Ever wanted to cook with liquid nitrogen? Grow your own clothes from bacterial and yeast cultures? Plug in potatoes to power LED lamps? No? Then the Science Fair isn’t for you.

But if you answered yes to any of the above you should clear 23 June in your diary and start getting excited. The Science Fair is just around the corner, with a massive program of free, zany, new workshops and activities that prove science isn’t just done in a lab

11-29 June Untitled Sound Project (Public art installation)
Use fruits and vegetables to make music in the walkway outside The Edge in the lead up to Science Fair. Brisbane kinetic artist Michael Candy will install the Untitled Sound Project, which uses fruits and and vegetables placed in a low voltage electric circuit, with switches underneath each. The different conductivities of the fruits and vegetables produce a range of tones when the switch is pressed, letting you make sweet, sweet music!

You can also dabble in a public science experiment will run alongside the installation, documenting how the gradual decay and the destruction of different fruits and vegetables by insects, impacts the tones they produce. We’d love to head your compositions, take a quick video and post it on our Facebook page.

SCIENCE FAIR PROGRAM

Make and take sessions from 1pm to 4:30pm
Nestled in the window bays are the Make and Take sessions. Get involved in your own science experiments and enter your creations in the Science Fair Awards to win a bunch of great prizes. Sessions will start every half hour, no bookings required.

• Preserved Flora Jewellery – craft a brooch, ring or pendant from plant samples set in resin
• Vege Powered Lamp – turn a humble potato into a battery to power an LED lamp
• Bio-fuelled Volcano – ditch the bicarb and vinegar, use yeast to create a bio-fuelled volcano
• Liquid Nitrogen Sorbet – indulge in molecular gastronomy to make fruity sorbet
• Bio Boat Derby – build and race your own yeast powered boat in the Bio Derby
• Belly Button Bio-Diversity – sample and incubate the micro-organisms in your belly button  

Workshops from 1pm
Delve a little deeper into projects where science meets fashion, music and performance. Workshops run for 1.5 hours unless otherwise indicated, no bookings required.

• Microscopy for Fashion starting 1pm & 3pm: ditch the dSLR, find out how to take photographs using a microscope. Use the photographs you’ve taken learn how to edit in Photoshop to create custom-printed fabric. A follow-up workshop will be offered in July with The Stitchery to create custom fashion pieces from the fabrics designed.
• DIY Organic Textiles starting 1pm & 3pm: take a vat of tea, add a little bacterial and yeast culture and begin to grow a cellulose textile which you can use to make clothing. Find out how it all works and start off a project that will unfold over the coming weeks as we grow, prepare and sew organic textiles.
• Bio-Acoustic Soundscapes starting 1pm & 3pm: your body is capable of making many different sounds, some more socially acceptable than others! We are looking to capture them all in a soundscape of the human body. Learn to record in the Recording Studio and edit in Ableton live.
• Spoken Science starting 2:30pm (2 hours): keep it simple, scientist. Work with a slam poet to learn how to present your scientific ideas in a way that will capture the attention of your audience and help them to understand exactly what you are trying to say. You are then invited to apply your newfound skills as a 5 minute guest speaker at the Mad Scientist Tea Party later on in the day.

Science Fair Awards Ceremony from 4:30pm
Do you know what a Non-Newtonian Fluid DJ/VJ set is? Hint: it’s a little like this. Opening the Science Fair Awards, local VJ Simulcast will show you how it’s done in a spectacular demonstration of what happens when sound meets science.

Then, the part of the day everyone has been waiting for. If you have entered your workshop creations into the Science Fair Awards you could be in the running to claim some great prizes and be crowned:

• Science Fair Bio Boat Derby Champion for fastest bio boat
• Science Fair Chief CryoGastronomist for tastiest liquid nitrogen sorbet
• Science Fair Artist in Resin for most imaginative resin jewellery piece
• Science Fair Yeast Vulcanologist for most explosive yeast volcano
• Science Fair Organic Energy Ambassador for brightest vege lamp

Mad Scientist Tea Party from 6pm
Under the stars there is a table set with tea for our mad scientists and their guests. Take a seat, and prepare to indulge in curiosities from the scientific world. Join Brisbane scientist Drew Titmarsh to learn more about the futurist microbioreactor array technology he helped to develop. Don’t forget to pack a jumper! Book your seat online.

