A picture book

Making a book is like making a t-shirt. It costs loads of money but it's really easy to do.

In January and April 2010 I was in Rome, Italy and collected quite a few snaps. I whittled the 3,000 or so down to 800 to less than 200 that I edited and popped up on flickr, after which, it seemed silly not to spend an afternoon choosing a final bunch and arranging them in a book.

I used the Blurb Book Smart software which was mega easy to suss out. I didn't really use it in any far out way, so don't know what the limitations are in terms of customisation when compared to doing the whole thing manually in Quark or whatever. This is not really a fair comparison though, as so many of the tricky bits (like bleed, spine alignment, etc) have been sorted out for you already in the Book Smart software.

My main challenge was purely aesthetic. Although I have made a book before (as a birthday gift for someone), I still found it tricky to maintain a restrained look that gave room for the photographs to speak for themselves. This has also been true of my photo-taking where I have only recently managed to try composing shots that are not full of colour which then get pumped to the max in Photoshop. Aside from a few black and white shots there is only one or two of these modest, desaturated shots included in the book. It is something I shall endeavor to work on.

P.S. For anyone interested in making a book using Blurb; perhaps it's blatantly obvious for everyone else but it took me a while to work out how to do a double page spread of a single image using the BookSmart software. The best work around I could come up with was to load up the same image on adjacent pages, zoom in to taste and move the left picture to only show it's left half and the right picture to only show it's right half. I found that the software doesn't do a great job of illustrating how much of the image will be lost in the fold to binding and so a bit of bleed (perhaps a centre metre or two) proved helpful.
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Making t-shirts

When ever anyone says some cool catch-phrase people often perk up with "that would be good on a t-shirt". I'm just as guilty as anyone for laughing off such observations, t-shirt making is Shirley for t-shirt makers? Not so.

I found it need not be a laborious task slapping a few words on a t-shirt. At the very least a bit of text would do, and with a bit more effort most designs could be elaborated further with illustrations. If the t-shirt ends up looking crap, who cares? A t-shirt exists where no t-shirt previously existed, this alone could be reason enough to realise t-shirt ideas. In my opinion at least.

After discovering how easy it was to knock up a one off t-shirt I tried to make it a given that any nifty idea I came up with would be on a t-shirt and available to the world as soon as possible. It feels good to make stuff and seems silly to shrug off good ideas, however trivial.

With this in mind I have begun to reconsider other previously shelved projects that I perhaps considered insubstantial (what is one lonely poem after all?) irrelevant or insignificant.

How can any idea be insignificant?
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Digital Name Assimilation

Digital Name Assimilation is a sound composition/installation that uses DNA (Deoxyribonucleic acid) data taken from a dairy cow and her three daughters and realises it as audio through a process of synthesis using the computer software Max/MSP. The Max/MSP patch also makes predictions based on the mother’s DNA of what the DNA of her three daughters might be like, then outputs this as audio.

The piece is suitable for fixed listening over seven speakers in a large space (speaker layout diagram included below), I'm yet to fathom out a decent way to present this online. I'm not yet familiar with many people browsing blogs whilst hooked up to an 8 channel surround system, so for the time being I will resort to presenting the work as a textual commentary. Through this commentary I hope to draw attention to the extensive similarities of the DNA data (and that of a computer prediction also) and the comparisons that can be made between a digital representation of life and digital media.

As the music industry slowly responds to the internet age, specifically the loss of profits through illegal downloading of music, we have seen an adaptation of copyright into a technology called Digital Rights Management (DRM). This is currently a form of access control technology designed to restrict and control our use of digital media, as a digital recording of a work is still the same work that was encoded on the original CD sold to the consumer. This is similar to our ability (as consumers) to use software for a period of time. We never own the digital media (software), just a license to use it on a given number of devices. This confusion over the ownership of digital media has meant that it has only very recently been possible for insurance companies to offer coverage for not just downloaded software (that never existed physically, yet cost $450 to use in the case of Max/MSP) but also for a person’s digital media collection. It is quite reasonable that a person embracing digital music owns the licence to over £1000 worth of media when considered that I have a collection of over 500 physical CDs and that one song costs 79p to download from Apple’s iTunes store.

