18.12.19
Truffle, Frimaire, 228: A short post on vanishing states, sieges and maths.
Short one this week, thankfully. It’s been a week of slogging it through Christmas events and feeling the extra 10 bpm added to my heart rate in hangovers. Augury got a nice mention in an article in WIRED dot com magazine from Ben Vickers and Hans Ulrich Obrist. I don't know if it's just me and my own filter bubble but the amount of tech and occult work in current circulation seems to have shot up over the last twelve months.
I’ve been readingVanished Kingdomswhich I’ve had sat around for a while. It’s a dense book on the forgotten histories of forgotten states or particularly short ones. I just finished the chapter on Burgundy of which there were 16 different incarnations over a thousand years. The history is list-like, interspersed with quotes from contemporary sources. The whole thing is book-ended with sprawling descriptions of geographic features, or, as is the case with Burgundy, critiques of the way we remember these forgotten states in media. I'm struggling a bit with it because of the density and pacing which I suppose is a hangover of mostly consuming history through Wikipedia and podcasts.
I also bought and started playing This War of Mine which was on sale on Steam. It's a really nicely designed survival platformer focusing on resource management in a war-torn city. I have yet to win a game, it's super difficult and full of curve balls and depressing plot developments.
Things I Learned This Week
Thanks to This War of Mine I delved into a Wikipedia hole on the Siege of Sarajevo (from which the game takes inspiration.) The Bosnian conflict is one that I know vanishingly little about and is one of those ones that is so complex that it's hard to hold it in your head all at once. The Siege of Sarajevo was the longest-lasting siege of the modern age.
A colleague at UAL writes a thing called the 'Digital Transformation Brief' every Monday for staff. It's a really nice thing. This week he posted a link to this story from Brigham Young University about scalable water rendering. There's not a lot there on the process but it's a super interesting development when it comes to artificially simulating 'noisy' physics like water surfaces which normally take a bunch of calculations.
Check out the lineup of writers for the latest issue of Continent. Loads of stuff on tech and magic. Talking about tech and magic is cool now.
Channel Recommendation
I recommended maths YouTube channel Three Blue One Brown a while ago which uses really smart python animations to demonstrate complex mathematical ideas, this is another maths one, this one a bit more personality-driven: Standup Maths from Matt Parker. It's very geeky and often quite puzzle-based and involves him talking to other people more often than not. Check out this one on the Frog Problem:
I'll see about doing another post next week. I have a lot of reading and writing that I'm avoiding so this might give me an excuse to do that.
Bonjour, I missed last week didn't I. I got up to a bunch of things this week. Managed to slip the first draft of a chapter on fiction, imagination and smart machines in just in time which is great. I write a lot about writing on here (and will probably do so again today) but I find myself cramming at the deadline, doing pretty well and wondering what would happen if I actually paced myself.
Which reminds me of the fact that I'm currently restructuring the enormous block of text that currently constitutes the insane ramblings and have finished thoughts of a PhD thesis. I made myself a target of 8 hours a week and so far I'm sticking to it. It is no way structurally or argumentatively sound and is basically 60,000 words of polemics. My transactional, strategic mindset is really struggling to comprehend or develop a structure or even how intellectual arguments work. Consequently, I'm returning to the advice which I give students; that reading makes us better writers and am trying to read a lot more. I've become much more disciplined at staying away from the YouTubes.
I gave a talk yesterday at Arup, who I used to work for, which was just a general scope of things I'm interested in and I find this quite a useful process in figuring out what a PhD might be about, but even then, it's still all incomprehensible rambling to me. I find myself looking for answers and some surety in the whole thing but the catch with 'reflexivity' is that every conversation of an intellectual nature we have just makes things more confusing. Is all this writing about writing just prevaricating?
I have to get back to more transactional things; books to balance, meetings to set up, documents to complete. I have an hour of time right now so I want to make the most of it.
I'll send better words next week, promise.
2.10.19
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 thesetutorials. 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
I spoke at the #UALPlatform on Networked Making last week. It was a really nice event and I got to meet some new people and catch up with some folks I've known a little while. I spoke about the models of the world that the university and the subject have and how they interact awkwardly and maybe poorly respond to each other sometimes. I made a short video to sum up the hypothesis which people enjoyed.
The slides from my talk and some of the others are up here and you can check those out.
The blog of my talk from the Design Futures meetup is still doing the rounds which is cool. It seems to have struck a resonance with people which makes me feel like it was a worthwhile thing to do so I'll try and keep writing up talks even though I have less and less to do with speculative design. Despite that less and lessness I did an interview with old friends at speculative.edu following on from the talk. It's a tricky tihng to talk about because I don't really have strong feelings about speculative design either way, I just find it concerning how strong other people's feelings are about it. I guess that's why I don't come across as particularly serious. Some quotes:
there’s the reasonable critique that the canon of Speculative Design ends up in galleries or on post-it notes. That seems pretty accurate. I would struggle to come up with more than a dozen speculative projects that weren’t either laundering corporate irresponsibility through the medium of post-it notes or inaccessible gallery work.
As for reclaiming it … I don’t know, why bother? It broadened the capabilities of design, it brought new relationships and tools and perhaps that’s enough. There are so many other interesting emerging practices out there that deserve attention. You wouldn’t remake Fawlty Towers, would you?
I've been getting more and more chat correspondence from folks via email and I think that's really cool. Please send me emails of things you're into or just about random little project, it's nice.
Learnings
On Saturday/Sunday I did the Dunwich Dynamo, riding 120 miles overnight form London to the Suffolk coast. I put the whole thing up on Strava and Instagram where most of my bike content is. I documented some of mine and my riding buddy's learnings of that specific process so you can check them out there.
This week I also learned:
Quite a lot about 'change management' from a training session I did on Monday, the Kubler Ross model is what people sometimes call the 'seven stages of...' thing. Not sure whether these models reduce complex phenomena or whether phenomena emerge from them. I've totally stopped being skeptical about these types of training things now, I almost always find them super useful and revealing. It's kind of cool to be standoffish about them but they're good opportunities for doing better.
Learnt quite a lot about connectivism from the #UALPlatform including a new physical activity for actually drawing strings together like a giant investigative wall chart.
I don't know if this was new or whether I had forgotten it but cats' meows and purrs are noises they've evolved specifically for humans. They don't miaow or purr at other cats.