Join Rebecca for a presentation of the results to date from her durational performance.

When: from 1pm, 30 Jun
Where: The Edge Auditorium,
Cost: Free
Bookings: Not required

And to further update on yesterday’s post, I’ve just been informed by our Creative Production Manager that it’s the structure of paper that matters for writing on it – the ability for the ink to catch on the chunks of fibre. It’s the effective smoothness of bacterial cellulose sheets that might pose a problem for such applications, then. But there are always ways around problems like that. If anyone knows of people already making paper from microbial cellulose, please link away!

There is so much to love about this, but as someone who loves a nice cup of Sri Lanka’s finest infusion, I am particularly delighted by the fact that the culture is grown in tea. The brew is called kombucha (which literally translates as “seaweed tea”), and has long been used as a kind of tonic drink, although having seen the stuff, I am curious as to how anyone thought to try drinking it! As you’ll see in Suzanne Lee’s videos, a couple of weeks of the microbes working away in a tub produces a thick mat on top of the tea, which looks to me rather like a big slab of pig skin.

The microbes that do the work are a collection of bacteria and yeasts: each helps keep conditions friendly for the other, which we call a symbiotic relationship (such a culture is sometimes known as a SCOBY – Symbiotic Culture Of Bacteria and Yeast). If my basic understanding is sensible, the yeast help keep the environment acidic, which makes the acetobacter cells happy to pump out cellulose fibrils; over time, these form a network that becomes great big floating home to all those tiny microbes.

Although kombucha has remained mostly in the culinary domain, Ms Lee isn’t the first to see the potential of cellulose-based materials made by microscopic things instead of plants (cellulose is the stuff we get from plants to make paper, cellophane, Rayon/viscose, and is the main component of textiles like cotton; it’s the main structural material plants make and are made from). Nöle Giulini used kombucha to make some rather fleshy-looking sculptures, and, as outlined in this jolly convenient article, microbe-produced cellulose has already found uses in food, medical and paper-making.

Despite the excitement and potential, there are always a bunch of intimidating technical challenges in projects like these. Suzanne Lee’s scientific collaborators are working on how to make the kombucha-derived material more water-resistant and durable (it currently absorbs water readily and breaks down quite quickly), as well as working on ways to optimise the bacteria’s productivity. This video touches on a few of the challenges and approaches. You may also note from Professor Brown’s summary that people don’t seem to be making paper purely from bacterial cellulose; I presume this is because you big sturdy fibres to make paper, and the bacteria (being tiny and single-celled) make tiny fine meshes. Or maybe it’s to do with the other material present that helps to bind the layers in wood-derived paper. Please comment if you know!

Clearly there is still much to learn and much to try, and one of the things I find exciting about this is that it’s science you can experiment with at home (or, say, at The Edge)! We are eager to see what we can do in this area, and would love to get more clever and enthusiastic people aboard. We’ll be teaming up with some university-based fashion innovators, and I would be delighted to hear from any kombucha enthusiasts, microbiologists, biochemists, polymer chemists, paper- and/or textile-makers, and anyone else who’s interested! So, if you want to get all mad sciency and try growing clothing, fabrics, fibres, paper or something entirely new in a vat, please leave a comment below or just drop in at The Edge: I’m usually about on Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays, and will also be at the Mad Scientist Tea Party on 12 June and the Science Fair on 23 June.

Let’s get something brewing!

