prosthetic knowledge
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Mind Out
A room-sized single-line drawing based on the flight pattern of a bee created with robotic drawing system:
Towards the end of 2012, as part of The Festival of the Mind in Sheffield, myself and a small team of technicians, coders and mathematicians developed a drawing system and put it to work. The robots drew one line pattern solutions, the shortest line possible, derived from theories on how bees fly from flower to flower. It ended up covering three walls and the floor of a twenty foot cube in one unbroken line.
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“ [Interviewer]: I think when most people think about synthesizers and computers, the last thing they imagine is something organic or natural. What does it mean for you to use these “artificial” technologies as a mirror to hold up to nature?
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King: It’s funny, because a computer is made up of silicon, one of the most abundant elements on Earth, and copper, which is found in abundance in the Earth’s crust, is used for circuit boards. These are natural elements, which we don’t think of as natural because they are encased in plastic, but their ‘essence’ is organic in the beginning. So in a sense, once you know this fact, you dont think of the hardware as artificial. The funny thing is with the mirror idea, you’re essentially showing nature how it looks in a new outfit (plastic).—Interview with King Britt at Create Digital Music on his latest project with Data Garden, “The Bee and The Stamen”, which combines electronic audio with nature …
… also an interesting thought for the day …
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It's Official - Cell Phones are Killing Bees (via mfs / theoriginaljoefisher / theantidote)
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Quite a good description of twitter
(via roomthily)
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Mobile phones responsible for disappearance of honey bee (via The Telegraph UK)
The growing use of mobile telephones is behind the disappearance of honey bees and the collapse of their hives, scientists have claimed.
Their disappearance has caused alarm throughout Europe and North America where campaigners have blamed agricultural pesticides, climate change and the advent of genetically modified crops for what is now known as ‘colony collapse disorder.’ Britain has seen a 15 per cent decline in its bee population in the last two years and shrinking numbers has led to a rise in thefts of hives.
Now researchers from Chandigarh’s Punjab University claim they have found the cause which could be the first step in reversing the decline: They have established that radiation from mobile telephones is a key factor in the phenomenon and say that it probably interfering with the bee’s navigation senses.
