 Hello everyone. I've got a question for you. I'm going to do this sort of talk which is telling you a story about Project Nimbus, which is the journey that we went on to project Moving Images on Clouds. Where are the current thoughts though? Try and use the talk to turn it into a bit of a vehicle to present to people from civic leaders, like their councillors, different business, about the value of risk. It would be really great for any kind of feedback a'i wedi byw i ddau sy'n d aloneig o'r adrwm yn gwneud gyda y gallu syni arddur hyn. Mae hyn yma, dyma'r gwneud dysgu ymlaen. Wrth i dwi'n dweud roedd yn bwynt i ddweud yng Nghymru, a byddwn yn ddweud y gilydd wedi am yr hyn. Dwi'n dweud o'r unrhyw i fynd yn credu rai gwybrae'n eu cymdeithasol a'r cyfan yn ei wneud, yn cael iawn er mwyn a diweddol â'r cynnig, mae gennynnu gyda drwn o dechrau o'r cyfan. I'm really interested in that and this idea of community and kind of bringing people together to kind of see where we can go with cross-disciplinary collaboration. But I'll get straight in. That works really well if it's really loud, but it doesn't have the same impact if it's not. I generally like to do things that involve a lot of risk and kind of make things up on the spot a lot like I'm kind of doing now. I'm quite terrified. It's kind of a lot easier hanging out of a plane a mile above the ground, staring at the floor than it is stood up here right now. So if I kind of run around and kind of get a bit excited and lost, just bear with me. I'll come back round. So, clouds. Manmade cloud projections. The earliest that I've found is from the book 2829 written by Jules Burns' son, Michael Burns. And in this book he depicts a kind of superpower kind of newspaper called The Earth Chronicle. And they project on the clouds during the day and kind of cover the entire sort of planet. And they have all of these dark intentions about doing all of these different things to kind of take away the sun so they can constantly kind of project advertising. So that's one of the earliest things that I've found which is potentially one of the dangerous things about the potential of this technology. Next is Harry Gwindol Matthews. So around the 1930s this guy also invented the death ray. He's one of the heroes. And he projected time on the clouds as well of lots of other different things. He also projected an angel apparently around kind of Christmas time, which is quite funny how a lot of people have this obsession of angels and clouds. She'll see. Deborah Kelly, Words of God. So this is kind of early 2000s. So she's the same kind of tech as Harry Gwindol Matthews, which is like this huge kind of cannon with a big truck lighting and a couple of lenses. And this is projected in Sydney as you can tell. But it's not happened a couple of times. And one of the things about this kind of medium is that it's really difficult really to find the clouds in the right place at the right time at the right height, which is probably why not much of it really kind of happens. Also various of the things which we'll get into. There's also Hey Hey, so they did a project using a laser. So they used a scan laser, which is different to the one that we made. The thing about a scan laser is that it's moving really quickly and so you've still got the same intensity of being, which will be important later on. But the project that they did, they projected onto this incinerator and they started to engage with the local community and told people at the community that if you'd start turning all your lights off, then this green cloud, which is above the sky, will get smaller because you're using electricity for one of the best projects I've seen using clouds. And of course we all know how to get Batman. Can we turn the lights off actually? Is that possible somehow? So my journey started when I was doing my MA back in 2007 and I was looking at non-lethal weapons of mass communication and I came across this paper from 1981 by the US military detailing weapons from the Vietnam War called non-lethal weapons terms and references. And this is a huge kind of booklet. It's got some amazing weapons in about sound weapons and all of these things. And it was the one in the middle that really got me, which is Hullogram Profit, which is the projection of this ancient guard over a small little village so they think it's rapture at the end of the world. And you're going and take them over. And I also like this one as well. I remember non-lethal, but he kind of died. So when I came across this I was really concerned about, well a couple of things really, is that one, I suppose that's possible, and two, that there's going to be this kind of seduction by this process into advertising. So I wanted to sort of start off on a journey to make something that was kind of open source to put in the hands of kind of artists and activists and anyone really that if this happened, would be aware that we could subvert this. My original idea was an angel, which is kind of, I don't know why, but there was something about this, I wanted to project a symbol of hope, that's why it was. And then the more I thought about this, the power of this image, is that this could either be a symbol of hope or it could be an angel of death. So depending on how this image is kind of read, this can have the exact opposite effect of what I'm sort of trying to do. And then I start to think more about how that could work in terms of like these non-lethal weapons or weapons of mass communication about how you preload the internet with all of these stories about this angel of death or hope is going to appear that would then define what's going to happen and how the public are going to react to it. So around this time I was on Instructables and I got sent this in