In science it is becoming more and more common to work with very complex sets of data and if people continue to look at whole systems that trend will continue. Through several conversations at the QMRI it became clear that there is a need for new ways of looking at these complex datasets. And seemingly the best way is to create visual representations. Different ways of representing data visually will result in new interpretations. It seems like there may be a McLuhan-esque shift happening where science moves beyond the world of the number and into the world of the visual.
As this process is very much aided by software that interprets the data and presents the researcher with the synergies it finds there is a certain control that is lost. The scientist moves into the realms of computer aided thought. A less defined realm. A certain absolute “grasp” is lost and traded for something that to me feels more intuitive or open.
Little Yellow Book: Extract 4
Little Yellow Book: Extract 3
I am very interested in this process called emergence. It seems there is ground to be covered considering its relevance to creative practise and fieldwork.
My own parameters of what makes a successful work of art seem to be very similar to what would be termed “emergent”. It results from the artist finding, manipulating, or maybe even creating a certain system which results in something new coming into being.
The difficulty is that one cannot “create” a system. A system never stands on its own but interacts with and results from everything around it. So it could be said that to attempt to create an emergence is pretentious, you’d equate the artistic process with wielding the hand of God. But I think through play an artist, or anyone in a creative practise, can create a driving force, an energy that can create new interactions and potentially something “emergent”.
The main question I ask myself is whether it is more effective to work in a goal oriented fashion, you imagine a final outcome and then set out to create it, or work in a more process oriented way, where you push an idea forward from a certain beginning point and makes adjustments and discoveries as you go. In terms of making a work that has “emergent” properties I feel the second way is much more effective. You are able to make new discoveries that where inconceivable prior to doing the work. Yet it is very hard to fit this way of working into a professional arts practise where any funding body will naturally want to know the exact outcome prior to deciding to fund your project. It is also quite hard to keep a momentum if one doesn’t know the purpose.
This is one of the areas where the similarities between arts practise and scientific research are striking. But in science there seems to more of an awareness of the parameters, the rules of the game seem much clearer.
Little Yellow Book: Extract 2
Science is often reductive. The world is reduced to smaller parts and those parts reduced again until there is one element of which the behaviour can be studied and quantified.
Yet oftentimes systems have qualities that result from the interaction of elements. These qualities cannot always be reduced to functions of any one element but result from their interactions. The system as a whole cannot be reduced to its parts.
It seems awareness is growing that further scientific advances lie in the study of systems as a whole rather than their parts. As, for instance, in systems biology. But inevitably this makes the research a lot more complex and the resulting data a lot harder to read. I had an interesting conversation with Donald Dunbar about this. How do you look at these complex datasets? It seems it is almost necessary to do so visually if one wants to gain any meaningful information. I feel that this area is where I want to go deeper. But more thought is needed. I don’t want to just make prettier graphs.
Little Yellow Book: Extract 1
My work in the QMRI makes me realise how much I have become a writer, how much I work with the story in things, the characters, often myself and their subjective experiences of space and time are the tools with which I map the world. In the context that I normally work in I feel that subjective, emotional responses are often much more meaningful than absolute data. But within the context of QMRI I struggle to find these responses and more importantly I struggle to see how they would be of any value. What I encounter is raw data. The world ordered and reduced to numbers. In my practise, these numbers are meaningless. So what can I say here?
BHF Artist in Residence at the Queens Medical Research Institute.
little yellow book
On july 1st I started a three month residency at Queens Medical Research Institute funded by the British Heart Foundation. The brief was fairly simple: To learn about the research being conducted into cardiovascular disease and to be inspired to make a final piece that can be shown both in the institute and further afield.
The first weeks were spent having a continuous series of meetings where researchers showed me what they did and tried, with varying degrees of success, to make me understand.
I discovered that cardiovascular research is a lot less focused on the heart and blood vessels as one would expect. Of course the body is a complex system of processes that pretty much all influence each other and one can look at the body clock, depression, spatial awareness etc. and relate them back to the circulatory system.
