DIY Fish Leather

I am trying to make fish leather. I really want to use some - fill it with water, perhaps make some fish skin water balloons. I have sourced some form Walter Reginald in London, but I am struggling to ascertain what  chemicals are used in the tanning process, and I don't want to run water through heavy metals. So I thought I would try and make some of my own. 

Had some mackerel in the fridge...apparently you can make it with any fish, although the stuff you get from Atlantic leather seems to have more of a snake skin look than I have achieved. Its really hard to get the flesh off without ripping the skin, and it is definitely tougher in some parts than others - but I also noticed that when I looked at some of the manufactured stuff at the sustainable materials library. 

So, you have to de-scale, de-flesh, and 'tann' in a mixture of oil and egg yolk (1 dl oil : 1 egg yolk) or use 50% urine and 50%water  ( preferably from a boy) see: Tanning Fish,  I left mine overnight to tan, have given it a good cold wash and it is drying now...

These patches where the skin colour comes off are not holes - they have a pretty tough translucent and patterned skin on them. I didn't realise the coloured part of the fish was behind this - and not on the outside. 

Its interesting that it so hard to find out what chemicals industry uses, and that often there is a surprisingly simple way to do things DIY. I 've yet to see if it works for me.  I think I might need a bit of practise,  I might have a go at some salmon at the weekend. 

The flies are after the leather. 

Water Table

Water Table is a potential architectural facet. This version is approx 1m high and 50 x 50 cm wide and deep. 

It works on the principle of horizontality, or perhaps the fact that water likes to find a level.

Net curtain and water will fuse together if both are horizontal - however I am not sure how much volume it will take,  so I have made two layers, thinking that some might come through.

Depending on the angle (horizontal) of the net, water will hold in the tiny spaces in between the threads or (if vertical) it will quickly disappear. This happens as if by magic - It is not apparent where it goes it seems to just 'pop' away. Actually it is just draining down to the bottom, by 'popping' rather than flowing. The closer it is to some sort of object in the net, ie. a bit of embroidery pattern - the quicker it disappears.  

It may be that a tiny tweaking of the angle will allow a fusion and a bit of movement, so that water can go on its way - I need some rain to find this out. 

                             

The structure tries to embrace water, and asks questions about ones desire  to be completely protected from it when dwelling outdoors. It all looks very delicate, and it is quite a precarious thing, but really it requires a certain hardy-ness. Although the chances of getting soaked are slimmer, they are definately still present.

I left some net hanging, this is some kind of wall, it means if water, the wind, the net or I adjust the angle away from horizontal, water has something to flow down. 

The net curtain could of course be interpreted as signaling the desire to be shielded in ones dwelling, to be able to look out  but not have others look in. It works differently outside though because light is all around it, it is not one-way at all, it is just a fragile boundary. 

This has given me a rough idea for a structure. 
These pictures were taken in my local park. 

Water and Dreams*

I am having watery dreams. 


Dream One:
Everything is collapsed and fused together. Water is everything and everything is water - but there is something really viscous to this - as if bones and blood and water are all the same thing.


Dream Two:
I am in some sort of post apocalyptic scene - a Bankok prison / homeless scenario, where rich people are going on as normal but there is a massive underclass of whome I am one. All I want is water. A waiter secretly gives me a glass. I need to wash. I eventually find a garden tap out in the suburbs, and risk my life to steal some. When I am trying to find a way out, I find myself inside a place full of swimming pools and children having swimming lessons. 


*Also the title of Gaston Bachelards (1985) book : 'Water and Dreams - an essay on the imagination of matter' 

Temperature-water-net.

This is a an experiment between water, temperature, net and myself - a congealing of all our intentions. 

                                      

It is made of sections of net sewn into random shapes with a running stitch that is then pulled. Size, each section approx 15 cm sq. There are 6 sections. The shape enables them to be assembled into a miniature space.

