I had the very great pleasure to fulfill a lifetime ambition to perform at the Big Chill Festival, which, in the end, did not consist of my being on stage and mixing electronica, but being part of a close knit group of artists, technologists and hackers as part of the Swap Meet area. I was there as an affiliate of Dorkbot London, through the kindness of the very lovely Julie Freeman and Alex McLean. I was armed with my trusty Macbook, a projector, a PS3 camera, some laptop speakers and lots of gaffer tape. I put together 4 pieces of open sourced camera input work using openFrameworks – two of my own pieces, and two open sourced pieces made during the Tukesprint hack lab earlier this year.

I was blown away by the friendliness of the crowds (which is not so surprising perhaps as I’ve been to all but one of the Big Chill festivals since the start) and also the stress free set up and breakdown from the point of view of installing an interactive. We were wooed with some free Danish Tuborg lager to begin with, and given a really sweet spot beneath the Body & Soul Healing Field, with passing traffic. Even had a fantastic view/ear-shot of the main stage. Dorkbot were present thanks to the support and encouragement of Julie Dempsey, who deserves a special mention for putting the Swap Meet zone together. Find out more about Swap Meet by following this link.

In any case, here are some photos on Flickr, and also, for Mac users, you can download a simple app I did on the day based on a Processing sketch I once came across, which takes changes to camera input and spreads it into a series of rising and falling tiles. There’s not direct correspondence to motion- it feeds in what it sees and applies this in a quite haphazard way to create the output- but I quite like it. You can download the zip file here. Hope to be back next year!!

Tweet This Post

I recently had the pleasure of spending a summer day at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park at the new David Nash exibition. Having been born in Surrey in 1945, he has spent the majority of his working life in North Wales, since 1967 living in a wonderful old disused Methodist chapel.

His work is an incredible antidote and counterpoint to much of the digital interactive work that I enjoy making and seeing. I have tried to escape the hegemony of the screen so many times, and have become quite antagonistic towards it. Only because my most meaningful moments come in quite solitary, late night settings. At least, that was the pattern, until a series of workshops with camaraderie and technical support in equal measure have shown me the benefit of a new way of working, one in which I perhaps close the textbooks and balance it with conversation.

I can’t say that I would have achieved the position and knowledge base I have without the late night contemplation – it certainly has its place – but there comes a time when you just have to close the books and hope for the best. That’s the point I’m at now. Not making any grand claims, but I hope to aspire to and emulate the practice of the late John Cage, in trying to find the zen in what I do. I’m on my way.

Tweet This Post

I’ve just returned from four days in Plzen, a small city set on several rivers in Bohemia, in the west of the Czech Republic. I was there with a group of local and international ‘bakers’, at the invitation of the British Council, who are supporting the city to consider how public space could be opened up and utilised for a range of cultural and artistic practices, for the development of social and economic possibilities for the citizens. Stef, also from the UK, built a Posterous site from the first kick off to log some thoughts and perceptions, well worth a dip into.

I have never had the fortune to travel to the Czech Republic- I remember the splitting apart of Czechoslovakia, and I’ve family members who have made several trips to Prague, always returning to speak of the architectural wonders, the artistic splendour, and the friendliness of local people. So I travelled with some considerable expectation- not to find a minature Prague, but buoyed by a sense of possible welcome, plus a chance to talk with a group of architects, activists and designers about how to turn around some underused space.

The city is not Prague. Being only around 60km or so away, it does feel a little like it falls under the shadow of it’s bigger sibling. It is highly historic- with an old centre encircled with factories, shops and houses, and sits on several rivers which join in the city to become one. It’s most famous exports are its incredible pilsner lager- which gives its name to all pilsner lagers of the world, and the activity of Skoda, both the car maker and parts maker. I arrived on a balmy Saturday night, and was launched straight into a wonderful perambulating population who were celebrating Mercuri day- where streets in the centre are closed to traffic and there’s music, performance, dance, food and celebration. With local and international bakers, we set off into the dizzying throng, to see the best of Plzen culture.

The experience stays with you as you ease into the process of group work with the bakery, which seeks to define need, post solutions and draw up action plans and business cases to put to the city authorities, sponsors and stakeholders. Overarching the whole process is the passionate desire from the city to be better known for the depth of its culture beyond popular conceptions as the birthplace of the worlds best lager. It is in the running as a candidate for the 2015 European Capital of Culture. As bakers, set to bake ingredients of resource together, this was clearly a primary goal. But in the days that unfolded, you became less dogmatic about this date, and just ready to add your own enthusiasm to help reimagine some wonderful, eccentric and historic spaces so communities could better use them.

