Posts tagged as randomstring

  • Week 73

    10 March 2014

    A busy week – not in the sense of absolute volume, but certainly in terms of the number of different things I was working on.

    On Friday I was in Coventry for the Random String symposium. I think the talk went down alright, and I had a lot of interesting conversations with artists and practitioners. I’ll try to get it online soon: it’s a talk called Technology as an Artist’s Material, and it takes a slightly different slant on some of the ‘materials’ based talks I’ve done in a while.

    Quite a bit of the week was spent working on that. However, I also fitted in a day of meetings for Haddington/Contributoria, about how we were going to get to 1.0, planning the next few months work, and seeing what else was on the horizon. Good to have the whole team in the same place, it always leads to strong conversations.

    I also spent a day on Seager, making the website for the connected-object degrade gracefully from Websockets to AJAX-based long polling when Websockets weren’t available. It’s easy to do this when you’re testing if the browser supports Websockets. The more important use case, though, is when a browser supports websockets but (for whatever reason) they’re not being transmitted correctly – for instance, if an HTTP proxy is blocking them. It was a reasonably day of fine-grained code and testing, but the end result was not just the correct, seamless functionality; it was also better-abstracted code that more clearly expressed all of the site’s functionality. Very worthwhile.

    A busy week. Week 74 is more focused, and less dependent on the muse sticking around long enough to write 30 minutes of flowing lecture. Onwards!

  • Quickly, because I’m between talks – I thought it’d be worth collating a list of projects mentioned in my talk at Random String, just in case you were in the audience and missed them (credited when not mine):

    Full talk perhaps online soon – when I get a minute!

  • I’m going to be speaking at the Random String Symposium on March 7th, in Coventry. There, I’ll be talking about Technology as an Artist’s Material:

    Here’s an idea: technology – technologies – are not only tools. They are also materials. To make art with a material, we need to be conversant in it, aware of its capabilities. And these new materials are not all tactile, physical; the materials of the digital world are as much immaterials.

    How do we develop that familiarity? How do we understand the grain of a material that we may not be able to feel? How can we sketch in technology?

    Let’s explore, briefly, what technology can be when considered as an artist’s material.

    It’s familiar territory if you’ve seen me speaking about materials or sketching, but it’s a new talk aimed at a slightly different audience – it’ll be nice to talk about practice in the artistic space, and perhaps use some different points of reference to normal. Regardless: looking forward to it. The full schedule is on Lanyrd.