Being transplanted from an arts environment into a scientific one has definitely pushed me out of my comfort zone and it has been a rather confusing first month where I was presented with a staggering amount of information but without the slightest idea of where or how to apply it. Mark, at QMRI expressed an interest in what was in my “little yellow book”. My ragged looking little notebooks always seem to invoke a certain fascination. So I decided to post some extracts here, hoping that it will be of interest to some…
Portfolio Anno 2010
Rotte Journals -- 2003-2006 This is pretty old work now but it still holds a key place within my practice. Over the course of several years numerous journeys were made searching for the source of the river Rotte, which gives Rotterdam its name. I would document these journeys, made without the use of maps, by noting down my observations in the field, thus creating a personal geography of my own home town. Copies of these books have been shown in several exhibitions as well as by appointment, as shown here at the home of Guus Vreeburg and Willem Besselink. 
MOUNTAIN -- 2006 The mountain often functions as a poetic construct in the narrative of my work. For me, as a Dutch artists, it stands counterpoint to the Dutch landscape, which is seen as a commodity that can be shaped to our needs and which is also, of course, very flat. In Het Plafond, Rotterdam itself a site that was claimed from the water not so long ago, I built a mountain using sticks, rubber bands and recycled cardboard. The construction occupies the whole gallery space, as well as the office on the second floor and even creeps up towards the living quarters on the third floor.
BuroVoor: Landinzicht -- 2007 Collaborating with Rosalie Monod de Froideville under the name Buro For: I created the project Land in Sight. We asked a number of people from all walks of life to spend half a day on a small island in lake in Rotterdam. Their experiences were recorded in a film that showed an array of different interpretations of the Dutch Landscape ranging from elated exclamations about the sound of the birds to fuming rants about Dutch Calvinist culture. The film was shown in art gallery De Kunstsuper and was turned into a documentary for local tv by AntenneTV. This documentary is still available online here (dutch). A short video with english subtitles can be seen here.
Sgurr Nan Gillean; Mountain of Young Men -- 2008 I spent most of my childhood years meticulously painting British landscapes from pictures in travel guides, fantasizing about how one day I would visit. Years later, when I received a grant to spend on a research project I finally decided to visit some of these places I had painted. What followed was a rather bizarre and confusing experience of place.
The imagined landscape of my youth is the one I entered when I got off the bus on the Isle of Skye. I wandered around, now an adult, and told my younger self: “Don’t worry I’m here now and so will you one day”. In essence I conversed with my younger self and this became a feedback loop where I walked through both the imagined landscape and real landscape at the same time. Afterwards I wrote a series of reminders on post-it notes that together recapture the journey. These were presented at DPC 2 at the former Photo Museum in Rotterdam where they could be read in chronological order, like a journey, or randomly from a pile where people could also pick their favourite to take home with them. These notes were combined with video footage of me wandering around on the flanks of the Mountain of Young Men.
FIELD 2009 -- Present FIELD is a monthly journal published by artist/writer Eddy van Mourik based on field visits in Scotland and the wider world. For a brief description of the project go here.
HereThere -- 2010 In collaboration with several Art, Space + Nature students I created the installation HereThere at Patriothall Gallery. The installation was based on a field visit to some of the coniferous forests grown for wood production around Scotland.
Mapping from Memory Workshop, Aberfeldy
Together with the organisation of the ELASA mini meeting in Scotland I devised a one day workshop for European students in landscape architecture. The goal was to investigate the memorized landscape as a site using simple techniques to stimulate spatial memory.
Questions I was hoping to answer were:
What is the value of working in this relatively random, subjective way for a practical discipline like landscape architecture? Can it provide new insights into the site?
The theme of the ELASA mini meeting was “Back to Basics” and the workshop was to have a strong emphasis on using a variety of materials and hands on techniques that may or may not be unfamiliar in this age of computer aided design solutions. Sculptor Lara Greene provided support for the students by introducing different and unexpected materials throughout the workshop.
Furthermore, the students were encouraged to take a playful approach and adopt a non critical attitude.