9.7.19
Something, Messidor, 227 (Microblogging and the self)
I didn’t blog last week. The last two weeks were a kind of perfect maelstrom of stuff and an endless domino rally of deadlines. I’m working from home today because there are no meetings and it is fascinating how much work I just got done in 2.5 hours which would normally take me the whole day in my office. So, I had time to think about what I’ve been thinking about and write about it here. It's also the reason why this post is dated 'something' since I'm not at my desk and don't have my French republic calendar to hand.
I was thinking about Twitter dot com yesterday. I know it’s a bit prosaic to have divided feelings about Twitter but I do. There’s different aspects to the way my personality engages here:
The player. The bit of me that is fully neuro-chemically bought into the content-creation-reward function of Twitter. The bit of it that is gamified like an RPG. You’re encouraged to grind away for likes and retweets and gain experience points as your followers. As a gamer this taps deeply into something that’s hard-wired in my elastic brain and I’m deeply and anxiously aware of in both online interaction and in my dangerous habit of slipping into gaming binges to get a kick.
The networker. The bit that reminds you what Twitter was for, why you signed up and what you got out of it; where you’re connected with interesting people or ideas. This is the bit that is optimistic every time I open Tweetdeck that someone might have done a; ‘Hey Tobias, you might like this’ or ‘you should meet this person.’ This is also the bit where I get people IRL come up to me saying ‘I saw that thing you tweeted, thanks’ and I think that it’s worth it if it’s useful to people. I know it’s corny but I genuinely believe the connections I made on Twitter in the early 2010s were responsible for getting my career started. However this is all held back by…
The doomsayer. This is the bit, that every time in a moment of idleness I open Tweetdeck growls ‘there is no joy to be found here.’ And it's right usually. It’s been years since anything on twitter made me joyful or laugh in a way that would have not been possible otherwise. On average its instrumental: I post what I’m up to, I share what some other people are up to and it’s like a bulletin board in a supermarket with no-one really engaging meaningfully. At worst it’s just a non-consensual hazing which by coincidence of being there you’re obligated to be grateful for. That and (and maybe it’s just my curation of my timeline) it’s anxiety-inducing stories of horror foretelling of the collapse of civilisation. In which case I’m divided again, because I don’t want to be complicit in turning away from knowing how others are suffering in the world.
So there’s kind of two reward functions: one is the nasty, neurochemical one that I’d happily be rid of but can’t, a bit like nicotine. The other is the one I get from being, learning or sharing something useful. I guess that’s what I enjoy in the media I consume, learning useful things.
There’s no right answer. Every time a new platform pops up and folks start to migrate I kind of wonder if we haven't damaged online discourse to the point where it's irretrievable regardless of where it is. I’ve found my approach to Instagram much better and fulfilling. I can share events and activities which is part of being in practice but I also put up bits of my life. Documenting a lot of what I thought might be boring and unrelatable bicycle activities seems to have got a good response, I had emails or comments from folks who said they were learning stuff about mechanics or maintenance and that’s great. If it’s useful and I can share some of the stuff I’ve learned or figured out that’s cool. Anyway, I'd appreciate any thoughts you might have as someone who is on the Internet. How do you reconcile all of this stuff?
This reminds me tangentially of a really great quote that Kristina Andersen introduced me to from The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There by Catherynne M. Valente:
First, you build the machine, then it tells you what it’s for. A machine is only a kind of magnet for attracting Use. That’s why we say things are Useful – because they are all full of the Use that chose them to perform itself. (Valente 2013)
I should read more children's books.
Learning stuff
Since I’m increasingly valuing learning simple things and it gives me a much richer sense of progress and self-growth than followers or likes, I’ve decided to keep a note and make a section on things I’ve learned each week. These aren’t necessarily useful yet but I've found everything ends up being useful at some point. I don’t know, it might be nice to share?
On Google maps, the short description for Starbucks is ‘Seattle-based coffeehouse chain known for its signature roasts, light bites and WiFi availability.’ which I find cute.
Despite being deep into French revolutionary history for a while (see titles of all recent posts) it was only this week that I connected Jacques-Louis David’s famous ‘Death of Marat’ (1793) (right) with theJean-Paul Marat. I had a real ‘oooohhhhh that Marat’ moment when the connection was made thanks to some untraceable prompt which was nice.
The length of sprocket teeth on bicycle parts have no real standards, despite the widths being pretty well standardised. They’re just a sort of best guess by the manufacturer. If you get your combination of parts wrong you can end up with a really noisy drive because the teeth stay in the gaps in the chain as the chain releases form the cog, essentially trying to continue pulling the chain with it. This is the source of the Bad Noises my new bike has been making and quite frustrating as there’s little guidance, just guesswork and it creates quite a bit of resistance.
Channel recommendation
Here’s a real quick (and bicycle related one). Since I’m sinewy and whippet-like it turns out I’m actually a real good climber as I’ve found from training round Richmond Park and doing Box Hill in Surrey the other weekend. Sprinting is bit harder than trudging up hill so I looked round for info and found this cool little series from State Bicycle Company. It’s a kind of interview format where they interview pro riders (usually with a good sense of humour) while riding fixed uphill. There’s a lot of speculation on the Tour de France in the later ones, some of which is… prescient. Anyway, I like them, enjoy.
There's too much on and I haven't had time to gather my thoughts. The exhibition for the design school at LCC opens this evening. It's the first time I haven't been directly involved and that makes me a bit sad. I'm an artist; I like to work with my hands and I get precious little opportunity to do so. It may well be for the best because the show looks incredible, it seems to get better every year so perhaps I should continue to withdraw from getting involved. I won't get to spend much time at the opening unfortunately. I've got a Big Thing first thing tomorrow morning that I've been preparing for all week (and still feel unprepared for) so I need a clear, sober head and a good night's sleep.
If you've been following me on the socials you might have noticed a lot more bicycle-related content. That's largely because I remembered that it used to be my great passion before I diverted too much into video games. Consequently I decided to refresh this passion by going on a bunch of long rides and documenting them and then blowing out on a new bike which I'm going to spend the weekend building. This means I've been watching bike films again so here's a quick:
Channel recommendation
Phil Gaimon used to be a professional cyclist and then retired but didn't turn out to be very good at retirement so now he has a YouTube channel where he talks about the bits of cycling and cycling culture that are fun and not ultra competitive. He has a dry sense of humour and an inquisitive mind which are basically my favourite two qualities in a person. Enjoy.
Instagrammin
I've been playing around with Instagram for documentation of things and getting more comfortable with showing bits of my life like the bike stuff. I used to find the need to update everyone about what you're doing intrusive and unwarranted but I guess we all have free will and I've learnt a lot by watching and listening to how other people do stuff so perhaps there's something to be learnt for others. Restarting this blog was a product of that. Perhaps this is more of me missing the front line of design and education.
