Sparkler Fun from petehindle on Vimeo.
I’m trying out posting videos from vimeo onto a wordpress blog. It’s quite a hassle, and I’m not sure if this will be the solution. There’s also the problem that I can’t use the nifty features of wordpress if I want to embed a vimeo video… sigh.
This is the first attempt by Brian, Topsy and myself at a podcast – it’s a roughly edited ten-minutes or so of us talking about some of the things that are coming up over the week, some of the things we are doing, and some of the art in the local area.
It’s not going to be here for long, as I’ll be shifting it over to a special NewcastleGraft website in the next week, so don’t link here. Or expect future podcasts to turn up here, unless I become almost completely self-obsessed
NewcastleGraft Podcast 1 – Pseudo. Please download the file to your computer, rather than listen to it online.
Links:
Am back in Newcastle now. Although my plans were to get a shave and go on a bike ride, today it’s snowing. Above, the first things I saw on my return to this city; after the eye-popping walk through the city centre on a Friday night.
Macbook Air; not small enough, not enough ports, too much bling. I wanted a macbook swiss army knife, but we got a macbook porsche instead.
Well, that’s what I just posted on Twitter. Okay, it’s pretty, but I need a digital leatherman more than some pretty laptop. I want something I can use for a variety of purposes in a variety of places, and the damn thing looks far too bling. I also don’t think that there will be a version of it in my (very low) price range.
I would have thrown my budgetary caution to the wind for a cut-back Macbook. One with no optical drive (useless things anyway) and less power. Instead, I find myself casting more towards the Linux end of the pool to give me what I want. No, not one of those Asus EEE’s, but a Thinkpad. If only I had some money…
I’m going to take a break from my review-writing and talk about some history. About three years ago (2005), around this time of year (January), I had an interview for the UK’s highest educational establishment, the Royal College of Arts.
Back then, I was really interested in making interactive art pieces. In some ways, I still am, but I wanted to go to the RCA’s Interaction Design department to fiddle with computers for two years and make cool stuff, because it was the only place in the UK that had anything like the level of techno-knowledge that I needed. If you are reading this from a bloggers point of view, you might think that last sentence sounded big-headed; however, I’d just finished studying at a university famous for it’s coverage of New Media art, where several important faculty members didn’t know how to email people.
And that’s not unusual either. The ivory towers of art academia are usually full of people who retired from using technology somepoint between betamax and steam boats. So I was really hoping to get into the RCA’s Interaction Design department, as I knew that they understood Processing, Max/MSP, and other, similar programs that were emerging around that time.
What I remember about the day is waiting outside the office for my interview, and hearing the sounds of the one workroom they had as it was full of students. And, to a man, those students seemed to be alpha-male types. The workroom of the course is very cramped, and the thought of spending two years in London, stuck in a room with braying alpha males did not appeal to me.
(Above: one of the four workbenches at the RCA’s Interaction Design room. Note the use of eMac’s, Apple’s loudest computer, which are pretty unpleasant to spend any time around.)
I didn’t do well in the interview. For one thing, I had an enormous ulcer on my tongue, which hurt when I talked. I’ve never had an ulcer like it since, but I still remember that bastard thing. Also, I wasn’t a designer. I was an artist, and they really wanted designers. Thirdly, I wasn’t somebody who wanted to do bio-art, which was where they have since re-focused the course.
I didn’t get on the course, and I was a whole lot busy with other things for that two years. It was only while doing some research last night that I remembered about that interview, as I saw a raft of familar names and what they were up to now. I guess if I’d passed that course, I could have been involved with some of the new interaction design programs coming up from London, like the people at tinker.it, or thishappened.org.
I wanted to do that course at a specific time in my life, and I think I would have been disappointed if I had got in. Instead of being thrown up against the crushing reality of living in London during an economic boom, I got to experience some really great stuff in Newcastle. And some other stuff that wasn’t so great, but was important to me.
Addendum: this blog post gets a lot of hits at the start of every year… I guess that RCA Design Interactions course is pretty popular! If you’re searching for help with the interview, or getting on the course, remember: I didn’t get on. But that doesn’t mean that I did nothing for two years – I did a whole bunch of stuff, I just didn’t get a degree from the RCA.
It’s late, I’m bored and thinking of Marmite, so it’s time for another review of Bad Tech I Have Brought. This week: the Creative Zen Micro.
I didn’t actually buy the Creative Zen Player for myself. I brought it for my Grandfather, at his express order. He used to get the John Lewis catalogue of tech toys, and he pointed at the Creative Zen and said words to the effect of “bring me back this one, it looks nifty”.
Being from an earlier generation, he was still impressed with the fact that you could store huge amounts of songs on it’s eight gig hard drive. That was where his impressed-ness ended, as everything after that pissed him off.