DNA data has been subject to similar protection rights issues, indeed, attempts have been made to ‘own’ a sequence of DNA, although most attempts have failed due to the ubiquitous nature of genes (Engineering the Farm: The Social and Ethical Aspects of Agricultural Biotechnology Britt Bailey and Marc A. Lappe 2002: p.72). It is of immense importance to human kind that this information stays in the public domain because subtle differences in sequences of base pairs create disease resistant plants, animals that grow more quickly and humans that are more or less susceptible to disease; this last point is of particular importance to insurance companies.

All animal life is made from one cell (the fusion of one sperm and one egg). Inside this one cell are the instructions on how the cell will function and ultimately divide into two cells, each of which will then both have their own complete set of instructions of how to function and divide yet again. Eventually a living organism will exist, made up of about 10,000 trillion cells (A Short History of Nearly Everything Bill Bryson 2004: p.450) which will each contain the full set of instructions on how to construct (by this method of division and growth) the same living being yet again. The process of organised and controlled cell division and differentiation is called growth. Uncontrolled it is called cancer. The instructions are the same in both cases.

This set of instructions is contained in DNA. The typical illustration of DNA (shown below) of the double helix represents the two parts that make up the list of instructions, which run in order along the double helix. It is these two strands that divide in two and each side goes into each of the two new cells(*1). Once in these two new cells it replicates the one strand into two and becomes a whole new cell (a complete double helix structure) ready for dividing again.



Joining the two sides of the double helix together are a pair of one of four types of molecules (one attached to each side of the double helix). This pair of molecules is called a base pair and is in fact a pair of amino acids. The instructions of how to construct an organism from just one cell are contained in the order and type of these base pairs joined to the backbone of the double helix (genes). That is, to observe the order of base pairs is to observe the genetic make up of a living being.

The four bases (amino acids) contained in DNA are Adenine, Guanine, Thymine and Cytosine, hence the short hand AGTC. A will only bind to T, and C only with G(*2). The sequence of the base pairs determines what type of protein is produced and the shape of the protein molecule, which in turn goes on to establish how it acts in the cell. So we can see that the sequence of the base pairs determines directly how the cell operates and what it produces (Almost Like a Whale Steve Jones 1999: p.120).

The technological ability to extract and analyse this quantity of base pairs at a reasonable cost is very new (available since the end of 2007) and demonstrates the increasing rate of insight we can gain of the natural world around us.

Incidentally, the 54,000 base pairs taken from each cow are not the first 54,000 of the sequence of billions. They are evenly distributed across all the chromosomes (like street lamps spread along a street). In the future, technology will allow us to extract 300,000 base pairs in a similar manner to adding in street lamps between already existing ones to observe the finer details of the street.

In animal breeding the best animals are mated together to theoretically produce the best offspring as a form of artificial selection (also referred to as selective breeding). This was first noted by Robert Bakewell (1725-1795) who is "usually regarded as the pioneer of livestock improvement as we know it” (Genetic Improvement of Cattle and Sheep Geoff Simm 1998: p.4). He spent time noting the best animals in his neighbourhood then followed the basic idea that ‘like begets like’ (Darwin) which itself draws on comparisons between animals favouring ‘good’ families. Of course for like to beget like there would need to be additional information passed on in the DNA from one generation to the next on top of the general blue print of the making.

There are large similarities between the DNA (both in data and audio form) between the daughters and their mother, even though the mother’s DNA is only responsible for half of the genetic make up of each daughter (the father being responsible for the other half). The same striking similarity is present between each daughter and the prediction of the daughter, even though the prediction of the daughter is only based on the mother’s DNA. If the father’s DNA were available, the prediction could have been made upon both responsible contributors. So large similarities and small variations in DNA make up the huge selection of species present in nature, much like the large similarities and small variations in sequences of only twelve notes that make up the massive variety of melodies in Western music. This relationship between cause and effect (along with most of the technical aspects of DNA) is much better explained in the generously thorough The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins.

