The End of Hearing: private view & friends and family viewing

"The End of Hearing" is now comfortably set up in the Rochelle School in Schoreditch, London. The whole Digital Media section is placed on the first floor of the gallery, making it a nice and cosy place to be around all animating and prototyping mates.

The private view will take place today at 18:00. You need an invitation to get in, so probably if you got one, you'd be considering to come. If this is the case, please do not hesitate any longer—come and see the amazing work of the last year of the good and old MACD.



If, however, you have not been blessed with a magic invitation, please feel free to come on any other day between June 15th and 23rd, 10:00 - 18:00. I will be there every day conducting my experiment (the Rochelle Experiment), and I will be happy to give you a tour around the place.

Another piece of good news: my parents have decided to visit me during the weekend and they will see my work at the "friends and family" opening. Horray!

The End of Hearing: building the implants #4

The blisters are now ready.



So far I have only 30 implants assembled, so I cannot use all the packaging I produced, but after June 14th (after the private view) I will be soldering more of them. I plan to have 60 implants in total to give away to people visiting my project and sharing their feedback.

Below: blisters with AIR implants inside and a close-up of the AIR implant. Looks pretty sinister, I hope.

The End of Hearing: filming #1

For the purpose of a film, some necessary changes were to be made in my initial script:

1. the name of the think tank should have been changed. Trade-off Futures Institute sounds good, but it does not indicate any connection with design—and this is very important in my work, as I try to redefine the role of a designer.

2.the scripts should be 3 times shorter. Otherwise all that reading will bore the viewer to death... and will take definitely more than 20 minutes. In a gallery, in which there is 55 other work to be seen, no one has that much time to spend. My films should be something in between 5-8 minutes.

3. There need to be more focus on the role of design in my project. The scenarios are all fine and intersting, but there is no way I can communicate all scientific evidence for each of then in a 1-2 minutes long presentation... I need to focus and shorten the script, as well as make it more dramatic. Dramatic is always good.

So, to conclude, what I came up with can be heard in the films that I will link to later on. The voice-over for the film was recorded by my sister. Thank you for all your generous help, Dotty!

The End of Hearing: building the Otomixer #5

Finally it's ready.



The Otomixer is working well, is looking good, and is making people curious.

Next thing to do is to film it and use the footage in a publicity release film I am going prepare for the show (it will communicate each scenarion separately, all of them as a general theme, as well as how the viewers can participate in the project).

All effort can be now directed towards making the blister for implants and creating the films.

The End of Hearing: building the implants #3

The box with foam filling did not work really well as a packaging for the implants. First of all it had a rather "home" touch and a "friendly" feel. I do not want it to look like that—this is an electronic device, which is supposed to be planted inside newborns' brains after all.

So I decided to create a blister. Because there is probably no blister of this size available in the market, and because I wanted it to be rather rigid and strong, I decided to create my own blister desing and vacuum form them using 1mm acrylic.

Below you can see the form I created. Thanks a lot to Melvin and Billy for hepling me out with routing the holes. The mold is equipped with a number of 1mm holes, through which air will be sucked out (2 holes in each implant nest, 4 holes in the corners of the mold (to prevent acrylic wrinckling in that areas) and 5 holes along the axis of the mold.



I made around 30 vacuum forms, around 14 of which are actually looking good enough to be used.

Another thing is the back of the blister... it turned out that finding an adequate material and processing it took me even more time that making the blisters!

The End of Hearing: building the Otomixer #4

When I came back from Gdańsk there was really no time to waste. On the very same day when my plane from northern Poland had landed in Luton, I went yet again to the workshop to continue my work on the Otomixer.

It took me a day to adjust the size, prime and paint the pre-laser-cut Otomixer main control panel. After assembling empty vials and plugging in the headphones, the device looked like this:



I took me several days to seal all the vials and pour the liquids into them. I used three food colourings (yellow, green and red), potassium permanganate (purple) and india ink (black). Vials are sealed with a termoplastic resin, which I got from my grandfather (it was used in Polish radio industry in the '70, but still does an excellent job).





