Choosing a Team –

Day three was all about formulating our ideas and finding a team that we each felt most aligned with those ideas.  The ideas window had certainly continued to grow from the day before.

Topics Begin to Emerge

Slowly but surely topics began to emerge.  Ideas were grouped onto six white boards.  Below are pictures of the whiteboards with ideas.

Project Titles

Eventually everyone settled on their groups and project titles although some of the decisions weren’t finalised till day four.  I was quite worried at first as my ideas just didn’t seem to fit anywhere.  I felt quite sad especially as one of the groups was vociferously against any notion of AI.  Given my research paper I should have known that some people would be opposed to AI. However, after wandering around aimlessly for a while, I finally found my fit and a great set of team members. Below are the project titles which developed from the topic boards above. I chose the project team ‘Beyond Earth’ and they very kindly let me join them.

Meet the Team

Afternoon in the Grow Lab

We all spent Wednesday afternoon in the Grow Lab.  we were experimenting with materials and chemicals that would go towards illustrating our chosen topics.  The day was manic.  Stick a bunch of creatives with enquiring minds into a laboratory and organised chaos ensued.  It was great fun but exhausting!  Initially I was involved in trying to shoot some time-lapses of our growing chemical gardens.  I wasn’t convinced that the results were going to be particularly good. I felt quite rushed and crowded and I was struggling to acquire focus on my macro lens which really didn’t help.  I also felt that if I didn’t shoot anything decent then I would be letting down the team. So no pressure there then.

However, I didn’t need to worry because the time-lapses weren’t half as bad as I’d envisioned them to be when viewing them in-camera.  Time-lapses 5, 6, and 7 are my results and can be seen in the following collaboration video that I put together.  The pink AI generations were also mine with the first four time-lapses created by Shem Johnson the lab technician.

The rest of the team made great progress and decided that they would attempt to displace the chemical garden solution with resin so that the creations could be saved for posterity.  This was a neat idea that was suggested by Shem one of the laboratory technicians.  However, time was rapidly running out so this was a job for tomorrow afternoon.

Summary

Today I’d felt quite pressured because I didn’t want to let the team down with my time-lapse photography.  They were working hard to create chemical gardens and I really wanted to be able to produce something worthwhile to compiment their hard work.  Luckily things hadn’t turned out half as badly as I had predicted and I was actually quite pleased with the results.  My daughter had just flown in from Dublin in Ireland, so instead of having a night out on the town we decided to watch Oppenheimer together in my hotel room.  Given the scientific nature of what we had just been exploring it felt like a good choice.