dead insect — website of Anthony Goh

recycled timber hollow wooden surfboard

February 21st, 2012 · portfolio

I started building this surfboard back in November 2011 down in Cornwall, from some softwood I found in a skip in Redruth. It’s been quite a long process but phenomenally enjoyable, I learned a lot of stuff along the way. Lots of woodworking was very new to me. I was also particularly bad at fibreglassing; I have a real weakness for any crafts involving the neat spreading of goo, I just get in a real mess.

It’s hollow and wooden, using the chambered method, which means you glue a load of wood together into a big lump, then shape it into a surfboard shape using an electric planer, then you have to break it up with a hammer, so you can hollow out the pieces, then you have to glue it all back together again.

A very time consuming method, but very satisfying as it makes you work in a big range of modes/skills – you go from being precise, to suddenly almost totally intuitive in the shaping process, and then back to being precise/repetitive in the hollowing out step.

About to take it for first surf, so praying it doesn’t fill up with water and sink!

Here’s a slideshow of the whole process:

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ghostwriter video

February 21st, 2012 · art, portfolio

an amazing video Chris Cairns shot and edited of the automated interactive antique grumpy typewriter that me and Neil built last year!

Ghostwriter by Neil Mendoza and Anthony Goh from Neil Mendoza on Vimeo.

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pallet phoenix

August 2nd, 2011 · art, london, portfolio

small quick pallet animal for Hackney Wicked Festival

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some paintings

July 2nd, 2011 · art, portfolio

Been doing some paintings recently in the sunshine! Aerosols on paper and cardboard.

plum blossoms, 60cm x 120cm

fish 7, 150cm x 120cm

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impossible fireflies

June 27th, 2011 · art, portfolio

This is a thermoelectric lantern using energy from one tea-light candle to power 6 high brightness LED fireflies who cluster round the flame. The combined light output of the LEDs is about 100 times more than the light output of the candle.

It’s constructed using a chip from an old 12v fridge, which normally uses electricity to create a temperature difference across its two faces. In a fridge, one side of this chip is kept at room temperature, and therefore the other side becomes colder.

In this project, we run this effect in reverse, heating one side of the chip with a candle, and allowing the other side to cool with a heatsink from an old Dell computer. So we generate small voltage which we then amplify to power the LEDs.

The lamp is made from an antique Chinese-made oil lamp. The oil fill valve on the back of the lamp has been converted into the control switch with 3 modes – FIREFLIES – OFF – HI-BEAM.

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solar powered LED underwater graffiti creatures

June 20th, 2011 · art, london

slug1, somewhere in East London, Anthony Goh, 2011

jellyfish1, somewhere in East London, Anthony Goh, 2011

EDIT: if you like this project, please consider voting for it in an instructables contest! If I win, I will auction the prize (an iPad) and give half the money to a marine charity which reduces the (obscene) amount of plastic junk in our water systems. YOu should also check out the other projects in the contest, some of them are insanely good.
Vote here at the Instructables 2011 LED Contest

LED graffiti has been around for a while, most notably LED Throwies and signage using LEDs to spell words. One problems is power supply – after the batteries expire, LED graffiti becomes simply more junk.

Solar panels used to be prohibitively expensive for novelty projects, but as solar powered LED garden lights have exploded in popularity so their price has plummeted. They are currently flooding the eco-system of consumer electronics at the cheap, destined-to-be-junk level , and you can find boxes and boxes of them at any car boot sale.

Solar garden lights (normally used to adorn a path) are simple devices which use solar panels to charge a rechargeable battery in the day, then they automatically switch an LED on at night. Since they are now very cheap, and are even often thrown away, so we can use these to create self-powering (immortal!) glowing pieces which can happily live in the wild.

After thinking about places for an installation – somewhere interesting, beautiful, that wouldn’t get disturbed – I settled on underwater.

So, inspired by nature, this art project re-creates beautiful, mysterious, bio-luminescent creatures from the deep sea in your urban canal, pond or river environment. In the initial test phase of this project, I built 2 creatures, one based loosely on a jellyfish and the other on a sea slug.

To find out more about the making of this project, check out the step-by-step guide on Instructables

the device is built from fibre optic LED garden lights, glued to a frame. the control box with solar panel floats in the water above the creature

3 solar panels are glued together. these float onthe surface, and the battery pack and electronics hang below in the water. The rim is made from an LED rope necklance and the guts from re-cycled plastic and a flashing RGB LED.