Mostly it's resulted in some good conversations with people, there's always some 'friends' who'll be a bit obstinate for the sake of it but that's why we play around with things I suppose.
Right, back to the exhibition.
12.6.19
Caille-lait, Prarial, 227 (Playing with Eevee)
Once again there's been a bunch of stuff I haven't been able to articulate with the time I have to get these things smashed out. I read somewhere that the Internet is a river, we can't hold on to things, so maybe it's time to close the tabs and move on.
decline.online
I made an exhibition version of decline.online which wasn't too arduous and it's off to the Sovereign Nature exhibition in Berlin next week. I won't be able to be there myself but there's a great lineup of people involved so I'm pretty happy to be put alongside them. I managed to fix a bunch of stuff at the weekend but I'm struggling to deal with the lateral visualisation. There's enough data now that if it's compressed on a screen, the red line becomes a mess while I've discovered that some browsers don't like the side-scrolling and also that may not even be apparent. Anyway, that's a problem for next time.
LCC Degree Show
Next week is the LCC Degree Shows opening again. It's the first time ever that I haven't spent June up ladders covered in dust and paint and I miss being able to get hands-on with building the shows and fixing problems. However, it's going to be great. There's more info available here, let me know if you're coming and I'll see if I can give you a tour.
Eevee
I spent almost the whole weekend messing around with Eevee, which is Blender's new render engine, currently in beta and building the above quick animation. The big change is the real-time rendering. There's no wait time to see rendered results so it behaves a little more like Unreal or something. The tradeoff is having to bake up the lights in advance. I also recorded a breakdown video:
Some observations:
The real time rendering speeds up the process of putting together materials that look great. You don't have to keep flitting back and forth between a render and the viewer and waiting for it. You can also (once baked) tweak the lights as you go to check it under different conditions. (I'm doing this around the 1min mark with the marble)
There are a bunch of quality-of-life UI tweaks which have long been the bug-bear of the Blender world including (shock-horror) the ability to set up with left click to select! There's also quick menus that appear around the mouse. For instance 'z' used to switch between wireframe and solid view modes. Now it gives you quick select options of wireframe, solid, materials or rendered which is so much quicker.
Some of the simulation stuff is still twitchy. By far and away (and most of it isn't included in the breakdown) hair particles took the most time. There were just a bunch of inexplicable glitches, either due to my mistakes or the nature of a beta that made it really hard to get right. I ended up having to stack multiple particle systems to get dense enough looking hair that didn't glitch.
Shadows in the render looks a bit rubbish, particularly where the focal length blurs and around the grass. There is a new setting for shadow resolution which I don't fully understand which may be at fault.
Generally speaking little has been changed formally since cycles so most of the skills are transferrable. The biggest change to everyday stuff is the need to bake lighting with light probes. Light probes are in Unity too and are basically similar to domains that you get in smoke or liquid simulation - they define an area that light can effect. I can imagine on bigger projects with more complex lights this will cause me problems. BUT, no more fireflies!
Not a huge amount of stuff since last week. These bank holidays just keep coming. I got the application in I've been working on and feel pretty confident about it so that was a nice thing to do. I'm off to Finland tomorrow for Cumulus conference. It's a day long trip each way and we're only spending one day on the ground, so it's kind of nuts.
This week has been a bunch of learning experiences, both from mistakes and from things I just hadn't had time to engage with. Despite the enormous arrogance I like to portray I actually really like learning things so I'm always grateful when folks take time out to tell me things I hadn't thought about or when I can make the time to go engage in new ideas.
I went down to the Shades of Noir event at Camberwell last week which was really exciting. The history of the different campaigns to increase diversity in staffing and increase opportunities for non-white students at UAL was something that I had been tangentially aware of as an operational matter but hearing about the thirty-five year history of these projects and the energy of the folks involved was great. The event was to celebrate the creation of fifty-five new positions across the university aimed specifically at broadening the diversity of our staff. Please go check them out.
I still hate writing
I managed to get a big piece of writing for a Senior Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy done this week which is a goddamn relief. I’m pretty open about my dislike for writing. I don’t much enjoy the process and sort of dread committing to writing things. However, I’m a vegetables before meat kind of guy so I spent my Sunday chucking out just shy of 6000 words into an application. Once I’m in the flow of it, it’s actually quite easy (though still not as enjoyable as say a day-long Civ VI bender or watching Lord of The Rings back-to-back). My writing approach is similar to how I mentally romanticise smithing to be, which is largely drawn from YouTube videos:
I start with just throwing out a bunch of words in relation to the topic, just completely off the top of my head.
After around 1000 words, subsections start to appear and I’ll reorder the paragraphs and put in temporary headings that indicate what should go in each subsection.
I’ll then iterate over each of these subsections, adding, deleting and removing to get the right ideas in the right subsections (usually three because three is neat and I’m a neat person). I’m still a dedicated GCSE history student so each paragraph follows the PEE model (Point, Evidence, Explanation) and I’ll try and get each subsection to around the same length.
I top and tail this with a loose introduction and conclusion which usually say what the text will be about and then reflects on what it was just about.
Then it’s just repeated rapid iteration to look for any obvious gaps, cut down on word count (I always aim to go over and trim back) and make sure spellings, references and styling are consistent.
I had a Skype with a co-author for an upcoming chapter yesterday so I guess I'm a sucker for punishment.
Ride w/ me
The other week, on a whim I resurrected my keirin bike which had sort of been languishing in our bedroom despite being my pride and joy for many years and doing hundreds of miles with me. God what a joy to ride! The last year or two I've been cruising around on a soft steel mid-50s path bike with a three-speed internal hub (which is deeply practical, comfortable, hard-wearing, fast when I need it and I get to wear normal shoes). Riding something that's a tenth of the weight and built entirely to go five hundred miles an hour is a great feeling.
Anyway, I bombed around Battersea yesterday (which showed me how much stamina I've lost since I used to do sixty mile rides twice a month) but have no-one to ride with! I sort of lost contact with my old riding buddies so if you're in London, ride a bit recklessly on a track bike and want to hang out please let me know.
Bike tube
Which leads me on to a channel recommendation. Terry Barentsen has a channel of great bike vids. There's a series where he just rides with folks around their home city; no music, no bullshit just following a rider around while they occasionally talk to themselves. This is a great one with Mexican professional cyclist Ana Puga.
