Beast Inspiration: Hydra

While reading Les Miz the below image appeared, a dreadful beast just emerged from the swamp water nears Lerna. Non tocarre!






The Hydra, fuming noxious gases from its many twisted necks has the body of a hound and the head of many serpents. It is a mythical creature living in water, but also represented by the largest constellation in the heavens. The Hydra is also a hybrid plant/animal creature whose extending tentacle network sweeps the water surface in search of prey. So similar is its anatomical structure, regenerative process and nerve toxins to the mythical creature that its discoverers naturally named the freshwater polyp after its beastly predecessor.

Could the figure of the Hydra play some part (large or small) in my Beast making?

Delightful Beast Makers: Jean-Pierre Gauthier and Arthur Ganson

Drawing Shadows

Jean-Pierre Gauthier's Marqueurs d'Incertitude is the latest work to appear in the Architecture II Gallery. A group of three mechanized "bugs", each attracted to its own wall, are made to move up and down, back and forth, according to some very simple mechanics and motors simply assembled and delightfully integrated into the aesthetic of the wiry but fresh and playful curves and colours of the bugs, which are themselves drawing machines, each fitted with one or two sticks of conte and smudge sticks scribbling, smudging and scratching at the surface of the walls.

Over the course of hours and days, layers of soft conte lines build up one next to the other, one on top of the other. What becomes apparent from the collection of minute affectations on the stark white wall surface is a large and complex tracing of the minutia of the wall surface, "its history", brought to the surface as one drawing but still evolving as long as the bugs keep flailing about.

ACADIA Halifax 2007

a




b


Just shy two week now, myself and six of my cohorts (+) Professor Harrop visited Halifax for eight days, with the focus on participating in different workshops exploring emerging technologies and fabrication systems, as well as attending presentations at the ACADIA conference. On the side, though, I had eight days to make a great little adventure out of exploring the city, catching up with friends from Waterloo (also attending the conference and workshops), and venturing out to the South
Shore whose beautiful coast I had not set eyes (or stomach) on in fourteen years: Remember Peggy's Cove Ma?!


W O R K S H O P S



c


I was in the ceramics workshop, headed by Neil Forrest, Professor of Ceramics at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD). The workshop was spread over three days, which included some presentations from visiting industrial artists and engineers R&D'ing sustainable systems (inc. Monty Stauffer, formerly resident artist and now employee at Kohler Arts/Industry Program, and Dr. William Carty from Alfred University researching sustainable ceramic wall systems), and time to get hands messy making clay forms for the press and slip moulds. Originally, the intent of the workshop was to work with the ram press (see video), but unfortunately, we never did. However, we did get to watch the NSCAD students go through the process of making moulds for the press.



Three days wasn't enough for me to go through iterations of mould making and form exploration, so I stayed on a few more days to keep working (thanks Neil for the extra time and space!). Two weeks ago, I knew very little about the make-up of ceramics and how it could enhance sustainable systems in architecture and other high tech industries. Now I know a little bit about ceramics, and would hope the learning curve keeps going up in the near future.

One way would be to try to integrate what I started making at the workshop into my own studio dedale work. I would be very interested to bring ceramic pipes into the beast mechanism of my MachinaKafe. Back in Halifax I made a mould of four generic forms of pipes. This is my first ever slip mould, and I should like to run some tests now that I back in the 'Peg.



d

a. The grain elevators at the Halifac Harbour. b. Thicket, Porcelain. Work by Neil Forrest, Professor of Ceramics, NSCAD, Halifax. c. Ceramic molecules: hexagonal in form, easy to compress and keep tightly packed. The molecules call trace sound vibrations and will organize themselves in a pattern according to the shapes of sound waves passing through the material. There is also a positive and negative pole to each molecule - ceramics can carry currents. d. my third attempt at mould making: four differnt pipes for a slip mould.

