Marbre, Nivôse, 228: How do you know if you produced knowledge?

Sometimes it’s hard to think big when your weekly ambition is just to read all your emails. I tweaked the design of this thing again. Blogger's current favourite thing is not saving HTML changes so I have to edit offline then 'restore' the HTML. It’s been a few weeks since the last post and now we’re in a glorious new Gregorian decade so this is a long one, sorry.

There’s still a lot of these 'decade/year in review' things going out on the social networks where folks list what they consider to be achievements over the period. I won't be doing one, I feel pretty divided about them. It feels vainglorious, boastful and my internal logic suggests that getting things done is in and of itself the validation rather than having other people acknowledge that you did it. On the other hand, it’s been really nice reading all the incredible things that people have been up to in the face of what to many has been years of adversity and struggle. I don’t know. If you know me well you know that I feel ‘sticky’ about talking about my own work. I don’t like it because a) if it was any good it would speak for itself b) if it’s not good then it’s not worth talking about and I’m just taking up airspace from people doing good work which is why (barring one attempt) I never do these year/decade in review things. Anyway, moving on from thoughts that will inevitably land me in trouble on twitter dot com forward slash replies…

Upcoming: Reciprocal Studio - What if Our World is Their Heaven?


Today Natalie and I are starting teaching one of the Reciprocal Studios for MA Graphic Media Design at LCC as Haunted Machines. These are small, short and directed specialist briefs run by creative practitioners that the students can sign up to. We’ve decided to run it about automated image production and the imagination, inspired heavily by the work of Joel McKim but using Carl Di Salvo’s strategies for designerly responses. We’ll do our best to document outcomes and process as we go on the Irish microblog and Instagram (there’s no Haunted Machines Instagram, you just have to follow us as individuals).

How do you know if you produced knowledge?

I’m putting together the ‘methodology’ bit of my PhD. 'Methodology' is such a vague word but I’m summoning the courage to look at the work I’ve been doing the last three years and ask why I did it that way. At some point I decided that speculative and critical design wasn’t doing what I wanted intellectually as far as furthering discourse goes. But I’m forced to consider why I chose to switch into a more artistic approach as in Augury, Finite State Fantasia and Charismatic Megapigment. I’m pretty comfortable describing and arguing about how it’s still ‘designerly;’ I’m always considering legibility of communication, the audience’s needs and experiences and using technical strategies to steer thoughts and behaviours. And in terms of 'research for design' I subscribe to the idea that we learn from doing and I can talk more authoritatively about, for example, machine learning, by actually making something that plays around with machine learning than speculating on it at some intellectual and technical distance.

But then why is this artistic, installation-style approach of Augury, Charismatic Megapigment and Finite State Fantasia effective at engaging audiences. Some of the speculative design work I’ve done is quite measurable – it went into policy papers, was presented at the Hour of Commons etc. So why does weird-tech-art feel better. I put it out on Irish microblog Twitter dot com and got some nice responses when I asked if anyone knew of ways of measuring the impact of critical practice. A couple of folks got back in touch saying that it’s about how things influence the zeitgeist, enter the canon or start to steer conversation. I think this is perhaps the right lead so Ill head down that rabbit hole for a while. I got some good links to things as well which I’ve listed here:
I also figure I should chuck in Matt Malpass' Critical Design in Context and Carl Di Salvo's Design and the Construction of Publics as brilliant sources. Steph suggested that impact/change assumes a testable hypothesis which I can see a problem with when it comes to critical creative practice, but these projects are in some way hypothesised. For instance, to take Augury, a hypothesis might be; 'Can we have a different type of conversation about machine learning if we talk about it as a semi-occult thing in the context of thousands of years of occult practice?' How then, can I test that hypothesis; of course standing in the gallery led to conversations, and it got a little traction in articles and blogs, but does that change the cultural assimilation of machine learning?

It's much easier to blog about this stuff than write it up academically, that's for sure.

