M.A.R.I.N. invites short proposals to attend Hacklab at the Sea, an informal workshop on an island in the Finnish archipelago combining tinkering and brainstorming of ideas. The workshop explores sensory experience of marine environment and ecologies. Participants should all do hands-on tinkering with the likes of but not limited to, sensors, sensor networks, DIY electronics, low power computing, and alternative energy production. read more: http://marin.cc/seahacklab
Archive for the ‘Tapio Mäkelä’ Category
Hacklab at the Sea July 12-18 /2010 (DL 26.6.)
Friday, June 18th, 2010Baltic Sea Residency 2011
Monday, December 7th, 2009Marin Association will organize a Baltic Sea research residenciy with series of workshops in the Summer of 2011 (June-September).
Call for proposals will be sent out in December 2010. Meanwhile, please join our Facebook group (link on the right).
M.A.R.I.N. on return journey
Sunday, September 27th, 2009
Big thanks to AND Festival; such a great start for a new event series. M.A.R.I.N. residency vessel departed Liverpool on Sunday morning after 6 am and set path to Isle of Man, Fort William, Inverness, Copenhagen. This jourey is mostly transit, and time to reflect, and work on writing. The two past months of residency was full of extremely interesting encounters with local marine scientists, artists, and folks from different communities. Besides, it was full on work with authoring, yet we also got to enjoy the festivals, ISEA2009 and AND.
M.A.R.I.N. residency can be developed a lot, of course, but what is exciting is that even with a year’s lead to production this Irish Sea residency was a great success. I would like to thank the participating artists, sailors and collaborators on shore, and not least, all the funders who made the work possible.
Image of Isle of Man before sunset.
Abandon unsustainable residencies
Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009
M.A.R.I.N. is an investigation in how an art and science residency itself can be sustainable and mobile at the same time. Our main area of research are marine biological and cultural ecosystems. For the AND festival, we abandoned flights for a 11-week residency at the Irish Sea. We sailed an equivalent of 4 hours of flight distance, from North of Germany to Scotland, onto Northern Ireland, and arriving to the coast of Cumbria. Hosted by Folly (Lancaster) we did workshops with SoundWave (Workington), The Dock Museum & Dropzone (Barrow-in-Furness) and Tate & Fact (Liverpool).
Workshop participants have contributed with sound, video and stills, some of which you can listen to at Ecolocated Pool group page. For example, youth from DropZone at Barrow-in-Furness did an hour long rap with their own rhymes, and Tate Youth contributed interviews with friends and family of the changing maritime culture of Liverpool. Some fragments are also uploaded to the Ecolocated map based interface, which includes arrival ship blog to Belfast, and audio and water quality data sonifications around the Albert Dock. An experimental stage version of this interface can also be viewed on 3G mobile phones using your browser, and the URL http://marin.cc/ecolocated/mobile.
You can read blog entries by the resident artists Tapio Mäkelä (FI), Nigel Helyer (AU) and Andreas Siagian (ID), who have collaborated on the project Ecolocated - Littoral Lives.
In Belfast, the Ecolocated team was joined by Michael Lake and Daniel Woo, with whom we authored a major 12-channel surround sound, locative installation, presented at Catalyst Arts gallery, as part of ISEA2009, The International Symposium on Electronic Art. In this work we worked with local marine scientists, historians, ex dock workers and other collaborators. We also measured water quality in the Belfast Lough, map of which was the interface for our project. The end result was a collage where users could navigate through several layers of audio, sonified and visualized data.
Also part of the exhibit here at FACT, The CDPDU (Common Data Processing and Display Unit, M.A.R.I.N. Alpha) by Marko Peljhan, Nejc Trost, and Matthew Biederman, draws satellite marine ecology data and environmental sensor data from a field unit in Santa Barbara, CA, as well as some data from a sister project’s (Arctic Perspective Initiative) expedition to Baffin Bay last month.