   

                                        

                                      

There is also quite a sensitive gravity - water - net relationship going on. Depending on the angle (horizontal) of the net, water will hold in the tiny spaces in between the threads or (if vertical) it will quickly disappear. This happens as if by magic - It is not apparent where it goes it seems to just 'pop' away. Actually it is just draining down to the bottom, by 'popping' rather than flowing. The closer it is to some sort of object in the net, ie. a bit of embroidery pattern - the quicker it disappears. 

                                       

If damp the net freezes rapidly and will hold a shape ( on this scale anyway). 

It thaws rapidly also, from top to bottom - the bottom is locked in a slightly bigger piece of ice because the water has 'popped' down there.

                                 

   

Actually , one of the things I like most about this is the well in the middle and the potential of draining water into a space.  

   

I am not sure how all of this works as a 'collaboration' but it is certainly a 'congealing of agency' .  Also I am becoming more aware of the way I speak about what's happening - I changed 'the water is sensitive to the angle of the net'  to say , 'there is quite a sensitive gravity-water-net relationship going on. It is interesting to try and construct  one language in away that  positions oneself in a different way of thinking / being. 

Making for RainDrought

Making for rain / drought

I made this little portable window water harvester at the weekend  - following reading some of Swyngedouw on Water, Nature and the Urban, and looking at the backs of houses paraded along the railway line to Waterloo. 

The idea is there are 3 or 4 different and interchangeable types of 'sheet' . 

Lets say...

One is for Dew - made out of some net Like structure.

One is for cooling water  - made out of some wool. 

One has a huge surface area  - for frost to form on. 

You have to practise understanding the weather - and know which one to put outside your window - if any at all. You can collect your own water if you are sensitive to its manifestations.

It may be a viable source of potable water, it may be something pleasurable in itself  - a practise that starts to tune you in, a ritual to demonstrate ones potential independence of water bills, and of waiting for others to do the purifying.

Perhaps it is the quotidian event that adheres you to a new quasi- religion.  

I have the feeling it is somehow not 'tough-enough' or presented in a tough enough way - it comes across as whimsical, perhaps this is the materials or the fact that it is not fully thought through.


Tom thinks it is very vaginal - and that it would look good on the side of the Gherkin or the Shard. It is born out of feminist science theory after all. 

No one in my all - female crit group said anything about its vaginal qualities. They said though that I should provide glimpses of the process I go through trying to meet Water in different ways. I need to film myself working in my conservatory while the rain thrashes on my roof and the multitude of bedsheets on the line outside that have been uncontrollably wee-d on, get uncontrollably wee-d on in bucket loads by the clouds. 


Thoughts 

Sometimes I feel so lighthearted about this idea collaborating with Water, sometimes it feels like the most deeply complex, neuron tangling and loaded thing I have tried to do. They both exist at once - it is both of these things always. 

I am optimistic that at some point I will be able to think about it both ways simultaneously.

I am mindful of when I get overwhelmed that I want to cover all the bases in some sort of logical way - be thorough: be intimate with water, negate the infrastructures, make something practical, respond to the weather, feel it on my skin -  and that's when it looses everything. I think these collaborations are moments, an anthology of partial experiences built over time.  

I am starting to visualise a type of architecture that is something like a collision of intentions, a materially cohesive, bender-ish, shanty-ish, under the canal bridge -ish thing that looks like it could be organised but has decided not to be. I know what I mean anyway. 


ad pic: 

I am constantly contemplating my position in the middle of all of this, today I had a moment where I felt like a very complicated balloon filled with water, it was a wobbly epiphany of what I am. I also felt my mood changed by a cool shower. I feel my body changed in shape by water inside. 

I wonder if collaboration is arrogant, like someone who reveals their arrogance by speaking about equality as something they are happy to 'give'.


Water  is much more than me - I wonder if it needs me at all?


But if we are living in the anthropocene*, Water and I are both quasi - hybrids, cyborgs. 