P R E S E N T A T I O N S

The second half of the week in Halifax was chalk full with Paper sessions and presentations of new research in "all things" related to the topic of "Expanding Bodies". There was a mix of professionals and academics presenting papers ranging from "The Ocean Tracking Network" to "Designing Mixed Realities: Principles, Projects and Practice". There were also a series of keynote addresses. Roy Ascott's was edgy and thought provoking. Others were not so hot...When the air the lecture room got stale my friends and I would take off on our "exploring Halifax" sessions - morning, noon and night!








Surreal Suburbia, Halifax, Gregory Beck Rubin October 5 2007

Readings: Victor Hugo, "Les Miserables"

Alongside Babbage, I am reading Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables".

an aside:

I spent my youth in a strict French School where our professors revealed to me and my classmates (several times over, year after year) everything great in this world has been endowed to humanity thanks to the French. And I believed them! So enamoured was I by the rule of the French that I insisted on adding the letter 'E' to the end of every word I spelled...

Now back to the reading. I picked up the text because it is a long time coming that a student of architecture such as myself should get to know the work and its awesome architectural dimensions. And while I would like to talk about sewers and guts of another dimension figuring prominently in the novel, I mention Hugo at this point in the blog for another reason. There is a wonderfully petit chapter about water and sky that caught my attention as I began to wonder about my beast machine. I have dutifullied copied it below (and broken some copyright rules along with it, pardonez-moi SVP), it is lovely and terrifying.

Book Two: The Outcast, Chapter Eight: Sea and Shadow

"Man Overboard!
But the ship does not stop. The wind is blowing and the doomladen vessel is set on a course from which it cannot depart. It sails on.
The man sinks and reappears, flings up his arms and shouts, but no one hears. The ship, heeling in the wind, is intent upon its business, and passengers and crew have lost sight of him, a pinpoint in the immensity of the sea.
He calls despairingly, gazing in anguish after the receding sail as, ghostlike, if fades from view. A short time ago he was on board, a member of the crew buy on deck with the rest, a living being with his share of air and sunlight. What has become of him now? He slipped and fell, and this is the end.
He is adrift in the monstrous waters with only their turbulence beneath him, hideously enclosed by wave-crests shredded by the wind, smothered as they break over his head, tumbled from one to another, rising and sinking into unfathomable darkness where he seems to become a part of the abyss, his mouth filled with bitter resentment at this treacherous ocean that is so resolved to destroy him, this monster toying with his death. To him, the sea has become the embodiment of hatred.
But he goes on swimming, still struggles despairingly for life, his strength dwindling as he battles against the inexhaustible. Above him he can see only the black pallor of the clouds. He is the witness in his death-throes of the immeasurable dementia of the sea, and, tormented by this madness, he hears the sounds unknown to man that seem to come from some dreadful place beyond the bounds of earth. There are birds flying amid the clouds as angels soar over the distresses of mankind, but what can they do for him? They sing as they glide and hover, and he grasps for life.
He is lost between the infinite of the sea and sky, the one a tome, the other a shroud. Darkness is falling. He has swum for hours until his strength is at an end and the ship with its company of men has long since passed from sight. Solitary in the huge gulf of twilight he twists and turn, feeling the waves of the unknowable close in upon him. And for the last time he calls, but not to man. Where is God?
He calls to anyone or anything - he calls and he calls but there is no reply, nothing on the face of the waters, nothing in the heaves. He calls to the sea and the spray, but they are deaf; he calls to the winds, but they are answerable only to infinity. Around him dusk and solitude, the heedless tumult of wild waters; within him, terror and exhaustion; below him the descent into nothingness. No foothold. He pictures his body adrift in that limitless dark. The chill numbs him. He hands open and close, clutching at nothing. Wind and tumult and useless stars. What can he do? Despair ends in resignation, exhaustion chooses death, and so at length he gives up the struggle and his body sinks for ever.
Such is the remorseless progression of human society, shedding lives and souls as it goes on its way. It is an ocean into which men sink who have been cast out by the law and consigned, with help most cruelly withheld, to moral death. The sea is the pitiless social darkness into which penal system casts those it has condemned, an unfathomable waste of misery. The human soul, lost in those depths, may become a corpse. Who shall revive it?"