I got to do some nice things this week and give out some good news which is a good way of feeling a bit better. Once again I don't have a huge amount to say but I made myself the obligation to write something down every week so here I am doing it. I have quite a writing debt at the moment, even after submitting the book manuscript.
This week I'm trying to finish a six-thousand-word application which very few people will read and which is curiously personal. I have to write about my experience in academia/teaching in a very reflective way and how it's contributed to my sense of a teaching philosophy. Articulating things you've never had to articulate before is quite revealing, these misty boundaries that have been hidden by the fog of war are explained in quite an out-of-body, God's-eye-view way that makes them feel like a distant memory. I have an episodic sense of self anyway so in a way it's quite comfortable.
In Supra Systems Studio we're working on a big project that I'm really excited about. The idea is to try out the notion of the 'demonstration' that we've been thinking about - creating work that brings some attention to an idea but is also replicable and usable by others. I'm waiting for the headspace to really get into it and really get building it.
This evening I'm at Camberwell for the Academic Futures event. We're creating some new jobs in the programme as part of a new fund aimed at broadening representation in academia so please come along if you're interested in coming to teach or research with us.
The bank holidays we're having are messing with my sense of timing. This morning I determinedly headed over to the community centre to vote thinking it was Thursday 23rd May.
Part of these extended weekends we're blessed/cursed with is that I've been binging on podcasts and probably listened to about twenty hours of history this weekend which is obviously fascinating but also has a strange Hitchcock zoom effect. The histories I listen to tend to be driven by the personal narratives of the people at the centre of the story and their decisions.
I go in phases with podcasts and at the moment I'm not so into the heavily edited and well produced ones like 99% Invisible or Pod Save America. History podcasts tend to be of the 'one person in their bedroom' genre like Hardcore History and Revolutions. Dan Carlin's Hardcore History was a new one for me - he has a gruff, hyperbolic style which sounds a bit like a shock jock so it's one of those things that took me a couple of listens to get in pace with but it is excellent. He also is a little more analytical (although, in a self-admitted conservative interpretation) than Mike Duncan's stuff. He tends to come from the perspective of; 'Why did this thing happen? Who were the people and what was the context and ideas that enabled it?'
He also made a point in the one on Persia (which was excellent) about all this history we just don't know and probably never will. He coined a phrase that's been rattling around my head since - 'History is the story of what you did to or with the Greeks.' In the story of Persia, most of what we know comes from the exaggerated hero myth of Alexander the Great. He argues that there's good evidence to suggest that to the Persians, the Greeks were nothing more than a bothersome little province rather than this great, pre-destined empire. We also have only one contemporary source for Alexander the Great which is a brief inscription on a temple, almost everything else was valorised in the Roman re-tellings.
I know it's obvious but we don't really know what was going on for most of the human population for enormous tracts of time and only have these brief windows where bits were decided to be plucked out and quasi-mythologised as part of European political projects. I need to spend more time on the Eastern histories, there's a podcast on China that I started a while back but I struggled with but I'm going to give it another go.
decline.online
I've been approached about exhibiting the project in a few weeks in a great sounding exhibition but I'm faced with this perennial problem of how you exhibit a website. I think that it might be a good idea to develop a static, streaming version of it rather than an interactive one, which at least would be a fun new challenge so that's something to look forward to.
Voyager's done an interesting thing. I didn't think about it before but Voyager's distance is sinusoidal because of Earth's orbit. So from when I started collecting data Voyager was actually getting closer to Earth rather than further away. This meant I spent ages thinking the data was wrong and trying to fix it. It's now moving away again so the line has ticked up.
I'm back from holiday after a few days driving around Lake Como and cavorting in Venice for my friend's birthday. I'm not very good at switching mindsets so it took me about three days to get into a relaxed groove and three days before leaving I started thinking about work again. So there was about forty-five minutes in the middle where I was relaxed.
Five Problems
Last week I posted a writeup of the talk I gave at the Speculative Futures meetup in London. Loads of folks read and shared which is great and no-one (at least publicly or to me) expressed outrage at the thoughtlessness of my polemics. It sort of refreshes my faith in the version of Twitter we had where it was fun and supportive before the vicious McCarthyist version we have now. It's funny that in a week it had almost as many reads as my original Critical Exploits writeup from six years ago.
Six years ago feels a Hitchcock zoom away. I suppose it demonstrates some sort of consistency in thought that I've kept it going that long and that the practice has expanded and grown so much since - sometimes for the better, sometimes not. I'm delivering Critical Exploits this afternoon to some students in fact and it always elicits a fun discussion.
It's a conversation I'm keen to continue and something I'm exploring actively in my PhD (when I have time) so having feedback from folks was super useful and I'm always grateful for links to other texts or examples of projects that I can measure my ideas against so please keep them coming.
decline.online
decline.online is cooked and on the table! I've just uploaded and launched a working version (2.2) and I'm really happy with it. I made a last minute decision last night to do some redesigning and remove the black border that was sitting over everything before. There were a couple of other more technical and conceptual things that I've been working through and will have to continuously evolve as it grows:
Dealing with the growing data set is going to be the most pressing problem. The background scraper runs every four hours which means it will rapidly start to become quite heavy. I've implemented a fixed-width visualisation for the line charts so that they scroll left to go back in time but I'll have to keep an eye on how that feels as the amount of data grows. I played around with a click-to-zoom feature so that you could click on a text line and it would zoom to show you the whole historical record but I couldn't get it running right.
I put in some static sources – links to PDFs, maps and so on that are interesting but not necessarily scrape-able. There's much more of these than scrape-able data sets so I need to be careful to not go overboard with these and stick with the idea of building a historical record that can be visualised in single data points.
I've tested in Chrome and Safari on various screens but who knows what type of problems will occur as people start to play with it.
I also need data sources. I've got a list of things to investigate and see what I can do but I want more from other people. If there are things you'd like to see or data sources you know of let me know and I'll run them into an update for version three if I can.
Building this again was a whole learning process and I got to grips with some things I've never done before, particularly working with Python for web-scraping (comparatively easy) and using d3 (often very frustrating.) As it keeps growing I'll try and make the most of the opportunity to keep learning new things. Send links, send feedback.
That's it
Like I say I was on holiday so this week I'm catching up with paperwork and finishing off a little project for Haunted Machines which might launch soon and I can tell you about then. I'm going to be at the Graphic Design Educator's Network event next Wednesday at the RCA. It'll be interesting to see what the movers and shakers of graphics are thinking about.
I’m currently engaged in a fellowship application which I keep being encouraged to make and I reckon I can get but the process seems to have been made Darwinian difficult. There’s obviously an element of ensuring rigour but at the same time, if you want people to do it, make it an easier process.
