Air Typing with Leap Motion + Dextype

"Dear G, I recently got the eagerly awaited LEAP MOTION in the mail, so I thought I would write you a touching and emotional first letter describing the magical moment in which I unboxed the Leap Motion - all whilst using the Leap Motion and some of the new typing applications that are available for the Leap and its apparently amazing gesture technology that we've heard so much about for so long now!"




"Hmm. It's okay, I suppose I just have to practice for a little while..."


TEN MINUTES LATER





"Nope, not happening. I mean I don't even... What is happening here? Also, my arms are kinda tired..."

---

To be fair I didn't want to spend that much time learning how to type all over again and this is the end of one pomodoro worth of faffing about with it. I'm sure I'll find a more logical and less tiring use for the LEAP in time to come. Yes it works out of the box, but after that, I think we all need to sit down and be practical about what we can and should be building for it. And, AIR TYPING? Hmmmmm..... Maybe not my kind of thing.

See also:
Leap Motion
Dextype

Converting CCTV surveillance camera system videos from .264 to .AVI on Mac OS X

My challenge for today was to convert footage from a CCTV security camera into AVI format. The footage format was .264, a format mainly used by security camera systems, and this format apparently lacks headers and so cannot be read in any of the usual programs such as Quicktime or VLC. What it needed was a wrapper of some sort but I'm not advanced enough to know how to do it on my own, since video is not my speciality. A search of the internet and online forums revealed there was ONE small obscure utility that did the trick (AVIGenerator), but the utility was Windows based. Since all the computers in my house are Macs and I haven't yet dug up my Parallels cd, another solution had to be found...

And the solution is to use Wine.

"Wine lets you run Windows software on other operating systems. With Wine, you can install and run these applications just like you would in Windows. Wine is still under active development. Not every program works yet, however there are already several million people using Wine to run their software. Wine is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version."

I downloaded WineBottler cos it came with Wine compiled for Mac OS X.


I used Wine to run the installer and then the AviGenerator program, available here.


To summarise the process:

How to convert .264 to .AVI on a Mac

1. Install Wine or WineBottler
2. Install AVIGenerator app using Wine. Alternatively, use WineBottler to package into a standalone Mac OS app.
3. Run the installed AVIGenerator and use it to convert the .264 video into .AVI



Successful Surveillance Camera Video Conversion!
Is there any other easier way to convert surveillance camera videos? Probably not. I'm surprised that the process was not as straightforward as just downloading and viewing it on my computer. The surveillance camera dvr is likely to be able to read the .264 format but without the conversion to avi it will be difficult for a casual home user to view the .264 format on their mac or even pc.

---

Alright and while I convert the rest of the videos, in the meantime, do head on down to BAN—FAM's '1 Dimensional Society', now on at Lasalle's TriSpace (Basement 1, #B1-05) until 14 Aug 2013! (More updates on the 1ds site in a bit...)

‘1 Dimensional Society’ by artists BAN—FAM is an homage to the social theory of Herbert Marcuse's ‘One Dimensional Man’.

Marcuse theorised that the 'one dimensional society' was one that subscribed to a totalitarian democracy – a system where the state is said to maximise its control over the lives of its citizens using the dual rationale of general will and majority rule. The beanbags abstractly symbolise and facilitate satirical social criticism towards ways of operating; this work is a critical commentary on the role of choice in society.

BAN—FAM (Vanessa Ban and Andrea Fam) is a practice that spans across contemporary art, graphic design, typography, curation and critique.

The Excitable Dog's Paradise Sensory Spa

It might have been G who told me first about it "Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response", wherein small sounds, speech patterns, and tactile encounters are thought to produce "tingles" or braingasms in some people. You can read about people and their experiences with it all over the internet... Huffington Post: Nicholas Tufnell - ASMR: Orgasms for Your Brain, or The Independent: 'Maria spends 20 minutes folding towels': Why millions are mesmerised by ASMR videos...

