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Bazelgette, Sybil and Colin 2024
No full textTideway Tunnel Public Art Commission at Acton. Three cast stone figures installed at Acton Pumping Station. Permanant commission
Stable and homogeneous SPION-infused Photo-Resins for 3D-printing magnetic hydrogels
Get PDF3D printing of magnetic stimuli hydrogels has shown promise in low-resolution extrusion printing but integrating superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPION) into water-based photo-resins has posed challenges. Rapid agglomeration and sedimentation of SPION in photo-resins require continuous mixing during printing, leading to uneven nanoparticle (NP) distribution and inconsistent magnetic actuation. Here, we optimise the use of citric acid (CA) and l-sodium ascorbate (LA) as capping agents on the SPION's surface, before trialling them with photo-resins. Ultimately, we present a two-step approach to overcome these limitations, enabling high-resolution SLA-based 3D printing of hydrogels. By employing CA in both SPION and photo-resin preparation, we achieve a highly stable mixture that requires no agitation during printing, resulting in magnetically responsive hydrogels. This methodology can be applied to various photo-resin formulations, ensuring uniform NP distribution and enabling the 3D printing of stimuli-responsive materials for applications in soft robotics, aquatic micro-swimmers, and soft actuators. The breakthrough in stable and homogenous SPION-infused photo-resins has broad implications for tissue engineering, drug delivery, and regenerative medicine, offering novel biocompatible materials with resistance to stress and deformation. This approach can be extended to other NP with poor dispersion in hydrogels, paving the way for advanced functional materials in diverse applications
Two cubes
No full text'Objects of Contemplation' marks over five years of collaboration, bringing together artist-makers from across the UK and internationally. The exhibition spans a broad range of disciplines, including wood, ceramics, glass, metal, stone, and mixed media, showcasing the diversity of contemporary craft. This collection of 19 featured artist-makers presents works that engage in a unique dialogue with one another, highlighting the close relationship between maker and material. Each piece reflects the maker’s current practice, where process and form intersect to reveal their mastery of materials. Among the showcased works is Mcvetis’ latest piece, 'Two Cubes'. This ongoing project explores time as a physical entity—manifesting time’s passage through material and meticulous process. The work symbolises a literal and metaphorical stitching together of time and space, offering viewers a contemplative experience of time made tangible
Map of dusk
No full textMap of Dusk is an exhibition about sunlight and screen light. It presents a recent body of work evoking Curran’s encounters with her garden at the end of the day and draws on longstanding themes within her practice around landscape, memory, embodied experience and modes of attention. Curran uses processes of painted collage, quilting and woven tapestry, piecing and patching fragments together through constellations of colour and material. Curran’s works orientate towards the touched and the felt through densely layered fields of stitched canvas and fabric, they reflect the physicality of their construction and an immersion in processes of making – painting, weaving, tearing, stitching. Dusk marks a threshold, a space and time between day and night where subtle shifts in perception take place, where our eyes adjust to falling light levels and our senses are heightened. Colours briefly glow, detail and definition start to fade. We are called upon to pay closer attention to our surroundings, becoming more attuned to sensory experience and to the many other worlds at work within, behind and passing through our own. The garden offers a space of encounter with the realms of plants, animals, insects, earth and atmosphere; a fragment of a wider universe of belonging. Fading sunlight also contrasts with the persistent light of the screen and the ever-glowing distractions that increasingly consume our attention. Perpetual illumination undermines our connection to the diurnal and seasonal rhythms once used to orientate ourselves in space and time; the transitions between day and night, light and dark, action and rest, waking and dreaming. This practice-based research uses colour and materials to map embodied experience that is drawn from encounters with the natural world via the space of the garden. It is informed by Virginia Woolf’s writings on ‘moments of being’ and everyday acts of attention
Shapeshifters
Get PDFSOFT SHAPESHIFTERS is the result of a residency funded by the British Council Thailand in collaboration with Fa (Dr. Wuthigrai Siriphon). It blends the realms of textiles and electronics, exploring textile technologies as powerful tools for embodied knowledge. This project aims to critically and artistically challenge traditional notions by weaving together past, present, and future narratives through the loom as a body-based expressive device. Participants engage with tools, technologies, and weaving methods, not merely as observers but as active contributors to a dialogue. This interaction encourages the co-construction of new experiences, revealing hidden potentials in often-undervalued knowledge and skills. By doing so, ’Soft Shapeshifters’ raises questions about our societal value systems and the everyday habits that shape them. This collaborative project grew out of conversations around the social fabric and the application of textile techniques in social contexts. The installation sparks the imagination, showing how weaving can serve as a form of communication and a medium for dialogue. The loom, with its tactile and rhythmic process, transforms into an instrument where people can connect, share ideas, and reflect on the intersection of technology, tradition, and personal expression. Each weaver is connected to a sound which is activated through the pressure in the belts. With this project we seek to create meaningful encounters, where participants not only discover the beauty of weaving but also engage in bodily communication
With the Participatory Consumer Audience in mind: exploring and developing professional brand identity designers reflexive practice