Voyager

I made some slow progress on Voyager over the break. Now that the Arduino knows where Voyager is relative to its position on Earth, the next stage is getting the Arduino to know where north is so it can make sure it’s pointing the right way. To do this I’m going to attach a BNO055 to the arm of the sign so that it will know what way it’s facing and at what angle it is. This is most important for when it first turns on and perhaps running occasional checks for drift.

Of course there’s always a little problem. In the image you can see the BNO055 using pins A4 and A5 for I2C communication with the Arduino Uno. I’d assumed that it would be the same pins on the Rev 2 (which I thought was just an Uno with a WiFi chip) but no, it actually has two special pins near the top of the digital pins for I2C stuff. So that was a few wasted hours trying to figure that out. The second problem is calibration. This takes a long time and requires moving the board around every time it turns on. Luckily Bohle Bots is a library that actually stores the calibration to the Arduino’s memory once done. Now that's all done I need to actually start making the thing so I can figure out where all the components will go and begin working on the motors. That's probably a little way off though, there's a lot of other things to do first. 

Things I learned this week:

  • I’m at the bit of the philosophy podcast about Jewish Andalusian ethics which is really good. I just heard all about Bahya Ibn Paquda (1050-112) who wrote the ‘Duties of The Heart’ which was a curiously accessible book on Aristotelean ethics in the context of the revealed Jewish texts. 
  • My commuter bike has a Sturmey-Archer coaster brake hub on it which hasn’t been shifting properly for the last few months. I finally decided to give it a look over and discovered that the cable just wasn’t moving in the housing. Easy enough to replace but along the way I learned that brake and gear cables are teflon-coated. So that was new. Not important, but new.
  • I went out for the first ride of the year at the weekend, intending to do the 80 mile loop from my place to Box Hill and back. What i learned was it was very cold. Which was fine once I got going. However, for some reason, the bolts holding the cleats on my right shoe protrude a little too far into the shoe and were literally conducting cold into my toes so they were numb for 41.9 miles. Again, not super interesting but true. I need to put some spacers on that little guy. 

Channel Game Recommendation

Amazingly, I haven't been on the YouTubes much over Christmas so don't have a new channel recommendation. I finished up playing This War of Mine and I don’t think I’ll go back for a second game. The game focuses on a group of survivors in a war-torn city and involves a mix of scavenging, crafting and occasionally fighting. It was really good at the beginning but a bit like with other resource management games, the middle-end is pretty repetitive. Once you’ve got your shelter set up and have all your crafting gear it’s mostly just a rinse and repeat job to manufacture and trade stuff. Also, the game is quite long for that amount of repetitiveness. So, on the recommendation of the Internet and Wes I went in to buy Disco Elysium for my Christmas game and HOLY SHIT what. a. game. 

I genuinely struggle to think of an indie story-driven RPG I’ve been so engaged with. It’s a small but super-rich world, everything appears to have meaning and connection, the writing is wonderful, the gameplay is tense and the world is weird af. You play an alcoholic, amnesiac detective in a surreal China Mieville-esque fictional city where you’re trying to figure out who killed a man who’s been hanged behind your hotel and also who the hell you are any why you tried to drink yourself to death. The character development works on different parts of your ‘self.’ Things like logic, rhetoric, drama, composure, electro-chemistry, empathy, reaction speed etc. What’s more, these different parts are also characters in the story, intervening in conversations to talk with you or bicker with each other, meaning that you most often fail to trust your self in the way that you make decisions. It’s a bleak, funny, horrifying, surreal and wonderful game which I can’t recommend enough. It's probably about 30 hours all in to get the full experience, so if you've got a couple of evenings, get on it. Amazing.


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Cédre, Frimaire, 228; Project PROBE, Knowledge Capture in Design Part 3

If I put the titles to what these posts are about, they might be easier to find, though I do tag liberally to help.

Project PROBE

Last week I wrote that I’d started a new little vanity project. I find myself very happy learning new technical stuff and this project gives me the chance to combine some of the things I learnt about servos from Charismatic Megapigment with some of the other projects that have used geolocation maths like Augury. I'm not going to give much away on what it's about, just show process as I go.

