Here’s a short looping animation, just in time for the Remembrance Day for Lost Species – I’m taking part in a pop-up exhibition tonight at Baumhaus Berlin, organised by Jenni Ottilie Keppler, together with other illustrators, poets and sculptors. ‘Huia (exquisite corpse)’ deals with cultural memory, and builds on two existing interpretations of the huia – which was one of three native New Zealand wattlebirds. The huia was driven to extinction before photography was prevalent, and before audio recordings could be made of its song. (The last confirmed sighting was in 1907.) The artist J.G Keulemans’ 1888 illustration of a huia pair appeared as a plate in Walter Buller’s A History of the Birds of New Zealand. His illustrations of native birds have become iconic representations, much reproduced in New Zealand and around the world. Keulemans was based in London and did not travel to New Zealand. Although he had done some work in the field, he mostly worked from stuffed skins – dead specimens, sent to him from around the world. The audible ‘bird calls’ are human imitations, recorded with Henare Hāmana in 1949. As a young man, Hāmana was familiar with the huia and had also been part of an unsuccessful search team in 1909. His whistles are created from 40-year-old memories. This animation that results is also a rather unreliable interpretation, hence the name ‘exquisite corpse‘ – its movement is based merely on videos of the Tieke, a surviving (though endangered) relative of the huia, which I’ve never seen in the wild. Further reading: Wikipedia’s Huia article is fascinating, particularly this section: “While we were looking...
Documentation for an Open Source Hardware project I developed as part of my ‘Year of Open Source‘ project (an attempt to live as open source as possible for a year, exploring different areas of open hardware, open education, free culture and free software). Inspired by the collaborative hacking of these old Brother machines, and seeing Fabienne’s amazing knitting projects (see the earlier interview I did with her) I wanted to make myself an open source hat, building on work in the commons. This video documents the process, and the writeup and ‘source code’ for the hat are all here: Snowflake...
