We're Back!

Wow it has been a loooooong time since the last blog post. A very long time! What have we been doing since February 25th? Well, let me tell you . . .

Kit, Emilio, Tocky and I were very busy for a month or so trying to secure funding for the next stage of our project. After lots of report writing and a video presentation we were able to secure the funding from CNZ and MoRST to ensure we could keep creating and experimenting. So thank you very much to those funding bodies for making this all happen. And congratulations to the other teams that made it through to this next stage. Please follow the links on this blog so you can see what each funding body is all about.

So now the hard part is over (the report), another hard part is still to come. We have big ideas and I mean big. We want to create an artwork that is large in scale. Right now we are planning and designing brand new rigs and tools so that we can make each working element of the artwork hopefully about 1metre squared. That's big as far as I'm concerned. We've enlisted the help of an IRL intern, Eric, to design the rig. I'm very excited that we can solve some of our manual and time consuming fabrication problems. Thanks Eric!

Before I forget, some of the team from the Biomimetics Lab at The University of Auckland went to the annual EAP conference in San Diego in March of this year. Along with all of their important discoveries and experiments, they took some of my EAP paintings with them to show the crowd. I am pleased to say that one of the paintings did survive the long journey and they were able to actuate it for the audience. We were all happy with how well the small artworks were received and I hope this will inspire some of the visiting scientists to take the idea back to their own countries and start something similar with their local artists. Artists can definately offer a new perspective and new ideas to this kind of technology.

Until next time . . . !