Decline online is basically done
Well, as per last week, it turns out I can run python from my server. Once I’ve updated python and installed all the modules which sounds simple right oh my god let me tell you about trying to install pip. I’m on a shared server and their version of Python doesn’t include pip or any of the other things I need so I have to install my own local version. But even a local install of Python won’t include pip. And without pip I can’t install anything. Including pip. The solution was simple, suggested the host's notes, install Python as normal and just include the flag ‘--with-ensurepip=install’ But. I'm a proud man and I outright refused to take ten minutes out of my day to reinstall and so instead spent hours trying to get round the lack of root access to sudo install, uploading packages, scraping archives, wget’ing the hell out of my keyboard. Eventually. Eventually. Eventually. I gave up and reinstalled including the flag. Easy peasy. Look, life’s a learning curve.
TLDR:
I wanted to do something my way
That thing was prevented by sensible security
I was obstinate that my way was how we were going to do it
I lost
 Look at him!
Anyway it works. I had actual tears in my eyes watching my little script run over SSH. So that’s fixed. Actually, it was quite a week after that. I pulled a couple of all-nighters and Decline Online is basically finished and ready to roll out. I followed this example to get some visualisations rolling with quite a bit of tweaking and adapting. The next major problem was trying to dynamically scale the data so that everything fitted in the same canvas. For example, sea level changes may be in the range of -5 to +5 while oil prices are in the range of 1000-1200 so getting them literally on the same page was a bit of a problem. Lucky for me Jonny Thaw here at LCC in the Creative Technology Lab solved the problem in like ten minutes with some JS wizardry after I'd poured a couple of hours into it. I'm eternally grateful to him for fixing that as well as explaining some core concepts to me that really helped.
So I've currently got the Python script churning away grabbing data. I'll come back to the front end in a week or two and see how it handles a larger set of data and if it looks good then I'll put it out there and hope that people find it interesting. I'm still always on the look out for new, interesting data sets which will be the next thing to fix up after launching.
Writing Sucks
I met with my PhD supervisor last week and we looked over a huge manuscript that I’d pulled together over the summer. There’s about three PhDs in there and I’ve got a lot of work to do to get it into something more manageable, but then my theory on everything is always that it’s more rewarding to overstretch and come back then just to go as far as you need to. He said my writing was really nice and he enjoyed reading it which was great but then I thought more about why I don't enjoy writing.
Having spent a lot of the week doing quite technical activities I realised I get the same kick from them as I do from playing the video games I like (RPGs and city builders generally). There’s a kick in seeing incremental progress towards a larger goal that’s very much present in coding, RPGs and city builders/strategy games. In both working on a bit of code and those games there’s sense of making progress, that I’m trying to achieve something and I’m getting closer all the time and each success is genuinely joyful. Getting the python script to run perfectly on the server was a very similar feeling to what I had when I beat the cleric beast in Bloodborne.
 Pictured: me iterating a function over a JSON array.
Writing doesn’t hold that same thrill because there’s nothing concrete about it. There’s no markers of like ‘ok that works, what’s next.’ Writing doesn’t ‘work’ at all, in fact. There’s no teleology (big word, probably used wrong) to it. So there’s no thrill to it for me. You finish it, it goes to someone they go ‘yeah, great, thanks’ maybe they give you money, maybe they don’t and that’s it. You never get to compile, deploy and test it to see how it behaves and whether it achieves what you want. In fact, the objectives, for me of writing are often pretty vague. It just needs to be done so I do it rather than wanting a specific outcome.
It’s not like I’m bad at it. I’m pretty good (maybe not on here) but when I put my mind to it I can pull together a pretty good sentence. Nowhere near Will Self level but certainly better than someone mashing the keyboard in the YouTube comments thread. I need to find a way to enjoy it, I have a lot of it to do.
Channel Recommendations
I don’t have a YouTube recommendation for you because I fell into a YouTube hole of influencer videos as a consequence of clearing my cache for Decline Online. I watched like three of them trying to get the point of what was going on, it was mostly teens talking about the things they owned or something someone said. YouTube do have all of Charley Boorman and Ewan MacGregor’s Long Way Round on there which I watched last week. That’s still a really fun series.
Tomorrow
I'm going to Milan. I'm around for about 48 hours so let me know if you want to hang out or catch up, I've got a bit of an itinerary but I'm always flexible, you know that. Alright, ciao.
Well, it’s still quiet. My calendar is perversely empty. Maybe I shouldn’t have told you that in case you want me to do something.
Supra Systems and the Cerebral
We had a good meeting of Supra Systems Studio last Thursday where we spent some time trying to figure out what we were about and why. We’ve got a larger group project coming up that we want to use as a demonstration of the studio’s potential and it was great to get just a load of super sharp people in a room together to hash out a plan, some ideas and a direction. It’s also great to have a whole day of intellectual discussion.
Paradoxically, the more time I spend in academia, the less time I spend in academic pursuits. Everyone has the usual complaints about the emails and meetings but I don’t actually mind the operational stuff, I actually really enjoy it. There’s a pleasure in feeling an institution, a subject and an attitude move forward and a privilege in having the opportunity to be part of steering it and that leads to a quiet appreciation the value of what might otherwise be quite prosaic activities. However, I do miss more cerebral work sometimes and it can be hard to jump out of the mindset of strategy and operations into intellectual discussion. I suppose it’s about keeping all these things in balance. That’s another reasons for redoing Ongoing Collapse, it gives me something technical to tinker with and keep those muscles active as well.
Anyway, the studio has some stuff coming up but we’re also at a point where big steps need to be taken to ensure its public and institutional legitimacy beyond than the fantastic excitement that was present at launch.
Decline online
I haven’t changed much online decline.online (added a clock and tidied up some styling errors I found while playing with it (the perils of working on a 4k screen)) this week because of having to get a load of stuff done on the book. I got some time on Wednesday night to get the scraping script and JSON FTP uploading setup.
I’ve been playing with Python in recent projects and I really never want to touch PHP ever again so I have a new pipeline which is running a python script with Beautiful Soup (on my computer at the moment) which scrapes and compiles into a JSON file then uploads that via FTP. It works really well and is much less finicky than PHP.
I have several things to figure out now (hopefully tonight):
Can I run this python on my server? (Tips and help would really be appreciated here.)
At the moment it prints out direct to JSON, however that's going to eventually cause issues as the data set grows.
So can I also set it up to send to an SQL database as a backup?