Yesterday I realised that there are lots and lots of videos on the internet of people roleplaying in spas, roleplaying haircuts, massages, and other things along with sounds like tapping, crinkling, brushing, and running one's nails over an uneven surface. Believe me, its a whole cottage industry of youtube videos of people pretending to touch your ear and whisper to you sweet nothings while standing and whispering very very close to the camera. The roleplay is totally asexual. It's really just what it is. Someone pretending to give you a haircut, and nothing more than that. Watching all these videos in which people specifically only make the video in order to showcase these small sounds, I've also realised that the reason why I like RRCherryPie's videos of miniature fake food is because of the tiny tapping and crinkling sounds he makes with the packaging. Right. Not at all weird. Not at all creepy. And don't doubt the power of ASMR. It hasn't yet been explained scientifically yet. But some people do report that they get relaxation from the videos and sometimes even a tingling sensation in the scalp.

So a lot of my projects begin this way. I see something like GentleWhispering's Paradise Lab, or WhispersUnicorn's Haircut and Shave roleplay, and think "What a curious genre of youtube videos this is". And I'm like, hold on a moment, couldn't I also make my own ASMR video too?...

And so, now I have.

Welcome to the new luxury series of
The Excitable Dog's Paradise Sensory Spa
Made specially for your relaxation...

In this video, I calmly brush the Excitable Dog with a fan brush, and then a nylon brush, and finally a large bristle brush. I got some of these brushes from Donna Ong so I don't know what they were previously used for, but I'm sure they were used to brush nice artistic things, so they are brushes of nice but mysterious origin. I wonder if the Excitable Dog likes being brushed all over with mysterious brushes. After brushing the Excitable Dog, I also brush "you", and part of the table, and also eventually I brush the other brushes. Its a brushapallooza. Insert apology for having an excitable voice. Why am I even brushing my toy? Who is watching me brushing my toy? Will anyone get funny feelings from watching me brush my $2 daiso toy? Are there really lots of people out there obsessively googling for ASMR videos so they can get to bed? I don't really know. Let me know or leave a comment...

---

BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE!
I've made another video for G to learn some random chinese words with. So here it is...

Simple Colour-changing Ambient Lamp (Arduino + 3 LED)

In this continuation of posts on learning to do the most basic of things with the Arduino, the next experiment I made was a colour-changing lamp with 3 different LEDs. I followed this simple instructable but edited slightly. I noticed there were lots of "#define" in the instructable - it seems that #define is something from C that is for defining a constant. What is the difference between using #define and int to define which pins each LED is controlled via? Well in practice nothing much seems to be different except the conceptual difference is that #define is for defining a CONSTANT whereas technically speaking an int would be initialising a VARIABLE that can be changed later on in the program, although in this case we don't really intend to change the pin number. But we could, if we wanted to.

Things with # in front of them like #include and #define are preprocessed before the program compiles. Also, apparently #define does not take up any program space, whereas int is stored as variable in RAM. For more info see this wiki entry on C Preprocessor.

Colour Changing Lamp

For this you'll need: an arduino uno, 4 jumper wires, 3 LEDs of different colour, and 3 x 330ohm resistors

int delayTime = 2;
int maxBrightness = 255;
int redPin = 9;
int greenPin = 10;
int bluePin = 11;
int red = 0;
int green = 170;
int blue = 170;

// Indicates whether a color will be incrementing (1) or decrementing (0) in brightness
int incR = 1;
int incG = 1;
int incB = 0;

void transition()
{
  if (red >= maxBrightness)
    incR = 0;
  else if (red <= 0)
    incR = 1;
  if (green >= maxBrightness)
    incG = 0;
  else if (green <= 0)
    incG = 1;
  if (blue >= maxBrightness)
    incB = 0;
  else if (blue <= 0)
    incB = 1;
  
  if (incR)
    red++;
  else
    red--;
  if(incG)
    green++;
  else
    green--;
  if(incB)
    blue++;
  else
    blue--;
}

void setColor()
{
  analogWrite(redPin, red);
  analogWrite(greenPin, green);
  analogWrite(bluePin, blue);
}

void setup()
{
  // do nothing
}

void loop()
{
  transition();
  setColor();
  delay(delayTime);
}

Stopping an Arduino Sketch

Now that you have this running, you might want to know how to make sketches stop. This baffled me for some time. My solution was eventually to create a blank sketch and to run it.