The pumping system I’m using at present isn’t the “air lift” described in the WindowFarms version 2 instructions.  I was hoping to get away from the fluid depth sensitivity of that system, so tried a setup to draw water into the tube by the Venturi effect: when you have a small hole in a pipe, a quick flow through the pipe will suck air or liquid in through the hole. This turned out not to avoid the need for the intake to be submerged at a substantial depth, but it did make it easier to keep it on the base of the reservoir (I previously had problems with the hose curling up, and because we had algae problems at the time, I didn’t want to put in more parts to use as bracing). The problem with the Venturi setup is that the water comes out as a fairly fine spray, and I suspect this is how we’re losing quite a lot of liquid. In contrast, the WindowFarms model has the liquid come out in a slow drip. So I’ll probably revert to that (or something else entirely) when I get time to make another…

Since Expo ’88, South Bank has become one of Brisbane’s most iconic destinations, enjoyed by millions of locals and tourists alike. Capture your favourite memories of South Bank in a free, two-day digital storytelling workshop.

Join with experts from State Library’s Queensland Memory team and The Edge to create a digital story which documents your favourite memories of South Bank. The workshop will cover how to generate and develop a concept, storyboard ideas, develop a script and digitise analogue materials. You will be introduced to iMovie and Audacity software as tools for creating your digital piece. To complete your story you will also be given access to previously unreleased visual materials from South Bank Corporation and State Library collections.

The two day workshop is free and will include lunch each day. Places are limited, so if you would like to participate please email book.it@edgeqld.org.au with your name, phone numbers and 2-3 sentences sharing the memory that will be the focus of your digital story. Successful applicants will be notified by 23 May.

When: 12-5pm, 2 & 3 Jun
Where: Lab 1, The Edge, State Library of Queensland
Cost: Free and lunch is included
Expressions of interest: Email book.it@edgeqld.org.au with your name, phone number and a short (2-3 sentence) description of what you would like to focus on for your digital story. Applications close 21 May.

The Edge in partnership with Portable and the Asia Pacific Design Library is proud to present Frank Chimero, one of America’s most influential thinkers in the design industry.

Based in New York, Frank Chimero is one of America’s preeminent thought leaders on design theory, practice and culture. He has worked as a designer, illustrator and strategist for brands such as the New York Times, Facebook and WIRED and his recent book The Shape of Design explores the notion that logic may not always to be the best way to solve design problems. His work often employs symbolism, concepts and storytelling simultaneously, creating pieces that both delight and provoke thought.

Frank will explore and reveal his innate understanding of design and its role within larger systems, discussing the patterns of good design, choices that we make in design and how it can influence change.

The series is suited to creative professionals working within a wide variety of design related industries including graphic design, web design, fashion, technology and industrial design. It consists of a keynote presentation, Q&A, along with networking drinks after the event.

When: 3-5:30pm, 5 Jun
Where: The Edge, State Library of Queensland
Cost: $85 conc./$95 adult +BF (for 20% off tickets use discount code LIBRARY at checkout)
Bookings: Online

Svenja Kratz – 15 May
Svenja Kratz is an interdisciplinary artist interested in the intersections and creative possibilities within art and science. Based in Brisbane, for the past three years she has produced an evolving series of exhibitions collectively titled The Absence of Alice. Her work maps the creative evolution and movement of this initial project into other areas of applied biology, including genetic engineering, and primary culture of human and fetal calf cells. She is currently completing a PhD in bio-media art, looking at of cell and tissue cultures at QUT in a creative partnership between the Creative Industries Faculty and Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation (IHBI).
Can’t make it? Stream this session live online with Kondoot.

This century will we genetically modify food, pets, our children, ourselves? Information and sharing information is reaching immense speeds and saturation, but what happens to that grey area between public and private?  When are our bodies our own, and when are we the property of the global social corpus? Living in times where we rarely put ourselves in situations where we need to trust each other, and in most cases given more reason to distrust, will you trust me with your most intimate material? Your DNA? ONE cannot exist without you.