My own bakery group focused on a patch of unused, unloved park sandwiched between a huge bus station, a technical art college and factory buildings. Faded yellow grass, a forgotten air and invisibility to travellers had rendered this park into a neglected zone where no-one thought to rest. We used a variety of design approaches and user consultations (data visualisations, modelling materials, aerial maps, chalk and tape on city streets) to take the pulse of potential users for a ‘design park’, with kino (cinema) bus, outlet for creative works from nearby studios, a canvas for their work, plus adjacent items of better furniture, lighting, refreshment, safety and wifi. Everything just flowed so well together it was a pleasure to learn from local bakers about all those incidental areas that impact on your planning and development: what the schools system was like, what politics was like, who movers and shakers were, what perceptions there were of design, what they thought of themselves, and how they were perceived by others. In the end, it’s largely about advocacy rather than town planning and architecture- it’s the social shift that needs to happen at the root of it all.

For me, making new friends from the UK, Poland, Hungary, Estonia, Belarus, and other places, plus the wonderful warmth and hospitality of our Czech hosts, will stay with me for some time, as a contrast and counterpoint to the pressure cooker of performance and ego that sometimes characterises these exercises here in the UK. It was structured but flexible, serious but fun, and by balancing the parts so well, I feel it served the city very well and boosts the chances of this wonderful small city becoming 2015 European Capital of Culture.

Tweet This Post

Inspired by Italo Calvino and If On a Winters Night A Traveller, a book of many starts and few ends, I have some small fragments of writing that will never go anywhere- so I wanted to put them here. Thanks Italo for all the continued inspiration…

Sliding Skin

You can look into someone’s eyes to judge the depths of their soul. It’s like a window. I’ve always believed you can open and close your eyes, shut out the world, escape your fate, your destiny.

That’s how it was for me and Pete. At school, we’d give each other a sign. Close our eyes. I could close my eyes, and escape the mountain of words piling onto me.

But soon Pete’s eyes turned towards the teacher. He just stopped noticing any signs. He sucked up their words, but I was helpless.

That seems so long ago now, when I compare that to now. What happened next was going to change everything, was going to see us blurred, burned, set on fire and ripped apart.

There never seems to be an exact time in England. We’ll see it 8.30am, a Saturday in June, 2002. I’d been out, my head was banging. I could hear children on the street.

I turned, rolled into my wet dribble. My own wet record of the night before and it set me off, swearing. I saw myself in the long mirror. Like a pile of human ash.

At points like this, it’s hard to know if you’re male or female. Your eyes seem surprised and feminine. Your chin, hair shape- all male. I spat into the empty mug and rolled my eyes to the ceiling.

I felt gutted. It was Saturday and I was this tired. I knew it was going to be a struggle all day. To put my clothes on, to talk to my mum, moving downstairs. I kind of wished I was in the army all of a sudden. That thought made me smile, made me mentally wind my neck right back in. Right, I was up.

Dark Heart

It’s two fights now in 24 hours – first for clothes, now for work. Nothing standing in my way but other people. I can hear their voices, rising at the end, whining at me about money. Dress for work- but I need work to pay for clothes. So I steal clothes and that works. Stealing work seems implausible- just go straight to stealing money.

Silent blood drops soak into my shirt. I didn’t stop to choose the one I wanted, did I? My heart is hot in my hands now, it seems to breathe in every direction, like it’s doing the work of my lungs as well. Panting would be a better way of describing it.

I stare disgusted at the pool of goo I’ve made. There’s blood, plasma, running in a river blending light and dark. I catch flashes of street lights going out. Dawn is stretching a hand over this part of the city. For the first time since leaving The Road, I think of food.

Now some people think of food as something to be savoured, a route to satisfaction. For me, food is always a little out of focus, something I forget to do and rush to make up. No-one I ever knew trusted me to cook for them.

I see the guy on the bike before he sees me. His bike circles slowly, getting smaller, and starting again. He sees me now; thin, weak looking, easy target. He flashes a gold tooth. I see the wrapping from a burger in his hand, and even from this distance, the smell lures me in.

‘So what you saying, guy?’

He is speaking, ‘You on your way to work?’

‘I’m hungry,’ I reply, ‘I’m looking for some food.’

‘No shit,’ he smiles. ‘You picked a shitty place to find food. You got money?’

I smile, ‘I don’t need money.’

He laughs at this. ‘So give it to me then, I’ll take care of it. No seriously, guy. Give me your money.’

I reach out and grasp his handlebars, note the surprise on his face. He grasps me in return, we stand locked. I wanted his burger, now I feel like embracing him. It’s a bitter, hateful love, something I want to pour over him and smother him with.