In Liverpool, M.A.R.I.N. had a very interesting visit to the British Oceanographic Data Centre, and The Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory. We participated to a Shelf sea workshop, where scientists (and electronic engineers really) discussed latest sea bed velocity sensors, HF radar for wave detection. In the basement of BODC we saw a sonde that makes our water measurement equipment seem like kids play: a gliding torpedo shaped UAV, which uses ballast to zigsaw through the ocean. At the end of an inspiring tour, a discussion with 7 researchers opened up real possibilities for future collaboration ranging from semantic, cartographic, visual and haptic interfaces to environmental data.
Sound Waves
Sunday, September 6th, 2009
As part of the collaboration with the AND Festival, M.A.R.I.N. artists in residence did a 2-day workshop with sound artists from SoundWave, a music and sound art organization from Workington. We met first on the catamaran docked in Whitehaven for informal discussion and dinner, introductions, and telling about our work and journey so far. In between several days of gushy winds, we enjoyed a cool and crisp, calmer evening.
We joined SoundWave at their offices in Workington for a show and tell, first myself, Nigel Helyer and Andreas Siagian discussed sound art in contexts of public space, locative work, and ecology. SoundWave coordinates programming for a nice 8-speaker rig in the town centre called The Hub, originally designed by BASE Structutes for the Allerdale Borough Council, and including work by Illustrious Company (Martyn Ware and Vince Clarke).
The Hub’s soundscape was quite beautiful, giving a sensation of for example sea birds hovering above you. Emma Foxall presented a community project called Sonic Picnic that they had realized at The Hub, from which one got a real sense of building community ownership through participation.
Also Steven Pearson, Dave Camlin, Mark Newport, and Dave Roberts discussed their work, in particular in the context of The Hub, 3D recording and authoring. Soundwave had also realized an interesting project called Slate Song at the Honister Slate Mine last Spring. Performed in the mine, a 1.5 tonne “Musical Stones of Skiddaw” instrument had been performed together by a mezzo-soprano and fiddler (Mike Newport).
2-day break and a great sail
Friday, September 4th, 2009We said farewell to Belfast and ISEA2009 on the night of September 1st, as weather forecasts suggested foul weather for the seas the following afternoon. M.A.R.I.N: catamaran set sail for Isle of Man during moonlight, arriving morning of the 2nd to Port Mary. We spent the day walking over hills with beautiful heather, sheeps and occasional posh housing estates here and there. Lars bought some scallops from a local fishery, which were perhaps the best on the planet. It was great to rest after 5 weeks of non stop work.
We sailed across to Whitehaven with winds up to 17 m/s from the North West, our travel speed around 10 knots yet reaching 18 knots on downsurfing the big waves. We got wet allright, but it was a great sail. Upon arrival to the Whitehaven marina, we just made it through the pier heads… there was only one try, or a splintered boat.
Today we have been gathering our thoughts and working away, getting ready for the AND Festival worksohp series hosted by Folly and FACT.
Data collection from Belfast to Bangor
Wednesday, August 19th, 2009
Nigel and myself, accompanied by cap Lars took a 2 night trip to Bangor. We wanted to make a data trace from river Lagan using the YSI 600XL Sonde, recording temperature, pH, salinity, dissolved oxygen and oxygen reduction potential. It was another summer in Belfast with lot of rainfall, so there should be a lot of nutrients in the water. Weather forecast was luckily wrong for the day we went out: it was sunny with a smooth South-Westerly wind that made it a pleasant sail after the harbor area motoring zone. We also stopped along the way to make hydrophone recordings.
Once in Bangor, we sought permission to take the catamaran onto a slipway. One of its folding propellers had corroded and literally disintegrated. Also it was time to get rid of some barnacles. They are an amazing species, leaving a substrate behind even when removed, leaving a “bed” for new larvae. Think we removed about 60kg of it from the boat, and put into trash. The catamaran looked mighty big when off water, yet also beautifully designed.
