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”.
IMPOSSIBLE ALONE
Tim Murray-Browne, an engineer and PhD student in the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary, University of London, brought IMPOSSIBLE ALONE to the Secret Garden Party this summer. He tells us more about this interactive installation and what it has to do with “science, technology, dance and life in general”.
At eleven on Sunday morning at the Secret Garden Party, when many were asleep, some still awake, and most struggling somewhere between the two, strange noises were emanating from the Guerilla Science tent. A small crowd watched as wary volunteers were paired up to perform what looked like synchronised tai chi. Under the gaze of a Kinect depth camera wired into a laptop, their movements were analysed and transformed into music. That is, until they deviated from synchrony – whereupon a crack of thunder resounded through the arena. This was the debut of IMPOSSIBLE ALONE, an interactive installation exploring the space between musical performance, creative movement and video-games. A series of sound worlds await exploration through the movements of two people, but only if they work together and mirror each other throughout.
It’s a project I had been working on for a couple of months in collaboration with Tiff Chan, a dancer who researches the teaching of movement through the principles of play. When Guerilla Science got in touch with the opportunity of showing IMPOSSIBLE ALONE at the Secret Garden Party we were of course thrilled, if a little apprehensive. It was conceived as a wander-in-wander-out installation, where two individuals interact in an unfamiliar way, provoking and disinhibiting each other and creating a personal connection with each other and with the soundscapes they explore. The amusement of spectators was always secondary to that of the participants. Now, it needed to become a one hour show. And be ready a month earlier than planned.
We knew that an hour of asking for volunteers to come forward and provide a commentary on their moves could quickly get dull. We needed a narrative, one that could keep an audience interested while communicating what ideas had led to the work, what we are trying to achieve, and how this is relevant to science, technology, dance and life in general.
September 20, 2011
Dirty Brains
Neuroscientist Dr Zarinah Agnew came to the Secret Garden Party this summer to teach us about the coital corners of the cortex in her new lecture, Dirty Brains. Here, she gives us the goods on how neuroscientists have probed our privates.
Trying to make science sound interesting whilst balanced and educational is somewhat of a challenge, but one that I consider to be a central part of being a scientist. I have been working with Guerilla Science for the last few years; we have done a number of events, festivals and parties and it’s been a pretty good ride. This year the theme from their funders the Wellcome Trust is “Dirt” and given that my (very general) theme is brains, I put in a proposal to talk about Dirty Brains: mapping out how the erogenous zones arerepresented in the brain.
Zarinah, introducing us to the "dirty" bits of the brain at the Dirt Banquet at the Secret Garden Party this summer.
The idea stemmed from a couple of lectures I saw at a conference in the US a few years ago: in light of the fact that most of what we know about genitals in the brain has been drawn from studies of men, researchers had decided to instead go to great lengths to map out the female genitals in the brain using real women. Of course my talk (done in conjunction with Dr Aidan Horner of UCL) was accompanied by a fairly long and drawn out description of what these experiments entailed: “mechanical self stimulators” and so forth.
August 17, 2011
SGP: Orang-utan > Zoe
I expected to smell better than two boys who had not washed for 40 days.
I did not expect to be deemed less attractive than an orang-utan.
“You will never live this down,” my best friend grinned.
The things we do for science.
At the Feast of Stenches at the Secret Garden Party this past July, we presented our audience with an array of human scents for them to sample, judge and rate: two boys, a woman (myself), and an ape (Hannah, a female orang-utan, only revealed to be non-human after the judging).
More than 50 eager noses took turns sniffing our Smell Stations, plastic boxes containing ripped shreds of fabric from t-shirts worn by our four research subjects.
This was a Guerilla Science take on the famous t-shirt experiments, which investigate the molecular basis of attraction and by examining how humans preferentially rate the smells of other people.
“We humans usually think that we pick our mates according to how they look – we think of ‘love at first sight’ – we don’t appreciate the importance of smell,” says Dr Leslie Knapp, a biological anthropologist who specialises in immunogenetics at the University of Cambridge and a global authority on the relationship between smell and attraction in primates. “But studies of primates and even studies of humans have shown that our ability to smell is very important, even in present day society – how we perceive the smell of someone has an influence on how we react to them, and there is good evidence to suggest that it has important influences on how we choose our mates.”
Anyone who has ever known the smell of a lover may be able to relate: the scent of that certain someone is utterly distinct, wholly individual, and – when it belongs to the right person – completely intoxicating. Once upon a time, it was the smell of someone that lay in the crease between his nose and his face that made me weak in the knees.
The mysterious charm and allure of a particular person’s scent is seemingly impossible to put into words, though a few have uttered some rather poignant phrases: Napoleon is reputed to have written to Josephine, “Will return to Paris tomorrow evening. Don’t wash.”
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