"The problem is that photography has always been a technical pursuit and the mediating technology required to make a photograph has always threatened to overwhelm it. To quote Donald Kuspit, 'Technology is the last valiant attempt to discredit and devalue the unconscious…. The unconscious is the bête noire in a scientifically and technologically managed world, which is why it must be killed or at least ostracized.' The endless upgrade cycle, the more and more laborious and tedious mastery of imaging software, the solid belief in technical improvement and control as a means to achieve success, all of this leads one further and further away from any possibility of making original or authentic work. This is the bind of the technology treadmill. What it gives, it also takes away. So in digital photography we have an inherent pitfall in the photographic process married to the culturally dominant fixation with technology and control which are themselves obstacles to the unconscious, the very source of creativity itself."

Fantastic quotation and comment from David Comdico over at TOP. I feel this applies hugely to electronic music, too.

Great writeup of the V&A games show from Robert Yang, making me all the more excited to see it, and all the prouder of peers and friends.

"This essay is a loose collection of principles for physical interaction." This is good, from Tom Igoe.

This is a lovely article about being an Autechre fan.

Nice interview with Taylor, who runs 12k and is a mastering engineer and musician in his own right.

No joke: this literally solved my problems with my old home monitor; everything is back to being acceptable over HDMI again.

Some sensible notes from patches on making sure your tools start out in configurations that are musically useful, rather than just 'there'.

"pid.codes is a registry of USB PID codes for open source hardware projects." Nice.

"Making entertainment media is a bit like telling a joke; you really can’t tell whether it’s going be funny until you’ve told it." A really good synthesis of many years of work and process from Jack and Timo. Reading this I remember how I'm somewhat shaped by this thinking.

"I mention Knuth because, of all the Old Masters of computer science, he is the one most interested in the relationship between computer programs and texts. Could we even suggest that a program is a text? It is, after all, a written expression of creativity. Certainly, when running, a computer game can be an artistic experience in the same way that a film, or a play can. But my concern here is not whether the program is art when it runs. I’m talking about whether its source code is a text. We could go down a bit of a rabbit-hole here about playful literary theories. Umberto Eco once reviewed a new Italian banknote as a work of art, describing it as a numbered, limited edition of engravings. But let’s concede that a functional document like a shopping list or a spreadsheet of student names is not a literary text. On the other hand, a recipe by a literary cook like Elizabeth David might be art, even though it also has function. Perhaps the relevant question is: can we experience a program as a text? Can we, in the fullest sense of the word, read it?

A cynical answer might be that if program source codes are texts, why can’t you buy them in a bookshop?" Graham Nelson on a potted history of Inform, and then its future. The second half may be less interesting to you, but the first half is a fantastic piece of writing on literate programming, source-code-as-art, and the nature of languages. I loved this.