1.4.20 13 Germinal 228; Moths add realism to anything.

Sorry, my French Republican calendar is in my office, where I obviously can't go so I'm having to use a crappy website to guestimate the date. I'm spending my days catching up with my reading and enjoying the peace. I guess it's the thing that's sort of still a bit socially unacceptable; I'm totally fine with social isolation and I'm getting so much done. I spent like a year once not talking to anyone and just playing World of Warcraft so a life behind screens is normal. I haven't been using Zoom (mostly because UAL favours Collaborate and Teams which both work perfectly well). It's sort of selfish of me I suppose to enjoy it. There's a lot of bombastic projects and happenings popping up all the time as folks out of their goodwill seize these times to try and make the best of it and us, especially as many are now in places where their futures look bleaker.

My day pretty much looks like; up at 7 for coffee and some morning exercise, sit in office all day reading, making notes, occasionally dropping in for meetings and bits of UAL work, hit the PlayStation around 5 or 6 (I'm playing Control which I suppose deserves more of a space to write up), cook dinner, eat it, watch YouTube, go to bed. It's great. Next week I'm going to start pulling together all the material for my PhD upgrade from the reading catching up I'm doing. This morning I want to re-do all the tags on my extensive Evernote library which has all the papers, articles and notes of the research in. Before I was going for really specific tags like 'Computation and imagination (future)' but then you get like one thing come up. I found Evernote has the ability to cross-reference so I can change that to three separate tags ('Computation', 'imagination' and 'future') and then just select all three for articles that feature all three. I've then got Mark Hansen's Fast Forward to take a crack at.

Channel Recommendation

Lazy Tutorials for lazy people by lazy people; Blender tutorials by Ian Hubert. There's twenty of them, they're each a minute long, they're pretty funny and they show you some neat technical and stylistic tricks in Blender. If you've got some experience in Blender you can probably use these, just pause them on screenshots to see what he's doing, I definitely got new stuff from them. Anyway, whole playlist is here and here's one about moths. 'Model a moth, moths are pure chaos so don't stress too much... But can we teach them to love?' Even if you're not into Blender they're nice ways of showing you what's possible with objectively quite simple techniques.



Love you, bye.

25.3.20 5th Germinal, 228

I'm away from the calendar in the office. I can only say it's the 5th day of Germinal. There's not much to add really. You know what's going on. As you might imagine, we're in a scramble at the moment to make everything work and keep everyone healthy. The Office for Students wants one thing Public Health England another. The left shift key on my keyboard broke and I can't reset the SMC without it, I need to get a proper Mac screwdriver and open it up to manually pull the battery. I caught up on my reading yesterday and I'm spending this morning organising my old essays and texts, including the ones I need to read. I've saved so much money (I used to eat out all the time) that I treated myself to a new Garmin GPS computer but now I feel bad about going out riding. I'm going to go tomorrow. I like social isolation so I'm not doing so bad but I know lots of people are and it sucks. The Disco Elysium soundtrack is on repeat. Be amazing.

4.3.20 Vélar, Ventôse, 228; Reading GANs

Oh I had lots to talk about but to be honest I'm tired an a bit sad so I'll just dump some quick thoughts on a thing and leave you to your week.

Wes sent me this to read which he's featured in of course. It's all good but I was particularly there to read How Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) Changed the Way we Look at the World by Lenka Hámošová. I appreciate a straightforward title and it's also a useful breakdown contextualising machine learning in the story of photographic forgery and propaganda-driven editing. Interestingly, the author also pushes at the idea of over-scepticism, that as well as the possibility for social manipulation through forgery, we may become overly suspicious of images that are in fact, unaltered. In my work on this subject I've drawn many of the same parallels; Stalin, photoshop etc etc but hadn't considered the idea that publics might wholesale distrust visual media as a result of its very production. For some reason I'm minded here of the sharpie issue when Trump altered a map of Hurricane Dorian's path with a Sharpie. Despite the obvious fraud (and Trump's ongoing fractious relationship with Sharpies) there appears to be an implicit notion that a direct connection between the author (Trump) and the artefact (the adapted map) implies truth while a digitally produced image without the hand of an author visibly present could be mistaken.