I also need to get into the grind of scraping all the sources, so if you have any I can add, please let me know.
Book
Speaking of the cerebral, we submitted the draft manuscript yesterday! I spend most of the weekend at it and we made a big push in the last few days to go over and over it and get all the styling and references sorted.
It’s quite a different writing process to normal. Because we’re aiming at an audience who are designers or students of design we’re not assuming have much of a reading of critical practice. This means that we’re starting at the core stuff and by the time you’re getting into full flow you hit the word count wall. So, more nuanced ideas sometimes have to get cut to accommodate the core stuff. After re-re-re-reading each chapter I sort of sit there and go ‘Is this good?’ But then I (or one of the people I talk to almost every day) wrote it. So, is it just that I’m so used to it that it strikes me as not that interesting? Reminds me of looking back on old bits of work and thinking ‘Hey, this is pretty cool, why did I hate it so much at the time?’ Or every time someone says they like a project and I’m like ‘really?’ in a high-pitched squeal of disbelief. (This is often taken offensively as people think I’m belittling them. I’m not. I’m sorry.)
Upcoming
I’ve got a meeting with my PhD supervisor (the lovely Matt Ward) tomorrow where I’m looking forward to thinking through what’s next. I feel like I’ve got a large chunk of it done, maybe a quarter(?) But then maybe I’m wrong. At LCC there’s loads of organisation to do, planning for next academic year has already started and I’ve got a massive team I’m working with at the moment. There’s a lot of moving parts but I’m thinking they’ll all line up well enough. There's also still two jobs we're recruiting for so please get in touch if you want to talk about them. (Senior Lecturer, Digital Experience and Motion Design and Course Leader, BA Graphic Media Design)
Oh, I’m going to be in Milan on 10th-12th April for [accent and hand gestures] Salone. It would be lovely to see anyone who wants to hang out.
I’m going back to Italy after that but I’m not telling you where or when because it’s my holiday with Mrs Revell. Leave us alone.
Is it worth saying what you actually think more? I try to be honest (situation allowing) and sometimes that gets me in trouble and sometimes it doesn't. But then I'm a white man and that gives me the privilege in most places. I also find it a good way out when I can't read the room very well. Just a hard reset button. I'm tired after driving home at the weekend through the night. I know very well that I need at least seven hours sleep a night and any romanticism about being able to pull of four hours sleep is long gone. I stick to my hard rule of waking up at the same time every day but I'm not very good at going to sleep on time which creates a sleep deficit. Anyway...
It's alive!
As promised last week I'm going to bring back the Ongoing Collapse. It's a good project and people seem to like it so it's probably worth doing. Well, stage one is done so the easy bits are out of the way I guess. Renewing the hosting (ongoingcollapse.com) proved tricky since I don’t know where it is. Over the last few years the hosting has been bounced around to various folks and though I still own the domain I didn't have the patience to go around hunting down whoever is supposed to be hosting it at the moment (clue there is nothing at the domain). I was going to go for collapse.club but for some reason it won't assign the domain properly so instead I got the extremely catchy decline.online.
You can go over there right now to have a look at the holding page if you like. The key stylings are done and some super basic d3 is implemented to just basically draw that red line across the canvas, but it all resizes nicely and should work on mobile too. In fact it looks even cooler on mobile.
Anyway the core of it's done, it's up, styling's done. So next stage is going to be really hard and it's going to mean re-building all the scraping and archiving. I'm not sure how to do that. Last time I used a PHP scraper being pushed by a CRON job into an SQL database every day. It works ok as a storage and retrieval method but the scraper was bad and any time someone re-styled their page it lost all the data and glitched out. I'm going to look back over the code from the last iteration and see what's salvageable but I'm up for suggestions of better approaches.
After that is implementing the visualisations. I never got that far in the last iteration, I want to set it so that if your mouse hovers (or thumb clicks) on a particular bit of data in the text then that graph is either highlighted or appears. Again, I've got d3 in the build and ready to go so that's just a case of playing around with some examples to find something that works.
Blogging regular
I set a recurring reminder to post a blog every Wednesday and have set up a note to just write things down in and then form them up into a post. This is supposed to be on Wednesdays but tomorrow is packed and I thought I'd do it today.
Term's over so it's the strange twilight of the university where everyone gradually goes off on holiday and very few of us are left in the building. It means there's some breathing room so I trudged through all my emails today to pick up anything I might have missed. There's some new projects coming up soon and I'm trying to figure out a mental calendar of the next six months and how everything's going to fit in.
Channelling
Another YouTube recommendation. Girlfriend Reviews. Basically it's someone reviewing what it's like to live her boyfriend who plays video games. It's very funny and has resulted in me an Santo saying 'hol up a minit!' around the flat a lot which is a good indication of strong cultural impression. Most of them are about video games and derivations thereof but this one for the Star Wars: A New Hope came out the other week and it made me snigger a lot so I'm sharing it with you.
I opened up this draft which I hadn't looked at since February and there was a whole load of paragraphs here about the turbulence of my relationship with social media. Essentially I never felt the need to quite or anything dramatic like that because I don't really use it properly. Anyway, all of that became irrelevant in recent weeks when the whole world decided it was going to sit up and have the same debate.
I've been keeping my head down at the moment, I have a course to run and a PhD to do. There's lots of other stuff but those two things are the least glamorous and most important. They essentially require looking at spreadsheets and blinking cursors day after day. It's not pretty but it matters and it's a case of just settling in for a long ride of three or so years to really build something that lasts and is important.
I was in Amsterdam the other week (surprise) visiting the Sandberg for the first time. I was there to give a talk and do some tutorials on a short course but I also got the opportunity to do some spying. I've worked with lots of people before from there but never had the chance to visit. I always like going to other universities and speaking to the staff and students about their problems, they tend to throw my own battles into a new light. The Dutch higher ed sector, particularly in arts and design has been going through some pretty interesting times with DAE students laying the line down on their management and concerns about levels of corporate interest. It's sometimes energising and sometimes disheartening to hear about the types of concerns they express in an atmosphere that is a lot closer to the ideal art school model than the target-driven, marketised and constricted confines of the mega-bureaucracy that I find myself playing. The issue of student representation is one that is brought up again and again in the Netherlands with no proper unionisation or quality assurance rocess involving student perspectives. Here, we're on the opposite ends with a system that has excellent representation of students in all levels of decision making but as a result is sometimes paralysed into inaction out of the fear of upsetting students with change.