void setup(){}
void loop(){}

---

See also: Simple Light Meter (Arduino, Photocell and Servo)

The Architecture of Tiny Prayer Houses

I have to admit that the world of Chinese is mostly a mystery to me. Tradition, culture, or language? - around here, we use google to find out about those things. One thing that really surprised me about my recent trip to Malaysia to visit my grandma for the first time, was that my grandma helps facilitate people's prayers to a certain Ma Xian Niang, which had been explained to me to be the sister of Mazu. It was the first time I heard of the name. Personally, I am not religious myself and honestly know nothing of the cultural or religious practices of Chinese people in general. Sorry, yeah I know I'm a big fat potato.

Most people in Singapore will be familiar with Mazu, the goddess of the sea, but her sister? There is no english language information on the name, and it seems I will need to look to more Chinese sources for the answer. The only page that I've found on the matter also involves a person accounting his search for the origins of Ma Xian Niang, and finding that even seemingly wise priests who gave muddled or contradictory accounts of the origins of Ma Xian Niang. The post on the internet suggests she was not the sister of Mazu but simply another girl with the family name Ma, with a prescience for knowing when it was safe to sail. But how reliable could this information be? And is this simply something that is not documented in the English-speaking world?

The point of all this was that I had never expected a strongly religious element to emerge, based on what little I knew of the area's history. So, my "ancestors" had been brought over from Foochow (China) to Sitiawan (Malaysia) by Methodist missionaries. But where had this worship of Ma Xian Niang come from? When did it emerge? Who brought it over? Who was building and maintaining all these beautifully painted accoutrements of.... the temple? Was there some complex and thriving world of temple industry that we knew nothing of?



Another thing that I noticed was that nearly all the houses in the area of Sitiawan had these little prayer houses. My father mentioned having seen them when he was a child, but did not know what they were for, or how they were to be used. I had not expected this - from the descriptions that I had received of the town having been a settlement of Chinese who had been brought over by missionaries, that initially suggested to me that many might have been Christians or would have had been related to the Methodist Church in Gutian, Foochow. The children of the new settlement would have had the opportunity to have an English education (my father attended a methodist english school), meaning they were potentially anglicized and exposed to Christianity. Yet here were entire neighborhoods with chinese prayer altars in EVERY SINGLE HOUSE. These little red houses were also dotting the roads as we drove along! THEY WERE EVERYWHERE!



They look exactly like a tiny traditional Chinese house. This is one very lovely example, perched on a raised foundation, replete with a TINY STAIR leading up! WHY A TINY STAIR? Is it for some sort of tiny earth god to access this tiny temple? I love the tiny stair detail, because it makes it even more house-like! Who is the architect of these tiny prayer houses? What a clever addition of the tiny stair. Hey, you can't be expecting the god to be climb up on his own, all arms and legs, that seems a little undignified. Although, hang on, how big is the earth god? And although the one above doesn't have it, a lot of these tiny houses have got ornate roof details like carvings of dragons, making it almost like a miniature model of a temple or a traditional chinese house. Inside there is usually a pot of incense and a tablet and other offerings. I feel like the construction and design of these "prayer houses" constitutes an artisanal craft in itself!

















Lots and lots of them in Ayer Tawar...
Finally, I found a shop that sold these tiny prayer houses! Forgive me for not knowing what they are actually called, for the purpose of this post I have just called them tiny prayer houses because they look just like little houses to me and I think they're used for prayers. Anyway, I was very excited to see this shop/factory, with lots of bright little prayer houses scattered on the roadside, on a main street completely lined with chinese temples, mosques, churches, and hindu temples - the big prayer houses!



The shop from afar!


The front of the tiny house factory
Its crazy! From the approach you can even see a sign indicating that there is a mosque very close to it. I mean, my reading of this whole "tiny prayer house" tradition is that people here are not only praying at public places of worship (the big prayer houses), but even going one step further by "building" their own personal places of worship at home!

