Almost immediately, I ran into a problem. The cops tried to blow up my luggage.

A man can’t even take a whizz on a train without the state getting up in his grill. Damn these post-terrorist times. Thankfully, the rest of the train journey was less eventful. In fact, it was so uneventful that I decided to do some watercolours out of the window, after drawing a dog and my waterbottle.

Painting on the train was ace, and I really enjoyed it. Sadly, it was the most productive – in terms of work I made – during my trip. As soon as I got off the train I was involved in the process of picking up my stuff and working out what to do with it.

I thought I would draw all the boxes from storage, but dealing with it was so exhausting – and so distracting – that it was hard to keep it together. Just waking up to the thought of all my boxes of crap was enough to wipe me out on Tuesday, and I spent the morning in bed under a giant fluffy duvet.

On Wednesday I picked myself up and went into town to see some friends. I took an early bus into the city centre so I could do some drawing, and this was pretty much the only time I managed to do so in the city. Lesson learned: if you want to do drawing, you have to make time for it. I particularly wanted to draw the train station, but those builders grabbed the good seats so they could smoke. I ended up surrounded by a bunch of teenagers.

(Oh, and by the way, excuse my fingers – this sketchbook’s uneven spine doesn’t make for good scanning. It does have lovely paper though, which makes it quite useful for on-the-go sketching.)

I managed a few quick watercolours before it was time for my lunch date, and then I barely managed to scribble anything on Thursday. I was exhausted by the prospect of throwing away, or giving away, pretty much a decade’s worth of stuff. Most of that stuff was books that I had built up, thinking they were the backbone of my “adult” possessions, but were just another lump of stuff that ended up needing to be disposed of.

I’m trying to write a short essay about it, but my thoughts are complicated by the reasons why I had to throw all that stuff away. Bad relationships, serious illnesses, and confused education choices made my life a lot more interesting than it normally is. The act of actually getting rid of the stuff was quite nice – a chance to see old friends, catch up, and give them presents. The act of sorting it out in some literary form is really tough, and I worry I’ve traded a talent with words for a talent with images…

My visit was generally fun, and it reinforced my urge to make more drawings, to make better drawings. But it also made me want to communicate better with those drawings, because otherwise, what’s the point?

Last week I went to London to see a gig by the effervescent Merrill Garbus, who performs as Tune Yards. This is really rare for me; I don’t usually go and see any live music, and I don’t usually go out at night. Like I said a few weeks ago, the evening is really the time I knuckle down and start making things, so I like to be at home making rather than out partying. I didn’t take my sketchbook, but I did take my camera. I snapped off this quick shot as we stood outside the gig.

One of the weirder aspects about returning to Biggleswade is that there are almost no people between 20 – 35. Back in Newcastle I  lived in areas that were mostly comprised of people in that age range, but now I’m back in the parental abode I can go days before having a face-to-face conversation with somebody in my age range. I often complain about this to the few friends I have here over a coffee. The Tune Yards gig was, of course, full of people in my generation, making me look like an overly grumpy fool.

It’s no fun running an email group. You end up doing a lot of work that nobody really acknowledges, and having to spend time listening to crazy people who just happen to have your email address, so therefore feel it’s applicable to send you any old bullshit they believe in. I can’t tell you the amount of unasked-for crap that ends up in my inbox these days.

At least most of that crap is about art though.

Now, in the past I’ve been somewhat respectful but disinclined to believe this stuff. Of course, I’m quitting ‘graft and have left newcastle, so I can just annoy people and not worry about it now. Hurrah.

With all due respect to (redacted), she’s one of those nice people who believe in a lot of airy-fairy bullshit. I have friends who are deeply into auras, chanting, magic, etc, and I’ve observed a few things about them. I’ve noticed that being inclined to believe in that sort of thing (auras, etc) seems to mean that you don’t have a very good critical facility; they tend to go on what “feels” right to them. They have trusted networks that send them emails – which I would consider to be spam – warning them about whatever cause du jour they consider important now.

Some people refer to this as relativism, meaning that what is important to one person must be given the same weight as what is important to another person. Or something. That’s not really a great explanation, but it’s one of the terms used to describe airy-fairy thinkers. It’s actually a bit of a bending of the term relativism, but that’s not so important.

I’m currently reading a Stephen King book about writing, and he describes how poetry in the sixties and seventies was full of relativists. They would write poems about the mountain – using it as a never-fully-explained analogy, and if you asked them to explain the analogy, the poet would decry you as somebody who doesn’t “get it”. King’s attitude to this sort of poetry seems to be “fuck you, I just wanted to know what you were talking about”.

