Month: April 2017

Backlightness

I began with the question of whether you could create ads for intermediary steps in the supply chains for the many products and devices that use rare earth elements. Supply chains are incredible opaque, and the need for them is driven by demand in the final products. My experience with efforts to clarify them in a way that conveys the magnitude of trade is often abstract and not impactful. Meanwhile, showing the effects of technological advancement and modern consumption at the human scale does not convey the breadth of the underlying systems. My goal was to try to reflect on these systems and the lifestyle I’m familiar with by rearranging texts related to both.

Source Texts

Through researching rare earths and exploring APIs I found that since the 1990’s an overwhelmingly large amount of rare earth mining and production is based in China. Instead of some complicated combination of trade API queries to get at supply chains, I settled on a report about China’s Rare Earth Industry from the USGS which provides detailed information.

I thought ad text like what I was looking for might already exist. Instead, looking through marketing and business papers on advertising, I found these are usually created for specific research projects. One way is to go through magazines and collect the text of ads that appear. I did this with the April 2017 issue of Wired, but specifically chose ads based on their relationship to the rare earth supply chain (directly used in their products or were in an industry that uses such products heavily- so as not to make it so broad that any company with a computer would be included, since that would be all of them). I also developed a second corpus by googling for companies who make products known to rely on rare earths, and grabbing a few of the top ads that appeared in google image search. I though this would give me a rich corpus to develop markov ads.

Code

The code imports the list of 17 rare earths from my very first rare earth poem and the USGS report for nouns and noun chunks (for the USGS report, noun chunks are extracted using Spacy.io). I created a function that finds the sentences created from character-level markov chains on the two ad texts imported, and replaces the nouns with one of the rare-earth nouns. The output from 3 of these functions is stacked together, and the words are stored in a list. Then, the portion of the list grows with each printed line so that the poem grows exponentially until the list is done. The print doesn’t go straight through, instead sweeping down so that there’s some repetition.

The poem prints such that the beginning of the line starts to move. I don’t know if this is effective in getting across the movement between all the places and companies that come up across the poems, but this was the intent. For the final form, I wanted the sense of the growing poem to come across, and I wanted to connect back to the 17 rare earths. I decided to pick 17 (which do not necessarily correspond in a linear way with the rare earth they appear next to) and create an image so this effect would be apparent. Through the process, I also tried mashing up markov generated text from both sets of text, and other ways of presenting the result.

For the reading, I will read 2-3 of my favorites (image and text both available on my github). This one reminded me of this Young-Hae Chang poem (I love these animated poems but you need Flash!):

Samsung
LED TVs

 Any excuse Imagine. Samsung
    LED Jiangxi Province Any This will allow the
       company to increase the recovery of rare earths to 50 percent from 25 percent in the
          separation process (China Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, 2010; Wang Ganzhou . You Need it You Need it Every and much more than a wide range lives. electronics Every and much
             more than a wide the volume tungsten products . Surgical supplies ration for all you need it Every Detail Sony 3D explorings to the microphone yet. Scandium for all you need it Every ion-adsorption Sony Jiangxi Province Pacemakers to the Ytterbium yet . Lowest priced technolo Lowest priced Environmental Protection era of do. nickel-cobalt products of do . Bigger The Best Catchbook. Bigger The
                Best Catchbook . Ultra Slim. Ultra Slim . FaceTime. FaceTime . Smart creater and game. Smart Chinalco and Metal smelting producers . Feel the LG Door-in- Feel the LG Door - in-

Growing algae in diluted urine & Final project

Our Spirulina has really proliferated which presents a new problem: how to harvest it? So I’ve been figuring out how much and how best to extract the biomass. Chlorella seems much more difficult to harvest.

Successful growth with blue-green algae

I continued to research microalgae growth with urine (citations updated) and fertilized a batch of algae with urine. Spirulina grows in a more basic medium, and will die if too much urine is introduced, so I added 8.5mL to about 850mL of Spirulina medium for a 1:100 ratio. I added 10mL to the Chlorella medium for about a 1:50 ratio. I also found some evidence that Chorella can grow in a solution of urine and water, so I’m trying this as well at about a 1:28 ratio.

additional mason jars fertilized with urine
Spirulina

Final Form

I’ve been struggling to figure what I will build for the final next week. I loved the Drink.Pee.Drink.Pee.Drink.Pee installation and DIY kit Bray & Riley assembled. They created struvite, a recycling phosphate fertilizer I came across when I first started research phosphorus pollution, by adding magnesium chloride to the pee. The reaction separates the solution into struvite and water almost instantly. I wonder if the same effect can be achieved by using algae (it would certainly take longer)?