Before dusk, Nigel and I took out the little dinghy boat with the water testing kit and hydrophones. At the entrance to the harbour, a dozen of fishermen were casting for mackerell. A few seals also loved this spot, not least to the treats that returning fishing boats would give them, the unused bait. We got pretty close, 2 meter distance from one of the seals, which seemed to have lost one eye. We tested the water in the commercial and yacht harbor, and then went out to Luke’s point, an area where I knew Bangor still has open sewage to the sea.
An unfriendly, cunning rock crept up from the sea to scratch the small engine propeller on the way. When going out to the sea, dissolved oxygen levels improved significantly, but when approaching the spill area, we’d hit values closer to six mg/l DO. The readings were showing worse water quality 200 meters off shore at the spill area than in the visibly polluted commercial harbor of Bangor.
The calculation one city may do is whether the wider impact of their sewage output has long term effects on wider aquatic areas. As it washes out to the open sea, the impact is in the short term, regional. What about the longer term stress on the marine ecosystem?
In the harbor, rather new mussle boat with trawling gear was in the harbor. On the coastal road, there was a sign warning to eat any mussels in Belfast Lough because of pollution. I turns out that the mussels in Belfast lough are replanted in other waters, grown, cleaned and sold.
We slept two nights in Bangor, and sailed off early in the morning to record a track from Bangor to the other side of the Lough near a power station, then up to the beginning of the Fairway buoy. The weather was rather windy.
Our water quality testing is something I would call indexical work. In order for the data to be meaningful for science, it takes a long period of time to monitor a single site to take into account changing conditions, and the possible measurement errors (which always are part of the picture). The mobile kind of monitoring that we do helps give an idea of an existing issue that may be worth investigating closer. For example, there are no permanent measuring equipment stationed in front of Bangor to monitor the sewage output.
Docking in Belfast
Monday, August 3rd, 2009
We arrive in Carrickfergus around 2.30 am and sleep in the marina for a few hours and take lovely warm showers. The weather gets worse, we VHF Belfast harbour master and head to our mooring on Lagan river in the morning, surrounded by mist and rain. We are also doing water quality readings along the way to the Lagan, yet aware that we need to come back for more concentrated sensing later on.
It is great feeling to set foot on Belfast. It took us 4 days longer than expected to make the journey; partly because I expected the boat to be quicker, but mostly because of winds facing us. At the same time, it could have taken even much longer. We are met by a friendly harbour master. The new mooring is very good. Paul Muhlbach, who has been assisting with local production, working for ISEA2009, greets us and we have a meeting over coffee. Then, to Catalyst Arts gallery (great artist run venue, very nice people running it) where we meet with Aideen Doran, and Duncan who helps out with construction work of the exhibition. Our sea legs sway us a bit, terra firma and first cappucino feel spot on.
One strategic notion for this residency, and future planning is to balance staying in harbours at sea carefully. Even though this was our longest stretch by far, one always needs to give a day or two extra for rain check. Even though sea was rough, our bodies are quite strong and momentum to work on our exhibition is really good.
Islay
Sunday, August 2nd, 2009
So far maybe the most sceninc area, passing through the Sound of Jura and heading alongside of Islay, besides reminding of the skillfully made single malts, the landscape is both harsh and serene. Tidal currents between the islands are strong, but they also form an excellent protected area from the open seas for sailing. This day is to be the most comfortable sailing day to the record, and we are able to work while sailing too. Again here the paradox, when you could most enjoy the sail, you head indoors to work and pop out to the deck every now and then to take a picture or two and breathe in, and go back in.
Some intense winds is ahead, so we go straight across over night to Belfast. At sunset, we see a beautiful sunray emboss the coast of North Ireland. Nigel sees a whale!
North of Oban
Saturday, August 1st, 2009We dock for the night North of Oban in a fairly large marina, dining well. At night time the wind howls in the masts, with gales at 17 m/s and above in the open sea. Even though the over all weather with winds has not been favourable, we are also well timed to be in harbors when the worse weather is around us. Each evening, our work plans for Belfast evolve and we are very conscious of time, or rather how little time we will have before the first part of the exhibition opens for ISEA2009. At the same time, as we are on a residency, and our work is cumulatively building up over the next month, we are OK.