my little inbox Instructables is a website which I'm sure most of you know which sends little projects by other kind of makers and things. And he made a laser image projector, still image projector. Now the reason why a laser is so important and especially for the clouds is that it's a single point source. So it's always in focus because it's a single frequency of light. So that's why in lasers and clubs it kind of cuts all the way through because it doesn't have a focal plane. So I thought the best way to kind of do this is to kind of make one of these things and stick it on a 16mm projector. Now I love 16mm projectors and I couldn't bear to take it apart. So I kind of made this whole construction on top and I projected it with a little laser. So this laser here is out of the CD burner. It goes through this tiny little lens out of a point and shoot camera and then goes through another lens and that focuses it. And you turn on the projector and it kind of wears round. Now it didn't work. Now the reason it didn't work is actually not my fault it turns out but it took five years to work for that. The other thing as well about this is that it's like it's a massive hefty device. 16mm projectors are a massive ball ache anyway to kind of make them work because of how complex they are to kind of thread. And so for me to kind of take this up into a helicopter was just a general no-no because it didn't work. I kind of left it alone. It's a little bit about me in the meantime to kind of explain part of the journey is that I quite like to do stuff. So one of my friends told me ages ago is that we all grew up in public. And so one of the things I like to do is just go out there and just sort of do things and then just see what kind of happens from it. But I find that to be a real great way to kind of explore things. I also do quite a lot of commercial work which I use that as a way to fund my practice. So I kind of go off and make kind of videos and all these different things for these people and tell them about my research. That pays for my kind of artistic research. A lot of these people are really into the idea that rather than funding a kind of couch at some kind of production company they're funding someone for genuine kind of exploration or something to do with art or collaboration. Now, the catalyst for this. So at Fond Festival in 2011 we've just finished doing a pirate radio station from a six foot swan peddler with John O'Shea. And we're on our way back and we're just chatting around about ideas and I was telling John about this cloud idea and he was like, well why don't you do it? It never really occurred to me that it was possible to sort of do it. And then he introduced me to two people at that sort of time. One was Abandoned Normal Devices Festival which is a kind of new cinema and cultural festival based in Manchester. We'd just been working with the Octopus Collective but he also introduced me to a pilot who flew 747s. Now, the 747s, I had a chat to this guy and he was telling me about all these little local airfields that were just full of pilots and they happened to modify the plane and take up anything and it can just glue it to the wing or something like that and so that made it all seem possible. So we've got a tiny little bit of seed money and it just uses it for the start of the exploration. Now, a key point about this is that we're in this caravan for a week in the middle of Manchester just talking to God knows whoever kind of came in the door which is a really interesting process in itself and I met Liz Elks from New Scientist. So that'll come back in later but I think it's just worth mentioning at this point that that's where we kind of started the kind of conversation. It wasn't until four years later that we actually finished the conversation. Around this time, I've been doing lots of projections out of moving vehicles so this is a projection out of a campervan of Edwin Mybridge's horse in motion which I've reanimated it. It's projected onto railings which is why it looks invisible. And throughout this exploration of being projecting out of vehicles it's maybe got me interested in this idea of planes and maybe rather than it being a helicopter it could be something that could be in motion. Now, at this point, the horse was only a viewpoint and a kind of direction indicator to the zoom practoscope which is what Mybridge's device was that he originally made to show the horse arguably the first ever photographic projector in the world as a disc of 14 images and then you've got a shitter and a hand crank and it turns the wheel and you get a flash across the image as one wheel goes one way and one wheel goes the other way and then you put those flashes of images together and you get motion. But the thing about this is that we could potentially make this lightweight. So in my version, the first place was a view master disc, a scale electric controller for variable resistors, speed control the repurpose bits of the laser so we've still got the red laser there that goes through this disc and the lens to correct it and I was thinking that it could shoulder mount this thing and sit in a plane and fire it out the side. Another thing that happened around this time is that lasers are completely changed in value so these lasers come out of a tiny little hybrid projector which actually happens in this projector so inside this projector there's nine of these blue lasers which are two watt and this was like $35 so this was the kind of so the more power the better the brighter it's going to be that's what I and I just thought at that time I went to see Aaron at Umlaut which I suppose most of you all know and Aaron completely changed my way of thinking about things so I went to see him about making the shutter