We stopped there so I could ask the proprietor a few silly questions. A lady inside came out and was very patient to answer my queries. She told me that the red houses situated closer to the ground were for 天宫 (Heaven god) and the raised houses on the pedestals were for 嗱督公. Googling for the latter reveals that it refers to Na Tuk Kong, a guardian spirit specific to Malaysia.



Detail of 天宫 prayer house



Detail of 嗱督公 prayer house
From Wikipedia:

It is not clear why the Chinese, having their own Earth deity can easily accept the Dato into their religious pantheon. May be they need a local deity to gain more spiritual protection (...) To most Malaysian Chinese, the Na Tuk Kong (Hokkien: Da Tok Kong) is a local guardian spirit that resides in trees, ant hills, caves, riversides and in strange stone formations...

This information seems to be have been derived from a Chinese source, so you can feel the awkward translation in it. I wish I could read Chinese more fluently. I should attempt to translate the entire article when I have more time. And boy oh boy, I am so very tickled by the idea of the local "Dato" guardian being thought to reside in this list of natural elements including "strange stone formations"! And this still does not explain who was the one who first started building tiny prayer houses???



When did people start building tiny prayer houses? Was it when the first wave of chinese migrants came over in 1905? The lady at the factory told me that this is definitely not something brought over from China, and that it was mainly only a practice of Chinese people living in Ipoh/Perak. She did conjecture that Singaporeans did not have it because of space constraints, and that some malaysian chinese opted for these prayer houses because they could be situated outside of their houses and thus not be a source of dust in the house. I wondered, was the use of normal house floor tiles intentional on the base of these tiny prayer houses? Or did people build this because they wanted to have a relic of what houses in China were like, because the houses in Malaysia are sure very different from the houses that one might have had in China! So many unanswered questions!







Not to be left out of the action, Indian Hindus can also get their own yellow prayer houses. The lady at the factory told me these yellow ones were indeed made for Hindus. She could not explain when exactly the Indian Hindus started getting prayer houses made, or how the malays, chinese and indians managed to influence one another in their religious worship. So this is basically all a mystery to me. Also, DO NOTE THE BRAND NEW TINY STAIR LEANING ON ONE OF THEM. Right now I am imagining people's possible conception of God.... in a tiny tun of dust, or a grain of sand! Being blown up the tiny stair into the tiny prayer house so the earth god can feast on the offerings. Why is this tiny prayer house made in this very particular size anyway? How big are the Chinese earth gods and Malaysian Na Tuk Kong thought to be? Does he really come in the form of small rocks and structures?

Would anyone more knowledgeable about all this care to enlighten me on this practice of keeping tiny prayer houses?...

Simple Light Meter (Arduino + Servo + Photocell)

Today I almost attended a 24-hour programming contest but at the briefing I decided I didn't fancy sitting there overnight, or being told where I can go and can't. So I simply left. Since the point of me signing up for such an event was mainly to force myself to set aside a little time to figure out how to use Arduino, I sat there for a little while looking up what I was interested in exploring, and went to Sim Lim, where I bought a few bits and bobs and a little servo - and then went home and made my own dumb experiment...

Arduino Uno + Photocell + 1 kΩ Resistor + Small Servo

BRIGHT!



DARK...

Okay this is basically a superbeginner mashup of these two basic tutorials: Adafruit's Making Sounds (Lesson 10) + Adafruit's Servo Motors (lesson 14). Well I guess I gotta start somewhere so don't laugh at the simpleness of this. I'm just writing it out here because I will probably forget it all if I don't write it down properly, and god knows actual hardware is an undiscovered country for me.

#include  
 
int servoPin = 9;
Servo servo;   
int angle = 0;   // servo position in degrees 
int photocellPin = 0;
 
void setup() 
{ 
  servo.attach(servoPin); 
  //Serial.begin(9600);
} 
 
void loop() 
{ 
  int reading = analogRead(photocellPin); 
  int newAngle = reading/3 - 100;
  //Serial.print(newAngle);
  //Serial.print("\n");
  servo.write(newAngle);           
  delay(60);  
} 

Fritzing

I made a sketch of the above with Fritzing. Fritzing is a useful tool for designers and programmers to design and document their prototypes for pcb boards, arduino-based and other electronics projects. Drag and drop and pull...

