Danielle Morgan – MLab in the Humanities

Illustrated Guide to Prototyping the Past

Danielle Morgan — Fri, 25 Nov 2016 17:59:11 +0000

In August 2016, the MLab began work on An Illustrated Guide to Prototyping the Past, which, instead of acting as a how-to manual, outlines the problems that prompt researchers to prototype histories of media and technologies. These problems include the “scale problem,” the “imitation problem,” the “capitalism problem,” the “labour problem,” and the “rot problem.” Throughout the last few years, problems like these impelled the MLab to prototype early wearbles, early optophonics, and early magnetic recording. Rather than attempting to solve these problems, or telling readers how to solve them, our Illustrated Guide conveys how they help us better understand historical gaps, social issues, or cultural phenomena we might otherwise overlook. Each week during the 2016-17 academic year, the MLab focuses on a different problem and holds a workshop to assemble the information we’ve gathered and the illustrations we’ve created. We then polish this material for our Illustrated Guide, which we will publish in print and electronically.

Kat Piecing Together Our Guide (photo by Maasa Lebus)

Research Leads, Contributors, and Support

Since August 2016, the following researchers have contributed to An Illustrated Guide to Prototyping the Past: Teddie Brock, Tiffany Chan, Katherine Goertz, Maasa Lebus, Evan Locke, Danielle Morgan, and Jentery Sayers, based on research by Nina Belojevic, Nicole Clouston, Laura Dosky, Devon Elliott, Jonathan O. Johnson, Shaun Macpherson, Kaitlynn McQueston, Victoria Murawski, William J. Turkel, and Zaqir Virani. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, and the British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund supported this research.

Early Sketch for the Guide (by Danielle)

Project Status

This project is ongoing, and completion is expected in 2017. An Illustrated Guide to Prototyping the Past will be available in print and also electronically (open access). To follow the project as it progresses, see the stream of posts below.

Post by Danielle Morgan, attached to the KitsForCulture project, with the fabrication, physcomp, and projects tags. Featured image for this post, of Kat, Tiffany, Teddie, and Jentery working on Chapter 1 of our Illustrated Guide, also by Danielle.

The Early Magnetic Recording Kit

Danielle Morgan — Fri, 28 Oct 2016 00:39:29 +0000

The second volume in the Kits for Cultural History series, the Early Magnetic Recording Kit prompts people to re-perform what many claim was the first magnetic recording experiment, conducted by Valdemar Poulsen as early as 1898. Poulsen holed up in a room in rural Denmark, where he recorded, replayed, erased, and re-recorded the name, “Jacob.” The only known account of this experiment is found in Marvin Camras’s Magnetic Recording Handbook. It contains a simple stick figure drawing of how the experiment apparently worked. Poulsen strung piano wire from one side of a room to the other. Then he ran alongside the wire with a trolley containing an electromagnet. For parts, he deconstructed a wall-mounted telephone and magnetized the wire by connecting a telephone transmitter, a battery, and an electromagnet in a circuit. Poulsen’s voice would vibrate the transmitter’s diaphragm, and the attached electromagnet would run along the wire, leaving a trace or impression of sound. For playback, Poulsen would connect the receiver to the electromagnet. As the electromagnet ran over the magnetized sections of the wire, it caused the receiver’s diaphragm to vibrate. The magnetized sections could then be wiped clean with a permanent magnet. Importantly, the fidelity of the recording was highly contingent upon numerous factors, including the room’s acoustics, the voice speaking, the tautness of the wire, and the speed of a person’s movement with the trolley. The Early Magnetic Recording Kit is interested precisely in these contingencies, or how early magnetic audio was made, not taken or captured.

Iron filings reveal impressions of sound on piano wire (image by Danielle Morgan)

Research Leads, Contributors, and Support

Since 2013, the following researchers have contributed to the Early Wire Recording Kit: Teddie Brock, Tiffany Chan, Laura Dosky, Katherine Goertz, Danielle Morgan, Victoria Murawski, Jentery Sayers, Zaqir Virani, and William J. Turkel. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund, and the University of Michigan Press supported this research.

“Jacob: Recording on Wire” exhibit at UVic’s Audain Gallery (image by Danielle Morgan)

Project Status

This project was completed in June 2016 with an exhibit, “Jacob: Recording on Wire,” at UVic’s Audain Gallery, based on existing research published in American Literature. The lab also published a public repository containing files related to the experiment. To learn more about the kit, see the stream of posts below. Please do not hesitate to either comment on a post or email maker@uvic.ca with feedback.

Post by Danielle Morgan, attached to the KitsForCulture project, with the fabrication, exhibits, physcomp, and projects tags. Featured image for this post, of Katherine Goertz with the lab’s recording trolley and mechanism, care of Danielle Morgan.