I’m trying to get all the inputs to talk to each other this week. Without giving away spoilers; it needs to know exactly where it is in relationship to where something else is. So I need a WiFi module and IMU (inertia measurement unit), ideally with a magnetometer so it can figure out where north is. This way it can use WiFi beacons and the magnetometer to figure it's exact position on the Earth and it's orientation to the poles. Rather than plugging in a bunch of different components, the Rev2 pictured has a WiFi module and IMU built in so that’ll save on space and complexity (although I'm not sure the IMU has a magnetometer built-in.) However, the first challenge was getting it to talk. It wouldn’t talk to any Macs but when I hook it in to a Window’s PC; no problem.

The solution was a creeping reinstall (there's probably a technical name): I had to do a complete manual reinstall of Arduino IDE and all the drivers, starting with oldest to newest until I got one that worked. This meant going through the preferences menu to find Arduino’s cache and wiping it. This is risky if you’re dependent on Arduino projects but I don’t use it everyday so I think I’ll survive.

The second issue was getting it to connect to a WiFi network. Luckily there is a secret one at work that has only WPA encryption (no username, just a password) so I managed to sneak it on. Currently the standard Arduino wifi library – WiFiNINA – has no support for WPA Enterprise without a lot of jiggery-pokery.

The next step is finding a way to get its location in longitude and latitude. Google now charges for its geolocation API which is a pain on a vanity project and not something I wanted to go through the hassle of setting up. Unwired Labs LocationAPI which I found through this helpful tutorial allows you to track up to five devices free for 100 calls every twenty-four hours. I only need to track one device and since it should only need to call the API when it's first turned on this would easily suit my purposes.

The idea here is to ask the Arduino to compile a list of nearby WiFi routers and their signal strength, send them to Unwired Labs and then receive a longitude and latitude, same as the Google Geolocation API. The code in the tutorial is pretty useful but there’s always a bunch of problems to be un-kinked when building a system from different components. The version of the Arduino WiFi scanner library being used in the tutorial had a handy ‘BSSIDstr’ function that converts the byte arrays of BSSID (the mac addresses of nearby routers) to strings so you can feed them into a JSON string. Essentially, the format that the mac addresses are scraped in are in the wrong format to send to the API and you get mangled gobbledy gook if you try. However, BSSIDstr no longer exists so I had to mangle in a ‘sprintf’ bit to do that for me. Sprintf is one of those things I've never properly understood so it was useful to learn how it and byte arrays work. FYI, just for fun, the order of the bytes is backwards so you need to lace the string backwards to get the BSSID in the right order. Then there just some tweaking around with the URL for the API request since it’s all changed since and it was good to go. Et Voila, my Arduino knows exactly where it is on the surface of the world as pictured to a remarkable degree of accuracy.

I already have a magnetometer working from an earlier test so I'm not hugely bothered by the amount of work there so once that's integrated the Arduino will be able to know it's position and orientation when it turns on easily. Most of the stuff that seems to happen in the early stages of these projects is versioning; tutorials use out of date firmware, terms have changed or been removed etc. etc. So most of what you end up doing is chasing around dates and versions to get everything to talk to each other.

If I get any more time I will be looking in to what turns out to be some exceptionally complicated geometry problems which I hitherto had considered child's play. Who knew there are different versions of time?

Knowledge in design part 3; cognitive dissonance and sympathy,

This is more of a short addendum than an entire new line of thinking. A lot of activities last week kept me from reading as much as I’d like but I met up with Yosuke Ushigome of Takram fame on Monday night and we discussed some of this stuff since he at least apparently reads this. We were reflecting briefly on the history and state of speculative and/or critical design with regard to our peers from MA Design Interactions: Why did the canon there struggle to respond to issues that were beyond a limited temporal window and individual scale?