Right, so that last paragraph is a bit too moralizing for me, but it does not take away from the overall startling and fearful impression Hugo creates in the characters of Wind and Water. I recently made a little sketch of how I want to set up my beast, and I noted that alongside the amplification of the noises and vapour effects of the MachinaKafe, I also need to retrace the inherent hierarchy of water and steam elements as devised by the form and section of apparatus. I am looking for datums; steam and hot water stem from the same source, but when heated and carried off by the laws of gravity and the aid of some tubes become two very different element whose physical transformations have the potential to illuminate very different and contrasting effects on space and our reading of space.

bonne nuit!

Humbaba and Tim Hawkinson (and another)

f


"Call me Guardian of the Fortress of Intestines. Or, Humbaba for short."

...?

The next task of MachinaKafe (following vivisection) is to transform the machine into a beast.

What is the beast? And how is it activated?

The beast is Humbaba, manifested by the gurgling noises of the water tank and the shrouding effects of steam; an apparition of beautiful white smoke belying scalding temperatures, suspending the source of unpleasant groans we often associate the movement of bowls.

In ancient Mesopotamian story telling, Humbaba is the embodiment of our darkest fears - our insides, our intestines.

Our being depends on the smooth operation of our guts and pulsing heart, but we are cautious and squeamish to explore them: their shape, they touch, their organization. We deliberately close our ears to the pulse of our own heartbeat, to knowing the moist and warm feeling of our intestines. We have our skin to seal off our touching and mishandling of our insides, and we have our eyes and ears and fingers and toes, directed outward to distract us with the knowledge of the outside world. We are squeamish, and often afraid to explore that which is inside, to know what we are, to acknowledge all the shit that passes through our system. There is no light inside our bodies, or at least we imagine our apparatus going about in total darkness. There is nothing to illuminate a vision of the human construct. Are bodies are simultaneously full and void.

When I took apart the MachinaKafe, I became intimate with its apparatus, its guts. I also developed a level of excitement at knowing how it worked the way it did. It is common nowadays to celebrate and glamorize the machine as beautiful object. Intriguing then, that we still resist celebrating the machine of our bodies. There are, of course, people who do celebrate the machine as a body (and I will get to that soon enough), but for the most part, this resistance to align the aesthetic of the machine outside our bodies with the machines inside our bodies is a disturbing and grotesque subject I will explore with the beast I make from the MachineKafe.

Part of the celebration of machines as beautiful objects stems from our glamorizing the scientific precision that informs its design and order. Even in the MachinaKafe, there is an admirable degree of efficiency in materials and organization. It is an intricate mesh of metal bodies and flalling wires, that in the end fit together very nicely inside a so-so (but also carefully designed) looking plastic casement. And it works great for what it was set out to do.

What happens then when it does not work the way it does? Or, from another perspective: how does our impression of the celebrated machine alter when we distort or "twist" its normal function? What do we begin to see in the grotesque machine that would also make us think about and question our own internal machine?

I am interested in manipulating (through amplification) the effects the sonic and visual qualities of steam and water. I would like to experiment with the gurgling noises of the boiling water and pumping steam. I would also like to experiment with steam, to increase its output, and use it as a kind of shrouding devise. In this way I can align the beastly character of MachineKafe with Humbaba; these are the same effects that our aching stomachs produce, and they are the reminders that our bodies are not voids. Every time we hear that tremor, we are reminded, perhaps unwillingly that there is apparatus going on without our touch, without our implicit directing and ordering about. And perhaps that gurgle is even a reminder of our weaknesses, of something not going right, of the machine falling to pieces. A reminder of the falibilty of what we have come to celebrate after the age of industrialization, the godlike power of all things mechanized.