ONE is my durational performance, which I will be continuing while in residence at The Edge from April to June 2012.

Each week there will be performance times, all free, if you would like to come and participate in the work. Thanks to the The Edge, ONE will move into phase two of this work – the imaging of the DNA. There will be open studios and opportunities to chat and imagine what will evenuate into a bio-portrait of one million  people.

Keep your eyes peeled for exact times, locations and  opportunities to participate in this project. ONE’s progress will be posted on The Edge website and also the ONE site.

ONE – first performed on September 8, 2011 presented by  Brisbane Festival UNDER THE RADAR

Rebecca Cunningham - photo by Alyssa Lee Wilmott

$10 000 commission: Ben Hamley
Ben’s project, The Cloud, centres on the provocation, what if you could curate serendipity and control context? Ben’s installation is an experiment in cognitive psychology, memory, and place making that combines brain-computer interaction technology, contextually responsive environments and biomimicry to create a physical ‘cloud’ in the entrance of The Edge that will capture, remember and display memories of visitors.

$3000 commission: Kati Eyles and Kate Geck
Kate and Kati’s animated digital mural will embody the energy, vibrancy and potential of The Edge. This colourful, animated mural has both non digital and digital media and is designed to welcome The Edge users and to engage them in creating content for their space. Along the walls there will be a series of lenticular printed cards shimmering waves of colour and digital photo frames playing animated GIFs.

$150 commission: Erin Evanochko
Erin’s project, The Monster, has been inspired by the feelings of fear, despair and terror you can feel when faced with a monster and the thought of using the Adobe Production and Design Suite for the first time. Exploring this theme, she will create a series of works combining hand drawn elements with animations create in After Effects and Photoshop, make digital wallpaper for spaces around The Edge.

Keep an eye out over the next couple of months as these projects start to pop up around our building.

Joining us in the office for the next couple of weeks is Sandra Carluccio. She is pulling together an interactive, locative theatre piece for the Anywhere Theatre Festival, and I sat down with her to learn a little more about it.

Tell us a bit about who you are and what you do?
I am a Brisbane based emerging performance artist. I studied Performance Studies at QUT with honours and graduated in 2010. This is around when I began my interest in outdoor, participatory, performance journeys. My first contact with this was from working as an artist’s assistant/audience guide with Melbourne based company One Step At A Time Like This and their piece called en route in 2010. Then I saved my money to complete an internship with world-renowned digital artists Blast Theory in Brighton for a few months last year. This year I was lucky enough to receive a JUMP mentorship to make my own participatory, technology and urban space driven performance piece and get some guidance from my chosen mentor, Steve Bull from the PVI Collective in Perth. The piece is titled This is Kansas City and will have its first public showing at the Anywhere Theatre Festival May 17-19.

How did you get involved with JUMP mentoring?
After getting some experience with more advanced artists, I decided it was time I put my learning into a consolidated project. I also wanted an outside eye to assist with the artistic shaping of the performance. I searched for companies with similar objectives to mine and got an idea of who to choose as a mentor. I was lucky enough to meet someone during my internship in the UK who was on the board of my mentor’s company – The PVI Collective, so she put me in contact with them. I approached Steve and put together an application of what I wanted to achieve with through the program.  With some of the grant money I took a short residency in March in the CIA studios to work on my piece and have daily contact with my mentor. As Steve lives in Perth we do a lot of remote mentorship. The Youth Arts Queensland team, who I seek support from for my state, help with marketing and organise other career development opportunities. The end result is really up to you though.

How did you become interested in performance?
Throughout highschool, Drama class was always a place where I expressed opinions, feelings, personal and meaningful stories, while at the same time having fun.  From then until now, my research, teachers, peers, and other artists have radically changed the way I view and create performances.