At the core of my Max/MSP patch is a sound engine based on very simple FM (frequency modulation) and AM (amplitude modulation) synthesis and the relative levels of these modulated sounds (dry/FM/AM). There are actually seven of these included inside the patch correlating to each of the cows (including the predicted cows). The sound engine receives data from the DNA file of its cow in the form of one of sixteen numbers every 10 milliseconds. Each of these sixteen numbers represent the sixteen possible combinations of the two base pairs available in the DNA data. The DNA file is stepped through in order and the numbers one to sixteen are fed into a unique table for each DNA file. This table acts as a probability distribution for the random object that (through the use of a coll object) triggers the pitch of the sound engine. So as to cover a wide pitch range I mapped the sixteen combinations of base pairs to a four-octave major 7 #11 arpeggio.

My first experiments in sounding the data involved attaching a pitch and an attack to every step of the sequence of base pairs, resulting in 54,000 notes taken from a range of sixteen pitches, all occurring with the same rhythmic interval. At eight notes per second (equivalent to 16th or semi quaver notes at 120 bpms) each pitch was detectable to the ear and nice harmonic combinations would become apparent between the cows/speakers (whether the 16 notes were of a scale or chromatic). These would manifest spatially, as different pitch interval relationships would appear in different areas between the clashing speakers (when ever two or more speakers played the same pitch the sound would appear to originate from in between the given speakers, similar to ‘big mono’).

One of the problems with this arrangement was that it would have taken 1 hour, 52 minutes and 30 seconds to get through the 54,000 steps. On top of this, aesthetically, it sounded very similar all the way through the running time as each cow just sounded one of sixteen pitches. I also tried a similar set up by stepping through the data at a much faster rate, somewhere near 32 notes per second. At this speed, many of the same attributes existed; to complete the 54,000 steps still took a considerable amount of time, but now the pitch of each step was mostly indistinguishable and the overall sound was close to noise. In either of these arrangements it would have been reasonable for a listener to gather all they could from just observing a random two or three minute segment.

So as to get away from the minute details in the data and move toward the surprisingly subtle differences in the overall architecture in each cows DNA(*3), all further sound manipulation is the result of groups of base pairs present over a period of time.

For example, a parameter of the sound engine (say for this explanation, the FM depth) will count how long it has been in milliseconds since it last received two hundred of the first combination of the two base pairs (A-A). Once it has counted two hundred of those base pairs the time taken is reported, scaled to a usable number and applied as the new FM depth. A very similar mapping applies to all aspects of the sound machines, counting different amounts of base pairs (ranging from fifty to five hundred) and a different combination of base pairs per changeable attribute.

Upon opening the master patch the mothers DNA is automatically loaded into a table which acts as a probability distribution map for three random number generators (with range 1 to 16) that feed the remaining three sound machines representing the three predictions of what each daughters’ DNA will sound like. This simple method offers an unbiased resolution, not dependent on chemistry or biology that yet still contains a foundation in the mother and so if one were not able to consider this mutant creation a prediction of the mother’s daughter, it could at least be considered a further new daughter (and a bastard daughter at that).

My choice of purely synthetic sounds is founded on the notion that although the inner parts of a living body may make noise (as everything vibrates), this DNA data is a step removed from the real physical world and is simply a list of instructions on how to create the real and physical, similar to a life score. “Sounds are inaudible usually because they are small, they take place where we cannot hear, or we cannot hear them unaided.” (Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts Douglas Kahn 2001: p.201). Representing something aurally that is not just inaudible to the human ear, but that is just inaudible period (data as data) takes us toward either a realisation of the unreal or back to a form of the real in which the unreal has been derived (Baudrillard). This also touches on Frayn's idea of information 'traffic' in the amazing The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of a Universe.

The way synthesised sounds are constructed is by a similar method as biological development from a genetic code; a set of simple generic data organised into an appropriate and manageable arrangement that can be applied to waves and inform them (and their modifiers) on how to operate, thus creating physical movements in air from digital information (that never once existed in the real world, but was generated digitally).