The easiest answer to me is in design’s aesthetic history of tackling human problems on Maslow’s hierarchy; where to live, how to eat and sleep, how to communicate and share information etc. All of these things can be interfaced or encountered within the human sensorium and consequently design’s aesthetic sensibility is drawn from the human body and it’s scale. It’s only in recent years that design has attempted to address ‘systems’ and even these are human-oriented with solutions and products largely being aimed at the interface of the human and the system; different information flows and architectures, levels of access or responsiveness. This is as opposed to the approach of an activist or artist who might address the system in total as an artefact rather than as an inevitability.

Take for example, Suzanne Triester’s work; Hexen 2.0 (left) which examines the history of computation through a quasi-occult, quasi-conspiratorial lens. The goal here is not to improve the system or design it in a different way but to give us a pan-historical reading of it that challenges our comprehensive model and presents alternate narratives.

This is opposed to any number of brilliant design projects on computation that address the way we interface with the very notion of computation through the interface. For example, the amazing work of IF and their catalogue of data patterns almost all of which feature a hand, a phone, a laptop. They address the system at the point of interface where design is most appropriate and comfortable. This is how cognitive understanding is built between the audience of the design and the idea of the design. We all have hands, phones and laptops, we can project ourselves into the alternatives that IF propose for data patterns. To a degree, Triester exploits the same sympathies by drawing on an aesthetic sensibility of diagrams and visualisations with which we might be familiar and so are equipped to interpret the work and put it in a certain frame of reference.


If I was to think about Augury as a project about computation then I’d say it is further abstract than Triester’s work. It draws on some familiar aesthetics; the audience having to look up indicates it’s about something above us, there are flight numbers and names of airline companies to conclude it has something to do with planes. Though it draws on a popular ancient practice of divination, this was less familiar to the audience which was perhaps a failing. Connecting this ancient divination technique with a contemporary technological equivalent – planes’ instead of birds’ flight patterns used to predict the future – was a knowing cognitive leap rather than one meant to create cognitive sympathy. The project exploited the idea that the audience might question why these things are together as way of teasing them towards the absurdity of computational prediction without having to reduce it to human terms (phones, laptops hands) that would make it more comfortable. From the perspective of my practice I find the only way to deal with things maybe beyond the human scale is to exploit cognitive dissonance as it's impossible to make these things sympathetic to human understanding in their entirety.

While a design project might draw on a more familiar aesthetic sensibility to provoke the idea of the absurdity of computational prediction by exploring alternative device interfaces or human interactions, in Augury Wes and I were keen to highlight the supra-human qualities of computation by placing it in the world of the supernatural. It’s hard to then draw on design aesthetics and logics for this kind of framing, there aren’t really (arguably) tenants, principles or methodologies for designing the supernatural. There are certainly designed aesthetics; colours, shapes, styles but not many functional models.

Let’s put this back into the question; ‘Why did Formafantasma design a chair about e-waste?’ which seems to have become the locus for this thinking. Ore Streams draws entirely on a comfortable and sympathetic design aesthetic – the chair – to engage with a bigger-than-human (I’ve been trying out various words here, you may have noticed) idea/issue. But, they draw on elements of sympathy and dissonance; it’s a chair with which we can all connect experientially but it is also provoking a discussion about e-waste with a particular audience. Consequently the audience might ask ‘why is the chair made that way?’  I am going to stop banging on Formafantasma now, I really do love their work and I’m sorry they’ve become a lynch pin that seems to be unduly criticised here. I do think Ore Streams is great, I’m just using it as an exemplar project for design projects that don’t give me a good sense of why did they do it that way? The follow on from which is what is the best way of doing this? Which is basically a PhD right.

Restoring some regular features - things I learned this week. 

A while back I said I liked reflecting on what I've learnt. Obviously it's a bit of a cheat this week because:
  1. I learnt a lot more Arduino stuff, particularly what is and how exactly 'sprintf' works and loads of other stuff about using Arduino with online stuff. 
  2. I've been listening intently to my Arabic philosophy podcast and have learnt a lot about Al-Razi who spent a lot of time refuting Galen and was mostly known as a heretic so most of his writings are only known by how they're refuted by later Islamic scholars. He dared to suggest that four things preceded God - soul, matter, the universe and time. 
  3. The folks at Wikimedia are super cool and have a lot of really interesting stuff going on. (Bit of a cop-out this one, I'll own it.)