That’s the problem with arguing the toss over geo-engineering, vaccines, or any of the other hot-button topics that airy-fairy thinkers favour. You make a logical reply and it’s all “you don’t understand”, or “but what about this proof from <a dodgy blog on the internet>” or “if you love science so much why don’t you marry it”.

I mean, it’d be perfectly possibly for me to go through those links and say what they really mean. I was even considering doing that. But we’ve been down that road before and it just leads to people asking me why I’m not getting gay married to science because I obviously love it so much. So bollocks to that. Did you expect me to sit here and let you pelt (metaphorical) rotten vegetables at me? No thanks!

Anybody who believes in airy-fairy bullshit because they “feel” it to be true, anybody who ignores the evidence that contradicts them because they have a set of beliefs, anybody who talks down science because “it doesn’t know all the answers”, is basically out to fuck you up. They want you to believe in something rather than think for yourself. They want your trust.

Because then they can feed you any bullshit they want.

Not only am I sure that I shouldn’t really be in Platform this year, I’m also sure that if you were to award/chose me to be in Platform you’d only be getting something along the lines of “Pete Hindle is nebbishly funny in a sarcastic manner about an element of geekdom.” This would suck; not that I’m not funny – far from it, the other day I made somebody laugh by putting on a jumper, and I’m pretty practised at making ladies laugh from the other side of the room by wiggling my eyebrows. But the reason that it would suck is that you’ve commissioned it before, I’ve done it already, and frankly, we’re all a little tired of stuff like that happening.

Hey, since Platform… whenever I did my last thing… nerds have taken off. In fact, you better be nerdy these days, since all the other social niches are pretty much played out, giving us this massive glut of homogenised stylish young people (girls: pretty, boys: dishevelled) who will no doubt be applying to do various things at this event. Hoo-fucking-rah; even the audiences at Platform are pretty darn hot these days, and considering that it’s a live art event (the epitome of niche) that’s saying something. I came to Platform last year with the pretty young girlfriend who broke my heart into a thousand pieces when she dumped me in Berlin, and even she was intimidated by some of the girls in the audience. Which is why I left early to go and drink mojitoes with her rather than stare at performance art.

Because, honestly, drinking with pretty girls is far more fun than performance art.

I was actually drinking with a few pretty girls recently when I made my nerd credentials quite clear. I said I was going to go home and watch Star Trek, at which point they laughed. I pointed out that I was wearing a red bodywarmer, and that I really was going home to watch Star Trek. I think they might have laughed some more at that point, but in a good way. I was, in fact, desperate to get home owing to the side effects of carrying around an ulcer in my stomach area for the past few months, such as not being able to drink and creating evil smelling farts out of my bottom. I’m presumably carrying around this ulcer owing to the stress of not working on my thesis, but I’m not entirely sure that having a useless fine art education and nowhere to display my “skillz” hasn’t also played a part in it.

So, if you really want an evil smelling, post-graduate educated sarcastic asshole who would rather be off drinking with pretty girls than making lame jokes about the puerile obsessions of a set of closeted individuals that value gadgetry and science fiction over personal contact and the real world, I’m your man. I do carry around in my head a few ideas that I might be able to turn into performances, so I thought I’d make a note of them in a list format in case you didn’t read any of the above.

•    The Quaker Performance: everybody sits in a circle and we have a traditional Quaker meeting, where there is silence for an hour. It’ll be awesome, promise.
•    Juggling: possibly with glasses. I can do a three ball cascade for around ten minutes.
•    Dialogue: I talk with the people in the audience, making them the focus of the performance. People will laugh.
•    The Fleetwood Mac Thing: I explain how I was in the unlikely position of having two girlfriends, and how I adopted the Fleetwood Mac album “Rumours” during that period.
•    The Roman Talk: I heart Romans. Did you know that Caligula tried to make his favourite horse a consul of Rome? Romans are comedy gold.
•    Full Lock: Somebody puts a car in the full lock position and does multiple donuts outside the venue. Again: awesome, with the added bonuses of illegality and danger of death.

Obviously, rather than fleshing out any of these ideas you’d be better employing another artist and giving them an opportunity that they’d enjoy. I’d probably find the whole prospect of standing in front of another audience gut-wrenchingly fear inducing and it’s not like I care enough to keep my CV updated anyway.

Arto Polus has some documentation of the day at his website, so please click through for the other serious artists, and a couple of pictures of me throwing balls around.

