LDF Digital Design Weekend

A couple of friends have been exhibiting a project, Deep Media Research, at the Unleashed Devices exhibition all the way over in Kew, West London and have also had the opportunity to be part of the London Design Festival’s Digital Design Weekend at the Victoria and Albert. The artists, Vincent and Olga, are using the bodies natural conductivity and varying resistance to electric current to explore infra-verbal communication. Using a toolkit of simple electronic circuits and well constructed interfaces to the skin/fingers Deep Media Research reads the irrepressible, and usually unobservable, non-visual communication between people, such as electromagnetic fields and chemicals secreted from the body. Perhaps a more empirical, less paranormal exploration of our Aura.

It was clear from speaking to Vincent that the two spaces for presenting their work where starkly different. The Waterman’s gallery in Kew being a more traditional setting for an art installation opposed to the V&A’s Sackler Centre which was more of an active, processual workshop space. The latter was perhaps more suited to their work, which by its nature requires participation rather than observation. Much like a lot of the other work there, which enabled a great deal of audience engagement.

Out of the other work that was there today here is a small selection that may be worth looking up:

Dead Insects consists of four former mobile phones which have been hacked to resemble, behave and sing/ring like birds. You can call each of them on their own number and that bird may then attempt to call one of its friends sitting on the branches with it. That bird will then in turn possibly make another call to another of its non-feathered friends.

An interesting side note was that the four birds were on different phones networks and the one which was on Virgin was the least communicative with the other birds.

sketchPatch is a platform for browsing, sharing and creating your own patches in the Processing programming environment. Once you create your own patch you can then publish this to sketchPatch through the browser to enable further creative appropriation!

Finally I chatted to Tom Schofield who was presenting a piece that involved visualising occurences or mentions of set of key themes or areas of human rights (defined the Office For the High Commission of Human Rights at the United Nations) amongst over 200 historical and contemporary constitutional documents, revolutionary manifestos, bills of rights, peace treaties, etc. He was interested in exploring the sticky philosophical subject of a possible universal, fundamental set of human rights.

All in all an interesting and inspiring afternoon at the V&A. Topped off with some out and out fun involving coloured LED’s, in a dark room with a camera set to a very long exposure ->[1] [2] [3]

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Published:
September 26, 2010 – 5:09 pm
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By gareth
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One Button Workshop

funny animated gif

I’m currently taking part in a workshop being put on by the Openlab Workshops group. Openlab specialise in workshops in art and technology using free software such as Processing and Arduino.

This particular workshop appealed to me because unlike most others there is the motivation to achieve a particular output at its completion rather than a particular level of knowledge which is harder to work towards and gauge.

The output of this workshop is to make a device which is powered by one button only. This sole precondition initially seems to restrict the creative possibilities because designing a digital artifact today more often involves a complex array of buttons or other more ‘sophisticated’ interfaces (touch, movement, sound). However the opposite is actually true as you are not bound by a history of electronic and digital product design that produces atifacts which are predominantly functional or technical opposed to other possible affordances such as the aesthetic or cultural.

Brief:
In a world where our interaction with technology is dominated by qwerty keyboards, multi-functional hand-held devices, motion-detection controllers and touch screens what becomes of the lowly, single button? Is it still possible to find inventiveness in simplicity?

The one button device workshop was inspired by an event earlier this year put on by the Kokoromi collective. The event is documented in this photo set. Unfortunately there is little in the way of written documentation to detail the individual buttons at this workshop but they seem to have some very interesting pieces. They larger majority of them seem to be focussed on the playful and entertaining. Our workshop so far seems to be taking slightly darker route as our buttons seem to be more geared toward the evocative and affective. See our wiki so far for progress – we are up to week 3.

Lately I have been increasingly interested in making projects that are technological introspective. Software that is self-reflexive and critical and the conception for a one button device is taking a similar direction.

I have two concepts so far both looking critically at the abundant use of buttons:

1) Difficult button – A personified, ‘difficult’ button; like a difficult child or person. Antagonistic, belligerent and embarrassing to be seen near or with. Buttons are so easy to press today (to easy?) and the consequences or effects are abstracted from any direct relationship to the action itself. Turning on a light, starting a car, dropping a bomb or crashing a stock market. All simple button pushes with outcomes far greater then the power of one persons index finger!

