Yeah, I know it's been ages. There's a bunch of stuff I've been up to and have coming up and I keep a note of it all but that note (despite being digital) is pretty illegible and disorganised. I've been ill for almost two weeks and it's made me really lethargic and slow but I had to do something so I deciphered what I could and wrote it here.
I recently started using the website twitter dot com again. I spent probably more than a year just disappointed by it and just very occasionally posted about things I was up to. If the Comic Heist Caper known as civilisation had a complaints box it would look like twitter dot com. It has gained the quality of small arms trading in recent times with folk sniping at each other or loading up on vanity and righteousness. I remember being miffed by all the folks making a point of quitting when twitter dot com refused to block Alex Jones et al. as if leaving a shithole stops the shithole existing. But there are good things there, interesting things; I get most of my climate science from it and do like seeing what others are up to but that all comes with a measure of self-direction in culling petulance from it. I still don't know what Instagram is for.
Recent
Teaching's been on effective hold of recent. Since September I've been acting in Programme Director roles around LCC which is an exciting new set of challenges. It also does strange things to not have routines. I used to orientate myself around teaching sessions but now everything's a bit more chaotic and you'll most often see me running from room to room scrolling through my calendar trying to figure out where I'm meant to be.
At the tail end of last year I organised a pretty ambitious workshop with ModUAL which involved students from our Interact exchange with universities in Melbourne and Copenhagen. Twenty students from each institution worked together on a brief for ten days, meeting online for two hours every morning (UK time). This was a continuation of the exchange aimed at opening up opportunities for those who might no otherwise be able to afford them while at the same time presenting a case for subject-orientated online delivery. I've embedded the video below and I'm writing up a paper with Eva Verhoeven for presentation at this year's Cumulus.
I gave a lecture in Dusseldorf at 'Technological Flesh' hosted by Choy Ka Fai. It was a neat little event which brought together some tech stuff with neurology and dance. One of those events where you learn something from everyone else. I'm not sure if they made a video or anything but if there's one around I'll put it up.
I uploaded a few recent things to the website. Z33 shipped me over a copy of Studio Time which was finally published by Black Dog. You can buy a copy at the link there and there's an extract and some images here. I'm not a huge fan of reading or writing but it does seem to end up being useful.
Wes knocked together a video of our most recent collaborative project (yes, we're already working on some more) to show people for new projects. Honestly, I'm not sure that we'll get round to re-doing it and improving it so might as well put it up here. I've done a brief writeup of the project on the site here and at some point I will get round to doing a technical writeup about the process. It was one of the most technically challenging projects we've done, involving several computers and half a dozen different software packages all speaking to each other.
Also, here's the video from the launch of Supra Systems Studio.
Coming Up
I'm speaking with J Paul Neely at the Speculative Futures London Meetup on 19th February. I gave them fair warning that I don't have much to say on speculative design that hasn't already been said. I certainly don't support the way its used in white washing technological fetishism dressed up in 'design thinking.' I'll probably try and re-ground it in the political ambitions of critical practice.
Earlier the same day I'm doing an online seminar 'Teaching Complexity' which is about complexity. And teaching. Honestly, it's quite interesting, there's something at the intersection of critical practice, technology and knowledge that universities aren't very good at comprehending and delivering and I like talking about this stuff if it helps others to get interested.
That's it. See you later.