Kinder/Garden Redux?

It’s been almost two years (!), but I’m planning to revive Kinder/Garden this summer with more fetal vegetables. Some changes? Well of course! This time I’ll be growing fetal pigs (and maybe some other baby animals?) “Why?” you wonder. Well first because fetal pigs are a mainstay of biology teaching and are readily (and cheaply!) [...]

Endings and beginnings…

We are coming to the end of another semester at Concordia. Panic is being overtaken by exhaustion, creating an all too brief pause before making plans for another (working, of course) summer and then another school year. Yet although the class it was created for has wrapped, the Kinder/Garden project continues. We (the plants and [...]

Sustainability?

Even though I am dealing with plants, sustainability is not really a core research concern for this project. Of course there are metaphoric links between the designed and monitored squash of Kinder/Garden, and plant/food cultivation. Researchers may be attempting to develop more resistant crops in response to climate change and as solutions such as phytoremediation [...]

A productive week!

This was an extremely busy and productive week for Kinder/Garden. Above is a (sorry about the poor quality – I’ll take more) photograph of my 3d models. After the first aborted (pun-intended) attempt, there they are! They were printed from STL (stereolithography) files made from the modified $10 3d baby model using Zcorp printer, which [...]

Curses! Foiled again….

Look 3d printing! It’s happening… well for about 15 minutes before a motor burned out. There is a massive cloud hanging over this project… first with the webcams and now with the mould making. Let’s try to explain this. First, creating the 3d files for the moulds took much longer to complete than expected because [...]

Rapid prototyping two steps forward, three back…forward 1/2?

I was scheduled to mill my first styrofoam negatives (to make plaster cast positives) in the Concordia Technical Core Rapid Prototyping lab last Wednesday evening. However, my appointment was delayed because a student ahead of me had a highly-detailed job that had been on since that morning and it was only a fraction complete. Knowing, [...]

Rapid Prototyping Update

Nope… didn’t happen. I showed up to my appointment this evening but it turned out that a job started this morning was only a fraction of the way complete and there was no telling when the process of milling the highly detailed work would end. For safety reasons, milling was to be suspended tonight when [...]

Rapid Prototyping…tonight?

This evening will be the first step (hopefully) in the physical part of the mould-making process. Using a CNC machine at the CTC (Core Technical Centre workshhop) of the Concordia Faculty of Fine Arts, we will mill negative moulds out of styrofoam. These moulds will be used to create plaster cast positives which will then [...]