Dream Syntax (A Collection of 102 dreams from 2008-2013), and a Dream Generated from Other Dreams.

In 2008 I began a small project called Dream Syntax - a dream journal which not only collected stories of my dreams but also the drawings of the spaces within my dreams. I have just self-printed and hand-bound the textual portion of this project, which consists of 102 dreams from the years 2008 to 2013.

On Dream Syntax: If the spaces and urban configurations of a city have the ability to affect the way we inhabit it, shouldn't the spaces in our dreams have the potential to influence us as well, since we experience them just as intensely as our everyday reality? The city exists largely in the memories of its inhabitants, and places in a rapidly changing city may be erased from existence as quickly as a hazy dream evaporates in the early morning. Who is to say then that dreams are of no consequence? Our memories of our dreams are no less tangible than the memories of the real places that we remember ourselves once inhabiting—places which, in reality, exist only in our imagination.

For THE ARTIST, THE BOOK AND THE CROWD, I was asked to rewrite a book that was of significance to me. There are very many books that have influenced me and my own work; my first degree had been in English Literature, and you could say that reading and writing will always be my first love. Although there were many works to choose from, I decided to rewrite my own book.

On A Dream Generated From Other Dreams: "Since 2008, I've been collecting my dreams in the form of texts and maps of interior spaces, in an attempt to articulate a 'dream syntax'. In 2013, I began experimenting with a simple Markov Text Generator written in Python. I was interested in using it to generate 'predictions' of what I might be dreaming next by applying it to the data I have collected from my dreams over the last few years. A Markov text generator uses a Markov chain to generate the next word in a sentence, and it is commonly used to generate spam text which looks superficially authentic. The choice of the next word depends only on the word preceding it, and there is no real memory or computation of grammar involved. The entire text is simply assessed in terms of what words have a higher probability of being used after each subsequent word. This allows one to generate a 'real-looking' text that repurposes words from a master text, through a very simple mechanism. This is a generated ghost of a dream, parsed from the last 6 years of dreaming."

The book and the print will be at shown at THE ARTIST, THE BOOK AND THE CROWD at The Substation Gallery, from 2 to 11 August 2013, a show about artists' relationship with books and the written/spoken word. Curated by Ho Rui An, Ang Siew Ching and Karen Yeh, THE ARTIST, THE BOOK AND THE CROWD features new and recent work by Song-Ming Ang, Stephen Black, Sze-Yenn Cheong, Heman Chong, Debbie Ding, Ho Tzu Nyen, Ho Zhen Ming, Godwin Koay, Michael Lee, Lee Wen, Susie Lingham, Joyce Teo, Yu Mingyi and Zhao Renhui.


You're invited to come to the opening tonight (1 August 2013) at the Substation at 7pm! I will be reading excerpts from my book.

More Information:
http://www.substation.org/event/the-artist-the-book-and-the-crowd/

https://www.facebook.com/events/1392190280999985/
http://artistbookcrowd.com/

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The Book Binding Process

I read books all the time, and going by my pigheaded kind of logic, since I read so many books I should KNOW how to make my own books. Piffle and bosh, I thought it would be a piece of cake. Unfortunately this is a very labour intensive work. This took numerous hours to complete at a time that I already had too little time to spare. I was there sewing for hours. I decided to embark on it because I already had all the tools - a suitable awl, a bone folder, some thread, a needle, some PVA glue, and a cutting board. Actual professional bookbinders, PLEASE AVERT YOUR EYES NOW, or else you will see that my stitching is horrifyingly messy and because I made it up.







I used Cheap Impostor to do the imposition for this book, which consists of 208 pages, or 13 signatures of 16 each (4 pages). Its a shareware program which costs USD$35, and I know there were many many "free" alternatives but to be honest I didn't have so much time to waste tweaking things forever and this just did the job. I've gotten to the point in my life where I will pay for applications and software if they do the job, especially coming from the perspective of someone who has gotten paid to write code before. So I registered the licence, and within 5 minutes of downloading it, I was on my way to make an imposition of the book that was absolutely perfect for my duplex printer. One another note is that you must select LONG-EDGE BINDING when printing with a duplex printer that ejects paper the short side first.