Get PDFThis PhD reflects upon first-hand unidirectional and passive consumer audience experience approaches prevalent in professional UK brand identity design. It explores: How brand identity designers might move towards an improved reflexive practice in the design of consumer audience experiences. This practice-led research focuses on the ideas generation stage of their design process. An ongoing constructivist audience paradigm shift signals that when thinking about and using their positionality in relation to their consumer audience experiences, designers need reflexive practice to support critical reflection of themselves, their biases and assumptions. This research uncovered a lack of relevant theory regarding reflexive practice specific to the context of brand identity design. This insufficiency throws into doubt designers' relational, participatory and equitable approaches in their working practices and their abilities to address market imperatives, including client requirements connected to the ongoing audience paradigm shift. Aligned with John Dewey's ethical pragmatism and drawing from Creswell, Tashakkori and Teddlie, my study adopts a mixed methods methodology. Alongside established qualitative and quantitative methods, this includes my practice via design visualisations, as discussed by Drucker, and builds upon Carl DiSalvo's approach of practice used to do inquiry and design as a method of inquiry. My practice enabled me to critically reflect, evaluate and construct reflexive practice knowledge, including the development of reflexive practice communications, to advance understanding of and improve other designers' reflexive practice, and to communicate my process of reflexive design practice research. Thirty UK-based professional brand identity designers participated in this research: nineteen participants in Phase One, a questionnaire, and six in Phase Two semi-structured interviews. Phase One and Two findings identified a gap in that designers are not employing a reflexive design practice and lack the resources to do so. Seeking to improve these shortcomings, eighteen initial reflexive design practice principles were explored and tested in Phase Three, a workshop involving five design participants. Results showed that the principles facilitated participants to advance prior thinking and engage in a reflexive design practice. Further reflections and insights from the same five Phase Three participants uncovered a need to refine and reduce the principles and communicate them in a guide. Eight revised overarching and eighteen sub-principles in a prototype guide were explored in Phase Four in applied practice by three brand identity designers involved in Phase Three. Results corroborated workshop findings and provided further recommendations. Contributions of this research are three-fold. First, offering an advanced understanding of professional brand identity designers' reflexive practice and process knowledge. Second, it produced a reflexive design guide with eight overarching and eighteen sub-reflexive design principles and corresponding digital app, thereby offering a preliminary new design practice method. This method offers a way to improve designers' thinking about and operation of their relational positionality, participatory consumer audience experience approaches, and reflexive design practice actions. Third, it provides a contribution to knowledge via its methodology, which integrates design visualisation practice into a mixed methods approach
Robotic repair system
Get PDFAn integrated robotic repair system for repairing a surface is described. The said system comprising: a base translation system (110), said system comprising a multistage platform; a repair module (150), said module coupled to the translation system (110) to move the module (150) relative to the base translation system (110); an end effector selector system coupled to the repair module, said selector system comprising end effector repair tools (360, 362, 366), each tool (360, 362, 366) configured to undertake a repair task on the surface; and deployable legs (120), said legs (120) coupled to the base translation system (110) and configured to engage and disengage from the surface to allow the system to walk along surface
The spectral transmissions research unit: Transmission #01
No full textCyclical time. Spectral media obliterates the boundaries between self and world, questions concerning the correct boundary between an alien everyday reality. Driven towards a madness. Resorting to illusory magical techniques. Fairies could once be heard making music under this artificial hill. The rustling of a woman's skirt could occasionally be heard behind the walls, as could ghostly music. A piano was said to play itself, even though most of the keys were broken. A ghostly black dog wearing a 1940s suit leaning on a bannister, Russian voices and music emerge from the jukebox. Within thirty seconds, the figure had vanished. Music is also said to be heard within the building when none should be playing. What was this abominable cipher? Made as part of Gravity Waves and The Spirit World. The Spectral Transmissions Research Unit is a collaboration between Ben Branagan Luke Pendrell dedicated to the theoretical and practical construction, dissemination, transmission, observation and analysis of spectral emanations. Comprising a diverse spectrum of entities of various degrees of stability and tangibility. In as much as linear time can be applied, members of the STRU could, have, and or will include(d): Ludd Püca, JohnFrum, Kay Jackson, T-J.Cut, Dr. Ray Power, Proff. Jock Moxter, EKA-Francium, Dr. Tinkerpaw, Kaspar Brøcken, and The Coincidence Sprite
(Dis)connecting dots, (un)making meanings: how images occupy (and are occupied by) language