How did you end up at The Edge?
I approached Daniel Flood last year when I was still in the UK about possibly having some support for a performance I was creating when I returned home. The concept was driven by an interest in using mobile technology so The Edge seemed like the most appropriate place to put my feelers out.  At the start of this year when I was back in Australia,  I met with Daniel and explained that I wanted to do a location triggered performance journey with mobile technology. He suggested two wonderful people I should talk to, that were around on a Thursday night at an event called Hack The Evening. I met Luke Atherton, and Clinton Freeman (now a Catalyst at The Edge) and have been hanging out at The Edge and working with them since.

Tell us a little more about your show and what makes it different?
This is Kansas City asks participants to enter an augmented reality where a series of phone calls to their mobile phone direct their body, gaze, and imagination around the cultural centre to unravel the story of a criminal only known as The Monster. I would call this piece a performance experience. There are no performers, although audience members who opt to come to the show act as performers by carrying out actions, being involved in the fiction, and also witness the urban space around them with a heightened engagement. The piece guides solo participants through two voices, The Authorities (the voice of the city) and The Monster (the voice of the River, also known as a criminal) who pose moral obstacles, and deliver their versions of reality of Kansas City. The voices were chosen to personify natural, political, cultural, and social events that have occurred in Brisbane’s recent landscape of history.

A performance experience on a mobile phone is not a new form, but it is different because this fiction is my interpretation of this city and its story on a heightened level. I hope that by participants experiencing this story they will take away a new perspective of this city, either physically or imaginatively.

How did you go about pulling together the technology used in the show?
I had a vision, and then I asked the hackers Luke and Clinton to realise this vision. I had them create the location based trigger system for mobile devices. The program works by using the GPS coordinates where I would like key phone calls to occur. When a participant arrives with their phone at the programmed location, a server sends a pre-recorded phone call from “The Monster” or “The Authorities”. This is how the fiction is delivered.

How can people get a ticket?
This is Kansas City is part of the Anywhere Theatre Festival, and is on from the 17-19 of May. You can purchase a ticket through the website. The performance experience goes for approximately 30 minutes and each session is for a capacity of 6 participants.

Fast four:

First three tabs you open in a new browser window: Gmail, Facebook (just as important for communication as email these days), and ArtsHub for browsing the news articles and reviews.

First mobile phone you ever owned: Nokia for sure. Miss you, Snake game…

The one piece of technology you couldn’t live without: My phone! Basically it’s the handiest tool for creating a site responsive performance, as it is ‘mobile’. It is my Internet, my voice recorder, note taker, picture taker, video taker, locator, and people communicator.

Geekiest habit or hobby: I hang out at the Library far too much, or maybe not enough

In a previous post, I asked how my skin would keep up with my increasing waistline if I put myself on DrRiviera’s “window to weight-gain” diet. The details are something scientists and engineers are still working on, but the general answer is that skin grows when it’s stretched beyond a certain comfortable limit. Just as we feel pain if our arms are pulled too hard in opposite directions, the cells in skin also release a kind of alarm signal when over-loaded, but this signal shouts “grow!” And it keeps growing until it feels suitably relaxed again.

So what does “grow” mean in this case?

To answer this, let’s have a quick look at what tissues are and what they’re made of. Tissues are the materials that organs are made from, and include stuff like skin, bone, muscle and even blood. The main things that make up a tissue are cells and what we call extracellular matrix.

You can think of a cell as the basic living unit of a body. That is, they can survive and reproduce on their own if you give them the right conditions (note: this won’t produce a whole human body J). Different cells act as builders, repairers, sensors, controllers and communications teams: in short, they do the work. In some cases, they’re also part of the structure: your skin keeps out the rest of the world, and your blood vessels keep your blood inside, by cells holding tightly onto one another.

The extracellular matrix (ECM) is the stuff in between the cells. If cells were spiders, the ECM would be the web. When a palaeontologist digs up an ancient bone, the cells that built, maintained and lived in that bone have long gone, but the matrix remains. It’s a mix of proteins, fats and sugars (and tiny plates of mineral, in the case of bones and teeth) that are produced and organised by the cells. If this all seems a bit abstract, think of a bowl of jelly: that’s pretty much the stuff I’m talking about (the jelly more so than the bowl).