Prototyping the Past, Workshop 1

Danielle Morgan — Sat, 22 Oct 2016 00:40:53 +0000

For the 2016-17 academic year, the MLab’s primary project is writing and designing a co-authored book tentatively titled, An Illustrated Guide to Prototyping the Past. We’ll have more details soon. For now, we’re starting a series of regular posts that will share photographs from our collaborative workshops on the book.

Kat Cutting Up Material for Chapter 1 (Photo by Danielle)

Kat, Tiffany, Teddie, and Jentery Working on Chapter 1 (Photo by Danielle)

Kat, Tiffany, Teddie, and Jentery Still Working on Chapter 1 (Photo by Danielle)

Post by Danielle Morgan, attached to the PrototypingThePast project, with the guide tag. Images for this post care of Danielle Morgan, featuring Teddie Brock, Tiffany Chan, Katherine Goertz, and Jentery Sayers.

Wire in the Gallery: The Jacob Recordings

Danielle Morgan — Fri, 15 Jul 2016 02:04:45 +0000

For the last year, the MLab team has been working on imitating the first known magnetic recording experiment, which was conducted by Valdemar Poulsen in 1898. Since essentially no evidence of the experiment exists, we’ve based almost all our research on this stick figure illustration by Marvin Camras:

Poulsen’s early magnetic recording experiment (illustrated by Marvin Camras)

To test and share our research, we held our Jacob: Recording on Wire exhibit at the UVic’s Audain Gallery a few weeks ago. Throughout the week, we conducted a series of demonstrations in the gallery and encouraged participants to imitate the experiment by impressing their voices on the piano wire.

Wall-mounted phone in the Jacob exhibit (image care of Danielle Morgan)

Because Poulsen used demanufactured telephone parts to record the name, “Jacob,” repeatedly on wire, we mounted a telephone box on the back wall of the gallery. The box was immediately visible when you entered the room. When visitors picked up the receiver, an audio guide provided historical details and context, with playback via a microcontroller, MP3 audio decoder chip, and amplifier hidden inside the box.

Trolley and wire recordings in the Jacob exhibit (image care of Danielle Morgan)

The wire strung diagonally on the left side of the room allowed participants to imitate Poulsen’s method of recording on piano wire.

Instructional photos and component parts in the Jacob exhibit (image care of Danielle Morgan)

On the wall behind this wire, we hung a series of seven instructional photographs and provided participants with the parts they would need to imitate the experiment. Participants were able to experiment with recording on the wire by hooking up provided telephone parts to the electromagnet, running alongside the trolley while speaking into the transmitter or listening to the receiver, testing their recording with iron filings, and wiping the wire clean with a permanent magnet.

Participant photographing their filings and impression on piano wire (image care of Danielle Morgan)

The wire on the right side of the room was strung parallel to the ground. Throughout the week, a trolley progressively moved from one side of the room to the other as participants impressed and left their voice on the wire for the remainder of the exhibit. Beside each recording, an attached tag described the content stored on each section of the wire.

Post by Danielle Morgan, attached to the KitsForCulture project, with the fabrication, physcomp, and exhibits tags. Images for this post care of Danielle Morgan and Marvin Camras. Post based on research by Katherine Goertz, Danielle Morgan, Victoria Murawski, and Jentery Sayers (including “Making the Perfect Record”), with contributions from Teddie Brock and Tiffany Chan.

Jacob: Recording on Wire

Danielle Morgan — Thu, 02 Jun 2016 17:49:47 +0000

As early as 1898, Valdemar Poulsen experimented with impressing sound on wire. Holed up in a cabin in rural Denmark, he recorded, replayed, erased, and rerecorded the name, “Jacob.” He strung piano wire from one side of his room to the other. Then he ran alongside the wire with a trolley containing an electromagnet. For parts, Poulsen deconstructed a wall-mounted telephone. He magnetized wire with a telephone transmitter and used a receiver for playback.

We imitated this experiment and will be exhibiting it on the UVic campus at the Audain Gallery, in the Visual Arts Building, Tuesday, June 14th through Friday, June 17th.

We will be demonstrating the experiment three times that week: Tuesday, June 14th, at 12:30pm; Wednesday, June 15th, at 4:30pm; and Thursday, June 16th, at 4:30pm. Demonstrations will last approximately 30 minutes. If you have any questions about the exhibit, then please email maker@uvic.ca.

Full-size posters: version 1 | version 2

Exhibit by Katherine Goertz, Danielle Morgan, Victoria Murawski, and Jentery Sayers, with contributions from Teddie Brock and Tiffany Chan

Post by Danielle Morgan, attached to the KitsForCulture project, with the fabrication, news, and exhibits tags. Images and posters by Danielle Morgan.