I see myself explode on his tooth. A gold mirror to a tiny supernova. His body stiffens as my heart pounds and pounds. I notice everything about him in an instant- how slippery his skin is, how his shaved head smells of hairspray. The dots of gold in his ear. I stand over him, eating. I feel nothing, looking at his awkward shape. It looks as though the bike and him have been spun together in a blender- all spokes and limbs. The brick walls around me close in, reproachfully.

You can see right to the end of the street- transparent, like a shop window. You step into a scene from Blade Runner, a woman in a raincoat runs from you, and you start shooting. Except she’s not here and it’s not a film. You’ve been strung out for days and been laughing to yourself. One stupid film set.

Tweet This Post

I say this as an outside this year, someone who attended vicariously, crashed the opening party, enjoyed the hospitality of a very fine individual with a vacant room, and met up with a friend from a recent other piece of activity in London. None of this would have been possible without trust. I would not have been able to walk in and meet old friends and new without it. I would not have slept the night without it. I would not have been able to run a very empowering interaction design workshop without it. And this is the quality of Thinking Digital that abounds this year. Sitting in the cafe at the base level of the Sage with Brian while we had coffee, I felt I could have strolled into the auditorium, shaken the hands of old friends, and made myself at home.

I think this is a big part of the shift in Being Digital these days, with funding scarcity and uncertain political and environmental conditions. I think digital networks are clearly thinking about it (having heard of the nervous user interface changes for clearer security made by Facebook, on the radio earlier). I have had to give up some of my own anxieties from being a ‘good’ project manager, when managing my workload and getting results. In my shift from project management to interaction design, and the shift in strategic thinking, I don’t think I have fully thought it through, in terms of how much trust can grow and provide the glue that holds so much digital work together. Hats off to Thinking Digital and all who attended, tweeted, blogged and networked, from the fringe!

Tweet This Post

The ideas of John Berger continue to inspire and elucidate a world in which power relationships and media management seem so completely enmeshed it’s hard to comprehend any kind of journalism that isn’t warped out of all recognition. In the run up to the UK General Election on May 6th, I haven’t seem too much analysis that takes a snapshot of media activity and tries to, with the reader or viewer or listener, make critical sense of it. It’s as if everyone involved really thinks that have to cover the enormity of everything that feeds into the process. It’s like some major feat of engineering or architecture, where there must always be millions of plans, dependencies and processes as the finished product is so huge.

It’s reassuring at times like this, to stop and think about stillness amongst all this. The writing of John Berger eloquently allows us to focus back on a snapshot in time, a moment in history. This is not a paean to a definitive image, the poster campaign piece, the iconic image, or utterance. Anything taken in isolation runs the risk of becoming this. Berger suggests we take a moment to think about this…

Berger is concerned throughout ‘Ways of Seeing’ with the monetisation  of art, and the way in which the oil painting celebrated a new kind of wealth, by providing 3. fairly rigid and set ways in which portraits and landscapes sanctioned the supreme buying power of money. It was a very material means of displaying your wealth; Berger uses a set of visual references to underline his point. These show wealthy aristocrats standing next to pictures, sometimes of themselves, of mastery of country estates, or highly contrived portraits of business and commercial partnerships, with other wealthy citizens.

Berger states that, ‘the visual desirability of what can be bought lies in its tangibility, in how it will reward the touch, the hand, of the owner.’

I think this is interesting and useful to hold in mind at the moment. The media is guiding us to consider politicians and their politics to see what they could do for us, our families and our economies, to protect ‘our way of life’. But so much has gone into those ways of life, and we can lose a lot and still be ‘us’ that I think we should start to think about how that 54% of young people got so disengaged and unregistered to vote as a consequence of the way media treats them. I think that much maligned subject ‘media studies’ could do with some major refreshes, and personally I would start by giving everyone in the UK a free copy of Ways of Seeing, alongside some juicy examples of visual media to get digesting…

Tweet This Post

Had a fantastic chance to catch up with Wendy Keay-Bright last week, Reader in Inclusive Design, Department of Creative Communication at the Cardiff School of Art & Design in Wales. Wendy is an old friend, and hugely knowledgeable about universal design, particularly the needs of pupils on the autistic spectrum, through her work on Reactive Colours (where I met her during my time at NESTA) and latterly, in her continued work with Reactickles.

Wendy was here at Culture Lab in Newcastle as part of a two day workshop for the creation and distribution of openFrameworks developed Reactickles for the site, which was arranged and managed by Joey Scully. We had a fantastic time, analysing the value of different approaches to interfaces, doing some step-throughs for code for the small group, and hearing first hand from Wendy of the value of paring back functionality to simple levels, which can be incremented gradually as the user gets more confident. It’s really exciting to here of the attachments and value placed on the Reactive Colours work to date from testimonies from pupils who have grown up with the software, and the therapeutic it has brought to their lives by dint of familiarity, and textural qualities. The next generation of Reactickles start here… check out the site for more information.

