Augmatic Disport (Test)

Little generative system I’ve been playing with. Not really sure what to do with it. Suggestions welcome. (STROBE WARNING)

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Fractal

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Last FM Visualisations

This time last month everyone was compiling their lists of the year and lists of the decade. But I wasn’t playing, and when it came to music I just lazily directed folks to my lastfm stats – the warts-and-all representation of what I’ve actually been listening to since 2004, untainted by any consideration toward “cool”. With the help of scrobblepod my lastfm account tracks more or less everything I listen to, be it on laptop, spotify or either of my iPods (how does one manage with less than two iPods?). Discounting vinyl, CDs (which I never listen to now), 6Music and the videos I watch on NME.tv pretty much all bases are covered.

But the real joy of stats is visualisation. The image above is a slice of my listening habits in the latter half of 2009, beautifully rendered by http://lastgraph.aeracode.org/. This is only one of many free tools on the web, if you want to explore further this list is a good place to start.

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Three Minute Wonder

I showed some of my generative art at FOTB09 last year, yes I did. Look, proof:

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Rudy at Decode

Rudy, my four year old, is a huge fan of “daddy’s patterns“, so naturally he was the person I most wanted to accompany me on my visit to Decode, the V&A/onedotzero “Digital Design Sensations” exhibition.

Rudy, as part of the resident savvy child collective in our house, acts as my personal futurologist. The way he interacts with the world is the way the world will be when his generation is running it. Rudy fails to understand why all content isn’t on demand, why every screen is not a touchscreen, why his favourite media is not available on every device. And seeing him, after lapping up Decode, attempt to prod, wave at or talk to other inanimate exhibits around the rest of the V&A, I suspect he will now be questioning the relevance of any artwork that doesn’t involve, reflect or interact with the viewer.

Interaction; with our machines, objects, materials, environments, and each other, will soon become something that is simply expected. And anything that we can’t communicate with will have decreasing relevance over the coming decades. Those who snobbishly dismiss interactive art as being “something for kids” should remember that soon it will be these very same kids who will be making the decisions as to what is and isn’t art.

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Happy Happy Joy Joy Division

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Rich Old Men Want Your Internet

Ok, I’ve calmed down over the Digital Economy Bill a bit now. If you don’t follow my Twitter (and you should, you really should) you may have escaped my incessantly expressed outrage at Lord Mandelson’s old man’s folly which, I am sorry to say, has lost this labour vote in the next election. Labour’s actions over Iraq were unforgivable, yet still to this voter they remained the lesser of two evils. But the day they start messing with my future livelihood, one has to question one’s own priorities.

There is a lot of good in the bill, don’t get me wrong, in fact it is only the parts on copyright and file-sharing where it falls down. But the proposals in this area are so unbelievably, insanely, dangerously wrong that they over-shadow everything else.

The problem is twofold:

1. Firstly, the powers the government are awarding themselves, to shut off internet access to anyone even suspected of file-sharing, are just plain draconian. And placing pressures on ISPs to enforce them will mean many, many innocents will be punished by threatened service providers forced to err on the side of caution.

Removal of one’s internet connection, in an age where most people bank, shop and connect with their friends online is a severity of punishment seemingly understated. It is certainly far beyond the crime, no matter how serious the copyright infringement.

2. Secondly, the gun is pointing in the wrong direction. The aim of the bill is to safeguard Digital Britain’s future. Not it’s past. The weighting towards the needs of copyright holders, at the expense of the new generation of digital media practitioners (the one’s most likely to be cut off, as their net usage might be greater, and less typical, than their neighbours), serves only to protect a fading status quo, not stimulate the new digital economy.

To most young digital practitioners the problem is obscurity, not a failure to maximise their income. Some digital content owners, myself included, are actually in favour of their work being distributed for free via file sharing. They are willing to adapt to the new “abundancy” economics, because they know scarcity economics no longer have the same relevance they once did.

The software industry and the music/film industry face the same issues regarding their ownership of digital content, yet it is only the latter who seem to be struggling. The (younger) software industry is coming up with ever new ways of thinking about digital economies, none of which is reflected in the Bill. Open Source, for example, may suffer. One consequence on insisting everything online comes with a price tag, is that it gets increasingly difficult to give stuff away for free.

At the time of writing the “Don’t Disconnect Us” petition stands at 27,000 signatures. Which isn’t bad (the successful Alan Turing petition had 32,108), but when you compare it to Lily Allen’s (fast becoming the poster girl for copyright confusion) million+ followers on Twitter, it seems but a drop in an ocean of popular ignorance.