It was also nice to meet Andrej and Ewelina in person, finally, and I really enjoyed their company during the day. They are doing the Digital Media Mres that I’m now loosely attached to, so it was interesting to hear some other students talking about the course.

Above: Heaton Park, last weekend.

Like I said in my last post, I was back in Newcastle at the weekend. Luck had it that I came back for a scorchingly hot few days, and the local park became full of people. On one side of the park, there were families playing, a bowling green, and a coffee vendor. On the other side of the park, pictured above, there was a horde of students. These students clustered in groups of between two to thirty, and I felt far too intimidated to sit anywhere near all these young people being all hip. So I sat near the bowling green and read my book.

On Monday the weather changed, and the council sent some men to tidy up Heaton park. I was amused to see the leftovers:

Heaton Park is actually quite lovely, when you don’t have to kick half a dozen students out of the way to see the views. But I felt a little left out; I didn’t feel part of this world of young, lazing students, each posse blithely burning the shape of a disposable barbecue into the grass.

Heaton is a student area now, and for all that the council might talk about setting right “student ghettos”, they are ignoring the people like me who have lived on the edges of studenthood for a while. I chose to live in Heaton to get away from the reverse snobbery that other areas in the Tyne and Wear urban conurbation have; Sunderland might be a city, but it doesn’t have anything like Heaton. There’s no nice area with a choice of coffee shops in Gateshead’s Low Fell. There’s no late-night shopping strip in Fenham.

But that weekend, unable to get out of the house for fear of triggering my fatigue, I spent a lot of time looking out of the window. In the main, the people who live in Heaton have somewhere to go. Something to do. Last weekend, they might have been headed to the park to see their friends, but Monday meant that they were back at work, or back in the lecture hall. For me, it seemed like another day of an ongoing holiday.

Huck Scarry’s book “The World Around Us” has a brief introduction, where he talks about seeing the world from the window of his flat in Zurich. From my flat, I could see the inhabitants of Heaton pass by, sometimes headed out, sometimes headed home. The best seat in the flat is the one that lets you people-watch all the busy lives outside the window.

This final picture is of the watering of the bowling green. It was late on Sunday evening, in the magic hour, but still hot. The smell of the water jetting out over the grass was just right after such a long, dry day. We stood and watched the water droplets as they were whipped by the strong wind. For a little while, I’d got out past the window.

Zed Shaw is an important man in the Ruby on Rails world, but more interestingly he’s a short-tempered essayist on elements of internet culture who has no truck with shibboleths. His blog might occasionally throw up a few nice pieces, but it’s his essays that are really interesting.

Mark Fisher has been linked to by a few people whom I enjoy reading, and I just finished his book. Thankfully, for a heavyweight leftist political tract, it was really short and kept referencing SF.

The Meat License Proposal by John O’Shea – imagine if you had to take the equivalent of a driving test to eat meat? One of the projects that, when I describe it, always has people volunteering to take a meat license test, where they would learn to kill and prepare their chosen meat.

The AV Festival is back again, with various installations and talks across the North-East. Some things are harder to locate than others on the sprawling website, and some feral trade coffee sounds good, but is this an open workshop or is it something else?

(I’m just too prudish to have it on my front page, but you can click through for NSFW object)

After a brief discussion between me and Alan (“Is that a…?” “Yeah.” “Look, it’s got crusty poo on it!” “That’s not poo, that’s blood.”) we took the above photo to mark the day we found a sex toy loose on the mean streets of Heaton. I’m not sure if that was the correct thing – the object did have blood on it, so perhaps I should have disposed of it safely. In a biohazard site, or something. I have nightmare images of a dog chewing it.

However, that wasn’t even the strangest thing I found. One street over, I found a 110 volt hammer drill sticking out of a skip. Considering these things retail at around £200, it seemed odd to just chuck it in the skip when you’ve finished renovating a house. They did take the plug off it before disposing of it – as if plugs were the expensive part of power tools.

I really wonder what’s going on that I could find these two disparate objects discarded in my neighbourhood. I am, however, the proud owner of a (probably broken) 110v hammer drill. Yay!

Some people suggested that I combine the two found objects. However, I have a personal rule not to take home blood-encrusted sex toys that I find in the street. I didn’t know that I had this as a personal rule until today, but you have to admit it makes a lot of sense.

In this post I’ll be talking about the specific programming decisions and techniques I used. But don’t don’t get too excited – I’m pretty sure that the techniques I used are either hack jobs or very low-complexity stuff. My original idea was to create a program that read words and then sorted them. This is a very simple idea and does not have a great deal to explain; I wished to make the computer do the hard work of counting for me, rather than me doing the hard work for computers, as actually turned out in this module.

