Last summer Giles and I created a set of eight StoryCubes for the Maverick Machines exhibition curated by Richard Brown. At a size of 20cm x 20cm each, these were far larger than the diffusion Generator StoryCubes. For precision they were produced using a laser cutter and made out of mount board. As a result of their size, people’s interaction with the cubes can be more sociable and collaborative than with the smaller StoryCubes. These cubes have to be grasped and manipulated using two hands and people can work together more easily to create landscapes.

The images on the StoryCubes are drawn mainly from Pask’s own work and show the projects, Musicolour, Colloquy of Mobiles, SAKI (Self-Adaptive Keyboard Instructor), Entailment Mesh and Eureka, as well as photographs of Gordon himself. Other images show work by Richard Brown inspired by Pask’s work with electro-chemical computing. Gordon Pask was a cybernetician who worked across disciplines including education, art, architecture, theatre and analogue computing and the StoryCubes aimed to illustrate this diversity of interests.

Pask Parallels written by Richard Brown to accompany the exhibition has been published through the diffusion Generator and is available here, while the eBook A Manual for Maverick Machines describes the selection of images on the StoryCubes and can be downloaded here.

Images on the StoryCubes copyright and courtesy of Richard Brown, Paul Pangaro and Jasia Reichardt.

Maverick Machines ran from 24th July to the 10th August 2007 at the Matthew Gallery, Edinburgh School of Architecture.