Re-making

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Andrew Logan Museum, Berriew, 2016 - Sculpture ©Andrew Logan

    For those who don't know Andrew Logan, his ethos or his work, Google him - suffice to say, we have a connection with the Museum in Berriew as a family, going back twenty-five or more years, often visiting the place when we're down in Shropshire.
    The point here is Andrew's use of found materials, repurposed in his sculptures and jewelery, tranforming mundane stuff into something rather more exotic. Un-precious materials made precious.
    This process of re-making and re-purposing is what I'm thinking about at the moment - I was going to push the argument sideways toward this in my 'Colossus' post, but I decided to leave it as it was. The essence of what Tommy Flowers and his colleagues did with Colossus, was to take existing GPO technologies and techniques and re-purpose them to a greater end: looking at familiar stuff in a different light to arrive at novel solutions to seemingly intractable problems.
    As I mentioned in that post, Flowers turned to the electronic to replace the electromagnetic, in order to gain speed. An obvious path to take, but sometimes a regressive path can be effective for other reasons.
    Nearly thirty years ago, we installed an audiovisual system of my design in Conwy Castle - a simple enough affair, which played an audio piece about the history of the particular tower in the castle where it was installed. It used a detector to alert the system to the presence of visitors in the room, and acted appropriately. I specified a rather nice piece of kit from Australia to do the job - over the top in it's capabilities, but there you go.
    I decided a few months down the line that the unit could be better used elsewhere - as it was the only one of its kind in the UK and I was pretty much the only bloke who knew how to programme the thing, we thought we could stretch it's usefulness on some other project. So I did exactly the opposite of the Tommy Flowers move from the electromechanical to the electronic and rewrote the logic used in the [microcontroller-based] unit in the display for relays and timers.
    Essentially, a process of de-construction, almost a destruction of the original show-control concept to achieve a neater, if more 'primitive' result and freeing up an expensive and over-specified generalist device. Re-making. Sometimes what you actually need is just staring you in the eye.

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