squirmelia | What I did in May 2022

I spent a lot of May making things - tentacles and bats for EMFCamp and sound art beer mats for an exhibition.

I ate brown bread ice-cream from Coffee and Cones.

I visited Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms at the Tate Modern with Steelfusion and stared at the reflections.

I went to the Louise Bourgeois exhibition with

doseybat at the Hayward Gallery and ate ice-cream at La Gelatiera on the Southbank.

I attended the Douglas Coupland bookclub online and we read All Families are Psychotic.

For Ingress Second Sunday, I did a banner in Brixton.

Leeky and I ate burritos one evening after I’d been to the office.

The tentacles went off to EMFCamp and I installed the beer mats in the Morley Gallery.

Here’s some more information about the things I made:

1. The red tentacle

I started by following the directions on here:
Making a Kraken, Sea Monster, Giant Octopus for your Pirate Themed Halloween

I stapled chicken wire to a round wooden base and then shaped the chicken wire. I then cut up a dryer hose and taped that onto the tip. I covered it all in masking tape, and then in a layer of plastic wrap (large sized cling film). I cut up foam pipe insulation for the suckers. It was looking fine, and then it fell over and would not stand up again, so I had to rebuild it, and rebuilt it stronger but smaller. I painted it with acrylic paint. Then the sound part: I painted two patches at the top with conductive paint. I tried painting over that, but then it all ran and smudged and cracked as I hadn’t varnished it first. I then varnished it but it still looked bad, so I decided to bejewel it with stickers and write “pitch” and “volume” on it, so it was more obvious which each did.

Top of tentacle monster that plays sounds

I ran wires up the inside of it and connected them to the conductive paint, and then to a Bare Conductive Touch Board that was hidden in a large cake box in the bottom of the tentacle. The cake box also helped to give it stability and I also added an extra wooden circle.

I also made a sign that said “To play the tentacle: Raise and lower your hands above “pitch” and “volume” “ to make it more obvious what to do.

This one ended up being about 80cm tall.

I also took a USB switch and decided it needed a better casing, so enclosed it in clay and stuck fake moss, a clay eyeball, a clay shell and some cogs onto it.

Video:

2. The green tentacle

The green tentacle was also made following the same instructions as the red tentacle, but this time I made a door so that a bubble machine could go inside, and attached a PIR sensor to the outside, so that when someone walked past it, it would blow bubbles. I also used a pump so that it would automatically refill the bubble machine with bubble mixture after a certain amount of times that the sensor was triggered, so that I would not have to refill it myself.

This one ended up being about 180cm tall.

Making boxes to fit the tentacles in also took me quite some time.

3. The purple tentacle.

The purple tentacle was made from pool noodles and duct tape and I followed instructions from here: Make your own tentacle. The purple tentacle was sadly abandoned after trying to make it stand up with various garden stakes and then it not standing up at all.

4. Bat decorations

I cut out some bat shapes from foam and pierced holes in them and poked LEDs on a chain of lights through, and then glued on the lights. I made black ones to start with, and then ones in different colours, and then white ones that I stuck on code I’d written in esoteric programming languages that all just printed “Gothic Valley”. I used Brainfuck, Evil, Dark, FiM++ and Rockstar.

These were to use as decorations in the Gothic Valley village at EMFCamp.

5. The King’s Arms

I painted beer mats with conductive paint and attached wires and poked them through a canvas and attached them to a Bare Conductive Touch Board. I also hid a speaker inside a plastic beer glass with crepe paper and cellophane. When you waved your hand over a beer mat, it would trigger sounds recorded in pubs.

I visited 10 pubs in London named the King’s Arms and recorded sounds in each of them.

The piece was exhibited at the Engine Room exhibition at the Morley Gallery in London in June.

For at least a hundred and fifty years, a pub named the King's Arms stood where the Morley Gallery now is in London. Although we may not be able to travel back to the time when the pub was open, we can listen to sounds from other pubs still open in London today which are also named the King's Arms.