I realized I could actually produce a urine-based algae-growing solution presented in a way similar to the Algohol idea I had at the beginning of the semester (like as a champagne-algae fountain? Or just a fancy bottle?). I bought some materials to experiment with–I wanted to create a fountain where instead of drinking you could observe the algae with a stereoscope microscope, but I quickly realized making a stereoscope microscope, or even just a stereoscope or a microscope within the design of the fountain quickly complicated things. Since there’s only a week left in class, I won’t try to figure this out unless there’s time.

If the fountain also functioned to grow the algae, it would need to incorporate a grow light–which presents it’s own problems. It shouldn’t be directly next to the algae, and I’m pretty sure it would be bad for people’s eyes. How could they view it safely, by say, turning on an LED closer to the top of the device, while avoiding any dangerous consequences of looking at a grow light?

I’m concerned also with the materials to be used in a project like this. Maybe I can create an algae fountain from recycled materials from the floor? While I like this a lot, I don’t know if this weakens the cohesiveness of the concept. Maybe the ideas are connected in that we’re creating new things to consume from our waste?

One idea is to recycling the acrylic chunks that accumulate at ITP this time of year to build parts of the fountain, although I think I would need to dissolve them in acetone, which isn’t the best. People do this to create acrylic glues so I don’t see why I couldn’t form it into something. Or perhaps use it to create waterproof cardboard.

A bit of a joke would be:

Microvideo & project progress

Microcinema

I’ve been experimenting with creating a microscope that allows me to easily take video.

The nice thing about using a piCam is I know it’s easily programmable. Although for my purposes the same functionality might be available for a cheap usb webcam.

I’ve been researching tools others have used to do similar things, and found a group at Betzig Lab that has created a microscope that does high speed imaging using bessel beam planes. Someone else created foldscope, a cheap paper microscope. I also discovered this microscopic film festival.

Generative & algorithmic art

I was very inspired by Markos Kay’s quantum fluctuations and other related work and searched for which software he might have used to create it. He hasn’t mentioned this in any of his interviews, so I tweeted at him, but he didn’t respond.

It got me thinking about whether I should find a way to generate the phenomena I’m interested in capturing with algae in some other way–like with Processing or other software, like Unity. I took a look through Shiffman’s Nature of Code examples and found a link to this great book: The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants.

Growth

My microgreens have grown, started to dry and die, and are now coming forth with new life. It’s been very interesting to watch!

Our algae are also growing–the chlorella and spirulina are doing great, while the nori doesn’t seem to be. We’re not sure why.

Final project concept progress

I’ve been revisiting Donella Meadows to think about how to steer my project towards something impactful.

I still really like the idea of creating a sort of stereoscope where there’s a sense of being immersed in an environment at a different scale.

Another perhaps more outrageous idea is to grow the chlorella or spirulina (perhaps chlorella since it’s a bit easier) in a higher nutrient medium, resembling something more like the runoff from industrial farms. I think it would be interesting to present this in the form of a water fountain, to make the association back to what we consume to sustain us. I wondered if people had perhaps made algae fountains before, and of course they have.

What if the nutrient solution was urine?

Two proposals

I’m hoping to get some direction in class on two ideas, since I have unwisely spent time becoming invested in both.

Idea #1

What if we tried selling all points of a supply chain as much as the end product?

  • Uncover as much specific information for the supply chains of as many rare earths, or heavy metals, or depleted elements as is feasible
  • Collect language from advertising
  • Create ad-like descriptions of starting, intermediary, and end points the supply chain

Concerns:

  • A lot of research
  • Highlighting bad things can be informative but I find this somewhat problematic when people aren’t empowered to address the issue. Perhaps I’m promoting awareness that reduces consumption?
  • As a positive, it could be interesting to include some but I don’t necessarily want to promote of these ‘responsibly sourced‘ product lines as a solution.

Progress

My poem from week 2 was sort of a first experiment with this, where I tried putting the rare earth element back into the end product.

There are also several places to look for supply chain information, although to get a complete picture often takes people several weeks and many databases have paywalls:

IDEA #2

Site-specific found poem

  • Sniff for wifi at a specific place (this would require going to the place, so it’s a physical limitation)
  • Pull all the tweets from that place (perhaps there’s other geo-located social media that would be fun to incorporate)
  • Create poem

I like that it’s could be found poetry that makes a connection to how the words might have been released to the world.

Concerns

  • Is twitter poetry Two Thousand and Late?
  • Enough twitter material?

Progress

I’m playing with the Twython library and twitter API (link to geosearch doc) but have been having trouble getting the actual tweets by querying geolocation. I know that only about 1% of tweets are geolocated so this might be a fatal limitation. Or maybe my code is just incomplete.