So when we talk about skin growing, we’re talking about more cells and more matrix. Cells divide and spit out a bunch more matrix such as collagen. The tricky bit is that they have to do this while still doing their job of holding together a tight seal against the outside world. Can you imagine how hard it would be to make a bridge longer while there are cars driving over it?

We still have a lot to learn about how this works, but surgeons have been putting the idea of mechanically-driven growth to work for a few decades now. Lengthening a bone was first attempted (as far as we know) in 1905 by Italian surgeon, Alessandro Codavilla, and the current method, known as distraction osteogenesis (used, for example, to replace large amounts of bone smashed by an accident), was pioneered in theUSSR by Gavriil Ilizarov in the 1940s or ’50s. Distraction osteogenesis involves letting the fracture (or cut) begin healing, but before it gets too far, to slowly move the two bone fragments apart – a rate somewhere around 1mm a day, if I remember rightly. The current procedure is reportedly painful enough, but I read that Codavilla tried to do the expansion all in one hit! Bone has not been the only target tissue. Also in the 1950s, Charles Neuman implanted a balloon beneath the skin to cause expansion as it was gradually inflated. Both of these methods have become widely used since the 1980s.

The great thing about skin expansion is that it lets the surgeon use the patient’s own skin to cover up defects, so you get the right amount of skin, it’s alive and fully functional already and won’t be rejected by the immune system. It’s challenging, though, for both clinician and patient: it’s hard to know exactly what size and shape of expander you need and how much to inflate it (because the elasticity of skin means it will shrink once the extra tension is removed), and the patient has to put up with having a huge bubble under their skin for a few weeks. But it works beautifully.

Getting back to how… Both the matrix and the cells of skin are under constant tension, like the rubber of an inflated balloon. Skin has to be pretty flexible to let us move, but once it’s stretched past this normal range of movement, the cells have to get busy to avoid the skin breaking.

There are a few different ways by which cells detect stretch, and that’s probably getting a bit too technical. But the effects on the cell are basically these: the cell gets set to divide (the process is called mitosis, and results in one cell becoming two of the same), it produces more extracellular matrix like collagen, and it gives out signals to encourage other cells around it to do the same. Not all of this goes on in any one cell at one time, but the end effect is, as mentioned above, more cells and more matrix. In the outer layer (the epidermis), we need more cells to cover the increasing surface area. Beneath this (in the dermis), we need more cells to build and maintain the tissue, and they need more matrix to hang on to and to carry the load.

To divide, a cell has to first detach from its surroundings and shrink back into a ball. So when a tissue grows, only a small proportion of its cells can divide, while the others go on holding everything in place. Likewise, when new matrix is produced, the existing structure needs to be disrupted somewhat to jostle it into place. It’s these processes that particularly fascinate me at present. I hope to have a lot more to tell you about them in the coming months!

An interesting aside: cells divide along the line of maximum tension. This is handy for skin growth, because it means a cell doubles in the direction of stretch. But the cartilage of growing bones is under a compressive load – that is, it’s being pushed rather than pulled. When you squeeze something elastic, you’ll notice it spreads out to the sides. So when the cartilage in the growth plate gets compressed, the cells are stretched sideways, which means they also divide sideways. For the bone to get longer, then, the newly divided cells have to do a little tumble so they’re both lined up with the axis of the bone (and load).

I am less convinced about my alternative pumping system, using the venturi effect instead of lifting water with bubbles. It works, but takes a lot of tuning to get the right flow rate, and at present, isn’t working very efficiently. Still, the plants are surviving, so it’ll do for now…

More pictures to come…

Alex busy at work in The Edge foyer space

Local artist Alex Jack is a familiar face here at The Edge, whether she is doing a workshop or refining her skills in Photoshop.