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The Oxford & Cambridge Goat Race 2011

March 31st, 2011 · abelha cachaca, art, london, nature

So, the dust has settled on another Goat Race, and we are happy to announce that about £6300 has been raised for the farm, a huge increase on the £3400 from last year! So thanks to everyone who came, everyone who worked there, especially those who volunteered their time, and to the farm staff.

Exciting new additions this year included the Oxford & Cambridge Stoat Race, food, coffee, beer from Meantime Brewery and cocktails from Abelha Cachaca.

Music from the excellent DJ Pigsnoots, and live freestyle MC’ing from the excellent Voodoo Browne, whose single, Low Budget Raver drops this April.

This year, we had more time to put into making lots more decorations and bits & bobs for the farm which was nice.

Bramble the Golden Guernsey romped home for Cambridge in 57 seconds as Oxford never recovered from stopping at the start of the race to do a poo.

From a personal point of view, I think it’s really important to connect people to city farms – they do an important thing of not letting us forget ultimately what life is about - which is easy to do in cities. So I was happy to see thousands of smiling people walking around the farm, taking it all in. Many will have been to Brick Lane and Shoreditch tens of times and never known about the farm just a street away.

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urban henge v1: equinox

March 23rd, 2011 · art, portfolio

The movement of the Sun, Moon and Earth create the most fundamental rhythms for life on Earth. In modern city life, we live to different, man-made rhythms – the weekend, Christmas, or the last friday (payday!) of an arbitrary, non-lunar month. It’s even difficult to find natural calendars – city lights mean that the effect of the moon’s light is often unnoticed, light pollution blocks stars, and our line of sight to horizons is often blocked by the city skyline.

Urban henge v1: Equinox is a street art version of a neolithic calender which indicates the Vernal and Autumnal Equinox from the Sun’s position. A small discreet mirror is positioned so that at precisely 12:00 noon on each equinox, and on only these 2 special days, the sun is reflected exactly onto the trilithon (stones).

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lotus flower bird feeder

February 17th, 2011 · nature

I made my mum a bird feeder for her birthday from an old tin can and a yogurt pot. You just fill the tin with meal, seed or worms and you’re good to go. The petals came out like a lotus blossom, so perhaps the little birdies that feed from it will acheive spiritual enlightenment.
Instructable: how to make a lotus flower bird feeder from junk

Inspired by this from the RSPB site

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temporosaurus: recycled pallet dinosaur fire sculpture

February 12th, 2011 · art, portfolio

“temporosaurus” by Anthony Goh, 2011, 2.5m x 1.5m x 2.5m high, discarded pallets

Temporosaurus is constructed from unwanted forklift pallets. These pallets are temporarily rearranged to give life to a creature of myth – a tyrannosaur – whose purpose is to be ritually burned. From the audience perspective, the fire marks the start of the creature’s life, but as soon as it is lit and becomes alive, it is also simultaneously dying as the flames consume it. So it illustrates that to die beautifully whilst giving warmth and light to others is also to live fully.

Photography by Lucy Tanner

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London Design Festival V&A video

January 23rd, 2011 · art

Short video from the V&A of all the digital art going on the London Design Festival. Myself and Neil are in it near the start somewhere.

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making balance boards (indoboards)

January 3rd, 2011 · frivolity

My friend Cat spangled her knee last year and wanted to build a balance board for rehab. By a weird coincidence, some surfers were talking about it and I’d already planned to build one. So we knocked a couple up in the shed in about an hour and a half. Made from some PVC pipe (found in a skip in East London) and some 15mm plywood. Total cost 0.00GBP.

If you don’t know what a balance board is, it’s one of these (video):

As well being popular with board riders, they’re also used as a general fitness and physiotherapy thing too.

I basically followed these Indoboard build plans I found on the Internet, but just used whatever shape of plywood I had lying around. Really good fun.

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2010 resolutions review

January 2nd, 2011 · london, nature

Last year I set a bunch of objectives for myself, based on aspects of my life that I wanted to explore. So here are the results. This year’s plans coming soon!

Food

1. Grow and eat 2 kinds of vegetable or fruit in the garden.

This doesn’t sound that hard, but I am a terrible gardener. I only have mint, thyme and chives (almost dead) in my back garden because Dog and I just could not kill them, despite our best efforts using claws, drought, biting, urine and neglect.

Results: Grew potatoes in tyres and a seemingly infinite supply of peppery rocket. Had some difficulties with tomatoes and rhubarb.

