Book coming soon… Energy at the End of the World: an Orkney Islands Saga tells the story of how these islands are making their own energy future, from marine energy to hydrogen fuel, at what some see as the edge of the world. “Mixing storytelling and ethnography, empiricism and lyricism, Watts tells an Orkney energy…
Orkney Cloud Forum is a living laboratory for cloud services at the network edge. Instead of distant, centralised data storage and processing, how might local cloud services support socialised, shared, and distributed data processing? In a community forum on Orkney, we are imagining and creating community-led managed cloud services at the edge, where the internet…
IT Communications and Energy convergence, or ‘ICE’ as I like to call it, seems to be here. The data industry is an energy industry: data centers are benchmarked and marketed by their Power Usage Efficiency (PUE), and the major data players (Facebook, Google, Apple etc.) are all busy building renewable energy-powered data centers with reduced…
A new book has just been published, authored by members of the International network for Social Studies of Marine Energy (ISSMER). The book is titled ‘Ocean Energy: Governance Challenges for Wave and Tidal Stream Technologies‘ and provides a series of in-depth chapters on the legal, economic, and social concerns around wave and tidal energy technologies.…
This visual poem has just been published in the journal of Cultural Anthropology, as part of their special collection ‘Our Lives with Electric Things’. View the published poem. “Why was the first Pelamis scrapped and not displayed on a plinth?” he asked me. So here is a plinth, perhaps not quite the stone block with…
In June 2017, myself as part of the ‘Reconstrained Design Group‘ (which includes James Auger and Julian Hanna at Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute M-ITI), Eday Renewable Energy Ltd. and Community Energy Scotland, won the International Cultural Innovation Prize 2017, from the prestigious art gallery, CCCB in Barcelona. Our project is a design manual and prototype…
‘The Draukie’s Tale: Origin Myth for Wave Energy’ poem (first published in the edited collection, Ebban an’ Flowan) has been published for a new audience in Energy Humanities: an Anthology, edited by Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer (published by John Hopkins University Press). It’s a behemoth 300 page book with almost 50 articles, ranging from…
“It was in Orkney, those Scottish islands closer to the Arctic and to Norway, than to London, where I lay down on the sandstone beach, closed my eyes and dreamed. There I lay, on the remnants of Lake Orcadie, an ancient sedimentary basin that was warm with water four hundred million years ago. There, I…
“Beside a sun-glazed canal in Copenhagen we met for the first time, and realised we shared a similar secret. We were both professional academics and profes- sional artists, but had found that our arts practice was not always visible to our colleagues in Science Studies.” –extract from ‘Letters from Wanna Wonder and the Electric Nemesis’.…
A single handmade book with interventions and poems was created as part of my one month residency at Seedbox, Environmental Humanities Collaboratory. This included the ‘Seedbox by Starlight‘ poem sequence with a fold-out constellation map and transparent overlay to show the stars over planet Seedbox. As part of my performance of poems at Seedbox, I…