All good for Saturday, 11am would be great, but Friday night could work but you have to share a twin room with Ben Dalton.
Entanglement. My former boss Norman met Ben at MIT Media Lab. I looked him up when he moved to Leeds. We had coffee. Ben introduced me to Linda. Linda and I started a cowork together. Our first resident was Richard. Richard invented electric spraypaint with Dave. I developed a mancrush on Dave’s brain. I’m headed to Barrow where Linda grew up and there are 30 Days Of Night. Dave has asked me to come write about his Digital Media Labs.
Ah looks like you can have a room to yourself now if your interested?
I’ll drive. The A65 wormhole will get me there faster than slingshotting around Manchester’s mountains and motorways.
Great, really cool! Thankyou ☺ Finishes at 3, presentations 12–2, networking after etc.
As pretty as this route is, I’m caught in the event horizon of a slow-crawling tractor on single country lane.
Yep, have you an ETA?
I think I‘ve annoyed Dave. I will be late. Entropy.
Why Barrow? The English Chicago is at the end-of-the-world. Once an island, now a peninsula– that rhymes with “furnace”. Only one road in; no wonder the vampires come here.
Would you be up for/ have the capacity for/ writing about the lab model from your perspective which would end up in a publication later in the year.
There’s a confluence of people, place and project here that’s suggesting reflection, not journalism. It’s deeply human infrastructure. I’m unsure how to write this…
The Octopus Collective has divided a cohort of ten artists, technologists and makers into pairs. There is a resident artist chef. For the last week, they’ve been playing, inventing and creating together in a house in the middle of Barrow Park. Big Brother with geeks.
At the start of the labs, cofounder Benedict Phillips challenges everyone to deduce his matchmaking algorithm. Today we discover it’s devilishly serendipitous — who was looking at whom. Fluctuation of the pupil? Involuntary dilation of the iris? Benedict runs a mutated Voight-Kampff test…
I’m late, but haven’t annoyed Dave. The text message was ghost written by Jenny as he drove. His Reggie Watts supernova hair is shorter than a few weeks ago. I speculate if this has diminished his powers; Jenny tells me Dave has developed new powers…
I ran a similar labs programme with academics and technologists in the Summer. There’s something deeply satisfying about curating this kind of human alchemy. What will I find amongst this entanglement of people and ideas in the park at the end-of-the-world…
Code As Poetry
Dr. Alex McClean isn’t here. I’m not sure what Live Coding is. I’m thinking it’s like Homer Simpson’s notion of live animators… “No, Homer, very few cartoons go to air live. It’s a tremendous strain on the animator’s wrist”.
It’s revelatory — the code is music, written live into a compiler that drives speakers in each corner of the room, assembling and crafting a performance procedurally and algorithmically. I’m annoyed I didn’t already know this, or that Alex is an academic at the university where I run my own creative lab programme! I’m reminded of Ge Wang’s Code as an Expressive Musical Instrument and his work at Smule, but this isn’t that, it’s code as an expressive musical instrument.
Though code is language, its invariably considered as prose, not poetry. I have to know more — what other kinds of art can be expressed live by code?
Sardonic Apps
I know Aaron — my third favourite Canadian after William Shatner and an ex-girlfriend. Yorkshire seems to attract a lot of Canadian technologists. One and a half of whom are here today. There are teams, players, a laser-cut Rube Goldberg aesthetic, and a web UI, but I didn’t quite follow the rules of Aaron’s Fancy Yoyo Experience.
Yes, it’s a web-operated yoyo but I think it’s best described as a sardonic app — it doesn’t understand when you’re winning or what causes you to win… “it’s virtue is its uselessness?” Aaron tells us. But it is useful, as a commentary on app culture in the same vein as Sam Lavigne’s satirical works such as LazyCoin — a currency that quantifies lack of activity. The more you do nothing, the more value you create!
Yarn from Pixels
I haven’t seen a knitting machine since the 80s. Like a 2D being trying to comprehend a third dimension, my brain’s never been able to comprehend how a sweater is made from a line. But then I look at screens all day… worlds, words and webs woven from flickering, strobing lines.