Kit Content as Kit Container

Danielle Morgan — Wed, 09 Dec 2015 23:55:14 +0000

As early as 1898, Valdemar Poulsen experimented with recording and storing voices on piano wire. He would stretch the wire from the top corner of a room to the opposite bottom corner. Then he would attach to the wire a trolley containing an electromagnet and either a transmitter or receiver. When the transmitter was attached, Poulsen would pull the trolley toward the top of a room and then run beside the trolley, speaking into the transmitter as the trolley glided downward. For playback, Poulsen attached a receiver to the trolley, which was returned to the top corner. As the trolley ran across the room once again, recorded sound could be heard through the receiver. After playback, Poulsen would run magnets along the wire to wipe it clean and restart the process.

To illustrate this early example of magnetic recording, Marvin Camras (1980/1988) sketched Poulsen’s experiment:

Using Camras’s illustration and other historical materials as guides, we created a trolley to run along piano wire attached to walls in the MLab. The trolley will become a core component of our Early Magnetic Recording Kit (Volume 2 in the Kits for Cultural History series), which we hope to exhibit in 2016.

The kit will eventually contain all the components necessary for performing a version of Poulsen’s experiment. Since Poulsen likely used parts of a wall-mounted telephone in the construction of his magnetic wire recorder, the container for the kit is modelled off an old telephone box. Here’s a rough, incomplete prototype:

While the box itself functions as a container (holding all the necessary components of the recorder), when it is disassembled all of its parts are also used to construct the trolley.

In the deconstruction of the kit, the container transforms into content, and a telephone box is reconstructed into a magnetic recording device.

Post by Danielle Morgan, attached to the KitsForCulture project, with the fabrication and exhibits tags. Images for this post care of Danielle Morgan and Marvin Camras.

Exhibiting the Early Wearables Kit at Rutgers

Danielle Morgan — Wed, 18 Nov 2015 02:30:37 +0000

Post by Danielle Morgan, attached to the KitsForCulture project, with the fabrication, exhibits, and news tags. Images for this post care of Danielle Morgan and the Maker Lab. Thanks to Jim Brown, Helen Burgess, Robert A. Emmons Jr., David Rieder, and everyone at Hyperrhiz and the Digital Studies Center at Rutgers University, Camden.

Designing Guides for Early Wearable Kits

Danielle Morgan — Thu, 18 Jun 2015 18:23:42 +0000

In the guide for our early wearable kit (which is part of the Kits for Cultural History series), we wanted to include historical information about Gustave Trouvé’s electro-mobile jewellery, the contexts in which the jewellery was worn (or not), as well as suggestions for building one of the pieces (a skull stick-pin) in multiple ways with numerous mechanisms. This approach assumes technologies are similar to texts: as objects, they are subject to interpretation, and they undergo revision prior to dissemination. Since early wearables were produced between the 1850s and 1880s, we began our design process by researching grangerizing techniques popular during the Victorian period. Grangerizing involves annotating an existing work with images and text. As Amanda Visconti suggests in her entry for the ArchBook project, grangerizing is comparable to common-placing and scrapbooking and nearly synonymous with extra-illustrating. She adds: “Because of changes in printing, the rise of scrapbooking, and changes in class differences, [g]rangerizing drifted away from a form of displaying wealth to a technique of hacking the book.” (For more on hacking the book, see Visconti’s “Shuffle, Fragment, Sort, Hack this Bibliography.”)

Inspired by grangerizing as well as Visconti’s notion of book hacking, we used Georges Barral’s biography of Trouvé, Histoire d’un Inventeur, as the base text for our early wearable guide. Since we could not work from a hardcopy of the biography, we instead printed a public domain PDF. We then used Victorian illustration styles to create something between a grangerized book and a zine. Zines usually represent subcultures or ideas that are not generally acknowledged in popular publications. Thus it seemed fitting to use the zine format to represent an inventor who, despite his numerous inventions and contributions to Victorian culture, remains minimally referenced in scholarly work. Some of our design influences include riot grrl weekly zines, various punk zines from the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, and Anna Anthropy’s videogame work, all of which combine forms of cultural criticism with experimental media.

During the process of making the guide, we designed three rough prototypes: the first could be read like a regular zine but also unfolded into a map-like series of instructions for building early wearables, the second intertwined instruction and information in a vertical format, and our final design contained a removable mini-booklet of instructions inserted into the grangerized text. By using manual and digital methods to mix contemporary and Victorian aesthetics, we wanted these physical guides to look and feel collaged. We also wanted them to exist as middle states, somewhere between distinct moments in history.

