Last post a gave a teaser on the three exploration strategies I had defined last week. These were defining my project territory as three ways of looking at the human body:
1. Outer-human (Body as a material)
2. Inner-human (Body as a factory)
3. Micro-human (Body as a social network)
Within these categories I proposed individual experiments, which I have spent the last week doing, weird and wonderful (albeit sometimes failed) results.
The first I did was something I've been planning for a while but just never got round to. My laser pointer arrived in the post a few days ago, and although playing with this long-range laser was so fun it was tempting to leave it intact for mischievous purposes, I hacked the thing and extracted the macro lens inside, giving me a really simple tool to take microscopic photos with my iPhone. It's a surprisingly powerful lens, with the ability to take photos at a much closer range that even my DSLR, so I immediately took to my ever-festering 'self samples' from the BioHackspace to investigate their makeup a little more closely.
Even though these bacterial samples are almost definitely contaminated by now, and not really much use to my project focus for the very moment, this lens proved really useful for taking a closer look at some of the other things I got up to.
I started by sketching up some up ideas for the components of a 'tool kit to mine the self'. Looking at the body as a tactile material, and a ever-growing resource of replenish-able matter, I wanted to optimize ways of extracting these resources.
I got started trying to extract some of these materials, but the initial swabs I took proved to be rather useless, and didn't really spark my imagination.
So I started playing some games. I thought it could be fun to have a physical competition over features of the body that you can't necessarily exercise or control, things that lie primarily in the hands of your genetic makeup rather than fitness regime. I employed my flatmate to compete with me in two games: The Toughest Hairball and Saliva of the Fittest.
The remaining research strategy I had left to perform was a social experiment with stethoscopes. I wondered what would happen if people had a hyper-awareness of their heartbeat and how it related to their surroundings. If a room full of people can hear every single heartbeat in the room, would they begin to align? What if one person started panicking and their heartbeat sped up – would the rest of the room calm the one down, or would the panicker induce panic in the rest of the group?
In order to try this I needed a way of hooking a stethoscope up to a speaker. I'd gotten my hands on a basic stethoscope and found a way to hack it using a cheap 'spy ear' microphone. Unfortunately, the microphone didn't seem to work before I even took it apart, and after spending an afternoon rewiring the thing to take the end of the stethoscope, it didnt yield any results. There might not be too much cause for despair though – although it's just a gimmick at the moment, it could still be used for potential social experiments. Nobody has to know it doesn't work, and the sounds I secretly play them could lead to some interesting reactions. This needs a little more thought, but we'll see if I come up with anything while I try to source a more functional mic.
So these are the wacky and somewhat disgusting things I've been up to in the last week. I'd been stuck in such a rut of conceptual thought until now that it feels really good to get my hands dirty and just run with my gut instinct. These are all only starting points, but this next week will hopefully see me develop them onto their next stages. Let's see where it takes me.
1. Outer-human (Body as a material)
2. Inner-human (Body as a factory)
3. Micro-human (Body as a social network)
Within these categories I proposed individual experiments, which I have spent the last week doing, weird and wonderful (albeit sometimes failed) results.
The first I did was something I've been planning for a while but just never got round to. My laser pointer arrived in the post a few days ago, and although playing with this long-range laser was so fun it was tempting to leave it intact for mischievous purposes, I hacked the thing and extracted the macro lens inside, giving me a really simple tool to take microscopic photos with my iPhone. It's a surprisingly powerful lens, with the ability to take photos at a much closer range that even my DSLR, so I immediately took to my ever-festering 'self samples' from the BioHackspace to investigate their makeup a little more closely.
Even though these bacterial samples are almost definitely contaminated by now, and not really much use to my project focus for the very moment, this lens proved really useful for taking a closer look at some of the other things I got up to.
I started by sketching up some up ideas for the components of a 'tool kit to mine the self'. Looking at the body as a tactile material, and a ever-growing resource of replenish-able matter, I wanted to optimize ways of extracting these resources.
I got started trying to extract some of these materials, but the initial swabs I took proved to be rather useless, and didn't really spark my imagination.
So I started playing some games. I thought it could be fun to have a physical competition over features of the body that you can't necessarily exercise or control, things that lie primarily in the hands of your genetic makeup rather than fitness regime. I employed my flatmate to compete with me in two games: The Toughest Hairball and Saliva of the Fittest.
It was a close call, and even though mine were the winning samples, it was pretty hard to tell in both the competitions. The hair became immersed in a goopy white liquid which made things difficult to see, and the saliva didn't quite dissolve the bread all the way so in the end it became a rather subjective matter.
