I like to think of ‘thinking’ as abstract (immaterial) making, and ‘making’ as tangible (material) thinking. We humans are constantly exerting ourselves in order for information to flow between these two forms of activity. There is much friction here and I experience getting stuck on one side or the other. But one also develops ways of overcoming the friction – running in circles to warm up, to build up the energy, to make the jump – lit-erally taking the tools in my hands and making something I’ve done before to remind myself and ease the way for information to flow from my mind into my hands. Caught up on one side of the action, the other can soon appear menial. Transitions require leaps of faith and bursts of energy, both in oneself and in the material. Decision-making becomes transitioning, not only through but also in the body – in this collaboration between the analytical mind and the gut feeling.
5 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, lecture at the San Francisco Art Institute, April 25, 2017, https://youtu.be/GrYA7sMQaBQ.
6 Mike Anusas and Tim Ingold, 'The Charge Against Electricity', Cultural Anthropology, vol. 30, no. 4, 2015: pp. 540-554. https://journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca/article/view/ca30.4.03/200.
</*March-April 2019::::: I found myself unpacking a 20g bag of thermochromic pigment that changes from black to white at 36°C. Placing it in the center of my empty worktable and thinking: What can I mix it with? What can I apply it to? --- Rummage through my working room, the kitchen, basically the whole house, and pull out a selection of materials that felt suita-ble. //As soon as I looked at the selection of materi-als, I see that my choices reveal things I’d not been consciously aware of while picking them. The table is full of flat, lightweight materials of natural and tech-nological origins. From prior experience <I knew> that the more dense the material the more power it took to heat and the longer it took to cool down again. +//
Every time I make a decision, I’m revealing underly-ing motivations, intuitions, expectations that can be uncovered if I only take the time to reflect. --- Reduced my selection back to 3-4 items to help myself focus on some concrete experiments.++//There is a gap between thinking-about-making and making. It requires energy to make the jump. Energy in the form of courage, hope, stamina. //How to make the jump when the energy is not there? >>>>>>>>>>>>> Going through familiar motions
with the most obvious of opportunities. Mixing the pig-ment with acrylic paint, textile paint…… painting it on fabrics, papers, seashells, pine needles, transistors….
>>>>>>>>>>>>> Hooking up the ends of a 20cm piece of steel thread to a 9V battery and using it to heat the what I had prepared. Swiping it across my samples and observing them change colour. +++//By simply doing something with the materials I had set myself up for discovering something interesting [origin of word in-teresting: from inter- ‘between’ + esse ‘be’ - to be between] that could then lead me further in. |<<<One tends towards familiar ground when entering new land-scapes” “First discoveries that excite... “(quotes from letter, 1/3/2019)>>>|<<<“Submerge myself in the process” (quote from letter, 1/3/2019)>>>|--- Thin, porous fabrics coated in the thermochromic mixm, held up to my noise/mouth, breathing out causes heat to spread, breathing in sucks cold air though the materi-al. ++++//This interplay of bodily heat and electronic heat drew me in…. --- Once submerged in the process, it was easy to keep meander-ing…. one idea leads to the next to the next… until I had lost track of what the point was. It was here that i made some of my most surprising and motivating discoveries >>>>>> Continuing to mix the pigment with
vaseline, nail varnish, water…… and finally wax. I nev-er would have thought that the pigment would mix so well with wax! And that I would return to my childhood enthusiasm for poking my fingers into melting candles, dripping it on snow and making thermochromic candles.
I used snow to make moulds, bringing in the outdoors, seasonal materials, adding lines of thread for compos-ite flexibility and surface coverage…. +++++// Exper-iments in creating surface heating with carbon paint were not successful. --- ((((Wanting to be submerged, lost, aimless…. but also needing to feel comfortable in this state. grappling for what I had experience with.)))) +++++++//What I found most intriguing was the interplay between the electrically controllable heating and the bodily (uncontrollable) heating and cooling caused by breathing as well as the heat from regular body temperature. I wanted to achieve a setup that would allow for these two different sourc-es of heat to meet through the material actuation in order to reveal something that would otherwise not oc-cur. --->>>>>>>>_______I am able to electri-cally change the colour of the thermochromic wax mix by embedding lines of steel thread (10-20 Ohm and can withstand high temp) in the wax, crimping their ends to copper threads, powering them from a 3.7V LiPo bat-tery. Controlling the heating via a MOSFET triggered by a microcontroller. Controlling the microcontroller with a sensor. Controlling the sensor with my body heat._______<<<<<<<<--- ::: Combining wax with threads resulted in a rigid yet fragile structures that could hold their form while retaining some flexibility.
Since the circuitry was also comprised of connected threads it should also become such an integral part of the structure. Since the wax became soft with the same heat that was intended to change the colour the shape could shift, and I would love to to collapse. :::
Pressing my face into the fold snow and then dripping molten thermochromic beeswax onto the cold snow mound.
I was making a mask, a object to use to tell <my_story>
of change and control. */>
Fig. 1. (previous pages) Hannah Perner-Wilson, ‘getting lost’ with thermochromic pigment captured in image and text, 2019.
Fig. 2. Hannah Perner-Wilson, thermochromic pigment, wax and threads on translucent paper, 20197.