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Land Art x Robots Happily Sorting Things. Brilliant.
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"I view ValhallaPlate as being closely related to an SM57. Or a hammer. No need to be delicate with the tool. No need to think about things too much. It just works." I liked this line on toolmaking, especially when it comes to music technology.
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Much more Illustrator-like than Sketch is, in many ways, and affordable. Certainly leaps ahead of Inkscape in not being rubbish. Going to use this for lasercutting/frontpanel work, I think.
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Really good article on the realities of installing iBeacons, and, secondarily, the way you develop your own internal processes just to solve workflow. I liked the trolly; I felt for the BKM very much as I read this.
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Translating Gender: Ancillary Justice in Five Languages Alex Dally MacFarlane | Interfictions OnlineFascinating article capturing how various translators worked around their languages to translate not only the absence of gendered language _suggested_ in Ancillary Justice, but also the author's deliberate use of the feminine as a generic case. (Also, how to translate things for different cultures – what they expect and what they intimate).
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Yes, it's a bit heavily focused on copying/emulation, but there's some useful stuff in here and some interesting starting points.
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Thoughtbot's engine for Rails admin UIs, sans-DSLs. Filed away for reference.
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Corrie Corfield on Peter Donaldson. Lovely.
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[this is good] and I will remember more of it in future.
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Wonderful, dense, three-part study of one of GTA V's renderer. I like Adrian's posts because he focuses on the art of the technology, as well as the technology of the art; a reminder that game art isn't just plonking OBJ files into a world, but relies on a whole host of developers, maths, and drawcalls.
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Interesting; the wrapper Github used for Atom, as a platform. Makes building desktop applications for web-folk like me a notch easier, though as ever, I find the Javascript ecosystem baffling.
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Wonderful article from an architect who worked on "The Witness" about the role of architecture practice in game design, and all the rough edges architects see within game worlds. Good on spatial design principles, too.
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"Every gallery project needs an Andy" – and other insights from Tim Hunkin on installation design, following his work on 'The Secret Life of the Home' at the Science Museum. All rings very true for me, and glad to see it's not just me that finds this sort of stuff challenging. Also: very interesting on museum culture.
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Lovely interview between Jeff Bridges and Roger Deakins – on film, and how they get made, and feel. Lots of deep knowledge and affection in this; I really enjoyed it.
“…this feels like a design problem – design something that works in a display without you having to be there – and it feels like a challenge design courses should be tackling, particularly the interactive ones.”
In his round up of some design shows he went to, Ben’s “grumpy bit” is spot on. I read it both a nod of recognition, and a twinge of stress-memories.
Having been part of installing a large gallery show, as well as putting on my own digital installation, I can safely say: this bit is really hard, and it is really important. It’s not just about turning it on; it’s about keeping it running. Long-term, if it’s a hassle to start, or restart, or you have to restart it too often… eventually, the attendant responsible for that (if there even is one) will get bored.
I learned this once the hard way. That experience definitely informed some of my later work. That’s what this post – which Matt B reminded me existed this week – is really about: reducing an installation to two steps:
- It should work as soon as it’s turned on.
- If it stops working, it should be fixed by turning it off and on again.
That takes the exhibit from requiring technical know-how to maintain to be being maintainable, and even installable, by any attendant. Fingers crossed it won’t fall over; but if it does, it’s a power-cycle away from coming back online.
(This way of thinking is also why, on one of my installations, there’s one LED to indicate that the power is on, and a second to indicate the code has started executing. It makes it easier to confirm when the thing will start functioning.)
Unfortunately, this is often not as straightforward (or interesting) as the rest of the work; it requires building robustness and resilience into the software and/or installation. But the moment you start having to specify lists of software to start in order, or which USB devices to connect in a particular order (so they always appear to your code at the same positions in an array)… the robustness of your project is just gone. And what it leads to is grumpy sighs from tired people in a gallery about digital installations; grumpy attendants or support staff constantly working out what’s going on with it, or putting the ‘out of order’ sign up again.
What that probably means you might have to investigate: all the weird tools at the edge of your chosen platform, like batch files, Applescript, or upstart. How to turn kiosk-mode on in a web browser from a shortcut. How to run things at startup. How to address USB devices by identifiers rather than indicies. How to turn off screen savers / power saving. Etcetera, etcetera.
It’s a tiring part of the last 5% of a project, but it’s almost always the first thing people will see in a gallery space: is your installation working? It might not be part of the design of the thing you’re exhibiting, but it’s sure part of the design of the exhibit – as much as the promotional postcards, the scrapbooks, the placards. Often at graduate shows, exhibits can feel like they’re designed to have the designer there to explain things – but even on a launch night, that’s almost never the case.