Lalya Gaye’s knitting pixels from yarn. A two-tone knitting machine, printing scarves with designs specific to politics and social changes. Afropean she says, a cold-weather garment for the diaspora of warm weather origins.
Patterns are encoded into punchcards, twenty-four pixel tiles where stitches are pixels and yarnbombing goes all New Aesthetic with the digital erupting into and orchestrating the physical. Elsewhere, Sam Meech rigged a camera to watch the machine (also programmable with an Isadora UI), using its action to drive a light installation. A knitted disco, coded in Purl?
Park/Life
Placeware, Nearables, Smart Cities, it’s all of that and none of that. I knew Barrow Park was the backdrop for this cohort, but it hadn’t occurred to me that it was also a design material.
Emily Briselden-Waters frames the park as a public space where personal things occur, surfacing the stories of those who used it, including residents of an adjacent care home.
“We used to drop things in water and see how fast it’s come out the other wise of the bridge — daft things like that.”
“Ian had walked his first steps in Barrow Park.”
Their memories become part of the fabric of the park, through typography, projection and curated night trails triggered by movement. Nesta’s Rethinking Parks programme explores models of sustainability and service. Emily knows what the rest of us do, that parks are really our collectively concentrated and situated stories.
Silicon Botanist
Our digital metaphors are all streams, ecospheres, walled gardens — any surprise that an unfurling Internet Of Plants is a thing? Laura Pullig’s work reminds me of Kati London’s Botanicalls, Disney’s Botanicus Interacticus and my own growing obsession with silicon botany.
Laura is hacking and instrumenting plants, as sensors and performers — a plant that senses the wind velocity could alters the speed of a projected visualization. The premise is to enable plants to become performers and enable part of a chain of events and messages between themselves and I suppose ourselves and machines. Old networks mediated by the new; the Anthropocene installs the Nature app.
A Data Staff
Ben Dalton is the half in the one-and-a-half Canadians at the lab. A technologist savant, with his MIT Media Lab education. Ben is thinking about how live events might be digitally archived and the process of capturing a live performance.
Good. For much of the previous year, I’ve been part of a long R&D project on institutional and personal archives, the Pararchive project. Archives are my thing right now.
Ben talks us through the inception of his Wild Man character, a personality that makes the capture of a performance explicit through performance itself. The Wild Man’s staff is an object of narrative and archiving, capturing rich data wherever it is present, a little like a theatrical mutation of Sascha Pohflepp’s Blind Camera.
I like this, humanizing a very abstract act with haptics, tactility and humour. Wait, didn’t Moses have a staff too? I’m thinking about a Data Bat, with which I could literally beat sense into people…
Invisibility Cloaks
Lo-res anxieties about surveillance culture permeate modern life and there’s a disappointing post-Assange resignation that a democratizing medium has become an infrastructure of tyranny.
So can we be connected and offline? Victoria Bradbury and Neil Winterburn are talking about playful offline communication — grounded in anonymity, misdirection and avoiding the gaze of big data.
Their design fiction, centers on an ACME-like invisibility cloak used by Victoria and Neil to shield themselves from others and allowing them to steal digital messages left in public places.
More interesting than the invisibility cloak, is the notion of short-range messages triggered by proximity and shielded from surveillance. This notion of almost physically passing messages to one and other affords a slower, more reflective mode of communicating… perhaps something that could actually be prototyped?
Observations
There’s alchemy here, I’ve struggled to separate one person’s work from another, the projects from the park, the code from the weaving and the poetry from the prose. It doesn’t matter.
What the labs engineer is a vibe and a tone and an attitude. The outcomes are secondary, the relationships and human connectedness that’s formed is the real product.
In a park at the end of the world, I found the blended artefacts of ancient and new cultures — data staffs, knitted pixels, invisibility cloaks, messages suspended in the ether, sardonic software and code as poetry.
An energetic entanglement of ideas and intellect that burned brightly for a week must now give way to entropy.