Design
- The button senses presences and proximity.
- Responds in an increasingly belligerent manner as people come closer to pressing it.
- EITHER shouts varying coherent/ranting phrases OR just shouts/screams incoherently OR creates some noise which causes physical discomfort
- Pushing the button simply increases the volume or intensity of the experience.

2) No title – Again indicating the lack of direct relationship between physical action of button pushing and the effects that this can cause. Using a pressure sensitive button to make a more tangible relationship between human physicality and the incorporeal digital effects of button pushing.

Design
- The button is aware of how hard it has been pushed.
- The harder it is pushed the further a signal – a bluetooth/AM/FM singal – is broadcast throughout the area.

This is the progress so far. Need to start making things today as we only have two weeks remaining! Eeek.

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Published:
September 22, 2010 – 8:18 am
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By gareth
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Quiet: We Live in Public

We Live in Public

We Live in Public is a documentary, which profiles an Internet pioneer that you will have never heard of: Josh Harris. He was one of the dot.com kids who gained unimaginable wealth in the 90s through Internet related businesses.

With hindsight it is easy to assume that all of these ‘pioneers’ had as much to offer culture and society as the majority of investment bankers and hedge fund managers who have lately become an unpopular breed. However watching this documentary unveils the uncanny foresight which this particular dot.com kid had when it came to foreseeing the way that technology would come to mediate and govern our existence.

From a purely entertainment point of view the documentary benefits from having as its protagonist a man who seems to be teetering between prophetic oracle, marginally narcissistic and slightly unbalanced. Either way he was willing to spend his vast fortune “like sand through the fingers of time” on an art project, Quiet: We Live in Public.

This is the most interesting part of the film by far. The art project struck me as part Big Brother (George Orwell novel and Channel 4 show) and part dystopian Cyberpunk fiction. Harris kitted out a disused warehouse in New York with small capsules for people to sleep/live in and any other necessities which would mean that an inhabitant would not need (or be able) to leave. Each capsule, the kitchen, the bathroom and all other living areas were covered by cameras and in each capsule was the ability to see every other camera feed in the warehouse. A voyeuristic heaven. Harris himself states that by committing to be a participant of this project that people will have access to everything they need or desire – food, drink, drugs, women, men – but the images that are captured “belong to us”. Initially what resulted for most inhabitants was a sene of freedom from the social constraints and banality of normal existence manifesting in non-stop, Ziggy Stardust themed hedonism. It was at this point which I cursed my own banal existence and considered breaking into the Big Brother house. Thankfully these thoughts were short lived. Of course the party cannot last forever. The inhabitants, some who already had fragile mental states were subjected to intensive psychological interrogations (in a room next to the gun range which was also installed for the occupants pleasure!) in order to heighten the intensification of the experience. A few days before the police stopped the show and removed the inhabitants people were beginning to turn. A combination of the free (gratis) and the consistent lack of privacy seemed to turn people, as described by one occupant, into beasts.

Although these were artificial circumstances Harris did succeed in showing the extremes that people are willing to go to in order for connection and recognition. It does not take a genius to overlay this art project with the tendencies and habits of online existence today. The intoxicating sense of exposure is now an almost ritualistic part of our existence and is a macrocosm of the early hedonistic stages of the Quiet: We Live in Public art project. Without the psychological interrogation, gun ranges and free alcohol/drugs it is hard to predict how the consistent lack of privacy will affect (or has already affected us) in the long run. Can’t wait to see.

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Published:
July 27, 2010 – 9:31 pm
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By gareth
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Wabbitware released

As I’ve mentioned previously my Major Project for a Masters in Interactive Media is a critical software piece called Wabbitware. Today I reached the point where I am ready to release it to the wild. There is now a website dedicated to the project distribution and also aggregation of modified versions of the software. Below is more detail on the project itself:

Link to the new website:
http://wabbitware.garethfoote.co.uk

There are three aspects to the project as a whole: the software itself, a website for distribution and collation of versions and most importantly the contributors.