So how is it activated? Still thinking on that one....aiyah! In the mean time, allow me to distract you with some tentalizing images....

Tim Hawkinson
(a. penitent 1994 b. Pnueman 1994 c. Balloon 1993, Reservoir 1995 , Head 1995
d. Uberorgan 2000)




a & b



c



d



Hermann Nitsch
(e. Last Supper 1976-79 f. Das Orgien Mysterien Theater 1990)




e

Readings: Charles Babbage, "On The Economy of Machinery and Manufactures" London 1835

I have previously stated that steam, water and steam power are specific characteristics of the MachinaKafe that I would like to further explore in the Studio Dedale. One key source I have turned to at the beginning of my research are the works of Charles Babbage. Babbage was a 19th century English Engineer.

"[...] we shall notice, in the art of making even the most insignificant of them,
processes calculated to excite our admiration by their symplicity
or to rivet our attention by their unlooked-for results."
(On The Economy of Machinery and Manufactures p.3)

So begins Charles Babbage's essay, stop.

So begins my reading of Charles Babbage's essay on the manufacturing processes of 19th England, its impact of the distribution of labour between men and the consequent restructuring society's daily lives.

"The three principle advantages derived from mechanical and
manufacturing processes seem to arise principally from three sources:
-The addition which they make to human power.
- The economy they produce of human time.
- The converion of substances apparently common and worthless
into valuable products."
(On The Economy of Machinery and Manufactures p.6)

What are the consequences of such restructuring of people's capacity when the men who make transform into the men who delegate? What is this economic framing of time? What happens to men when time is mechanized? What are the effects of the three eight hour shift days (eight hours sleep? eight hours work? eight hours leisure?)? What is leisure time versus work or mechanized time?

If machines have a conscious then their conscious is absolute, resolute, even righteous. The separation of labour from man, implanted in the machine is the simultaneous draining of certainty, of heirarchy, of order perceived in the physical world around us. Doubt, imagination, anarchy, impiousness, chaos, overtake the drive of our minds. Certainly the Springtime revolutions of 1848 (Milan, Paris, etc...), mass transformation of traditional European city centres into modern day infrastructures (Haussmann's Paris), and the invention of the Picturesque landscape (Olmstead's numerous invented natures), each point to symptoms of social unrest going on hand in hand with the mechanization of landscape. I am cautious, however, and note, that I can not say for certain what are the connections, if such connections exist. This is all a brief overview, and of course, requires more in-depth research and analysis. Please comment!!

.....Back to Babbage......

On steam power:

"The force of vapour is another source of moving power:
but even in this case it cannot be maintained that power is created.
Water is converted into elastic vapour by the combustion of fuel.
The chemical changes which thus take place are constantly
increasing the atmosphere by large quantities of carbonic
acid and other gases noxious to animal life. The means by which
nature decomposes these elements, or reconverts them into a solid
form, are not sufficiently known: but if the end could be
accomplished by mechanical force, it is almost certain that the power
necessary to produce it would at least equal that which was generated by
the original combustion. Man, therefore, does not create power; but, availing
himself of his knowledge of nature's mysteries, he applies his talents to
diverting a small and limited portion of her energies to his own wants: and
whether he employs the regulated action of steam, or the more rapid and
tremendous effect of gunpowder, he is only producing on a small scale
compositions and decompositions which nature is incessantly at work
in reversing, for the restoration of that equilibrium which we cannot
doubt is constantly maintained throughout even the most
remotest limits of our system."
(On The Economy of Machinery and Manufactures p.18)

(excuse the long excerpt!) Out of the text many suggestions begin to flood my head as to the nature of the machine as god-like figure, the place of the machine, if it is a mere representation of nature, within the object/subject context, or the physical attributes of vapour: ethereal, light, burning, mystifying. I think it is relevant to delve more into this approach to the MachinaKafe and my own interest with water steam hierarchies both defined by the form and operation of the machine, and outside sources too.