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 [...]
The Piksels and Lines Orchestra (PLO) If we turned our tools into instruments, could we experience Libre Graphics as an ensemble? What would be the performative potential of lay-out and drawing, and how to listen to the sound of a pixel, or to the tune of a line? In response to these curious questions, The [...]
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 [...]
Her colleagues often repeated that ‘there is no perfect solution to a design problem’. Rebecca was pretty sure she had read it somewhere within the context of computer science or learning technology but after looking all over, she still had not found a solid source for the idea. After posting her question to the mailinglist, [...]
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 first harvest of future tools that were brought to the surface at the Co-position Research Meeting: Colorfont The days of monochrome digital typography are over. Inspired by art-deco hand-drawn lettering experiments, Manufactura Independente came up with colorfont.js. This javascript library makes it easier to create multi-colored typography for the web. It was further developed [...]
PH works on a teaser for the next LGRU Research Meeting. Launch at FOSDEM next weekend.
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. [...]
Bravo was the first WYSIWYG editor (…) Previous editors rarely made any attempt to match the display to the printed page; this meant that users could not check whether they had formatted the document correctly, except by printing it out.1 Newman, W. (2012). Design case study: The Bravo text editor. Interactions, 19(1), 75-80
A conversation with Tom Lechner We discovered the work of Tom Lechner at the Libre Graphics Meeting 2010 in Brussels. Tom traveled from Portland, US to present Laidout, an amazing tool that he made to produce his own comic books and also to work on three dimensional mathematical objects. His software interests us for several [...]
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 [...]
The first ever Research Meeting in the context of the Libre Graphics Research Unit took place now more than a week ago. Organised by Worm and themed Networked Graphics, 30 participants from across Europe gathered in Rotterdam for five days. We traversed “The extremes of Networked Graphics” as WL puts it: From demo-scene classics to [...]
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
Last Friday, WORM opened it’s new location in the center of Rotterdam. It was nice to see lots of people show up to celebrate this event, to see their new book- and recordshop back in such good shape and to discover forms of architectural re-use we only dreamt of, until now. The first LGRU-research meeting [...]
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 [...]
A work visit to AC and RL (Manufactura Independente) in Porto.
AM: Pre-designed software, be it commercial or open source, pre-supposes how users intend to interact with it, what they want to do, and how they ought to do it, what the pipeline and the process ought to be. M: Whenever I need a new functionality, I immediately try to design a simple re-usable API for [...]
For the 5th edition of the Libre Graphics Meeting, OSP proposed to replace the paint splash by an abstract drawing of three squares forming a flag and also the letter M.1 The splash had been in use since 2006 and some community members felt alienated by the proposal. On 10/10/2009 AL explained on the CREATE-mailinglist: “The [...]
“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 [...]
After an inspiring first Co-position session at Baltan Laboratories we are impatient to see what we can do next. In the trunk a To-Do-list, a wishlist and lots of notes:
http://lgru.pad.constantvzw.org:8000/21
http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/lab/wiki…
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…
Exercise for next week: “From the phrase Don’t read, a line extends horizontally and then angles diagonally downward to the word Take, from which extend three short lines that connect the words paper, rods, blocks to the rest of the phrase. To the right of this cluster is the phrase, set them out, color, build” [...]
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 [...]
On 5 October the Co-position team will travel from Amsterdam, Brussels and Porto to meet in Eindhoven (NL) at Baltan Laboratories. Co-position is the title of the thread at the Libre Graphics Research Unit focusing on digital tools for lay-out. This particular compartment of the (Libre) graphics toolbox is very much defined through historical practices [...]
With SARMA (‘an artistic and discursive laboratory for criticism, dramaturgy, research and creation in the field of dance and beyond’) AL + SV are developing an on-line archive for oral histories, a branch of the Active Archives platform. How to imagine a software together? KVDB responded with this astute sketch.
Wanting to go see the fourth edition of Graphology in Antwerp (the show opens only next weekend), I end up at Explosition instead. The exhibition in the Museum of Ixelles is only half interesting but the catalog is nice. I also like the video registration of Human Brush, a performance by the Brussels street-drawing phenomenon [...]
A conversation with Asheesh Laroia Our conversation took place at the last day of the Libre Graphics Meeting 2011 in Montreal, a day after the panel ‘How to keep and make productive libre graphics projects?’. Asheesh had responded rather sharply to someone in the audience who remarked that only a very small number of women [...]
With only two out of three days of presentations and missing out on the BOF-sessions altogether I am still happy to have made it to the second Desktop Summit in Berlin. The event operates on a scale that filters out the kind of experimental work you might come across at LGM or even at FOSDEM; [...]
“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…
MM reads the introduction to Mark Pilgrims’ Dive into HTML5: “HTML has always been a conversation between browser makers, authors, standards wonks, and other people who just showed up and liked to talk about angle brackets. Most of the successful versi…
Donald Knuth performs his own future tool. Thanks IML!
Karl Marx shines his light on the Desktop Summit (at the Humboldt University Berlin): “Die Philosophen haben nur die Welt verschieden interpretiert. Es kommt aber dar auf an die Welt zu verändern” (Philosophers have only interpreted the world in vario…
I have found an empty seat with a working AC-power outlet; they are scarce in the ICE that takes me from Cologne to Berlin. Someone obviously looking for the same thing sits down across and I signal that I am OK to share. He produces a four-socket exte…
Question: “But what would be the real advantage of developing free software tools, if soon proprietary ones will offer you the same ‘hackability’ (through APIs for example), or what if they would even be more flexible?” Answer: “More interesting fricti…
Tools shape orient practice Practice shapes orients tools We are imagining the future of Constant this afternoon. At some point, we discuss Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, a book by Sara Ahmed we like. She uses queer both in the sen…