The context of this work lies in the extreme notion of a digital life, or a digital representation of life. This notion seemed difficult to grasp for people introduced later in life to virtual reality, owning (a license for) digital media, social networking websites and advanced artificial intelligence in video games. Yet for anyone born after circa 1996, these ideas form the foundations of their acceptance of a very small and blurred boundary between real, unreal and physical and virtual. In the works’ current form, it is most suitable for fixed listening of some sort. With the inclusion of n more mother’s and three daughters’ DNA files, the Max/MSP patch could be installed in a gallery and could run through the DNA of family after family. It could even be linked to a network so as to update its database of DNA when more became available.

Listening to the piece in a space at least 5 metres squared at a volume you could just about talk over allows the listener to move around the speaker array and observe overlapping aural arenas of each cow with out too much interference from the room itself (listening in an acoustically controlled studio is helpful). This size of room and volume is preferred to limit (but not destroy) the overlapping of these aural arenas and to preserve the mono quality of each speaker. It is suggested that the listener begin by familiarising themselves with the sound of the mother, followed by her three daughters and lastly the sound of the three predicted daughters by standing in close proximity to the relevant speaker. The listener might then explore the overlap that should occur in a vertical line (shown on the speaker configuration diagram as the interphonic knot (The Sonic Composition of the City in The Auditory Culture Reader Jean-Paul Thibaud 2003: p.335)) through the middle of the speakers. Moving in and around this line is perhaps the most interesting activity as the relative differences (and extreme similarities) are not only most apparent here, but can also be changed dynamically by moving around the space.



The Max/MSP patch is laid out in the same way as the speaker array with outputs 1-7 matching up with the numbered speakers in the SPEAKER CONFIGURATION diagram below. Pressing space bar will start the sequence and a silence of anywhere up to thirty seconds can be expected before any audio is heard. Additionally there is a bar at the top of the patch that charts the progression of the nine minutes; the blue LEDs in the centre will also go out when the piece is finished.



ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the Scottish Agricultural College (SAC) for the use of DNA data from four anonymous cows from their Langhill lines of dairy cows.

Footnotes:

*1: The process of cell division is called mitosis where the DNA strands separate, move to opposite ends of the cell and the cell membrane closes around each end, making two new cells.

*2: Upon inspecting the included data of the 54,000 base pairs taken from a mother and her three daughters it may seem confusing that A appears able to bind with C, G and T and indeed, that all sixteen combinations of amino acids appear to be present. This data actually represents 54,000 base pairs taken from two chromosomes (in the text document: one chromosome is on the left, the other chromosome on the right). Since A will only bind with T, the data only requires one letter per base pair as we always know what the other letter will be.

*3: Humans share about 95% of their genes with fish demonstrating that very small changes in a DNA sequence produces large variation in the final organism. Animals have about three billion base pairs and may differ between each other at only one million of these. However, this small group of differing genes may govern how the remaining shared genes operate. The genes are not immune; they can be transformed by the mother’s uterus and be passed on to offspring in an altered fashion. If that alteration is not favourable then death is inevitable, but out of all successful pregnancies comes variation, and improvement, hence evolution.

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Documenting the mundane - part 3

In film the focal plane moves with the action, and sometimes without for effect. I really like this look and as I don't have a video camera I tried to achieve it in a time-lapse video.

I found that no matter how quick or slow I wanted the focal plane to move, it had to be made via completely even steps. Of course as I was doing this by hand it was very difficult. Just like a panning camera, the movement of the focal plane looks abrupt and jittery if it is not completely even. I expected I would be able to make a small change every other shot but this is not the case.

The best option would probably be to continuously turn the focus wheel with a very slow motor. I have since tried this with various small motors attached to elastic bands and have found that none of them deliver enough torque. On my most flimsy lens the focus wheel almost moves how I want it to, but it seems the elastic band absorbs the tension up to a point, then twists the focus wheel, then the process starts again. I don't want to get into chains and what not and so am trying to come up with some kind of string that is perhaps everso slightly elastic and abrasive enough to grasp the focus wheel. If I can get this balance right I may be able to get the results from one of the small motors I have already been playing with.