And – Channel recommendation

I've loved Girlfriend Reviews since they first started. Witty and irreverent reviews of games which are becoming increasingly more critically engaged in discussion of the industry. The latest one on the new Star Wars game which received lavish praise is brilliant as a piece of media criticism on how games reuse and reconstruct tropes but also now hilarious for my new catch phrase; 'Have y'all lost your minds cos I'll help ya find 'em!'



I've already started notes for next week's blog and it's currently Tuesday so I guess it's going well. I hope you enjoy something and it's not too tiresome. 
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Cormier, Brumaire, 228

I’ll confess to sinking more time into the Playstation than I should at the moment, something about these early dark evenings. I’ve decided to lay off Death Stranding until I’ve done a big chunk of other work I can reward myself with. Did you see that Valve announced a new Half-Life? But the thing is only going to be VR and probably on Steam's own platform? Millions of people hesitantly let out a sigh of relief they've been holding for 15 years this morning. Still it's a good technique to push us all into VR gaming.

decline.online is still working. Remarkably. I went to visit it to see how messed up it might be but most of it, apart from the Air Quality indexes, were all there. I’m going to spend some time at Christmas improving it, adding new data sources and figuring out a better scrolling mechanism.

WTF Targeting

I came across this fascinating targeted post on Instagram from a housing developer. I suppose the targeting is pretty easy to figure out: As a recent homeowner I’m still targeted by things related to a search history of someone who has recently bought a flat. The image falls easily into the remit of rendered development images we’re used to and isn’t anything particularly remarkable in that regard. It has that aesthetic that we might call ‘instructions to photons.’ From a distance it appears real enough but the execution is all wrong: As usual, the selection of render ghosts have light coming from different directions, the lack of contact shadows and ambient occlusion means they appear to float just in front of the image, they have no reflections in the glass. The textures on the black metal and paving slabs repeat too regularly and are too clean to be believable. It’s as if you’ve taught someone how light works really well but they’ve never visually experienced it.

I’m used to seeing these images and have talked about them quite extensively. To be honest, I find them remarkable in their unremarkableness. An aesthetic of rushed imperfection against the noisy ur-reality of CGI cinema has been normalised. However, I then read the text:

Join us in Chinatown for the launch of our brand new development on the 26th November. Chinese experts will be on hand 6pm-9pm. Discover more about life in an unrivalled, Zone 1 location. RSVP to confirm your place.

Well goddamnit if that isn’t the most remarkable little bit of marketing guff I’ve ever read. Let’s unpack the obvious errors and park some of the further questions they open up:

  1. Tottenham Court Road station is not in Chinatown. It’s arguable that it’s at the North-East corner, but even according to Chinatown’s own map, it’s nowhere near.
  2. The follow up question is then, why is Chinatown the point of appeal and not Soho which is geographically more proximate?
  3. So in that case what are ‘Chinese experts’? Are they Chinese folks who are experts in London or London folks (Chinese or otherwise) who are experts in Chinatown? And why would you need that?

Anyway, I'm in the midst of trying to do some digging to find answers. I spoke to Wes about it and suggested the text was fil-in-the-blanks algorithmically generated. He reckons it's just a bad intern and Instagram thinks I'm a Chinese oligarch. Either way, I figured the reason it struck me is it's basically spam mail. There's no attempt at sophistication or individuality. It's just a meaningless sentence that for one very specific group of people (that I'm clearly not in) will make sense. The transaction cost for the developer is so low that for every 10,000 people that see this, they just need 1 to click so they can afford to be completely nonsensical to 9,999 people.

Attitude, Formafantasma, Art and Deisgn.

I started reading Alice Rawsthorn’s Design as an Attitude at the weekend. I never read her columns but like anyone in design am deeply aware of her significant and positive impact in the field. The book seems to offer a pretty coherent overview for folks from design and perhaps even non-design fields of the shift from functional or decorative practice of the industrial eras to ‘attitudinal’ practice, drawing on Maholy-Nagy’s notion of design as contributing to social good and ‘being generally resourceful and inventive.’ It’s not pitched super high and it is littered with great historical and contemporary references so it’s definitely going on my student reading list.