The Final Binding

Book aficionados may describe my binding as a "creative mix between a coptic stitch and long stitch". Or, a big amateurish mess of red thread. You may be wondering, "Debbie, why did you use red thread to bind your book together? Was it because red threads represent the red string of destiny or fate in many east asian cultures including our own?" Well the answer is a lot more quotidian. I mainly had four spools of threads in my posession at the time of binding. I could have bound it with white, red, yellow, or green thread. However, I had a lot more of this red thread than the white, yellow and green threads. The white, yellow, and green had come from a pound store in London in a box of 12 spools for a pound, so you can imagine it seemed a little dodgy as well. The white would have been my first choice but i was almost out of it as white is often one's first go-to colour for sewing things back together. But... I had lot of red thread because these had been cast-offs from a friend's overzealous shopping trip at Ikea...

BUT HEY WHATEVER, I'VE MADE MY OWN BOOK!

A Whack-a-Carrot Game in an hour

This is a story about how we got a Whack-a-Carrot game up and running in an hour. Last Friday at 6.30pm, I suddenly decided to find a way to make a simple Whack-a-mole game with vegetables in the house and the Makey Makey, before people were to arrive at 8PM at our house for a going-away party.

It so happened that I bought a Makey Makey the other day. What is Makey Makey? Its a simple board that lets you plug things to become controllers for your computer. You can easily connect crocodile clips to it to make objects like vegetables and playdoh controllers for things on your computer - easily accessible keys include arrows, spacebar, standard directional keys for games (WASD), right mouse click, left mouse click. Objects you can use include anything with slightly conductive properties. That means most vegetables and fruits will work, but try not to use something too squishy/mushy/wet otherwise it will be a complete mess (unless that is the point of the thing you're trying to make...).

A few months ago I also signed up for a free licence for Loom game engine - attracted by its description of being similar to Actionscript 3; however I had never gotten around to investigating it further, besides looking inside its example folder, which had a Whack-a-mole example. So I reinstalled Loom on my mac (which was very small, the download was 8.1MB). By that point I also googled for WHACK-A-MOLE and MAKEY-MAKEY and interestingly someone had already made it! In fact extremely recently!! The whole thing was already on Github by a user called johnbatty - featuring a small modification on the Whack-a-mole example to use the A S D keys which are easily accessible on the Makey-Makey.

Makey Makey: http://www.makeymakey.com/
Loom Game Engine: http://theengine.co/loom
Github: https://github.com/johnbatty/WhackAPotato

Nevertheless in the interest of understanding what is going on and to see what Loomscript is like, I opened up the code (.ls) to make sure that I at least understood what was going on before utilising it. Loomscript does look almost exactly like Actionscript! The main modification here that makes it easy to use with Makey-Makey is that instead of a TouchEvent its been replaced with a KeyboardEvent which (surprise surprise) looks exactly like a KeyboardEvent in AS3.

ORIGINAL EXAMPLE:

mole1.addEventListener( TouchEvent.TOUCH, function(e:TouchEvent) { 
                if (e.getTouch(mole1, TouchPhase.BEGAN)) {                    
                    whackMole(e, mole1) 
                } } );   

JOHNBATTY'S MODIFIED EXAMPLE:

protected function keyDownHandler(event:KeyboardEvent):void
        {   
            var keycode = event.keyCode;

            if (keycode == LoomKey.A) {
                whackMole(null, moles[0]);
            }
            
            if (keycode == LoomKey.S) {
                whackMole(null, moles[1]);            
            }
            
            if (keycode == LoomKey.D) {
                whackMole(null, moles[2]);            
            }

            // etc etc etc
        }

Looks just like AS3 doesn't it? I can imagine people familiar with AS3 should have no problems doing Loomscript.

Next we needed a willing.... face. A victim was quickly found in the kitchen.



The very sporting Star of the Whack-A-Kent... oops I mean Whack-a-Carrot
And within less than an hour of first taking the Makey-Makey out of the box, installing Loom, looking inside the examples, downloading the modified code from the user johnbatty (thanks!), and photoshopping some pics, we already managed to have a Whack-a-carrot game with Kent's face on it. The interesting thing is that Loom also has live reload so we could just swop in new pictures along the way....