Mine is only one opinion, and one vote, in this mess. But, if you are a UK resident, I can only urge you to consider yourself where you would imagine your digital life to be in ten years time, and if this bill serves your needs. And if you disagree with Mandelson’s vision, express your concerns now while it can still make a difference.

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White Night, with Source Code

This is my projection from White Night last month. I was hit by bloody Swine Flu so never got to see it live, so repeated thanks both to Sarah Bird and the BANG team for organising, and J4mie Matthews for videoing it.

For the source code, this is how it breaks down:

• intro/outro – Smoking Ribbon. Source code here.
• 0:10-1:20 – AbArt 59. Source code here.
• 1:20-1:45 – Disco. Source code here.
• 1:45-2:30 – Noise Garden. Doesn’t show too well in the vid, but you can see it better (and download the source) here.
• 2:30-3:25 – Orbitals. I haven’t added this to 100AbArts (yet) because I’ve rather overused it in videos recently, so a bit sick of it. But the source code is very similar to this.

I open source all my generative art code. I make a point of it. The reason I do so is because I would never be so bold as to declare my work the definitive rendering of any particular algorithm. I want others to join me in exploring these ideas and hopefully improve upon my work.

The 100 works at http://abandonedart.org are not intended to be a gallery, they are meant to be a recipe book. So, please, don’t just look at this video and say “pah, I could do better”. Take my source code and prove it.

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Forgetting Facebook

Here’s my proposal. On New Years Eve 2009 we close Facebook. Hermetically seal it and drop it in a data mine somewhere, as a noughties time capsule not to be dug up for a minimum of twenty years, when it can be gently mocked on a Channel 4 nostalgia show. We’ll look back on it and laugh at the primitive, puerile crap we used to do back then.

Ok, I still log in perhaps once a week, but I feel a bit dirty every time I do. Even only three years old, it feels hideously clunky and archaic now. And ever since the redesign it has felt to me like visiting my childhood bedroom after suffering a stroke. A place once familiar, now slightly twisted. Even so, I’d now find it difficult to sever all these tenuous connections I have re-established with people I’d once lost touch with (probably for a reason).

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger is doing the rounds at the moment, promoting his new book “Delete”, on the value of digital forgetting, how our data trails don’t go away and the dangers thereof. I have talked about this before, and have myself been a victim of private data being used against me, but I still think, having not read the book (uninformed opinion alert) that it isn’t of too much concern.

Although, one thing that does worry me is the effect services such as Facebook have on adolescence and personal development. You can always tell when a Facebook user is of school or college age, because they have a minimum of two or three hundred friends. We wise, cynical old farts might (jealously) insist the majority of the people we knew at this age were probably, at best, acquaintances, but it doesn’t work like that when you’re a kid. It is only when you move on, leave home, go to university, that you grow beyond this stage and start to discover who you really are, and move in more exclusive circles.

Room For Re-invention

An essential part of that personal growth is re-invention. The first thing most young people did when they went to Uni in my day is go through their goth stage, punk stage, emo stage, dope-fiend stage, or whatever was on the fringes that year. This is because for the first time they had the freedom to reinvent themselves, and experiment (and make mistakes) with finding their personal style and identity. This is an important process; it is what separates the individuals from the sheep. It is those without the fear to find themselves who develop both the idiosyncrasy and, more importantly, confidence in that idiosyncrasy, to go out there and change the world.

But surely this is so much more difficult to do while you retain all these virtual connections to the people you went to school with, the people who used to make fun of you of every time you had a haircut, or a new coat. School is all about conformity; that is how the social structure of the playground works. And so is the real world too, if we allow it to be that way. If we enter the world with a status-quo reinforcing web of social connections already in place, it must be so much harder to branch out or grow beyond it.

I may be worrying about nothing. I recently re-read a 10 year old tech-sociology book (for the book, everything is for the book these days) which made a very big deal about how content on demand is going to mean the importance of the 8pm prime time TV slot is going to be lost. The answer that time has given to this problem is: so what? It is simply the way we operate today, from within the entrappings of social media. Hopefully, the iconoclasts of the 21st Century will find their own ways of dealing with it.

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Rogue Automata

This is one image for which the source code will not be on my Generative Art site any time soon, because I’m an idiot. Coding like the clappers some GOL visualisations for the book, I decided it was shite, so never actually saved it. But, then, going back through the stills, it began to grow on me, long after the magic numbers were lost to the ether. Ah, well.

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