However, something in it is making me uncomfortable; I often run into a problem with these texts, conversations and exhibitions where the sense of the subject doesn’t align to my own. Perhaps it’s where I sit at an intersection of media theory and media art and design ‘thinking’ and that needs some reconciling with design literature but to me Rawsthorn’s book (so far) draws heavily on the materialistic version of design that litters Salone, Clerkenwell Design Week, Dezeen newsletters and Instagram. She spends the opening chapters of this book exploring design's journey form the crafts to industrial production, through decoration and now into critical practice but with little reference to how the methods and intellectual frameworks have changed: From ceramics to machines to recycled furniture but with (so far) no reference of piecework, Fordism, cybernetics, ecological theory and even design thinking as the theories with which these practices were/are in dialogue.

To explore an example of this division, which reductively could be seen as a focus on practice at the cost of theory; almost every chapter (sometimes every page) in Rawsthorn’s book (so far) makes reference to Formafantasma. I have no particular issue with this apparently renowned studio I’d never heard of until about six months ago. I really like their work, I think it’s clever, challenging and insightful. However, in the long established discourses of critical technology and media studies I’ve been engaged with throughout my career they just don’t figure - not in exhibition, conversation or text despite their clever exploration of critical technological issues like e-waste. This isn’t in anyway to undermine the importance of their work but simply to say that there is a very apparent dissonance in orientating points which – looking at Formafantasma’s follower count – would imply it’s more my ignorance than anything else but nonetheless speaks of a design world that is not acknowledged in this book.

In the design world of Formafantasma's value often seems to be captured in the production rather than the process. What I mean here is that the object itself is the thing to be celebrated as a sort of idol of intellectual enquiry. Time and effort is invested in perfecting the aesthetics of a product to slide it into the high-end world of luxury design. This is a clever subversion but at the same time undermines the criticality of the work: The response is; ‘oh you made something beautiful and it says something’ rather than ‘oh you created knowledge which we can now use to improve the human condition.’ This fetishisation of design outcomes occludes the intellectual frameworks, varied, complex and contested though they are that design has birthed through an understand of materials and how these frameworks are applied elsewhere. It makes these designs remarkable and headline-worthy but the knowledge they produce unreachable.

Formafantasma's Ore Streams. Found with the caption 'formafantasma uses electronic waste to create office furniture concepts' on Designboom (2017)
Formafantasma’s work remains highly exclusive in its audience of European design students and bloggers. Take, for example, Ore Streams. It’s clear from first glance that the primary consideration is aesthetic. Clean, beautiful, viral aesthetics in concept furniture are a great way to bring people in to the ideas of the project, but the subject and issue is still beyond reach. It tells me nothing about what I can do about e-waste, no data about my devices or products or organisations I can go to. There are a series of interviews on the project's website with almost entirely white male academics and industry leaders prevaricating on the issues but no clear designerly guidance on how to improve the social condition that Rawsthorn stipulates in her introduction as the responsibility of design.

Going back to this idea of production versus process, Rawsthorn mentions Fixperts (now FixEd), another design-led organisation dealing with e-waste. However, rather than focussing on a high-end engagement with the boutique design world, Fixperts develop iterative policy, education and technical methods and interventions that engage ‘publics’ in a real way with e-waste. Again, Rawsthorn mentions these folks so it’s no criticism of the scope of her work, but Fixperts (so far) get none of the careful analysis of Formafantasma; their work is brushed over as simplistic and functional.

Again and again, I don’t want to criticise Rawsthorn’s excellent work here but there’s a mismatch in what design is in my perception. So far, the book has made little reference to the significant impact of service and policy design methods in impacting e-waste at governmental and corporate levels or the work of critical and investigative practitioners in unveiling and communicating systems which produce e-waste. I would argue that these processes are firstly much more ‘designerly’ in their approach of design as investigative and probing tools and secondly much more impactful than the work of Formafantasma.