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Sleeping

I was so surprised to hear in The Pocket Book of General Ignorance that on average a person falls asleep in about seven minutes. Like a lot of people I was sure that I take a long time to fall into a deep sleep, but wondered if perhaps all the waking (apparently around 35 times a night) was clouding my judgment. It's quite reasonable that I could fall asleep in seven minutes then wake fifteen or thirty minutes later for the first of thirty five times and assume I had never been asleep.

Clearly a time-lapse video with some cool music was in order.

There are lots of mysteries involved in sleeping; how much tossing and turning occurs, under-cover/without-cover, whether or not you stay in bed, etc. As I found out, a time-lapse video only really reveals the general goings on of sleep because the sleeping is played back so fast, no small details are revealed though the footage is interesting. It is however, a little like old family photos where the person most interested in the video is the sleeper themselves. I suppose in the case of unusual sleeping practices interest may stir in a wider collection of people. This of course doesn't make creating the video any less fulfilling, making cool stuff is always good.

As with pretty much every time-lapse video I have made so far, there was difficulties. If you want to take pictures of anything you generally need light to do it (I don't have any night vision stuff), if you don't have an intervelometer you need to use a laptop to trip the camera.So this means you have to sleep with the light on and a laptop whirring away. I sleep like a log and so this didn't bother me (video above), but Jody on the other hand, is not such a heavy sleeper. Probably even more annoying than the light or the laptop is the sound of the shutter mechanism on the camera which seems to get really loud once you turn the lights off and try to get some sleep! On top of all this the interval at which the camera takes a picture is 10 to 15 seconds, too far apart to feel like a rhythm, regular enough to be ongoingly annoying.



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Sunrise

A lot of times the doing can be just as fulfilling as the end result. When this is true it can be great because it allows you to enjoy the smaller stages of a project's development, even if it all goes wrong.

This time-lapse video of the rising sun didn't go completely wrong, but didn't go exactly to plan.

Before we even chose a location Jody and I were well aware that the making of this video could be quite fun. Our intention was to record the rising sun in a time-lapse video somewhere in the town we grew up in. We chose December so that we could get out of bed later and so one very chilly morning we got up around 6.45am, made a thermos-flask of coffee and with scarf and gloves, set off with our extensive amount of prepacked photography equipment (a point and shoot and a tripod).

We walked about a mile and a half out of town to the top of a hill that looks back down on where we came from. As we approached the top of the hill we realised that we could have left a bit earlier to get more of the sunrise, turns out the official time of sunrise on bbc.co.uk is the time when you can actually see the sun pop up over the horizon. Still, it was dark enough so we set up the tripod facing east back down into the valley and began taking pictures at what felt like regular intervals (at around 4 seconds) whilst trying not to kick the tripod.

The first problem (and only real problem) was that in December, the sun does not rise in the east. It rises in the south east(ish). Jody pointed this out after we had been taking pictures for about twenty minutes (we planned to take pictures for two hours in all) while the sun was yet to make an appearance, but we (I) felt too invested in the easterly direction and besides, the south east direction was a boring motorway. Jody turned out to be right and the sun rose in the most spectacular fashion (just out of shot) that it would have made the motorway look like the most exciting motorway you'd have ever seen.

Unfortunately this was before I had realised that a time-lapse video doesn't have to be a long single shot. I perhaps felt like cutting between shots was not doing justice to the presentation of manipulated time. It probably would have looked pretty cool cutting from the awakening town in the valley to the amazing sun appearing over the brow of the motorway with the streaking traffic and migrating flare. Determined to get some kind of video out of the expedition, we soldiered on, clicking until our hands were too cold to take any more pictures and the sun was in the sky (to our right).