Haunted Machines +
I've done a couple of talks recently starting to build on the Haunted Machines work and into my PhD research. There was Arrational Machines at Thingscon and then Pure Machines at Future Sessions in Manchester. That whole things was conducted in the shadow of the Facebook revelations which made a lot of folks decidedly uncomfortable and resulted in some quite heated and enlightening exchanges. I don't know if it was recorded but I think the Q&As throughout the day were very rich. On that note, I'm not sure if I remembered to tell you about a podcast that Natalie and I did last year after Haunted Machines. Natalie now has a newsletter. I thought newsletters were a 2016 thing but then I found out yesterday that wearing a green hat in China mean someone is cheating on you. There's all sorts of things I don't know.
Synthesising Obama
I did a quick project for Dirty Furniture for an exhibition they're touring. I was asked to chose an artefact that I felt represented the contemporary age and I chose a piece of software, the Synthesising Obama machine learning package. The notion is that these objects will go in time capsules so I had an interesting dilemma of how to make it legible for years to come. Acrylic takes around 40,000 years to degrade so that was an easy choice. The exhibition is travelling to London for Clerkenwell design week so once it's there and I can get some proper photos I'll do a proper writeup. Milan
I've been working on a little research/curatorial project with Z33 since January. They've set up a series of research schools to do projects under certain themes and I've been involved in the School of Time. As part of this they're exhibiting research at Milan this year, I've selected some diagrams and fragments of text that go into a plotter to be drawn into people's notebooks. If you're in Milan go check it out. Also go and check out Wesley's work with Superflux - he's done a new critical data vis project and will be doing a talk. There's also some IDC action at Atelier Clerici this year with Virginie Tan, a recent grad, presenting her work.
Writing
Beyond crunking out a good chunk of PhD I've been doing various other bits of writing. I'm in Paris next week for Cumulus to report on the Interact project I've been involved in for the last few year, Strange Telemetry wrote a chapter for Economic Science Fictions from Goldsmiths Press which is now available at all good bookstores and I've got a couple of essays in catalogues and books coming up that I'll let you know about when they're out.
Coming Up
Natalie and I are running another series of event with Impakt. First on the 20th April in Osnabruck at the European Media Arts Festival and then on the 21st April in Utrecht. The events, both called 'Deep Fakes or Rendering The Truth' are opportunities to talk about the effects of advancing simulation and rendering on notions of truthfulness and objectivity in images. We've got a great lineup of speakers - Anna Riddler, Lucy Hardcastle, Luba Elliot, Igor Schwarzmann and others. Hopefully see you there. After that I'm in Geneva for Mapping Festival where I'll be sharing the stage with Julian Oliver for the first time in four years in a conversation with Daphne Dragona.
That's it. That's all I've got time for. There are probably other things.
No preamble. This is by no means exhaustive but it's mostly true.
January
I started the year at 30. The early weeks of January are peppered with planning meetings for various projects that came to fruition throughout the year. Various projects in collaboration with Wesley Goatley and of course Impakt was still ten months away so was nothing more than a weekly Skype and hundreds of pages in dozens of PDFs. At the end of the month I helped Wesley out with some visuals for Breathing Mephitic Air, part of Space to Breathe at Somerset House.
February
In February I was out in Leuven setting up the first version ofThe Finite State Fantasiaat STUK. This project was a real challenge to try and embody some of the ideas I was working through in my PhD about what a machine is and what it's for. Wesley was there to help pull the sound together and get some complicated projectors all working together. I put together a lecture which I gave at STUK which I've been bringing around with me all year, updating and modifying as we go that's been useful in explaining a lot of the stuff that ties together things like The Finite State Fantasia and Haunted Machines. The talk wasn't recorded unfortunately but it was given in several other places and in different iterations that are reported further down the line.
March
At the beginning of March I was hosting a part of Next UP, a University Arts London event that brought together professionals and practitioners to talk about careers with final year undergrad students. Then it was off to Eindhoven to set up The Finite State Fantasia again. This time for STRP's biennale. I gave a shorter version of the talk I gave at STUK right after Stelarc had finished weirding everyone.
After that I headed over to Utrecht to meet up with Natalie Kane and begin a residency as part of our research for Impakt. We did a load of lectures, teaching sessions and meetings all over the country and got to meet a lot of folks that formed a lot of our curatorial direction for the festival.
April
The residency and its ceaseless procession of coffee meetings spilled over into April. While there we hosted our first official Impakt event as part of the Haunted Machines & Wicked Problems program - Accursed Creator. We managed to get a full house and generate a lot of excitement six months before the madness of the real thing happened. I landed back in the UK on the first day of term just in time to remember that I have a full time job in a university.
May
After just over a week in the UK and doing my actual job I was back out in the Netherlands for Fiber festival - another iteration of the Finite State Fantasia was on exhibition at De Brakke Grond along with Natalie and I's project Alchemy and I gave another version of my talk from STUK and STRP. Fiber was fantastic and I saw some great stuff. There's a video breakdown below.
At the end of May I was in Athens wearing several different hats. Georgina Voss and I ran a workshop as Strange Telemetry looking at alternative urban futures for Athens as part of the exhibition 'Tomorrows' which also had New Mumbai on exhibition. We wrote an essay as well. Not sure where that is though.
June
From the beginning of the month I took up a new job at LCC as Course Leader of MA Interaction Design Communication and spent a lot of time giving lectures including for the Something or Other series. I was back and forth from the Netherlands a lot for various Impakt related missions including beginning a seminar with HKU students and was beginning work on curating Possible/Probable Worlds at Uncertainty Playground, LCC. In Strange Telemetry we were working hard on a project for the Royal Society on futures in scientific research. We should really publish that on the site.
July
July was mental. I got married. I ran the Speculative and Critical Design Summer School again but only for a week this time. Before running off on my honeymoon I took part in 'The Fix' with Cat Drew of Uscreates and various other luminary figures.
August
August started with Georgina Voss and I going out to Australia as part of the Interact program at LCC. This is the last year of a series of exchanges with RMIT in Melbourne and QUT in Brisbane but we're already working on the next stage of the relationship. With all the footage we've managed to capture over the last few years of our trips there we put together a little montage video.
September
Got back from Australia and went straight back to the Netherlands for Cultural Sunday. Natalie and I ran a little event with some of our speakers and partners talking about current affairs and Game of Thrones.