Tweet This Post

Had the very great pleasure to enjoy a day and night of cutting edge sonic arts practice and performance yesterday as part of AV10. Spent the day with Jamie Allen and Will Schrimshaw at the Resonator workshop, followed by an evening of performance at the Star and Shadow cinema and bar in Ouseburn.

During the day, I was able to hear Kanta Horio and Ann Rosen discuss their work. I was struck by the deceptive simplicity of what they had to say, which enveloped some very profound thinking about sound. Kanta spoke about found objects, reducing parameters, how this led him to naming sound-without-sound, sound as an energy driving objects. Ann spoke about how sound can be used against itself, like sound to negate sound to produce a variety of silence. Both presentations of work and ideas were thought-provoking and whet my appetite to spend the rest of the day creating a simple square wave oscillator, built as a simple harp. With either copper speaker wire or polymer pick-ups, you can vary the tone sent to an amp chip and on to a speaker. What will be interesting over time is how this output might be sent to a software visualisation tool or music playback system.

In the evening, we gathered to see Kanta perform, which he did with incredible deftness and without artifice or obfuscation, using a wide range of sound making materials: speakers and solenoids on brushes, springs from microphone stands connected to a hand drill above a ceramic dish, ball bearings inside glass bowls. The parts were mesmerising, and the sound beautifully subtle, like small streams or tributaries making their way into a meandering river of sound. I enjoyed it enormously.

He was followed by Atsuhiro Ito, performing light and sound, via effects pedals and Marshall amps. This was brutal mathematics, rich stuttering techno tones, washing out, bursts and fragments of light to which you were drawn but had to sometimes look past. Balancing often on one leg, barefoot, hood covering his concentration, there was as much concentration from this master musician of his material even though it seemed a monolith. Both he and Kanta before him showed that improvisational electronic music has an amazing force, expressed this night in two very different ways.

Tweet This Post

Resonator from jamie allen on Vimeo.

I’m sitting here digesting a few ideas and basking in the glow of another masterful week of being a student at SMARTlab digital media institute, part of the University of East London, where I got to spend some time with many dear friends taking the academic journey with me.

Some of my recent experiences are starting to change how I think about sound and music in some quite interesting ways. One is the way in which gender bias has crept into my writing, with the critically unchallenged (by myself, until recently) use of only male voices within my academic writing over the course of the last few months.

Another is the sheer scarcity of sound as a material force in my life, having recently been told of probable nerve damage meaning I have lost 60% of my ability to hear sounds of a high frequency, over 20db. This has led to a reconsideration of how I feel about my hearing, about how I want to use it, how I feel about it (well, I hear differently now, not in a worse way…). I have become immediately less tolerant about listening to stuff that overwhelms me. The imperative issue for me right now, is some sense of honing my radar to find challenging sounds that don’t muffle, distort or present too much sonic information aggregated into one place.

To return to the issue of gender bias in my work, I had not considered how exactly this might make a difference to my emerging theory of auditory saccadism – which I am claiming is common to both sexes and in equal amounts. But do I know this for sure? As my work is metaphoric and largely about the ways maths and cognitive science engage the imagination over both the short and long terms, these may have some socio-cultural roots which in turn show up some gender conditioning issues. The important issue for me, like putting actual materials in front of my ears, is to be sensitive to it, and act accordingly.

So what has this to do with suund, and the video above? The video is linked to an upcoming series of workshops that I am hopeful will help widen my knowledge of sound production, gender and culture, it’s the Resonator talks, part of AV10 here in the north east of England. And suund- well, that’s my made up word for a female perspective on sonic arts – uu is the XX of chromosonal gender specificity, as opposed to the normal ou, or XY chromosone…

Tweet This Post

Some of the workshop participants try bodystorming on stage

There was a brief flash of wonderment and digital inspiration down at Seven Stories on the Wednesday evening, when Joel, Memo and Chris displayed some of their incredible interactive pieces for an invited audience of 40, who enjoyed a glass of wine whilst viewing Baroque Masks, Body Paint and Delicate Boundaries from Joel, Memo and Chris respectively. Due to the health and safety considerations that must dictate what can stay in a gallery so open to the public (and particularly young children), these exhibits have proven to be all too fleeting, although there is a willingness to try and make them happen again some time in the future, with some perseverance and energy from all the partners!

Workshop participant works on openFrameworks application

Tweet This Post