Rawsthorn ends this chapter by glossing over the art/design argument. That's fine; I’m not particularly interested in this argument either. When it comes up I tend to dismiss it as I find the distinction relatively meaningless so I agree with her rhetorical question that ‘does it matter whether a piece of work that explores a theme equally adroitly is described as art or design?’ However, there’s an insistence at this point in the text that Formafantasma’s projects epitomise a design ‘attitude’ because they are functional and something is understood about design in their production. But this function and understanding is incredibly exclusive. Formafantasma themselves have begun to understand something of the design process in the production of their work but they’ve done a terrible job of communicating that understanding. A beautiful concept chair made from e-waste tells us nothing about the financial systems that perpetuate e-waste’s production nor does it provide a pragmatic, scalable solution, nor does it expose the means of its production. And their chair is functional only theoretically; I doubt they’d allow you to perch on it for a break while stomping around Salone for hours on end. Its function is a statement piece in the context of an incredibly wasteful luxury design industry. Ore Streams is an idol to Formafantasma’s own exclusive understanding of the work that bears little of the generosity and clarity of what I understand design to be. In this I would make the argument that it sits more firmly in the art camp - exclusive both physically and intellectually; requiring an aesthetic sophistication (read: level of understanding) in its audience to insinuate meaning and a physical proximity to examine.

I guess this leaves me looking at my own hands a bit. The work I’ve done in the last few years; Charismatic Megapigment for example, which I’m trying to figure out how to write about, is also exclusive. It can stand in for any of the art projects I’ve done recently; exclusive, elusive, intellectual. I’m quite open about this and I call it ‘art.’ I make these projects because I want to learn more about the technical and intellectual processes behind, in this instance, robotics, machine learning and working with a proper fine artist. I don’t consider it a communicative piece in the same way as a great piece of data visualisation or even a policy document – it’s not meant to be generous. This doesn’t relegate it or promote it above designerly practices but I certainly wouldn’t, in a discussion on designerly, publicly meaningful and impactful discourse on greenwashing, hold it up as an epitome, (except for selfish reasons).

Charismatic Megapigment draws on the same mechanics as Ore Streams for engagement with subject and audience and in the use of a designerly (read: inventive, resourceful, methodical) process for production, and maybe a handful of people were impacted by it, but that’s not what it’s for and I would feel uncomfortable pitching it that way.


Gee, thanks for getting this far

That was exhausting and still not quite right but perhaps has helped me untangle this knot of practice a bit. Even just a slight budge is good.


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Pomme de Terre, Vendemiaire, 228 (Happy new year!)

The way I write these is that I keep an open note in which I write the beginning of sentences or ideas or just bullet points to then follow up on later. Toward the end of the last (academic) year I got in a good habit of taking half an hour first thing in the morning to expand on some of them so that by each Wednesday I generally had a good amount of information together ready to tidy up and post.

Since it’s been a couple of weeks since I last posted (for which I have no good excuse) there is an inordinate amount of half-formed ideas and auto-corrected scribblings below here in my notes which I’m loathe to drag up for risk of just retreading things that seemed important weeks ago. I suppose that’s what blogs are in a way, a repository for things that only occasionally retain importance beyond the immediate.

Charismatic Megapigment



If you’ve been following me on any of the social channels over the summer you will have seen the work I’ve been doing with Wesley Goatley and Charley Peters on a new collaborative project. Charismatic Megapigment is currently on exhibition at London College of Communication as part of Emergence for the London Design Festival. The project, which I describe in short-hand as ‘a robot reading a painting’ features a roving camera and screen that compare small sections of Charley’s paintings and drawing nearest-neighbour matches from a database of 102,000 images related to ‘green’ and all it’s implicit connotations. There’s more information on the project page here.