Early in 2015, we made mock-ups of how we thought we might integrate historical newspaper clippings, annotations, illustrations, and Barral’s biography through collage and drawings. Here’s one instance of those mock-ups:

As the guide progressed, we developed the collaged aesthetic:

For the inserted instruction booklet, we modified a photograph of Trouvé and turned him into a narrator, who playfully conveys instructions for building the stick-pin in multiple ways. Should audiences trust their narrator? Is he reliable? What is his bias? His pedagogy?

Since we are foregrounding the role that prototyping, revision, and decision-making play in the construction of technologies, we wanted Trouvé’s narration to give the sense that the reader/builder is meant to explore tangible possibilities alongside him instead of somehow replicating his procedures, which—to be clear—we cannot fully recover or even mimic in 2015. The instruction booklet can be read in context with the rest of the guide, but it can also be removed and used during the assembly process. Because the instructions can be held in hand, audiences don’t need to stare at a screen while they are unpacking a kit or making a wearable.

In order to situate early wearables in the context of Victorian culture, we explored six aspects or “keywords” (in the tradition of Raymond Williams’s work) that may have contributed either to the skull’s design or to the way early wearables such as the skull stick-pin were received. The sections on clocks and telegraphs briefly touch on the way those technologies may have influenced Trouvé’s design choices, while the segments on class and gender give some context for cultural etiquette around jewellery during the period. The mourning section addresses mourning jewellery traditions in Victorian culture, where skulls were significant symbols central to what Susan Elizabeth Ryan calls “dress acts.” Additionally, the section about performance describes instances where Trouvé’s jewellery was worn publicly. As often as possible, we drew this information from books and newspaper articles from the period. Below is a photo of the gender section. In the future, we’ll be adding more sections, including sections on the role race, positivism, and electromagnetic worldviews played in early wearables.

To bind the guide, we used a pamphlet stitch and nested the instruction booklet inside the guide with leather string:

Finally, the guide was ready to be placed inside the kit:

Together with a calling card, of course:

Post by Danielle Morgan, attached to the KitsForCulture project, with the fabrication and versioning tags. Images for this post care of Danielle Morgan and the Maker Lab. Thanks again to Amanda Visconti for her history of grangerizing: https://drc.usask.ca/projects/archbook/grangerizing.php.

The Kits + the DFL Appear in The Ring

Danielle Morgan — Wed, 06 May 2015 19:49:33 +0000

Thanks to Tara Sharpe for writing a piece on the Kits for Cultural History and our new Digital Fabrication Lab for The Ring at UVic. The piece, titled “Makerspaces Matter,” appeared both online and in print. Two excerpts are below.

The lab is remaking and reinvigorating antiquated technologies—which are no longer accessible and perhaps never functioned properly in the first place—by creating high resolution 3D models and manufacturing them with computer-controlled machines. “Put this way, the Maker Lab actively intervenes in the stuff of material history, determining what is missing and then circulating physical prototypes of the absences for interpretation,” says Sayers.

And:

The Digital Fabrication Lab (DFL), an extension of the Maker Lab, is now open in the Visual Arts Building. While the TEF space works well for the prototyping side of Sayers’ research, it is not sufficient for digital fabrication and machining. The DFL is the first lab of its kind to encompass the arts and humanities in North America. Additionally, no university or college in North America yet has a computer numerical control (CNC) lab in the humanities, meaning the DFL is the first humanities facility of its kind on the continent.

Digital Music Circulation in Cuba

Danielle Morgan — Thu, 12 Mar 2015 17:58:37 +0000

We are happy to announce Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier’s talk, “Digital Music Circulation in Contemporary Cuba,” which will take place on Friday, March 20th at UVic. Details and poster below. Hope to see you there!

Digital Music Circulation in Contemporary Cuba
Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier, UVic
Friday 20 March at 12:30pm
Cornett Building B107
Public Lecture

The extensive use of memory sticks (a practice considered somewhat archaic in North America) takes place concurrently with the use of the Internet in Cuba, where web access remains limited and difficult today. But this situation is rapidly changing. In Cuba, the infrastructures created by the exchange of digital media through memory sticks and other portable devices offer forms of mobility, sociality, and proximity that the Internet does not strive for.

Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier is professor of Anthropology at the University of Victoria. She conducts research on popular culture, digital music, and alternative networks of music production and circulation in Cuba since 2000. She directed the film Golden Scars (2010) in part funded by the NFB of Canada and is currently finishing a docu-fiction called Farbik Funk (2015) based in the periphery of São Paulo.

Post by Danielle Morgan, attached to the Makerspace project, with the news tag. Images for this post care of Danielle Morgan.