Software:
EXECUTE / MODIFY / PRECOMPILE / COMPILE – visualised here
In slightly more detail:
When the software executable (binary) is executed it will distribute a copy of the source code onto the host machine. You are then free to make any modifications to the source code. After this the original binary can be used to precompile those modifications ensuring that they are carried forward to the next generation of Wabbitware. The final stage is to compile the software, creating the next instantiation/generation/version of Wabbitware.

The process is then looped ad infinitum. The software is therefore never complete or whole but always in process.

Website:
The website whilst acting as a code repository for the first version of the code also aggregates any newly submitted versions of Wabbitware. There are instructions in the Versions section of the Wabbitware site, which state that once a new instance of software has been created there is an option to attach and email your binary to the email address: wabbitware@garethfoote.co.uk. This aggregation process is a simplified concurrent version system which enables the rhizomatic growth of Wabbitware.

Contributions (/*Comments*/):
It may seem that, despite the forceful access to the software source code, there is a knowledge barrier for open contributions. In normal circumstances you do need to understand some of the grammar and syntax involved in programming to able to make functional code. However on the website there are step by step instructions for creating your own instance of Wabbitware. There is not however a guide on how to program software in general. For anyone who would like to contribute but doesn’t have the programming experience you can simple add comments to the source code. A comment is a section of the source code which is ignored by the compiler in the process of making software. They are there to enable programmers to write notes to themselves and to other programmers who they may be collaborating with.

In many cases these are purely functional:

/* count the occurances of each $keyword (supplied with categories) in the given $cmt */

/* assuming you're in /usr/src/linux/ (and linux .c and .h are present) */

in other cases create a collaborative narrative or psychological snapshot of a programmers state of mind:

/* It looks like I can't do a simple tweak with this structure because the IRIX
* version is just *too* stupid. Ok, here's a new version of it..
*/

/* This is fucking braindead. There is NO WAY of doing this without
the CONFIG_SYSCTL unless you don't want to detect errors.
Grrr... --RR */

As you can see form these examples – which are all taken from the Linux kernel – a comment is started with a /* and closed with a */. Feel free to use this practice in Wabbitware.

One affordance of the Wabbitware project is that it has NO functional goals and NO beta release schedules. This is mainly due to its principle characteristic of being permanently incomplete or in a state of flux. The definition of the software does not end at its code, it continues into the social dynamics that are made up by the collaborative practice. The project is about the process as much as the code itself so any contributions are welcome and they do not need to be grand or well thought out.

Suggestions:
//a favourite piece of code
//a malicious piece of code – see http://runme.org/project/+forkbomb/ – (Feel free to right code that will break the software )
//pointless code – see http://runme.org/project/+highestnumber/

If you don’t have a preferred piece of code then comments are just as welcome. You could add:
//prose, poetry, song lyrics, a quote, an insult, a link, a statement, a political message, a joke, etc, etc,etc

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Published:
July 10, 2010 – 4:39 pm
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By gareth
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Wabbitware

Below is the introductory text for my major project. It is a critical software project called Wabbitware and will be part of the We are All Transistors graduate Exposition at Goldsmiths.

Wabbitware is derived from the term ‘wabbit’ which is used in hacker jargon to describe a certain class of software which self-replicates or which induces infinite self-replication but is not a worm or virus.

The manifestation of this first Wabbitware project will be a precompiled, closed-source software piece which, when executed will spawn a copy of its own source code onto the host machine. Rather than using a copyleft legal framework to allow or enable the modification and redistribution of software, Wabbitware forces its source code onto the host machine. It will also preform the secondary function of (pre)compiling any modifications or additions to the source code into a format which ensures that these mutations will be transferred to the next version (generation) of Wabbitware.

Once the first version of Wabbitware is released it will be programmed to always ensure its own propagation and genealogy. It contradicts the proprietary model of software production which produces the feature saturated, version frenzied and bounded software, in exchange for open collaborative practices and limitless potential for creativity and individuation.

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Published:
June 27, 2010 – 9:41 pm
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By gareth
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