After a chat with my mentor about this however, I realized there are definite possibilities of defining these games into something a bit more sophisticated. Two beakers standing next to each other doesn't look quite like a game, and the simplicity of the mechanism might be what makes it difficult to judge a winner. I think the next step here will be to develop these ideas into some kind of formalized, game-type contraption that might indicate a clearer winner and also make it a lot more fun to look at.
I also brought a couple of palette knives with me to the gym that week, and tried to scrape as much sweat as possible off my body after a 30 minute run. Although I had worked up a pretty decent sweat, actually extracting the liquid off my body and putting it into a beaker not only made me look like a crazy person but was a pretty difficult affair. In the end all I was left with was a tiny amount of milky liquid that I wasn't entirely sure what to do with. It didn't take long for the sweat to completely evaporate, but upon closer inspection I noticed that the evaporated sweat had left behind some crystal-like formations, that I had a hunch might be salt residue.
This was oddly exciting to me, and upon further investigation I found out that this is actually how table salt is mined – by evaporating salt water. I just needed more sweat, and a better way to collect it. Going back to my initial self-mining sketches, I stitched together a load of cotton pads into a makeshift sweat soaking sports bra, and got back on the treadmill.
Post-workout, the cotton balls were significantly soaked, and I separated the individual parts. I popped them into a mason jar and diluted them slightly with water, in the hope that if I boiled the jar the salt residue would be left on the sides of the jar rather than inside the cotton pads. It kind of worked (I think), since there were certainly some suspicious looking marks and deposits left all around the glass, but I couldn't be sure of what they were and whether they had come from my sweat or some other contaminating source (like the water or the pads themselves).
On reflection I think I need a way of collecting the sweat that would allow me to keep it in an independent liquid form rather than soaked into something else. I have a hunch this may involve wrapping myself in cling film.
The next experiment I did got me back into cooking in the kitchen. In the initial stages of mining my bodily materials, I'd take a foot file to myself and collected a bunch of dead skin. Assuming that the human body is covered in yeast, my research strategy was to bake some bread using this skin. I got my recipe together, and plunged into my first ever forray into bread baking.
It was disgusting and also fun, but the bread didn't quite rise and I suspected it was because there just wasn't enough yeast present in the skin. I've already emailed my contact at Imperial College for their opinion on this problem, but my bread-loving mentor also advised me that I'd used the wrong bread recipe – apparently sour dough is the one to use, because it requires the dough to be left to rise for several days, taking full advantage of any yeast microbes that might be living in there. At any rate I think it'd be wise to see what scientific advice I get back, and possibly figure out a way of testing for human yeast, before I give it another go.
It was disgusting and also fun, but the bread didn't quite rise and I suspected it was because there just wasn't enough yeast present in the skin. I've already emailed my contact at Imperial College for their opinion on this problem, but my bread-loving mentor also advised me that I'd used the wrong bread recipe – apparently sour dough is the one to use, because it requires the dough to be left to rise for several days, taking full advantage of any yeast microbes that might be living in there. At any rate I think it'd be wise to see what scientific advice I get back, and possibly figure out a way of testing for human yeast, before I give it another go.
The remaining research strategy I had left to perform was a social experiment with stethoscopes. I wondered what would happen if people had a hyper-awareness of their heartbeat and how it related to their surroundings. If a room full of people can hear every single heartbeat in the room, would they begin to align? What if one person started panicking and their heartbeat sped up – would the rest of the room calm the one down, or would the panicker induce panic in the rest of the group?
In order to try this I needed a way of hooking a stethoscope up to a speaker. I'd gotten my hands on a basic stethoscope and found a way to hack it using a cheap 'spy ear' microphone. Unfortunately, the microphone didn't seem to work before I even took it apart, and after spending an afternoon rewiring the thing to take the end of the stethoscope, it didnt yield any results. There might not be too much cause for despair though – although it's just a gimmick at the moment, it could still be used for potential social experiments. Nobody has to know it doesn't work, and the sounds I secretly play them could lead to some interesting reactions. This needs a little more thought, but we'll see if I come up with anything while I try to source a more functional mic.
So these are the wacky and somewhat disgusting things I've been up to in the last week. I'd been stuck in such a rut of conceptual thought until now that it feels really good to get my hands dirty and just run with my gut instinct. These are all only starting points, but this next week will hopefully see me develop them onto their next stages. Let's see where it takes me.