Status: ACHIEVED, HAPPY

2. Forage 3 new wild items and utilise them for food (or chutney, soup etc.)
Two high points of 2009 included picking sloes from inside the M25 and the resulting sloe cachaca, and also an amazing wild blackberry crumble. So more of the same this year.

Results: Achieved with a couple of different types of mushrooms and a good day’s foraging in Two Trees Island in Essex, picking Sea Purslaine and Wild Fennel. I think picking and eating wild fungi was my happiest surprise discovery for 2010, I am definitely now a slightly cringey amateur mycologist.

Status: ACHIEVED, VERY HAPPY

3. Kill and eat 3 different species of animal.

There is nothing more satisfying than catching your own dinner. I hope to maybe catch/eat a couple of new types sea fish (bass?), or maybe a rabbit.

Didn’t go fishing at all this year, and not really to any farm-like places either. I seem to be eating less meat these days anyway too. Feel ok about this one.

Status: FAILED, DON’T MIND

4. Build 6 new food/drink items from scratch.
Last year I set the wholly unrealistic goal of only eating scratch built things (e.g. no bought ketchup, no coleslaw, etc). This year I will try a few new things like beer, jam, tonic water, jelly or a gala pie.

I just couldn’t get this going, but on the plus side we now use the breadmaker every day which is amazing. It took a while to get right, and even now we get it wrong sometimes, but I love the smell of yeasty baking flooding the house from 5 in the morning, and we rarely buy bread from a store.

Status: FAILED, PERTURBED

Work

My theme for work is building things with long term value, and generally being freer – getting more control of my time and more control of what kind of work I do.

1. Abelha
has gone well in our first year so me and Hal are mega-excited about the future. We started with the theory that booze makes people happy, and henceforth the more booze we move, the more we get people to spend time happily chatting, chilling, flirting, dancing and who knows what else. So far we are up to something like 17800 of these man-hours of Abelha-fuelled fun. Our resolution is to further increase the peace around the UK and world.

A big year for us, we have increased our volumes significantly, started working with a great agency, LoveDrinks, and myself and Hal’s roles in the business has changed a lot too. Up to about 111,948 hours of Abelha-fuelled good times now. All systems set for world domination.

Status: ACHIEVED, HAPPY

2. Work freelance less, and more on developing own projects.
(about 1:2 ratio of freelance to own projects)

Status: ACHIEVED, HAPPY

3. Get the wheels going on one new product or service with long term potential.

We started getting paid (tiny amounts) for our art-related activities, which is excellent, and also I realised that don’t even almost have time to set up a new business scheme right now.

Status: FAILED, DON’T MIND

4. Do about 165 days of work in 2010.

Status: ACHIEVED, DON’T MIND

Fun/Art

This is the easy section. I think it’s really important that we try to bring lots of moments of beauty into other people’s lives (as well as our own). For me this means craft, sort-of-art, events, and general silliness.

1. Make the Goat Race bigger and better this year.

Wowee, we had over 1000 people through the door and coverage in nationals and all over the radio. So a resounding success. Even bigger for 2011, watch this space.

Status: ACHIEVED, HAPPY

2. Do another installation piece in a gallery or festival.

2 exhibitions this year, one of which was in the V&A, which was ace.

Status: ACHIEVED, HAPPY

3. Develop our multi-touch screen into new useful object.

Hmmm. We learned the obvious lesson that it’s much more interesting to make new things than muck around with old ones. I am glad to be moving away from screen-based stuff though. However it is taking up room in the shed.
Status: FAILED, OH WELL

4. Build a piece of art that has ongoing development/usage potential.

Status: UNCERTAIN, DON’T MIND

5. Do our jousting party bigger and better this year.

I really haven’t been in a party mood since my epic birthday, and over the spring and summer I spent a lot of time surfing, which has been my other favourite activity this year. Bike jousting is a noble art which will have it’s day though.

Status: FAILED, DON’T MIND

6. Make the DogBox club into a regular self-sustaining thing.

Status: SEMI-ACHIEVED, DON’T MIND

7. Build three hats that I designed ages ago but still haven’t made.

I just didn’t have the bandwidth/energy to pursue this. In fairness the amount of time I spent doing self-directed art-like projects has been much more than I thought this year, so I am not too bothered about this. There is now a studio-traffic list of projects waiting to be built, so it will just have to wait it’s course.

Status: FAILED, PERTURBED

8. Make one sustainability-related project.
Both Mobile Phone Birds and this lamp I built would count. Would like to do more in this field. Watch this space.