His computer wasn’t able to run the software that came bundled with the player, and I ended up ripping his small collection of CD’s with my Mac, and then uploading to it using the open source XNJB – and we all know how much fun FLOSS/FOSS stuff is.
But for once, it’s unfair to blame the Open Source community for a bad user experience. Creative have managed to make an object almost unusable for the purpose it was designed. Let’s start off by looking at the case of the unit -
See that screen? See how it’s nearly as big as all the buttons on the screen, but not quite? That would be fine, but all the buttons are touch-sensitive. So every time you touch the surface of the object, you trigger the unit into doing something, or the screen.
This stunning setback to user-friendlyness was only dwarfed by one thing – the user interface. Never have I seen an interface so unfriendly. It practically sets the dogs on you as soon as you press the menu button (which isn’t a menu button, but actually a context-activate button which offers you a drop-down menu from which you can select the top menu to take you to the music menu to take you to the ‘now playing’ menu).
As if the unit wasn’t bad enough, it also tries to do an number of extra things as badly as possible. It has a radio receiver, that doesn’t pick up radio very well owing to electromagnetic interference from the unit. It records sound, but only using the bad inbuilt microphone. It can operate as a hard-drive, but only under some conditions. And you can use it to show your photographs on, if you can ever work out how to transfer your data across to it when not in hard-drive mode.
Eventually, my grandfather gave up on this device, for the reasons outlined above, and it’s rubbish battery life. (It’s supposed to charge from USB, but it really means USB 2.0 charging only.) He gave it to me, and I’ve tried to give it away to other people. As yet, no joy. However, I recently came across a method for getting the hard-drive out, which keeps me going on those long train journeys when I feel like destroying this particular hand-held device, as it might be the only thing worth doing with it.
I can’t think of anything more painful (in terms of UI) than using Excel on a Mac. It stinks. It’s even making me think about using one of the Open Office variants that are around, and I know they suck.
I thought I’d do some reviews of some of the really really bad tech I own. I’ve got some critical facilities, and I like tinkering with technology. So this seems like a good way to fill in some otherwise empty time.
You might be asking, ‘What is an M3 DS Simply?, which would be appropriate if you are anything but a giant nerd. If you are a giant nerd (by which I mean a nerd who knows a lot of stuff, rather than somebody suffering from giantism who also happens to be a nerd) you’ll know that an M3 DS Simply is a way of playing pirate games on a Nintendo DS.
The devices are advertised as being for ‘homebrew’, which is a type of computer program written by hobbyists, but the majority of people buy these devices to run pirate copies of games. Which is why the M3 is advertised as having a 100% success rate at running ‘backup’ copies of games.
I’ve found the success rate to be somewhere around 2%. I’ll admit to not knowing everything about the process of running my… uh… ‘backup’ games, but I’ve tried pretty much everything I can try without resorting to shaking a dead chicken over the cartridge, or praying to a baleful god of handheld gaming. The few games backups I have got working are so random as to be remarkable in their diversity.
This leaves me running homebrew on my expensive DS. Well… such homebrew as works, anyway. And frankly, if I wasn’t constantly messing around with computers in a way that’s considered ‘arty’, I’d have very little use for most of the homebrew that’s out there.
If you are considering getting a *cough cough* backup device like the M3 DS Simply for yourself, I’d advise against it unless you really wanted to use homebrew software. Even then, I might point you towards a PSP, an iPhone, or an iPod Touch, all of which are more expensive, but have a better track record of running homebrew software. The DS Simply – and other, similar products – are too much bother for too little return.
I must admit to being slack about this; I was not actually aware that there was a Northern Art Prize, nor that it was in Leeds, or that the winner would be announced this month. So finding out about it was quite a shock – but not as much of a shock as seeing the shortlist, because for a prize based around the idea of art in the North, three out of five artists on the list are based in London.
I’m not saying that London is a bad place to live. And I’m not saying that artists from London shouldn’t be able to work in the North. But if you are going to have a prize that rewards artists for taking part in a “cultural renaissance [that] is transforming attitudes and confounding old stereotypes” happening all over the North, and then stock the shortlist with artists based in the South… you come pretty close to making the prize a mockery of the ideas it sets out to encourage.
Whoever wins this prize will get an award of £16,500, in order to recognise the contribution that artist has made towards art in the North. I really hope that the money goes towards an artist who does actually live and work in the North – you can vote on the website for which artist you think should get the dosh. The winner gets announced on the 17th of January.
Frankly, I think it’s time we stopped judging contemporary art on which area of the country it was made in. It’s either good quality art or it’s not – and it seems that the government agrees with me, as a new report states that ‘excellence’ rather than ‘bums on seats’ is to be the new yardstick to measure arts funding by. This won’t make a difference to the Northern Arts Prize, but perhaps it will go some way towards making regional prizes as irrelevant as Watercolour Challenge.