When Ben says “design something that works in a display without you having to be there” – well, that’s the default state for an exhibit. On average, you won’t be there. And so that screen, or interactive, or tablet, isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s a key part of explaining the exhibit (and it might possibly be the exhibit). So it’s worth the effort keeping it turned on.
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"When I started the installation, people passing by would see me draped in cables and ask if I was making the world's biggest Xbox or something. Then when it was done, they would stop and say 'Dude, that's awesome!' You don't get that visceral reaction to online work so much—at least, not so you can hear it in person."
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"Instead of using a dolphin model, we would, for example, use a colored rectangular solid or some tapered low-polygon basic shape. This plan would save us all a lot of headaches. Or it would have had I stuck to the plan. More on this later." This is a great post from Robert Hodgin about process, showing-everything, and how sometimes ambition leads to way more work, and is probably the right thing to do. Also: I'm still jealous of people who can think in 3D. That's part of my work for this year.
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Installing Redis on Linode.
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"RequestBin lets you create a URL that will collect requests made to it, then let you inspect them in a human-friendly way. Use RequestBin to see what your HTTP client is sending or to look at webhook requests." Which is very useful.
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"It's sort of a no-brainer. And a fascinating way to think about creating a sustainable source of income to allow, even in part, artists to produce works are genuinely expensive in time and cost to create. It should also prove to artists, and anyone who frets over the illusion of print rights, that they've got nothing to worry about. This stuff is an entirely other material and colour made of light, it turns out, doesn't just magically translate to colour made of pigment the way that, say, a word-processing document does. And if anyone is really going to lose sleep over the people who are already predisposed to print things out on their shitty homes printers my only advice is to give up now. Let them and understand that there are more interesting problems to solve and if projects like 20×200 are any indication there's a whole world of people who want to help with not only their moral support but their wallets." Aaron on the Hockney show, subscription app art, and drawing on iPads.
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"This gem is a C binding to the excellent YAJL JSON parsing and generation library." Ooh, JSON stream-parsing.
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I am not an expert in these matters, but that is rather lovely.
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That performance of Billie Jean. But with a Giant White Glove. Brilliant.
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"On May 4th, 2007, we asked internet users to help isolate Michael Jackson's white glove in all 10,060 frames of his nationally televised landmark performance of Billy Jean. 72 hours later 125,000 gloves had been located. wgt_data_v1.txt (listed below) is the culmination of data collected. It is released here for all to download and use as an input into any digital system. Just as the data was gathered collectively it is our hope that it will be visualized collectively." This is amazing. And what it leads to is even better.
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Thoughtbot discover their RFID door-lock system has an API. A short bash at some code later, and they now have theme songs when they enter the office.
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"From 30th June to 25th August, I'll be following a route across Scotland from the south western tip of Mull to the outskirts of Edinburgh, as charted in Chapters 14–27 of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Kidnapped’." I remember talking to Tim about this at BookCamp; it's great to see it in-the-world.
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"Peter Newman's Skystation is a circular sculpture inspired by the form of Le Corbusier's LC4 chaise longue which encourages the user to lie down and contemplate the vast expanse of space above and beyond." I rather like that. Doesn't look comfortable, but I agree with the sentiment.
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"After years of observation and reverse engineering I am proud to say I have been able to reproduce the IE6 algorithm to break even the most standards-compliant websites." Hur hur hur.
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There is nothing about this that is not amazing.
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"…halfway through the film, the Ghostbusters realize that NYNEX isn't a phone system at all: it's the embedded nervous system of an angel – a fallen angel – and all those phone calls and dial-up modems in college dorm rooms and public pay phones are actually connected into the fiber-optic anatomy of a vast, ethereal organism that preceded the architectural build-up of Manhattan. Manhattan came afterwards, that is: NYNEX was here first." There is no way this wouldn't be awesome. And: a great write-up from Geoff.
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How to compile APC into the Marc Liyanage PHP5 package (which is clearly the most sensible one to be using on OSX). Though this is for Server, it works fine on desktop, and as such comes recommended.
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"This toaster was built from scratch by Thomas Thwaites, a design student at the Royal College of Art, London, as a project in extreme self-sufficiency and to highlight the effects of mass production we take for granted." And this is what it looks like.
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"I'm Thomas Thwaites and I'm trying to build a toaster, from scratch – beginning by mining the raw materials and ending with a product that Argos sells for only £3.99. A toaster." This is clearly amazing, and a timely reminder of, you know, what the age of mass production really means.