Status: ACHIEVED, PERTURBED

Nature

1. Observe and sketch the 12 Zodiacal constellations.

I observed 9 of them, including getting much better grip of all the stars visible from the UK. Capricorn, Sagittarius and Scorpio eluded me though.
Status: FAILED, DON’T MIND

2. Observe and sketch 10 Messier objects (e.g. galaxies, star clusters).

Had some other great moments “discovering” Jupiter’s moons, shooting stars, and so don’t mind this. I haven’t yet found myself that interested in the Messier objects yet, perhaps they’re more of a thing for telescopes.

Status: FAILED, DON’T MIND

3. Pick/sketch/photograph 12 UK wild flowers.
yup
Status: ACHIEVED, HAPPY

4. Catch a falling leaf.

This was a surprise highlight of 2010. Having never done this as a child, I couldn’t believe what a rush it was. Daft but true.
Status: ACHIEVED, SUPER-HAPPY

5. Observe and sketch common cloud types

I in fact got totally obsessed with clouds, collecting about 100 pictures of them. They are a constant source of beauty and amazement to me.

Status: OVER-ACHIEVED, HAPPY

6. Mark the equinoxes with some kind of cool sculpture (this is the goal I am least keen on, and to be frank it sounds a bit druidic, but I like the idea of building a modern stonehenge).

Done, pictures coming soon!
Status: ACHIEVED, HAPPY

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happy christmas 2010

December 24th, 2010 · art, london

Nice festive piece of art somewhere in East London

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digital drop-in session at the V&A

December 22nd, 2010 · Uncategorized, art

The V&A have a whole load of educational/interesting talks, courses and so on. Myself and Neil Mendoza hosted a chat about our work, and a workshop session where we built a microcontroller-powered bodypopping bear. More pictures at the V&A’s flickr site.

concept

execution

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if cats do not like being washed…

December 22nd, 2010 · domestic life

Then why do they make it so funny?

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sloe gin 2010

December 5th, 2010 · domestic life, london, nature

Spent a morning picking sloes in the glorious winter sunshine. The hardest part about making sloe gin is avoiding the temptation to drink it before it’s ready.

The difference between homemade sloe gin and the store bought stuff is phenomenal – store bought stuff tastes like Ribena and Halls Soothers, while the homemade stuff is very mellow and berry-like.

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today’s work

October 25th, 2010 · frivolity, thoughts

Building a sort-of-Halloween project, work-in-progress for Inspirit Brands. It’s just knocking together a few bits of wood, but turns out building a coffin, measured around your own body (just for convenience) is quite a nice/odd meditative experience. Nice to be working outside all day in under a cloudless blue sky.

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wild field mushroom omelette

October 19th, 2010 · domestic life, london, nature

One of the things I am enjoying most this autumn is learning about, and eating, wild mushrooms.

Today’s breakfast, omelette with freshly picked field mushrooms form around the Hackney / Tower Hamlets area. Field mushrooms (agaricus campestris) are just about the most common edible mushroom. Delicious, deeply satisfying and a bit scary.

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trusty bike stolen

October 17th, 2010 · frivolity, london

You were my only bike to not ever get a name, but my most faithful steed of all time. You seemed so cheap when I got you for 20 quid, and now no amount of money can bring you back. Together we skipped, skidded, weaved and filtered over 7000 miles together, went to Belgium, Cornwall and Wales. Ran over 2 squirrels and a pigeon, got run over by the 55 on Hackney Road. Given backies to numerous cute females, and you outlasted the fickle human promises of love not once, but twice.

The time you steered completely by yourself all the way home from KFC Dalston so I could use both hands to eat a whole 3pc Colonels meal, including the coleslaw. You also chewed up all my right leg cuffs and now I have no smart trousers left, but that’s ok, it’s part of my style now. Us two and Zogger all getting stuck together in 6 inch deep river side mud in the Marshes and Zogger being terrified of you because you used to always fall on him with a terrible metallic clang.

Singing Patrick Swayze with that chick at the lights at Tower Bridge. Playing probably the world’s only ever game of Bike Jereed in the car park at Gwithian beach. The time your bars were covered in blood when I sliced my hand open on a sharp bit of chrome flake that was peeling off.

But tonight you have left me for someone else, no note, just a broken lock where you once stood. I know they won’t love you like I did, probably they have taken your wheels and seat and thrown the rest of you in the canal.

But you will never truly die physically as some parts of you will live on forever in the bike ecosphere. And everything you taught me about riding is forever in my muscle memory and so you live again each time I ride.

Unnamed but never forgotten.
Aug 2008 – Oct 2010

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