I have to say that it was easily one of the most pleasing and natural collaborations ever. Mine and Wesley’s practice has been explored through several collaborative projects and we tend to have an easy relationship with points of conflict only on important questions of outcome and form rather than on responsibility or authorship which can plague many poor working relationships. We tend to quickly divide up tasks based on how much we need to learn to get to where we need to be and work relatively independently, coming together regularly to update each other. With Charley we also fell into an easy collaboration mostly because the role of our expertise were so easily divisible; Charley to produce the painting, Wes and I to produce the machine. Consequently, I imagined most of the frictions might emerge from methodological differences: Charley is a formalist who produces beautiful images from an expert and innate sense of form, colour and shape while Wes and I are critical practitioners who privilege reason and rationale when we consider our aesthetic decisions.

However, these imagined frictions never materialised which is a great sign of respect and admiration for alternative forms of practice which is what these type of things should be about. Equally, while Instagramming the process I found a supportive and insight full group of co-practitioners eager to offer advice and insight. One of those projects that makes you feel good about what you’re doing rather than like a bad person for talking about what you love.

At some point I will be doing a proper write up for the PhD. This may in fact help me get back into that process. Like many others before me I have an enormous document and workload in my peripheral vision that I’ve committed to spending eight hours a week working on. Opening it up on Monday I struggled for forty-five minutes to find an entry point to this block of text I produced a year ago, like trying to storm a crumbling but heterogenous fortress.

I also imagined I might find the time to document the technical process of Charismatic Megapigment in some detail so that others might find it useful as I found the blog posts and wikis of others useful in my own production and technical development. However I’ve since forgotten most of it and don’t think I’d do as good a job. If you’re interested in pursuing something similar I worked most of it from this kit and using these tutorials. Thanks to their authors.

What else

Aside from Charismatic Megapigment, I moved house and have spent some time playing Assassins Creed Odyssey. We have to agree that the Assassins’s Creed series is ludicrous and stupid. Frankly it’s also rather poorly designed. The mechanics haven’t ever really changed and in fact the game feels so bloated with bolt-on features that it’s very hard sometime to enjoy the core principles: sneaking around, exploring and well, assassinating. The fetch-questing gamification of this latest one is getting very close to putting the nail in the coffin for me. In the post-Red-Dead-2 world (which admittedly I never finished) it seems lazy to just cash in on a franchise re-hashing the same mechanics with added feature-loading. However, the draw is in the scale, beauty and most importantly the history. I’m sure you know I’m a history buff and Assassin’s Creed games with their historical settings are a good place to learn about new bits of history, even if you have to spend some time unpicking the apocrypha. However, the good folks at Ubisoft seem to have stripped out the history entirely for this one. With Origins (the previous one) they removed the encyclopaedia bit of the games which I assume I was the only person to look at and read. However, they kept a ‘historical tour’ mode which retained some of the features. With this one, there’s no contextualisation whatsoever. So as you meet characters like Herodotus, Sophocles and Pericles expecting some meta-exposition on their lives, you get nothing. Worse still, as you meet other characters who you’ve never heard of, you wonder if they are in fact significant figures. Consequently for every ten minutes I play I spend thirty minutes on Wikipedia.

Anyway, this frustration is tempered by returning to read some Borges. I’m writing a chapter for a book on smart things and design and with my co-author, Kristina Andersen, we were talking about precedents for ‘smart things’ in fiction and I finally decided to crack the spine on the US edition of the collected Borges Fictions I’ve had sat around for years. I’ve read all of Borges’ fictions over the years but it’s a pleasure to indulge in the pithy, humorous and fantastical world of his stories all in one go, particularly having since learned a lot more about the history of Argentina and South America through the Revolutions podcast.

Channel Recommendation

Probably because of all the geometry I was looking up for Charismatic Megapigment, the algorithm steered me towards maths over the summer and I found this great channel; 3Blue1Brown which explores some complex and not so complex mathematical things. The one that got me into it was this explanation of one of the International Mathematics Olympiad’s most apparently simple but difficult issues. Enjoy.



There are some notes that remain worth exploring. Some thoughts on this year’s Ars Electronica and some other events I’ve been to but I will leave them for later. Ciao. x
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