Objects in Flux - RMIT Research Repository - RMIT University

[Figure 5-20]
Bat detector active, 2005.
and the controls I’ve added to the base. It even weighs about
the same.
And it actually works (I’m always surprised when that
happens). If you don’t have a bat on hand you can test a
bat detector by pointing it at fast-running water; just turn
your kitchen tap on full and start the detector. The faster the
water, the more ultrasonic sound is produced.
[Figure 5-21]
Bat detector at VCA gallery, 2005.
The bat detector has just spent three weeks at VCA gallery 15
in an exhibition called ‘slave’ 16 curated by Christopher LG
Hill, Kain Picken, Rob McKenzie and Nick Selenitsch. (No
bats were found.)
15/ http://www.vca.unimelb.edu.au/art/gallery/index.html,
accessed 20 July 2006.
16/ http://www.vca.unimelb.edu.au/art/gallery/program2005.
html, accessed 20 July 2006.
5.3 Fictional narratives
Telling Stories
In many respects, practices of hacking, mod-
ding and DIY may be regarded as forms of
research activity. The various processes un-
dertaken – the public presentation of projects,
linking to parallel practices, providing feedback
and advice to peers, and encouraging oth-
ers to copy or extend existing works – mirror
activities found in institutionalised research
practices. There remains, however, something
excessive in the practice of object modification
that is not reducible to the creation, presenta-
tion and exchange of knowledge. xix This excess
brings a motivated, personal, social and playful
dimension to project descriptions. Project doc-
umentation often develops complex storylines
with strong narrative themes such as romance,
hardship, tragedy, heroic struggle,and triumph.
In Tim Hirzel’s coffee machine modification a
fictional love story is constructed between the
coffee machine and microcontroller, and pre-
sented online in the form of the video, ‘Arduino
and Silvia: Two Italians, One Tangled Affair’. xx
Fictional narratives such as this typically draw
on and extend existing social structures. In
the case of the Arduino-Silvia romance, Hirzel
expands and rewrites the Rancilio advertising
material that presents his particular model of
coffee machine as ‘Miss Silvia’.
De Certeau claims that narration is not ‘a
question of approaching a “reality” (a techni-
xix. It has long been argued that this ‘excess’
is also present in ‘proper’ research (Traweek,
1988).
xx. http://growdown.blogspot.com/2008/04/
arduino-and-silvia-two-italians-one.html,
accessed 18 July 2010.
91