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This project explicitly acknowledges aleatory contingencies for its resolution as it attempts at the creation of what can be inexactly termed “a new crystallography”. A mix of minerals derived from computers including copper, iron ore, lead, magnesium, magnetite, silicon was prepared for embedding at various sites in The Suffolk Psychogeophysics Summit 2011 in anticipation of both mundane and spectacular methods of harnessing colossal electrostatic discharges to create artifical fulgurites.
The purpose of the conductive metal and mineral arrangements is for the synthesis and creation of custom fulgurites. When lightning strikes a sandy soil or a beach, the lightning bolt's path into the earth can sometimes transform any silica based minerals into glass like tubes, called fulgurites; the conceit of this project is that other minerals can be entrained in the molten silica as the strike hits the substrate, thus making any new crystals available for further investigation and use, (for example, through Kirlian photography).
Placing mineral mix and lightning rod conductor for the creation of custom fulgurites, Grimes Graves, Norfolk, 01.09.2011
Grimes Graves was the site of extensive neolithic flint mines and evidence suggests that the black flint production of stone axes, knives, and scrapers was highly ritualized.
Placing mineral mix ready to be hit by lighting strikes for the creation of custom fulgurites, RAF Bentwaters, Suffolk, 29.08.2011
Placing the mineral mix at the end of a lightning conductor on a disused hangar
Placing mineral mix and lightning rod conductor for the creation of custom fulgurites, Orford Ness, 02.09.2011
Making custom fulgurites, CSV Ipswich, 03.09.2011
Mundane creation of artifical fulgurites using a bucket of sand (recovered from the nearby Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, site of an infamous UFO incident in the 1980's) as the substrate in which an embedded “trench” of the same minerals was made and lightly covered with the sand. One exposed end of a high voltage cable was loosely fixed to one end of the trench whilst another similar cable was attached to a piece of wood; both of the cables exited from a 9 kilowatt 25 milliamp neon light transformer. Once the current was switched on an arc was drawn across the mineral and sand trench by judiciously holding to the cable end attached to the wood and then drawing back from near the other fixed cable end in the trench. As a result small dark and fragile mixed “new crystal” fulgurites were formed
Preparations for rocket induced lightning custom fulgurites, Suffolk, 28-03.09.2011
Real time weather system reports were monitored for the area for another component of this project: the direct forcing of lightning to strike an area of prepared minerals. Rockets, copper wire and slow burning fuses had been prepared in anticipation that storms would take place during the week. The plan was to fire a rocket prepared with a copper wire attached to it and a bucket of minerals, up into the base of the storm to provoke a direct lightning strike that would travel down the wire and into the minerals. The weather proved benign and so this transmutation remains immanent.
images Martin Howse and Petr Kazil
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