Soon afterwards I started to assemble all necessary electronic components. Eventually, I manage to fit in 2 amplifiers (based no the stethoscope design that I build before) and an equaliser (5 band, instead of 6 band, which I used previously, but this is still the same circutry). It works all fine, and is pretty exciting when you can equalise the same voices you can normally hear around you (it's actually live equalisation). Unfortunately the differences in frequencies are not that distinct (even though I used capacitors ranging from several hunderds of pF to 10.000 times stronger ones of uF value)... This is something I might want to work on later on, improving my electronic circutry skills at the same time.

Art & Science Meeting, Gdańsk 2011

I'm just leaving Gdańsk in northern Poland, where I managed to attend the Art & Science Meeting conference. I should have been sitting home preparing for the final show in less than two weeks time now, but I could not miss this kind of event in my own country.

And it was definitely worth it!

I visited three very interesting shows, each tackling a completely different aspect of art + science theme. "The Pleasure of Light" is a retrospection of work by F Malina and G Kepes work from fifty years ago. "Performing Data" by M Fleischmann and W Strauss reveals the very beginnings of virtual reality and computer interaction projects, as well as the creation of 3d spaces. All this when I was enjoying Mario Bros on my 64 colours Nintendo console in 1992! The last one is "Blue Morph" by V Vesna and J Gimzewski. It is a lovely piece really gaining from being placed in a gothic church.



"Blue Morph" by Vesna & Gimzewski.

In five hours time I will be boarding a plane back to London and going straight to work on my own projects. Nevertheless, I will have very positive memories from Gdańsk in May 2011!

The End of Hearing: building the Otomixer #3

Today I bought half a liter of white primer and half a liter of white glossy paint, and I gave the Otomixer its lovely, elaborate, bespoke colour—clear, neutral white. I decided to keep it white for several reasons:
• it is a medical appliance, therefore it needs to fit our expectations of such device;
• it is a tool of the future, and future is clean and sterile—at least in science fiction that I read;
• it is the best colour for something that does not exist (yet!);
• it will be a nice background for the glass vials with vividly colourful liquids;
• it will help focusing on what the tool does, rather than how it looks like, which is what I hope for.



The final coating of the Otomixer can be seen above. Of course I could not stop myself from spraying too much paint, which proves the old saying from my homeland right: "the very good is the worst enemy of the good"...

Tomorrow I will start mounting the glass vials on the top of the Otomixer, cleaning the jack sockets, installing 4 bumpers to the base, laser cutting the front panel and of cause installing the equaliser mechanism (this however, will not take place in the workshop due to the fact that dust might not be beneficial for electronics).

The End of Hearing: building the implants #2

So apart from 60 ready to use radio receiver implants, I will need to present them in a way to the audience, and also think of how to give them as a reward to those, who decide to help we with the feedback.



I tried out using an old ink pen box, but it does not work really, makes the whole thing look rather cosy and gives a wring impression about the nature of the implant. It probably need to be more medical, with an edge, a bit like medical devices opened from a disposable septic packaging and then disposed into a bin with other tools heading for a hot, bubbly, germ-killing bath. Or something like a metal tray with meat in Marks & Spencer (btw, what a criminal waste of materials and resources!).

All this needs some thought.

The End of Hearing: building the implants #1

Apart from the Otomoxer, I need to build a number of working radio implants. This is the physical part of the "Voices inside my head" story, where a possibility of having a radio receiver implanted into the cochlear nerve is discussed.

I ordered sixty germanium OA91 diodes, which proved to work well before. Apart from that I need capacitors and induction coils.



Although previously I had managed to tune in to talkSport at 1089 kHz, the signal was rather weak. This is because I had picked the value of the capacitance imprecisely. Later on I managed to tune in to BBC radio 5 at 909 kHz. I used a pair of 390 pF ceramic capacitors (joint capacitance = 780pF) and a 39 uH inductance coil. This makes the circuit resonate at 912 kHz—almost precisely at the wavelength of BBC 5!

I will assemble 50 "BBC radio 5" receivers and 10 "talkSport" receivers. I hope all these will work in the Rochelle School during the show. One of my concerns is the roof, which is made of tin-clad. This might hinder the reception. Another issue is the antenna—should I organise a more professional one, or stick to the simple wire, which has been working to a better or worse extent all the time now?