*Anthropocene |ˈanθrəpəˌsēn|nounthe current geological age, viewed as having begun about 200 years ago with the significant impact of human activity on the ecosphere.ORIGIN 2000: based on Greek anthrōpos ‘human being’ + kainos ‘recent’ ; reportedly coined by chemist Paul Crutzen (1933– ).

RainDrought

There is confusion about the current drought / flood situation. I think we look for a simple logic in our relationship with Water and there isn't one. It acts, it intra-acts, differently over geology and time. Partly the problem is we don't understand our own particular site, the south is chalky, Water flow is a situated knowledge, we are quite connected to our regional geology through it - unlike oil, heat etc the other things we depend on.


In the chalky South East  it takes quite a while for the water to filter through. If you are a geologist you understand this. For the rest of us it starts to make no sense that there is none of this vital material available even though it is falling form the skies on top of us everyday. And in a way there is a truth in that - would it not be better just to harvest it directly?  Rain water is (apparently) potable  - but you need to filter it.  Why do we wait for someone else to drag it out of the ground for us ?

 

A microscopic planktonic coccolith, whose skeletons form the chalk aquifers in the SE of England. These impact high porosity to the chalk matrix. The water contained in the pore spaces of the rocks matrix are virtually immobile, being held by capillary forces. It is cracks in the aquifer that impart a high permeability. Individual boreholes in the chalk can yield more than ten million litres per day. 

'We inhabit Water and Water inhabits us' *

Is there any conflict between the idea of designing in collaboration with water directly  and designing in response to the agency of Water other people are experiencing now? I don't think so. 

Can I hone in on the specific ironies of waters agency that other people experience as well as my own? Like now - we are simultaneously in flood and drought. What can I make for this? What can I give to this?

Currently my indoor life is  very wet, my daughter is trying to learn not to wee in the bed. The sheets are wet with wee, and stay wet in the rain on the washing line, it is a flow that I can't seem to stop. 

There is no way for me to act upon the rain or the drought. I have to leave it to huge systems of power and men who stand on the side of the road with spades. And there is no way for me to act upon the wee either even though it is in my house. What I experience everyday makes me feel impotent. 


What could I design for this? 

My mum bought me a contraption that sounds an alarm when the tinyest trickle of wee comes out. My daughter is supposed to wake up, change the sheets and get back to bed. She slept through it. For two weeks I got woken up twice a night by a hideous relentless buzzing, I felt quite insane by the end of it , and the bedwetting had not stopped. 

I got a balloon and with my daughter filled it with the same mount of water she had drunk in a day. I told her that if she managed to get through the night without wetting the bed, she could pop the balloon in the morning. She liked this idea, it worked for a night or two. 

A big part of the idea of having a direct relationship with water is empowerment, but this is not the same as control. It is perhaps instead the ability to respond. 


I need to acknowledge the infrastructures that surround water, and their influence on its journey through my mind. So I can make in a way that mucks about with their influence. 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/02/drought-water-utilities-companies?newsfeed=true


*Jennifer Gabrys

Meeting Water

I start by making

I make in my conservatory. The rain has been thrashing down for three weeks, I have had the same washing on the line for two, I look at it getting dragged further towards the ground everyday. The sound is relentless. When I go outside I notice that its not as bad as it sounds - its not that heavy or brittle. It seems to me that the rain just wants to soak things, the ground my clothes.

So it wants to soak, and drive itself down, I want to make, so my first thought is perhaps I am not making in collaboration with water -  but just collaborating with water.

I could make a surface that lets water sound how it is, that doesn't misrepresent it. Would this be a good honest start? Collaboration needs honesty.

Perhaps I could also meet water half way with the soaking thing, perhaps make something that wants the soak. Would this be a way of merging our intentions? 

Perhaps I need to make things that enhance Waters ability to do its thing  - that's another sign of a good collaboration. I don't think I should just make for it  - that's not really the point, but instead something that furthers both of our intentions. 