After a brief introduction to my practice I asked the students to have a drawing pad and a pen ready, to sit with their eyes closed and not open them throughout the exercise. I then proceeded to read a text to help them recall yesterdays walk:
Where are you? Are you in a room? Are you alone? Are you with people? What can you hear? What can you smell? Are you tired? Was it hard to get out of bed? Did you get drunk last night? Did you have fun? Which food did you like best? Did you talk a lot? What did you talk about? Were you tired from our walk? Were you hungry when we got back? When did you first feel hungry? Did you get cold? Did you go into the dark forest? What was in the dark forest? What was in the lake? Did you think the road was steep? Did you pick up a rock? Who did you talk to? Did you remember their name? Did you think the farmer should get more money? Did you pet his dog? Were you out of breath? What did you draw? How small was it? Was it really smaller than the mountain on the horizon? Was the hill steep? Did you walk on the road? Did you fall asleep when the lady told you about the forest in the sun? Did you walk on the road? Did you see a dead lamb in the field? Did you see Harry Potter? Did you see a rabbit that was chopped in half? What did you hear? Was it wind? Was it water? Was it someone singing? Did you walk on the road? Down the snaky path? Did you draw the hill or talk the hill? Did you wear a blindfold? Were you afraid? Did you walk down the snaky path? Where were you?
Keep your eyes closed and draw a line describing the route you walked.
Do you think it is beautiful here? Yesterday, did you take pictures? Which picture did you like best? Try and remember it. Draw it or write it on the paper in front of you. What did you photograph? What was to the left of that? What was to the right? Try to remember as much as possible about that place. Was it windy? Was it warm? Cold? Where did the cold come from? Try to remember.
Write a word or a sentence that describes being in the place where you took the picture. Where were you before you were there? Write a word. Before that, where were you? Write a word. Continue taking steps back until you are here.
After this exercise I took the students to a different room and asked them to build a large three-dimensional map that showed their experiences while walking around Aberfeldy the day prior. They were free to use whatever material present. I urged them to think big so there would be space for everyone to include their own input. The end result filled the whole room from floor to ceiling; a landscape consisting of piled up furniture, bedding used as a cover playfully recreated the typical patchwork of fields, forests and heath that makes up the landscape around Aberfeldy. This landscape was then the canvas on which everyone could place the scenes they recalled.
Today is Yesterdays Tomorrow: Exhibition in Cumbernauld town centre.
The town of Cumbernauld with its contested architecture and its failed utopian ideals is a very complex context to work in. In the midst of all these political confusions and outside attempts to improve the town I mostly found myself fascinated by the sense of isolation one gets there. The horizon around Cumbernauld invariably consists of empty hills and forests and Cumbernauld, to me, feels very much like an isolated outpost.
In the middle of a run down shop in Cumbernauld town centre I installed a 9 metre long panorama showing the horizon around Cumbernauld but avoiding where possible, to depict the town itself. The panorama was shown in an inverted continuous circle that faced outwards, towards the town, attempting a dialogue and in a politically ambiguous was promoting the idea that Cumbernauld, above all, is just a place.
This work will form the basis for FIELD 2: Cumbernauld.
Little Yellow Book: Extract 5
How can we truly understand this world? A world where some lives flicker by in the space of seconds and where others labour slowly through the millennia, where the breath of one organism can be the lifeblood of the other and where either depend on hundreds of other factors for their survival. This is a world where everything has an impact and dependencies run from the microscopic to the colossal, the biological to the political, the geological to the virtual, across the different strata that make up our world It is never completely comprehensible to us but it is our nature to try to understand and control everything around us. In science one does this mostly by reducing everything to its smallest element so it can be expressed in a set of numbers and the brain can encompass it. In life one simply follows a line. We move forward, always, and draw a line through this world of complexity. This line we understand. It is a cross section, a map. It is one line of cause and effect, of effort, of energy, tracing an ever changing viewpoint through time and space.
In my art practise I have always equated this line with a walk, a journey. But in my time at the QMRI I have been introduced to lines of another sort: Data, a series of numbers, is a line that is not so different. It is a line of understanding traversing the unknown. I am looking more and more at these lines of data as elements of a map and thus as a spatial, sculptural entity. How do they relate to each other? What is the space in between? What occupies the space between a line representing the effects of diesel particles on vessel contraction and a line representing the size of the placenta of mice with different levels of stress hormones?
I am playing around revisiting old visual experiments and connecting data from the QMRI:
Morningside; Line
Innocent Railway; Line
South Devon; Lines
Elidir Fawr; Lines
Elidir Fawr; Lines 2
Rat vessels, diesel with ACh/SOD; Lines