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==== Machine Ecology Design Notes ====

==== Design Notes Cornwall Workshop ====

=== Theun's Team ===

From the exploration in the morning around the Penryn estuary the image emerges of a creature that extends across the landscape and taps into the communication of tree roots, branches and throughout varied parts of the environment. A creature as an indicator of hidden processes that is less like a body and more like a network.\\
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From the list of parameters for developing wilderness machines 'reproduction' in particular raises questions in terms of machine creatures. We discuss if reproduction or replication should be the more appropriate term for our hybrid creature.\\
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The experience of walking through the reed beds is discussed; how it enables shifting paces and tracks. When you are small you don't even make a path, but can pass through. Could our creature meander through the reed bed and exchange information? What if it extends from up the creek down to the reed bed and it stores its data into the mud. Mud as a sedimentation of environmental data. A model from biology could be a [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siphonophorae|Siphonophore]], a marine creature that is at ones a single organism and may collaborating beings. Could there be a second species that reads the mud bed archive by digging through it? A librarian?\\
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The team discusses the pros and cons of oven information exchange between creatures. What are the risks to individual members and to the collaborative super-organism they form? Can it be nessisary to withhold information from others? How do they create barriers to sharing information? If we want to maintain free information sharing, the super-organism needs to be able to handle that in terms of evolution. In robotics individuals actually don't need internal representation of the world to have behavior, maybe it could exist only externally; in the mud.\\
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Could the creatures that form our super-organism differ in functions? Is it cast-based? How does our creature tap into the different modes of communication from the many species in the environment it is tapping into? How do you find a common language. Maybe that is ritual based; ritual behavior remarks time and space. We discuss magic transformation.\\
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Maybe another model from biology is a combination between Hydra and Plenaria. Our creature could consist of a water filled membrane that has sensors floating in it like organellae and has tentacles that can tap into communication flows and information layers. It could extend around the reeds in the reed bed and bore little holes in them, by which the data is sonified. It could climb up by the movement that is used in squeeze tubes; water filled toys that consist of a sinlge surface that can travel along a straight line like a reed.\\

=== Amber's Team ===
Our machine was called Fucus - as it was heavily inspired by seaweed: bladderwrack [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucus_vesiculosus|Fucus vesiculosus]]
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The group was very drawn to the beach and the mud - as soon as they were
on the beach they found some bladderwrack hanging from a tree, and we
talked about the 'bladders' as buoyancy, and how the structure
completely changes when there is water present or not. Stillness with
the tide out/seaweed 'dances' with the tide in. (Dry seaweed - brown,
brittle, hardened, crunchy, opaque, ochre... Wet seaweed - maleable,
slimy, green, strong, shiny, colourful, rubbery, elasticity, breaks
along the vein, transluscent, dappled texture). We talked about why they
have multiple bubbles - one bubble is risky if the seaweed is broken.
One prevailing feeling was the amount of rubbish in the environment -
china, glass, plastic - people talked about how this 'doesn't fit in',
yet it is 'part of the environment' and some things live on it. There
was an idea to accelerate evolution to make creatures that fed on
plastic - and talk about how plastic is made from oil, which is recycled
life - where does 'nature' start and end?\\
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The design built on this - making a creature to eat or collect plastic
from the water surface - designed to rise up with the tide, and collapse
down to an anchor point when the tide went out, much like bladderwrack.
The group thought of MANY different iterations, before being encouraged
to think about the 'minimum viable design'. They ended up with an anchor
(like seaweed, to loosely anchor on the mud), a long string to allow the
creature to rise to the surface as the water came in. There was a
central floating hub, with a long tube attached. Along the long tube
there were floats, inspired by the seaweed bladders. At the other end of
the tube was a finned floating object, with a marine motor, allowing it
to travel round in a wide circle around the central hub. Hanging from
the long tube was a hand made net, fashioned from a material similar to
seaweed - thin and breakable to allow any fish to escape easily, while
still entangling floating rubbish.\\
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The dream was to have a system capable of using the collected plastic to
fuel and rebuild the creature, allowing it to replicate independently to
collect plastic over a broader area.\\