This is a 'soaker', made out of lambswool and nettle fibres. The flowery looking bit soaks up all he rain, it travels down the stem and you squeeze the ball at the bottom to get water out. The fabric seems to keep the water really cool. Imagine it 2 m's high with the flowery bit poking out the top of a tent roof and the squeeze ball sitting on the floor. 

This is also a 'soaker'. I need to draw a picture to fully explain. 

Same material as above but the top of it laid out almost horizontally, it catches the rain,

which flows down to the bottom, which you can squeeze as above.

Imagine it 2m's high, like an upside down curtain. 

                                      

These are the beginnings of a roof that diffracts the sound of rain. This is made of an old waterproof mattress protector. I intend that this will somehow distribute water more 'naturally' as it falls from a roof. Imagine it as a 5m square canopy.

Collaborating with Water

So I am trying to make in collaboration with Water. By this I do not intend to anthropomorphise it. I have done lots of human to human collaborating, what I am interested in is not a an equality of sameness, but an equality of difference. I want to bring the openness, the possibility of the unexpected, the 'getting to know you through what you do' of collaboration, the intrigue of another's way, and see what it means to collaborate with something, possibly alive, but not human. I want to level out the playing field between the human and the non-human.

Out of 3 years of studying psychology at degree level, what I remember most of all was a lecture towards the end about the rocky philosophical foundations of science - the impossibility of objectivity. Twenty years years later, all the feminist theory around material agency, embodied knowledge, post humanist intra-activity etc. (Haraway/Barad) describes an alternative to objectivity that is so compelling to me. It articulates a way of knowing that I thought could only be felt - a possibility of communicating something about belief, about our way of being in the world, about what we are doing to the world, that is not ideological or conceptual, but bright, knowing and possible. It grounds  the physical and ideas together. The premise that every substance has agency and is a congealing of the agency of other substances, processes and ideas is so exciting. Most importantly it nudges humanity off the centre - stage.

Saying this it is easy to be captivated by a theory - even if its purpose is partly to question the theoretical. What you do matters infinitely more than what you say. So my 'collaboartion' is an attempt to test the theory out in practise. I need to make, I have found a niche for myself in the desire to make tent-ish temporary architecture rooted in a desire to have a non-vicarious relationship with the world. As the vicar mediates ones knowledge of God, from the moment we enter primary school, science mediates our knowledge of the world. I want to undo this - not as way to return to innocence, but as a way to intelligently proceed. 

For this endeavour the possibility of objectivity is mooted. But the desire to know is everything, even though 'know' is not the right word.


The Trope of Collaboration

I am starting to think already that it could be dangerous to get hung up on the word 'collaboration'. Is this too contrived ? I think it's a good starting block. I have to be careful not to do really blatantly obvious things under the trope of collaboration - like those people from 'Perfect Curve' (on the Twenty Twelve TV show) who think they've invented the pun. I need to make things not already made ( I have to admit I made many versions of the funnel in the warm up to this exercise) I have to make things, and not know if they will work, not know if my collaborator will run with them. I want to make things that are more because we have done it together.

I feel awkward also that I am getting water involved in something I want to do - would it be better to think that I am involving myself in what it has done forever? Suddenly I am aware of how massive water is, and I am not concerned about my default instinct to control it , but instead about the impossibility of being an equal with something so immense.  Does that make me subservient? I may be the minion, but if this is a collaboration I also need to be sure of  my own equality. I should think of myself as a representative of humanity.

Already looking back over this blog, it seems to me it is easy to see the balance of power any way you want to. Perhaps it depends on scale : humanity and water both work on the meta and the micro, whose in charge might depend on the location on this scale. Its good when balance has the potential to swing either way in a collaboration. 

I am trying to make in collaboration with water. 


I want to work within the openness, the possibility, the 'getting to know you through what you do' of collaboration, and see what it means to collaborate with something not human, but with its own complex intention. 

This blog documents the beginnings of this sometimes absurd, sometimes profound, venture. 

Inspired by water, and by feminist theory, I am trying to approach my practice of making temporary architecture with this intention , as a critique of anthropocentrism.