This video I have described is not the video above. Once we lined up all the pictures it was a rather unfair portrayal of the majestic sunrise we had witnessed, so we decided to have another attempt in a different spot of the same town. We found a bridge going from a car park to a shopping centre, over looking a busy round about (indeed, a magic round about) and facing the direction that the sun was due to rise in. As before, we set off early with our stuff and began shooting. After about forty-five minutes some pencil pushing security guard came over to escort us off the premises! We didn't bother arguing or unleashing any judo chops, we just quickly chose another spot close by and carried on.

At the time we were quite bummed out about having to move in the middle of the video, but carried on anyway, this being our second attempt and all. As it turned out, the scene change in the middle went some way toward not making this a really boring video. Although the sun did rise (it rises everyday - in the south of the UK (that rhymes)), it was barely noticeable and not very exciting. Still, for the sake of doing, we finished it all off, recorded some sombre guitar and went with some words from a poem I wrote about how sad you can feel when you get out of bed late and miss the day:

How it pains the collection
To dream unhindered the night's rejection
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A yearly retrospective

Once upon a time I was browsing videos on vimeo and came across an interview someone had filmed with their granny. Needless to say, after 30 seconds I was bored stiff, but it got me thinking. Of my Grandparents I have one Grandmother and one Grandfather still alive, one from each side, both over 75 years old. As far as I'm concerned, they have both always been 'old person' age and I have no idea of how they would be in their teens, mid twenties, late fourties, etc.

If video technology were as available then (say 1955) as it is now there would be no excuse for there not to be at least some footage of them doing their thing. Indeed, there is now no excuse not to document the present!

With this in mind I began to consider ways to best capture in video format each of my Grandparents frozen in their current state of being. A short interview seemed sensible but I was struggling for ways to avoid a full on autobiography told in their own words, you know how grandparents like to go on. A specific brief topic was needed, either something significant in their lives (would most likely be something from twenty or more years ago), or just something recent.

Recounting an event or series of events that had occurred over the last year seemed like a good idea as it could potentially be quite brief and would be relevant to the time the video was made. It would represent each Grandparent at that moment (or that year).

Unfortunately both of these Grandparents of mine live very far away and I see each of them rarely. Still, the idea of capturing a moment remained poignant, so I instead turned to my immediate family.



What began as a warm up interview turned into a small project in itself of which I am very glad to have undertaken. I asked each of my three immediate family members to bring their 2008 diary, planner, or what ever they had that would help them remember what they got up to that year. Then we each wizzed through our diaries, jotting down in bullet point form any things of significance that we had done that year. These things included moving house, getting fired, being on the TV, finishing a degree, jogging a record needle at a club, etc. Between the four of us there were quite a range of things, not just events that happened but also outcomes of events, lessons learned and hopes for the future.

I was filming the interviews with two Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX55EBpoint and shoot cameras that appear to (most of the time) have a fifteen minute maximum in video mode, whether there is a two or four gig card installed. So each person would sit in the hot seat and have fifteen minutes to get through their piece of paper. It proved more than enough time and I think quite nice to have a time limit. Though I knew next to nothing about how to light an interview I had a try. I had three identical cheapo desk lamps which I placed either side of the interviewee, just a little in front and the third went behind the chair facing up with a red Quality Street wrapper over it. To try and make the two lights shining at the subject act as a key and fill (strong light and softer light that eases off shadows, I think) I hung tissue paper over them both and moved them closer or further away to control their relative brightness and resulting shadows.

For sound recording I used a single Rode NT5 condenser microphone placed at about waist level. This proved quite acceptable and the moving around of the interviewee didn't seem to matter.

Just like the interview with the Granny that I mentioned above; if anyone else watched even just thirty seconds of any of these four interviews they would be very bored. Yet we are all really pleased that we made them. I edited them around March (just to get rid of bits of shuffling around, sipping water, etc) and in just that short space of time I had forgotten a lot of the stuff I had recounted and it felt like I had found some long lost archive. So whether we choose to watch our interviews back this Christmas or in five, ten or twenty years time, we are bound to be super glad we filmed them and recorded, not just the events we all took part in in 2008, but our mannerisms, hair-cuts, vocabulary and all sorts.
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