because that was the one thing that I couldn't make out of the bits of random stuff I had on my workshop floor and his kind of approach that was like let's remake everything and let's laser cut everything and then we can do different generations of things and take the journey from there so we used the viewmaster disc as the kind of the benchmark for everything and then we came up with an initial prototype so the first prototype was old laser cut we got an image disc at the back with 16mm filming we've got this other slit here I've got two independent motors which you can control the speed of I mean it can't really be that hard to figure out how this the first projector work is just two discs and so I spent ages of time I got in touch with my old 16mm friends and we spent ages trying to figure it out and we couldn't get anywhere with it I started to experiment with the laser that we've got and this laser just with this long throw lens to see if we could potentially do it from the ground and it was this image in the top left hand corner that really kind of drew my attention cos at that point it comes back to a focal point and when it comes to a focal point it's just as intense as being a single beam and before I take this up into a plane or point it at the sky I need to know that I've done absolutely everything I can to make sure that I'm not going to do any damage there's a woman called Grace Hopper who's got this amazing quote that's better to ask forgiveness and get permission which I find with a lot of the work that I do no one will give you permission for and there's no laws for or against it so it's best just not to ask and the other way you can truly sort of embody that I think is to do absolutely everything you can to make sure you can stand up in a court of law and well just say you did everything I guess so I went to see some businessists so this is Ben Whitaker and there was also Mike Nix and we've been working on a project called Phase Revival which uses a series of pendulums to explore femtosecond spectroscopy and it turns out that femtosecond spectroscopy which is their scientific practice which is partly inspired by Mybridge so I'm going to reveal use Mybridge as an analogy on his Nobel Prize when in paper to kind of explore what they do and essentially what they do at Femtosecond which is a million billionth of a second they look at atoms using a very similar principle to how Mybridge photographed the horse which is a series of tripwires so Mybridge captured time at a thousandth of a second there was one of the first to do that which led to the horse's hooves leaving the ground at the time which was a popular debated question and there was something about these scientists that we were just really interested in this idea that we just wanted to figure out how this whole process worked and their interest was basically they got this device and kind of pushed me out of the way and just started to take it apart and kind of break it which was really exciting to see this kind of engagement so even with these two physicists working on it we still couldn't figure it out it was sort of ridiculously the answer is ridiculously simple which we'll get to in a bit but it was I think there was too many parameters of what we could kind of control so and this became this was the end of the residency with the Ann Festival and this is kind of where the work kind of got to and this okay so part of this project because I've got this kind of commercial practice and one of the things that's quite interesting about it is that this is kind of research so all of the money that's kind of been paying for this has been coming from kind of invest in sort of time and paying for the people's time and at this point one of the things that kind of held everything together was the fact that there was no image so all of the different people that have been speaking to include a new scientist that was projecting a specific image on the clouds so one of the things that was brought to new scientists was about is that what image do they want to project which will engage their scientific community and with the scientists it was the same thing what is important to them about what the potential of the image is and the same thing with the pilots and I think starting the kind of the project without knowing where it's going to go was something that really helped with the progression during this time shortly after I met Ystwch of who's a cultural specialist and he was really excited about this idea of the image and we explored this idea of a still image and the work that I did with him a lot of that basically went on trying to find a plane and all of these little bits of things and so so this is really weird I'm kind of condensing the talk and there's a couple of slides kind of missing so at this point we had this little plane and we've been to an aircraft an airport just outside of Selby in New Yorkshire and there was two options so there was this little plane here and then this plane so this one's sort of like a 60 kind of horsepower it goes really fast, looks like a kind of spitfire this one's like a kind of little mini, it's really safe, it's nice can fly at night this one can't fly at night but this one can, it's a lot cheaper it's about 50p a minute this one's about a pound a minute makes no logical sense but of course it went for this one now at this point I've not even thought if I like flying I'm sort of sat in the back of this thing the little GoPro thinking what am I doing I'm doing it with the window open because I'm going to imagine holding this kind of projector and I'm probably about as scared as I am now actually it's interesting and so it was something nice about this part of the process about just throwing yourself to