I haven’t delved into this first step of collecting wifi networks.

returned:

{
u ‘search_metadata’: {
u ‘count’: 100, u ‘completed_in’: 0.025, u ‘max_id_str’: u ‘852568659604234240’, u ‘since_id_str’: u ‘0’, u ‘refresh_url’: u ‘?since_id=852568659604234240&q=&geocode=40.72%2C%20-73.95%2C%2010mi&include_entities=1’, u ‘since_id’: 0, u ‘query’: u ”, u ‘max_id’: 852568659604234240
}, u ‘statuses’: []
}

markov budget

My poems for this week juxtapose the language of Trump’s 2018 Federal Budget with the Sequoia National Park text I’ve been using. Because the federal budget is not a text I enjoy engaging with and we learned natural language processing tools, I thought it might be interesting to use these new tools to decipher it. I found it as a PDF: I tried using PDFMiner & Slate but ended up using pyPdf to convert it to text.

Considering there have been a number of controversies around the current White House administration and the Parks Department, I became curious about using the National Parks text, specifically (and considering I’m familiar with it). I tried combining the two texts in different ways and finally found what I thought was a compelling way to show the different priorities, values, and kind of patriotism exhibited in both (final code), while also analyzing the similarities.

I couldn’t find Ibex Meadow but I did find Horseshoe Meadow, Lone Pine, California.

One of the
Enforcement law enforcement personnel
Ibex Meadow on Lone
a view of
Enforcement law enforcement personnel
Ibex Meadow on Lone
which is now
Enforcement law enforcement personnel
Ibex Meadow on Lone
the size of
Enforcement law enforcement personnel
Ibex Meadow on Lone

Final project progress update

Revisiting micro green composites

Something unexpected this week was realizing my micro greens are dying. I was thinking a lot about apoptosis, and how death is necessary for a healthy ecosystem, to allow other living things to thrive. I recreated some of the composites I made when my micro greens were growing now that they are shriveling, drying, changing color, and dying. Some of the colors were really striking.

Micro green bin on day 32:

@ 10x magnification

Each type of micro green planted:

@ 7.5-50x magnification

Algae Cultures

  

These photos made me wonder if it would be interesting to include as part of my project a color study of the dominant species of the world now and what it might be once other species dominate the planet. Or maybe even a color study of the life and death of particular organisms.

I’m continuing research on microscopy and time-lapse microscopic photography, and have ordered a few more items to start experimenting with (including a raspberry pi camera and magnifying beads).

Algae growing set up

We set up mason jars to being growing spirulina, porphyra, and chlorella!

Final concept development

Played with some initial logo ideas: somehow ended up with stuff that looked like a street light or mastercard logo. I liked the idea of showing a cycle of life and death but couldn’t pull out the elemental pieces.

Can immersing ourselves in an environment of small, growing, parts of the larger ecosystem help us understand our own consumption and the work the earth does to replenish itself?

Can juxtaposition between living and dying help us think about our role in the larger biosphere? How can observing the mechanisms by which other living things recycle everything in their environment and are ultimately absorbed back into it help us reflect on the waste we produce throughout our lives?

How can speculative design problems arising from replicating our environment on other planets help us appreciate the earth’s services and help us address problems that have already arisen trying to maintain our habitats on earth?

Why focus on algae? I was interested in algae in the first place as a potential way to bio-remediate phosphorus and nitrogen pollution. Nutrient pollution was an interesting problem to address since it sits at the intersection of food security, resource depletion, human population growth, and pollution. Thinking about this made me reframe the idea of ‘limits to growth’ less abstractly as limits to HUMAN growth and societal development.

Algae grows rapidly & has a number of environmental benefits: it can be used as biofuel, food, to produce oxygen, to remediate polluted environments, including as a chelating agent, even to terraform mars. There is also so much work being done around cultivating it at different scales. I wonder if we can better address the ecological problems at hand by imagining a world where we’re hyper-reliant on algae? Or maybe many solutions really do lie in further algae-focused biodesign?

Idea #1: VR stereoscope that leverages scale

Try a microscopic VR stereoscope-esque experience that includes increasing levels of magnification and/or some kind of telling comparison. For in-class testing, I’m going to present using google cardboard:

I created additional 360 photos to juxtapose those I took when the plants were still growing.

Idea #2: Yet Another Way of experiencing microscopic worlds

Try using projection, pepper’s ghost, hologram to display a magnification or scientific information in a new way. Perhaps you insert a slide to start, and play with a physical controller to manipulate information, comparisons to other things, the magnification settings.