i P a d (Michael Murtaugh’s melted version for Prototyping Futures) I am enjoying Household Words, an associative analysis of ‘common-sensical’ words such as Sucker, Bloomers, and Bombshell. In her last chapter, Cyber, Stephanie A. Smith refers to On the road to intimacy, a 1992 whitepaper calling for the development of ‘personal digital assistants’. The [...]
It is barely visible through the glare of its plexiglass container but I am struck by a paint-splattered box-camera included in the exhibition George Hendrik Breitner: Pioneer of Street Photography at De Kunsthal, Rotterdam. As a reminder of this crude object tainted by extensive use, I take a picture. At home, I realise that I [...]
This year I could only make it for a few days to LGM, but I am glad I came. First of all to meet friends and colleagues, to find out how they and their projects have been. I enjoyed getting hold of a fresh issue of Libre Graphics Magazine for example; The Physical, the Digital [...]
Q: I found these scissors here. Did you make them? A: No, I did not make them. Q: But who did? A: I do not know. Q: I found these scissors. Did you do this? A: No, they are not mine. Q: They are not yours? I was told that you did make them. A: [...]
A group from Chicago visited Constant Variable last week. One student explains his mother is a publisher and that she compiled an on-line glossary of terms used in her mixed practice of printing, publishing and writing. It is stunning. For example, under W: word spacing: The amount of space between each word in typeset text. [...]
In an intense discussion about ‘the interface of the future’, John Lilly (then CEO Mozilla Corporation, now working for another company); Aza Raskin (then Head of User Experience at Mozilla Labs, now running his own company) and Dan Mills (then Lead Developer of Weave, now leading the Account Manager project at Mozilla Labs) debate what [...]
‘Dilettante expertise’ as a way to make practice meet theory: Expertise is the classical foundation of all geekdom, whether it is encyclopedic knowledge of Shakespeare, of the Star Trek universe or the registers of an 8-bit controller. Dilettantism is the unavoidable condition of drawing the bigger picture. It can end up badly like with the [...]
In the summer of 2010, Constant commissioned artist and researcher Evan Roth to develop a work of his choice, and to make the development process available in some way. He decided to use a part of his fee as prize-money for The GML-Recorder Challenge, inviting makers to propose an open source device ‘that can unobtrusively [...]
WVW is making beautiful bristlebots from paper cups, felt-pens and the kind of vibrating motors you find in mobile phones. The drawings it makes are interesting too: video | more images
Designer Dick Elffers made many Versneden affiches by cutting and binding posters into small booklets: He enjoyed the surprising compositions that resulted from arbitrarily combining pieces of his work, ‘Le meilleur des mondes possibles’. But when I bring them up during the Co-positioning worksession (we are discussing ‘designing with imposition’, more about that later), GDH [...]
“Go into the kitchen and open the first drawer you come to and the odds are you’ll find the wooden spoon that is used to stir soups and sauces. If this spoon is of a certain age you will see it no longer has its original shape. It has changed, as if a piece had [...]
A late report from I Don’t Know! — an artistic conference on knowledge production [18/09/2011] Arriving for the second day of the conference, I am welcomed by EVC with a cheerful: “We are very curious what you’ll do. When we received your proposal we really did not know what to expect!”. At that point I [...]
“A story, doubtless true in the life of such a man, tells us how Hokusai tried to paint without the use of his hands. It is said that one day, having unrolled his scroll of paper on the floor before the Shogu, he poured over it a pot of blue paint; then, dipping the claws [...]
This morning: Review of lists, dictionaries, arrays, functions, loops.
Afternoon: Remembering how to speak to the Scribus-API (results possibly less abstract tomorrow). For now:
instructions = ['Don't read', {'Take': ['paper', 'rods', 'blocks']}, [‘se…
Proposal for a ‘table practice’ at the conference Don’t Know!, this Saturday 17 September: The Graffiti Markup Language1 is a standard for describing graffiti practice. By making graffiti motion data freely available, GML allows anyone to transfer, compare and interrogate the work of individual writers. The standard is developed by artist Evan Roth2 with the [...]
“In 1970 Pierre Gaudibert, director of Animation-Recherche-Confrontation (ARC) at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, visited the computer center of the Meteorology Institute in Paris, Avenue Rapp, where Manfred Mohr conducted his research i…