Get PDFThis practice-led research takes as its subject embodied discovery and the photographic object - its media, language, encounters, and systems of meaning-making. The fundamental questions of my research are these: how does embodied logic shape photographic meaning-making, and how can image encounters manifest this logic? Periodically throughout this work I switch between personal, analytic, and pseudonymic voices. This is both to employ the concepts at hand in a practical way, but also to provide a method for additional questioning of texts - thus linking metaphoric structures are shown to pervade different writing genres and systems of communication. The first chapter deals with the closest and most immediate of physical encounters - that of touch and the embodied haptic. Taking as its catalyst my work touch piece, a series of photographic child nudes by famous photographers and reproduced on plain paper, photocopy-style, with heat-reactive thermochromic pigments, this section unpacks the implications of the primary embodied metaphors ‘intimacy is closeness’, ‘seeing is touching’, and ‘understanding is grasping’. Tracing the examples of these metaphors through texts by Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, WJT Mitchell, Marquard Smith, and Mark Paterson and visual works by Amber Hawk Swanson, Caravaggio, Jean-Léon Gérôme, and F. Holland Day, the conflation of physical proximity with emotional involvement ultimately manifests again in the touch piece work, implicating the viewer in an unsought, uncomfortable intimacy. Progressively zooming out, the second chapter takes on many types and ramifications of networked images in the most expansive understanding of the term. It begins with my work Toward a unified field theory of photography, an analogue image map of assorted pictures I’ve aggregated wrapping the wall, floor, and ceiling and connected by colour-coded lines indicating formal, conceptual, or content-based connections. Exploring the primary embodied metaphor ‘similarity is closeness’, this part brings together folk theories of contamination, proximity, and relational thinking regarding photographic networks, systems, and sorting devices. Chapter II analyses the psychologically networked image via Isabella Stewart Gardner’s art collection and exhibition ethos, Lacanian optical device metaphors, and digital tagging systems, as well as the writing of Jean-François Lyotard, WJT Mitchell, Pierre Bourdieu, and Mieke Bal. Moving out even farther (while simultaneously looping back to the immediate intimacy of the body) the third chapter deals with the spectre of timespace and death that grounds photography. Led by my works All This and Nothing More, a deep textural analysis of the surface patina of a Polaroid image of my late mother during the aftermath of cancer and the birth of her last child, and Cenotaphs, a series of Internet memes and clickbait detritus immortalised as bas-relief sculptures, this section engages works such as the 1954 George Cukor/Judy Garland film A Star is Born, Zeno’s Paradox of the Arrow, and Stan Douglas’s still and moving Monodramas. Tracing back the embodied metaphors ‘time is motion’, ‘change is motion’, and ‘states are locations’, this final chapter will wrangle with photography’s ineffable connection to the infinite and encapsulation of human mortality. Arguing for an expanded field of the photographic medium, this practice-led research forms the invisible and often unconscious ‘connective tissue’ that contributes to the image’s facility to create meaning spontaneously. The (dis)connections in the title refer to my own efforts to slow or frustrate this unconscious facilitation in order to bring it to light, offering new ways of understanding the stickiness of image objects and their attendant psychological and physical encounters
Analysis and optimisation of modular stadium design with machine learning
Get PDFThis practice-led research explores the problem of multi-objective and multi-scale optimisation of modular stadium design based on the quantitative assessment of its performance. Stadiums are one of the largest and more challenging building genre to construct, with its design process traditionally separated by different disciplines. This can prevent a holistic understanding of an interconnected system of drivers that determine the design and performance of stadiums, which is especially challenging in stadiums designed for more than one function. This research examines the benefits and limitations that machine learning might bring to the design process, focusing on the spectator experience in relation to sightline quality, internal layout, and circulation. The research asks: 1. How can a combined functional and structural stadium design approach based on a modular and parametric design model improve the design process and optimise the performance of multi-use stadiums? 2. How can multi-use stadium design be analysed as a problem of sightline quality, the optimisation of circulation distances and the provision of legally regulated functional spaces and captured in a parametric design model? 3. How can the proposed design method for multi-use stadiums, requiring multi-objective optimisation and performance assessment, benefit from machine learning-based data analysis? The first part of the research uses machine learning to analyse the spatial and organisational properties of stadiums to identify their key design drivers. Classified by the UK Building Regulations as places for assembly and recreation, the thesis focuses specifically on modular stadiums. It contextualises these through a study of their historical development and increasing design and performance legislation. A typological study, along with the literature review, are used to determine a set of shared parameters that define modular stadium design. Sightline quality, circulation, and layout are found to be critical to the spectator experience, as they define the slope of the seating stands, crowd flow and escape distances, and the overall building organisation and morphology. The second part of the research uses these design drivers to develop a parametric model to simulate stadium designs. This model captures the typical modular scales of stadiums: 2D section, 3D bay unit, stands, and whole stadium. The model is used to generate, analyse, and compare existing stadium designs and to establish performance benchmarks for key design metrics. As the parametric model is based on shared typological characteristics, the data produced is not detailed enough for construction but useful for the comparison of design performance criteria. In the third part of the research, the RIBA Plan of Work stages are used to develop a set of workflows to test the parametric model and relevant performance criteria and design optimisation. To overcome the lack of linear relation between the parametric inputs and the resulting performance, the study explores three distinct workflows. These test a multi-objective evolutionary optimisation, semi-supervised learning, and supervised learning approach. The aim of combining typological analysis, parametric modelling, and an utilisation of the workflows is to facilitate, optimise, and enrich the design process through the study of both existing and previously unattainable design solutions. The research is relevant to both practitioner and academic audiences by expanding the current use of machine learning in design development and evaluation