestival! Set to the sublime sonic styles of UK beatbox champion Reeps One.
Featuring the Galactic Gourmet, Science Junkie Greg Foot, Marcus du Sautoy, Simon Foster, Blind Robot’s Bluff, Tobin May & The Bionic Ear, Andrea Sella and Physics V Chemistry, the Vaccine Assault Course, and the cornstarch runway. With thanks to the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Science and Technologies Facilities Council, who sponsored all our events celebration Invention and the Universe this summer.
Shot and directed by Isis Thompson.
October 28, 2011
Messages From Earth
At the Astronomers’ Ball on October 22 at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, we gave everyone the chance to send a message to space, using two vintage typewriters (or in several cases, hand drawn illustrations). These will all be broadcast into deep space using a radio parabolic dish antenna in Cape Canaveral, Florida, and will travel for four years at a frequency of ~6,250MHz.
The sign read: “What would you say if you had one chance to speak to the stars? Remember, this is for posterity, so be honest.”
This is what they wanted to say…
Do you want to play with me?
Beware of bears. Send food and supplies. xo
Hello? Is it me you’re looking for?
If this reaches a Bex in a parallel universe, here is some advice: boys can be mean, drugs are good, and always do what scares you.
Dear aliens: I don’t know what to call my new cat. Any suggestions?
Hullo, Hope you’re well. Maybe you’ve seen some previous transmissions from our planet. Just to say, please don’t judge us too harshly for Hollyoaks. Many of us hate it. Ta muchly. Jim.
Come and help us save our planet please.
October 3, 2011
Mike Hughson: The Vaccine Assault Course
Biochemical engineer Mike Hughson of UCL joined us (with fellow engineers Chris Grant and Matthew Shiers) at the Secret Garden Party and Bestival this summer with an outlandish event: The Vaccine Assault Course. “Telling people what I do can be somewhat challenging, as their eyes often glaze over at the mention of ‘biochemical engineering’. So we thought we would try a different tact: have people act out the steps in the engineering process, and pretend to become the drug themselves.” He tells us more about the genesis of this very unusual spectacle.
“Your balls are very important,” I said to the guy dressed solely in fiery red lingerie and fox ears. “Try and make sure you don’t lose them.”
In his eyes I saw a hunger for fame and glory that could only come from a semi-naked man on the Isle of Wight clad in lace suspenders, matching bra and spurred on by his huntsman comrades and the gathering crowd. Although probably the least foxy fox the world has ever seen, he was determined to dominate this assault course and become the most morally dubious vaccine the world has ever seen; this was Bestival, and anything was possible.
September 28, 2011
Blind Man’s Bluff
Engineer and robotocist Dr Adam Spiers from the Bristol Robotics Laboratory brought his Haptic Lotus – a robotic flower like “a really dreadful Sat Nav” – to the Secret Garden Party. Here he tells us about the device, which uses infrared to help the sighted and the blind to move via touch, and “that weird parental feeling that I hope other engineers get when seeing a creation working in the field”.
“It’s like a flower you hold in your hand, but it’s a robot and it tells you where to go… in the dark”. This is what I found myself shouting at the progressively bemused couple I’d just met on Friday night on the Chair Swing ride. We were flying through the air at the time, which explains the shouting, though the conversation had started while we were all still stationary, with an innocent “so what brings you to the festival?”.
That was certainly one thing I learned quickly about the Secret Garden Party: everyone likes to chat. In fact, it was probably this friendliness that meant we (me, Navjit Sagoo and Peter Bennett, my two assistants for the day) could get away with blindfolding strangers before fitting them with headphones and sending them into a couple of darkened gazebos on a race to return with a silver capsule filled with sweets before their friends could.
Actually, what we were really doing was a practical demonstration of sensory augmentation, which is where the “typical” human sensory spectrum is modified, either to improve certain abilities, or to attempt to figure out something about how our minds and bodies work. In our Thursday-long installation / demonstration we gave our volunteers a handheld device, called the Haptic Lotus, to aid them on their blindfolded quest.
The Haptic Lotus. Photo courtesy of Braunarts.
Like a number of sensory substitution devices, the Lotus is a navigation aid. Quite often I explain it to people as akin to “a really dreadful Sat Nav”. It has no screen, no speakers and no satellite positioning. But then that’s the fun bit. You see, the Lotus really is a robotic flower that you hold in your hand, and by opening and closing its plastic petals it can communicate with whoever is holding it via their sense of touch, which is known in certain circles as “haptics”.
0