Two days later I was off to Austria and Ars Electronica with the MA IDC students for them to show their work at the campus exhibition. I had to run back early to go to Ben Stopher's wedding which was in the countryside somewhere. Literally the next day (oh god I remember September now) Wesley and I were beginning a week of ricocheting back and forth between Brighton and London. This was the famous week of opening three exhibitions at the same time, one of which I was curating. At LCC we had Possible/Probable Worlds opening. Simultaneously in Brighton was Mephitic Air while at Somerset House we were building and installing Moving Mephitic Air - a collaboration between Strange Telemetry, Superflux and Wesley Goatley for Design Frontiers. I can't even begin to tell you how hard we worked that week. No sleep all-night rendering and coding sessions before running around shouting and climbing ladders. Here's the video from Mephitic Air.
Then London Design Festival opened and I was still running around now presenting all the work I'd built, there was seminar rounding up the Interact project, artists talks and a visiting contingent of RMIT students doing a workshop. At some point I managed to plan a curriculum for MA IDC as well and moved the course into a brand new studio.
October
Term started, 40 brand new fresh students turned up and filled up the new studio quickly. Then I had to go and take down all the projects form September. I went to Vienna to take part in Steirischer Herbst and give a version of 88.7 at what felt very much like being a after dinner performer. I liked it and I got to meet a hero of mine. The type of hero where you don't even think of them as a human with a body. We joked about trains. Then, quick as that it was Impakt: Haunted Machines & Wicked Problems. Five days of talks, exhibitions, performances and events curated by myself and Natalie Kane. The time flew by and was rejuvenating. I can't write about it in a year review. I couldn't in my last month review. But we're going to write a book next year so you can get all your reflexivity there. Here's a video of Impakt in 8 minutes. I like that 2017 lets us compress three years of work to 8 minutes. Very efficient.
November
November came, I gained a year of age. The students had their graduation show. We're making a video about it at the moment. There's more about the year in IDC over on the IDC blog here. I came back from Impakt a lot more short-tempered and belligerent and did a couple of things to prove that. First a podcast with Natalie which descends from the history of Haunted Machines into how to win the culture war. Then I was back in the Netherlands (I know, I've asked the Dutch government about a loyalty scheme) for ThingsCon where I introduced 'Arrational Machines' (a frankly brilliant blog post that not many people read) - a kind of working title for post-Haunted Machines. Actually seizing technology to do more than just the same old capitalist shit over and over again. I'm real happy with this material as it hits the pivot point of my PhD work bang on.
In November Natalie and I also went to Brussels to have a fireside chat thing with Diederik Peeters who was one of our commissions for Impakt. There was vitriol there too. Last thing that month was Barcelona to see some PhD students give presentations and schmooze because we started a new research hub - Supra Systems Studio.
December
Now we're in December, I promised in my last missive I'd be buttoning down to spend time with my students and I successfully did that. They produced a fantastic show (again written about over on the IDC blog) and we had some good fun seeing the previous cohort leave as well as getting to know the new guys. There's a lot of work to do but there's so many opportunities for great things.
2018
Two books to write.
PhD to stride through.
A new curatorial/research job.
An MA to make incredible.
A new research hub.
Second viewing of new Star Wars.
Cool new Art with Wesley.
At every point in writing this I've wanted to stop. See you next year.
I got married, I hid for a week and a half. Actually, you know, the wedding, the honeymoon. All of it was perfect. Just fucking perfect. Thanks for asking. The next few weeks are going to be some of the most intense I've been through for a while, lots of curation and organisational stuff and some new original Art. Super quick recap of the recent stuff:
The Summer School went really well, great group of folks and some really interesting challenges. I'm going to be publishing some writeups on the IDC blog when I get a minute (also go and follow the IDC blog). (edit: Writeup done. It's really good.)
I took part in a live Radio design workshop thing with Cat Drew of UsCreates recently. It's called the Fix and we Design Thought about how to fix the housing crisis. My gorup ended up settling on using unused brownlands as demonstrators of alternative housing models (co-ops, WikiHouse etc.) We won.
I was in Australia with George Voss (with our LCC hats on) as part of the Interact program. We were visiting colleagues at RMIT and QUT to be grilled about Brexit and think about future academic partnerships. It was productive.... and I have a debrief with the boss in 18 minutes so I should probably think of more to say.
Alright, so here's my flight schedule for the next two months (so far).
03.09: Cultural Sunday 3rd September with Impakt
Natalie and I are going to Utrecht (unsurprisingly) to take part in cultural Sunday. This is a big event across the whole city. We're hosting a panel discussion and mini-screening with a couple of guests including Simone Niquille, Dries Verhoeven, Dr Edwin Akin Hubbard and others. It's going to be a good way to introduce and kick off the program. 08.09 - 12.09: MA IDC exhibition at Ars Electronica 8th-12th September
My students are exhibiting some of their work at Ars Electronica this year as part of the campus exhibition. They're going to be showing work they've been producing over the last few months under the broad title of 'Social Things.' If you're there, it would be great to hang out.
We're also working on a version in collaboration with Superflux for Somerset House during London Design Festival. 16.09 - 20.10: Uncertainty Playground for London Design Festival at LCC 16th September
I've been quietly working away on LCC's London Design Festival Exhibition. Titled Uncertainty Playground, the exhibition explores the work of staff and academics at LCC in relation to the uncertainty operating at a very local level as well as a global level. I've got an insane construction plan which started last Wednesday with the great folks at Commissioned By You being very understanding of my weird plans. I don't want to give it away but there's a great lineup of people. Come to the official opening on 20th September and hang out!
27.09: Netherlands Film Festival, Storyspace
As part of the Netherlands Film Festival interactive strand I'm taking part in a group discussion with curators of a recent media festivals in Europe all roundly addressing superstition and sensing. The folks from STRP and Fiber will be there, and I think a few others too. It's an interesting opportunity to reflect on a question I've been asking a lot recently - why the occult has come back into fashion and whether it's memetic or a genuine product of the times we're in.
11.10 - 13.10: 88.7 at Steirischer Herbst festival in Gratz
I'm reperforming 88.7 for an Austrian Crowd at Steirischer Herbst in Gratz. Should be a lot of fun, I really enjoyed doing it last time in Korea. Hopefully I won't have to do too much work to get it up to scratch. 20.10 - 29.10: Impakt
And then it's Impakt. You've heard enough about it. I don't have to go over it again and again. You can say that you're going on the Facebook event page here. Then you can actually defy the event page model by actually turning up. We've started announcing lineup already. (Actually a lot more than I thought, this genuinely looks like a really good festival huh? I would actually go even if I wasn't organising it.) I've been recording more scrycasts that are going to be released soon too as little previews.
2018: Doing my PhD
Seriously.
Ugh. Fuck. Here's the instagram picture I always put in. Happy?
