Bother Consulting

Taking inspiration from our Kitchen project, we pivoted for audiences online with a browser-based project, Epic Hand Washing in a Time of Lost Narratives. This project (fig. 2) showcases 68 videos found in Epic Kitchens’ 2018 dataset that had been tagged by researchers with the keywords “wash” or “hand”, which burrough and MacDonald optimised for the web browser and republished in a showcase on Vimeo (burrough, Starnaman, and MacDonald, “Epic”). Starnaman and burrough developed a new dataset of complementary quotes for this iteration including selections from literature written during or about pandemics such as the bubonic plague and the global influenza pandemic of 1918-19.

Epic Hand Washing | M/C Journal (media-culture.org.au)

A Kitchen of One’s Own was commissioned for “Data/Set/Match”—a year-long program dedicated to analysing, interpreting, and visualising image datasets (burrough, Starnaman, and MacDonald). The image dataset we interpreted is Epic Kitchens’ 2018 collection. Epic Kitchens is a dataset of videos collected by a group of researchers whose participants create non-scripted recordings of daily activities in kitchens. It is the largest known dataset produced using first-person vision. Researchers assign each recorded action with a verb like “wash”, “peel”, “toast”, or “rub” to describe and categorise the event. Our project juxtaposed the videos from Epic Kitchens with quotes from a dataset created by Starnaman with research assistant Alyssa Yates. 

Epic Hand Washing | M/C Journal (media-culture.org.au)

A Lover, Inverted is a collaboration between hybrid artist xtine burrough and media scholar Kristin Drogos, with technical direction by Dale MacDonald.
Our conversation begins with a new media art installation that reverse engineers a poem by Amy Lowell to create a participatory, imagined (or reimagined) world:
“If I could catch the green lantern of the firefly
I could see to write you a letter”
(“A Lover,” Amy Lowell)
We invite participants to several conversations: First, we request participants type a letter to someone on a mid-twentieth century green Remington typewriter. In this creative exchange, everything old is new again. When participants type, a group of green, origami fireflies, hanging from a mobile above the Remington, will shine their (LED) lanterns.
The second conversation happens outside of the installation, where participants reflect on the letter they typed (or, if they did not participate, consider the person to whom they may have addressed a letter) in a 90-second survey. Following this activity, Dr. Drogos studies participants’ experiences with the installation to investigate how new media art impacts participant audiences.
The third and ongoing conversation is across disciplines, between an artist and a social scientist. The authors’ conversation meets at the intersection of participatory media art and media psychology to explore the possible worlds, past, present, and future, that sensory input can trigger.

A Lover, Inverted (missconceptions.net)