Spores at the Apple Store
For the past few weeks Patrick Hickey and I have been working more and more on our Secret Sounds of Spores project, which is coming together nicely. For those of you just joining us, we are building an installation for the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh which will create music from falling mushroom spores. You can see these spores if you shine a laser underneath a live (or recently deceased) mushroom, and I’m building custom software that will analyze them and trigger a series of strange musical instruments that Patrick and I are building. My previous post explains the concept a bit more, and here’s a new video that shows some of the instruments in action:
Patrick and I will be giving a demonstration and explanation tomorrow night, the 15th of July, at the Apple Store in Glasgow. The event is free and begins at 6pm. We will be showing off a few of the instruments, I’ll be explaining how I’ve approached the software, and if this rain continues we shouldn’t have any trouble finding some mushrooms!
You can RSVP on the New Media Scotland Facebook Group or Eventbrite page.
Hope to see you there!
edit: as I’ve said in the comments, thanks to all who came by! I’ll post photos as soon as I get them from the Apple Store, in the mean time here is one of the mushrooms set up with the laser:
Wow, it’s really coming together nicely!
How are you going to get the mushroom to drop their spores at the right time???
JF
Thanks to everyone who came by, it went really well and I was pleased to see such a nice turnout. Special thanks to the super enthusiastic staff at the Apple Store and Mark from New Media Scotland for making it all happen.
Merci Andrew, je suis content que tu suis mes projets de loin!
It’s been raining constantly here, so Patrick went out yesterday and picked a whole pile of mushrooms for the presentation. As long as the mushrooms are fresh and protected from the wind the spores will fall on their own without any coaxing…Patrick mounted them inside petri dishes to protect them and with the laser beam they looked gorgeous. The spores will fall continuously from any mushroom for about a day or two from picking, billions and billions of them…after a few hours you can actually see them piling up all around the base of the mushroom, looking like little snow crystals.