the point and not getting caught up too much about it when I went to see the pilot I had to visit him three times before he even let me in the plane because you don't have any small problems in aeroplanes you've either got a problem or you've not so this is me holding on to the side because that will stop me falling out if we go upside down and it's an amazing experience at this point everything completely changes for me it's actually like flying it's really good but there was no way I was going to work from this aircraft because we couldn't fly at night there was going way too fast to stick something out of the side of the plane and it goes like that so we got to the end of Leeds Creative Labs working with Vlad Strokov and one of the people on there called Simon Popple and Simon had worked on a Zupraxascope replica one of the seven in the world and it's like would you like to contact him it's like yeah of course so we gave him a call and he explained the ratio of one to minus one so as one of the discs goes one way the other disc goes the other way and it's as simple as that which baffled us for months and months so straight back to all that Aaron loves a challenge and so his Lego gears there's a way to kind of work out how to do it and we had the Zupraxascope mark three although I'll have to follow them up two straight back to 16mm so we shot lots of 16mm frames of the horse because we thought if we're going to do this it'd be really nice to see the horse is the first thing following the footsteps of my bridge and see what he saw and this is the first time of his testing it you're not supposed to be able to see anything it does work and we can see it but there's no way it's going to work on a cloud and so one of the key things about this is the laser how do you want to test this that's awesome I can see the legs going that's brilliant now for the proper laser so their proper laser is a five watts laser costs 20,000 pounds it's got a cooler about this big it takes ages to warm up and we can see it quite clearly but not that clearly just about sitting with the naked eye it picks up quite well with the film but there's no way we're going to be able to take this up onto a plane so game over really it's like there's no way this process is ever going to work and that's it it's the end of the line and then I've got a phone call from Mike for the next day and this is what he said so the beam comes through here the beam is correlated at this point it's bounded by this line that's before and then focus to a strike by this so the strike appears here on the slide and then that's the fixed cylindrical lens that the beam can't make so it projects onto the screen which is the box so if I just take that out of the way for a second then I can just make sure it's aligned so laser on and you can see on the box if I just project the light straight through the slide I'll get a test you've got that? so that's not very interesting if I put the oops it's from the partner it's guaranteed if I put the lens in there then you can see that what we end up with is a very very thin stripe here so that's a privilege to slate that's what the box will have and then you've got a beam which is expanded and it's about the same width now it's like this lens so it's currently correlated from the lens and screen which is important because the screen can be as prominent so we'll just push the box out of the way stick it up on the wall test on the screen test on the screen now is it the same size? is it by removing the cylindrical lens completely? so Mike had this idea now the only kind of downside to this idea is that to test out this theory it's going to cost £1000 on lenses which nobody seems to have lying around while listening on me this coincided with a residency from the octopus collector who got in touch that same week to say oh I'd like to see if you could do a bit more work on project Nubus we have about £1000 which was great it's like straight in straight out didn't even think about it and then a couple of weeks later we had the first time that we saw it now the horse is running vertical which is why it's not very great so this is the point where I think the actual horse took over the point that that should be the first image because it was the point where the horse brought the two disciplines together so another thing during this time is that we started to kind of explore with the two scientists I've been working with and Andrew Wilson and Laurence Mulroy this idea of kind of collaboration so we started this collectible super position which has done various other things which I'll come back to sort of slightly later on we did a presentation at the FOM Festival with Vlad which was a really interesting way and one of the things about this while I left the sliding we used to do the whole presentation just on completely analog which is a really interesting way to do it because it's not like you do it with digital where you can just have a quick flick through your slides to see what the order is you've literally got to make it up it should go along we went back to the plane we sort of tested it out with the smaller laser we didn't think it was bright enough it was going to cost us about £200 a time to go up so we took out the loan we invested in a kind of new laser we came out to try and build all of these things into one thing and this happened over quite a quick succession of time but it's actually been over sort of three years and the role of the maker in this was kind of completely critical because there was art and science on one side but the role of the maker informed us as much as we informed it in terms of disciplines and things because it was right there from the court and a driving force so we went back up into the plane and nothing