Here is Kent playing with his own Whack-a-Carrot game.







More happy participants:







I also swopped in a lemon at some point to prove that other vegetables worked too. Also, the reason I used carrots was because I only had carrots left in the house after having boiled all my potatoes to make mash earlier in the day.

Hunt & Gather, Terraria - Wawi Nazarozza

Recently the Singapore Psychogeographical Society was up in Manila to speak at a satellite event for Wawi Navarroza's exhibition, "Hunt & Gather, Terraria". She had kindly invited me down, and I had long wanted to visit Manila, so it was perfect, especially because the project seemed really fascinating and close to my heart.



From the project text: "Project Terraria is the artist Wawi Navarroza's public call for the urbanfolk of Metro Manila to forage for soil, plants, wild growth, moss, pebbles, and ephemera from unlikely places and meaningful locations in the city. The materials from various sources are then juxtaposed and arranged in terrariums by the artist, and photographed for exhibition "ULTRAMAR, Part II: HUNT & GATHER, TERRARIA" on view at Silverlens Galleries 5 June - 6 July 2013. Ultimately, the communal project builds a psychogeographic map of the corners of Metropolitan Manila, the city and its memories, and its pressing realities written in a created habitat of plantlife and native soil."

In short, a public call was made for urban dwellers in Manila to collect ephemera and other materials from all sorts of locations around Manila, and then Wawi arranged them into beautiful terrariums, which were documented in photographs and are later to be published in a book that Wawi and the Office of Culture and Design are working on at the moment. They should be announcing their book launch soon and I'm real excited to see the book - it already sounds like the book will be really amazing!











Exhibition View
For me, reading the descriptions were just as interesting as viewing the terrariums. Here are a few of them...









Preparing for the talk in the Gallery



"Matters of Psychogeography"



Post-talk picture: Wawi, Marc, Clara, Debbie.


As we departed from Silverlens, the group of us attracted the attentions of a taxi with an incredible name, and it pulled up, lingering in front of us for quite some time, trying to convince us to go together with him on the Metropolis Adventure Royal Cruise. A Metropolis Cruise to Nowhere...

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I'll be really interested to see what happens to the plants after a few months. I suppose I've had some experience moving plants around - I remember being the sort of horrifying child that would put everything in her pockets, so much so that common statements that I constantly heard from my parents (and still hear to this day) include "DON'T PUT IN YOUR MOUTH!" and "DON'T PICK UP THE RED WAX!!!!". I once carried home some raintree seeds from the school playground and planted a small raintree in the utility area, somewhat to the detriment of my mother's washing. Repeated "scavenging" for plants outside, and bringing home new plants resulted in my realisation that plants could actually contract diseases from one another, that perhaps the reason why people did not pick up plants from random places to bring back to one's garden was that some soil and some plants were indeed carriers for diseases that could wipe out an existing garden, even if you initially couldn't see any traces of the bugs or the diseases. Or who knows, perhaps they will thrive in spite of the environment, developing a resistance to these strains of plant diseases.

I just love the idea of it being a movement of soil. I think being able to move and transport things around is part of life, or a sign of life. Soil and earth is the very fabric of the land, something so nurturing, yet also commonly referred to as dirt. Most people in the city don't like getting themselves muddy or dirty. But I am not afraid to get my hands dirty to get to know the soil and the earth. What if in a distant future all other information about the world was erased, but Wawi's terrariums were still alive, and a future archaeologist/geologists examines it without knowing the context of its formation. What would they make of it? Would it confuse them, that so much effort and time had been spent to bring these particles together to form individual little pods of ecosystems, the unusual combination of which might not be apparent visually until one examined the nature of the soil and the rocks, and the origins of the plants inside?



Keep us updated on your terrariums, Wawi!

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Facebook updates on the project here: https://www.facebook.com/WNterrariaproject
Thank you so much to Wawi, Clara, Marc, Karen, the people at Silverlens, for facilitating the talk, and making the project all come together!