To be honest, there's not much more to the text than a description of the current state of play in the technology and a call for tools to interpret images produced by GANs. It's easy to speculate on dystopian visions of total distrust and then demand better tools for verification. I'm more interested in the wider social and human effects on visual culture.

26.2.20 Violette, Ventôse, 228; Falling through Earth

Hi. This is a short missive. I know I didn't do one last week but time just ran away with me. My sleep pattern has become incredibly erratic. Some nights I get three or four hours sleep, some times I crash out at like 7pm and just sleep straight through 12 hours. A couple of years ago I tried to train myself to need less sleep and just couldn't; I am an 8 hour sleep person and know that the key to good sleep is regularity. This also means I'm trying to drink less, normally I'm out three or four nights a week and I need to cut that down to a maximum of two or at least not drink every night.

I'm just going to post some links up and ahve done with it this week. I haven't read anything (because of the sleep thing) and you already know about the thing on Friday with natalie at the V&A? I learned about the Royal Game of Ur the other day which I guess is the world's oldest and longest-played game. There's a video from Tom Scott here on how the rules were kind of reverse engineered from correspondence hundreds of years after its first engineering.

Channel Recommendation

I already recommended this so it's not necessarily new but here's Standup Maths showing you how it wold take exactly 42 minutes and 10 seconds to fall through any object with the density of Earth, no matter how far you fell through. So weird.


There are so many good science communication channels out there I wonder what design and art have been doing wrong. I suppose 99% Invisible is about as close as you can get to a genuinely accessible and popular thing but it's still an audio podcast about design and there's something about the production values that I sometimes don't like; it's too shiny. I like Standup Maths and others because it's just someone who's really excited about something talking to other people about ideas. Should I do a design vlog?

I've been assembling a list of axioms I go by. I find I have quite a well self-articulated ruleset on how and why I do things which makes my life quicker because I hate prevaricating and waiting.

13.2.20 Lièvre, Pluviôse, 228; Speculative design is still a thing and Warhammer is great.

What if Our World is Their Heaven?

I got around to pulling together the video from 'What if Our World is Their Heaven?' and uploaded it to Vimeo. I also stuck up some images and the text we used in the brief up on the Haunted Machines site. The whole workshop was based around the 'automated production and dissemination of images'; a phrase which, if you've spoken to me in the last month, you would have heard me use a lot. The talk here introduces some of the key ideas of the area and identifies some existing weak signals and indicators that could be used by the students to kick off their thinking.

Coming up

There's a quite a lot going on this month. Not least of which I'm doing a lot of actual teaching which is why this is a day late. I spent a while trying to pull together a Blender workshop for Eevee on Saturday but really couldn't find a way to make it do what I wanted it to do and do it in a way which was easily teachable. It's definitely really promising but at the moment there's just too many hoops to go through for an 'intro to Blender' class. 

Other than that is a bunch of speculative design stuff. I'm teaching MA Service Design students tomorrow with the old Critical Exploits and thanks to my old friend and colleague Radha Mistry have found myself on the jury for the Core 77 design awards for speculative design. The submission are open now until the end of March I think. It'll be interesting to see what people are playing with in the field. I suppose it's a field now.

On 28th February Natalie and I are presenting at Pre-histories and Futures of Machine Vision, an event put together by Joel McKim. Honestly I'm not 100% on what we're talking about yet but we've titled it 'What if Our World was Their Heaven?' again.

Channel recommendation – Warhammer and climate change

So I suppose the commonality about my viewing habits is I like watching people build things. Not in a Grand Designs way but in a really grounded craft-based way. The algorithm has pushed me recently into miniature painting which is very enjoyable to watch mostly for the remarkable amount of skill involved. Anyway, I came across Goobertown Hobbies and really like it. The guy has a good pace and voice in talking about what he's doing. However, about half way through he completely switches, turns out he's a biochemist and he wants to use his platform to engage people in talking about climate change. He talks in this one about becoming confident in who you are and what you believe – in his case that he likes Warhammer (which he was 'closeted' about for a long time) and is really concerned about the lack of public engagement with climate change. It's just a really lovely, non-aggressive, non-ranty way of calling for openness, honesty and meaningful conversation. Loved it. 

Ok. In the words of Mr Buckles: I love you. BYYYYEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!