so this is all we got but one thing we noticed about this is that you might as well be projecting on a hedge we can't even see that it's a cloud so you can't even see there's an image so there's one key thing about this is that it reduced our window to about 15 minutes so we needed to be able to see the horse where we've got some clouds in the background so you can actually see context the other thing that we changed as well because we were using a 60mm film and our 60mm film kind of loves laser light and it just melts away so we made a laser disk which then kind of turned it into like high definition it was super clear, it was really nice it also made it a lot easier to kind of share the design because now everything was in there that we could kind of share it became quite abstracted from where we started off originally because we wanted to do something that was really low cost and now we've spent like a grand on lasers and a grand on lenses which kind of takes it out but there's still the kind of the core thing of being able to build the zoo praxiscope for free just with the normal process with the actual slits and then nothing a whole year absolutely nothing, we lost the plane the pilot, the airfield we landed at night, they set up a load of cars on the runway, they didn't like that they banned us we just thought again it was just a kind of game over a brick wall we had this amazing projector all kind of ready and working and people seem to be a little bit scared of it now because it's taking lasers and planes don't really go well together especially with all the stuff in the media so here we can see the laser light coming through which goes through a lens here which then diverges the beam to this lens this here which then turns into a line just like Mike was saying that goes through the image disc and then there's another lens here which corrects the image so as the image disc goes one way with the horse the line goes the other way in sync so that's when we get these flashes of images we applied some money to kind of look back at the project and kind of reflect on the process which was just another way of getting some money for some plane fuel really spending all the fee on that and out of the blue we got onto the plane and there's it just came out of nowhere with the pilot now what was really interesting about this process is that the pilot also be taken on the role of a maker so maker turned into something that was more about someone who had expertise who was sharing the project who wanted the project to work we'd offered to pay everyone but because we weren't doing it driven by advertising and we were just driven to see if it could work they were really interested in the same thing that we were so it became this kind of collective pursuit of discovery but the thing with this airport is that it was just down in Nottingham and we were nowhere near it so we had to get good at reading clouds and we looked at all the different things and one of the key people key disciplines who don't like clouds or astronomers so when it's bad for astronomers it's good for us and this is the place that we used to read the letter called Ogimet and we were looking for clouds like this at 5,000 feet that's 10,000 feet there and this is not easy not easy to get especially when you've got the pilot to get in the right place you've got to get out of the scientist or someone else to come and film there's so many different things that have all got to come together at the same time but then in July no in June 2015 we finally made it up everything kind of came together and we got the first images one of the issues we had with this is trying to capture this on film is completely different because the horse's frame rate is some kind of ridiculous weird 0.8625 number and trying to get that on film means that you don't really out of this out of a seven minute film there's three frames which are actually of a full horse everything else is just a tiny little section of the horse so it's it's really interesting this relationship between how it looks when you're up there and also how it captures on film so so after this the article kind of went out on the new scientist that we've been chatting to all of this sort of time and kind of kept them engaged with the process and we were really keen that it didn't become about this spectacle and it became about the whole point of collaboration between all the disciplines and when we first spoke to new scientists we sort of pretended that Wyatt were interested for a world exclusive and that made them really fight for it and then so we had this really nice process of being able to sort of send them this after four years and then write this piece together in there which was really interesting process to then sort of see how it kind of expanded out into the world I'll just finish with a video actually of one of the fans of the project let's say so let me R-T-L they it's just sick name I'm projecting it's got David Lynch and Nimbus is what they call it and Nimbus is a they're projecting a field green horse University of Leeds funding is saying they can do it be a plane projector they can do it from the ground they project it up in the clouds and they're doing a field green horse isn't it great that we just happen to pick up every horse we need let's see a fourth seal of revelation and now we are at the fifth seal and meanwhile all of them are open and they're happening until we get to the sixth seal which is about to occur and we will be raptured before you captain of my other videos check this out we scumbags is like scumbags and I'm going to let you know that you don't fool us because we don't have something then gay so yeah that's a nono audience for that so yes thank you very much let's do it