As the stated aim for the project was to read from a text file I assumed that the best way of doing this was to break apart the text and load it into a string array. One of the first big mistakes I made in this area was to assume that the string array would be a two-dimensional array – after all, I was counting lots of different things, rather than making something like a time-graph for one thing. Right?

No. A 2D array was far too complex for me, and didn’t actually do what I needed. If a regular (one-dimensional) array has storage for an item at each defined point, a 2D array has a list of arrays, each with storage at a defined point. That storage can be used for one defined type of data, like integers, floats, or strings. As I was determined to count specific words that I had chosen, the idea of a 2D array was overkill. Not only that, but the method I was using to break up the text and read it wasn’t really compatible.

Another big error was wandering into regular expression-land with a dazed look on my face. Perhaps if my project was more technically acute, there might have been some call for the use of regular expressions, but as the code was merely sifting through an array of strings it was much better to do a straight comparison using relational operators. In the current level of code I have been using an ‘if’ statement with a ‘directly equals’ (==) comparison.

I was convinced for a long time that regex was what I should be doing, but the documentation for regex is so dense and tough that I think you have to have some sort of special programming gene to be able to get your head round it. Every time I looked at it I found all of it so dense and unwieldy that I couldn’t get into it, and I found that the examples it came with were not something that really matched up with what Processing could use. The few times I did have success with regex and Processing were using the match() command, which seemed to behave in a way that I didn’t expect, although on closer reading of the documentation it was nearly as it said on the tin.

Moving onto discussion the actual production of a graphical output, this was something I started working on first. My working practice with Processing might not have been the most methodical, but I find that when I get stuck working on something within Processing I tend to pop open a new window and then start chewing on it in a separate bit of code. Pretty soon I have enormous amounts of windows open in Processing and I can’t remember what I was doing with half of them.

See what I mean?

For the graphical output I started working on modular blocks of code that I could call from elsewhere in the program. This approach mostly worked, but when I started compiling code together in one big bloc (what I’ve saved as version 3 in the repository of code) I found the way I had of fading in and out the text caused some sort of massive slowdown in the program.

After much experimenting the cause was not the fact that the text was fading in, but the fact that I had two different PFont’s being called, one inside a function, and one inside the main setup. Debugging this problem was pretty much the only time I felt successful at solving a problem during the entire run of the module, and after changing the way the typefont call worked the program was back up to speed.

Finally, after much unsuccessful toil and experimentation with what amounted to The Wrong Stuff, I ended up with a program that could count through a text and produce a small graph whilst doing so, and then output a text file that contained the ‘count’ of all the words searched for. This program, whilst technically fulfilling the brief I wrote for myself, is still a long way away from what I would like. For instance, the idea of changing the words searched for or the text would involve the user diving into the code and being prepared to edit it. This is not the ideal usage for most people, but as the code is written for a target audience of one (myself) I think I can handle it.

I have also not prepared a sketch to show what can be done with the output of the program as yet, despite making some mock-ups.  Here, however, is the original sketches from my notebook about the depiction of the program:

At some point in my research I experimented with using Apple’s Automator program to collate and collect text files from a specific directory. I was less than successful with this, and the results of the script actually ended up meaning I had to restart my machine. However, in the spirit of completeness, I am including those results along with my other code in this blog post.

Applescript application (OS X Only): basic-text-scan

Online repository of Processing Sketches for this project

ADDENDUM: Production list of Processing Sketches, in reverse order:

Buttons_test
Buttons_test-090428a.zip
I_dont_understand_match
basic_tech2
experimental_envisioning
fake_values
fake_values_2
match_test
orange_text_example
orange_text_example-090428a.zip
orange_text_test
orange_text_test.zip
printreader_again
printreader_again-090428a.zip
roma
roma_two
slight_succes2
slight_success
version_1
version_2
version_3
word_lines
basic_tech/.DS_Store
basic_tech2.pde
basic_tech/basic_tech2/basic_tech2.pde
Buttons_test.pde
conjoining_list.pde
data
basic_tech/Buttons_test/.DS_Store
basic_tech/Buttons_test/Buttons_test.pde
basic_tech/Buttons_test/conjoining_list.pde
Serif-200.vlw
basic_tech/Buttons_test/data/Serif-200.vlw
basic_tech/Buttons_test-090428a.zip
experimental_envisioning.pde
basic_tech/experimental_envisioning/experimental_envisioning.pde
conjoining_list.pde
fake_values.pde
basic_tech/fake_values/conjoining_list.pde
basic_tech/fake_values/fake_values.pde
applet
fake_values_2-090502a.zip
fake_values_2-090502b.zip
fake_values_2.pde
basic_tech/fake_values_2/.DS_Store
fake_values_2.jar
fake_values_2.java
fake_values_2.pde
index.html
loading.gif
basic_tech/fake_values_2/applet/fake_values_2.jar
basic_tech/fake_values_2/applet/fake_values_2.java
basic_tech/fake_values_2/applet/fake_values_2.pde
basic_tech/fake_values_2/applet/index.html
basic_tech/fake_values_2/applet/loading.gif
basic_tech/fake_values_2/fake_values_2-090502a.zip
basic_tech/fake_values_2/fake_values_2-090502b.zip
basic_tech/fake_values_2/fake_values_2.pde
I_dont_understand_match.pde
basic_tech/I_dont_understand_match/I_dont_understand_match.pde
match_test.pde
basic_tech/match_test/match_test.pde
data
orange_text_example.pde
basic_tech/orange_text_example/.DS_Store
Georgia-Bold-16.vlw
basic_tech/orange_text_example/data/Georgia-Bold-16.vlw
basic_tech/orange_text_example/orange_text_example.pde
basic_tech/orange_text_example-090428a.zip
conjoining_list.pde
data
orange_text_test
orange_text_test-090513a.zip
orange_text_test-090525a.zip
orange_text_test.pde
positions.txt
basic_tech/orange_text_test/.DS_Store
basic_tech/orange_text_test/conjoining_list.pde
Georgia-Bold-16.vlw
it.txt
terribletest.txt
basic_tech/orange_text_test/data/Georgia-Bold-16.vlw
basic_tech/orange_text_test/data/it.txt
basic_tech/orange_text_test/data/terribletest.txt
conjoining_list.pde
data
orange_text_test.pde
basic_tech/orange_text_test/orange_text_test/.DS_Store
basic_tech/orange_text_test/orange_text_test/conjoining_list.pde
Georgia-Bold-16.vlw
it.txt
basic_tech/orange_text_test/orange_text_test/data/Georgia-Bold-16.vlw
basic_tech/orange_text_test/orange_text_test/data/it.txt
basic_tech/orange_text_test/orange_text_test/orange_text_test.pde
basic_tech/orange_text_test/orange_text_test-090513a.zip
basic_tech/orange_text_test/orange_text_test-090525a.zip
basic_tech/orange_text_test/orange_text_test.pde
basic_tech/orange_text_test/positions.txt
basic_tech/orange_text_test.zip
data
positions.rtf
positions.txt
printreader_again.pde
positions.txt
basic_tech/printreader_again/data/positions.txt
basic_tech/printreader_again/positions.rtf
basic_tech/printreader_again/positions.txt
basic_tech/printreader_again/printreader_again.pde
basic_tech/printreader_again-090428a.zip
roma_movie
roma_movie.pde
basic_tech/roma/roma_movie/roma_movie.pde
roma_two.pde
basic_tech/roma_two/roma_two.pde
slight_succes2.pde
basic_tech/slight_succes2/slight_succes2.pde
slight_success.pde
basic_tech/slight_success/slight_success.pde
version_1-090422a.zip
version_1.pde
basic_tech/version_1/version_1-090422a.zip
basic_tech/version_1/version_1.pde
button_class.pde
conjoining_list.pde
data
version_2.pde
basic_tech/version_2/.DS_Store
basic_tech/version_2/button_class.pde
basic_tech/version_2/conjoining_list.pde
basic_tech/version_2/version_2.pde
button_class.pde
conjoining_list.pde
data
version_3.pde
basic_tech/version_3/button_class.pde
basic_tech/version_3/conjoining_list.pde
basic_tech/version_3/version_3.pde
conjoining_list.pde
word_lines.pde
basic_tech/word_lines/conjoining_list.pde
basic_tech/word_lines/word_lines.pde

This list was outputted using the command “find basic_tech -exec ls  {} ; | open -tf” in the OS X Terminal.

The grandiose title of this piece could be read as a sign that I’m going to write about things other than relevant to the course. In general, I’m going to steer clear of that sort of approach in this piece of text. I am slightly tempted to do a cross-comparative chart of my mental state versus the deadline of this module, but the time for that sort of navel-gazing isn’t now, and this isn’t really the place. So, what to do with such a grandiose title?

I know: we’ll talk about Lev Manovich.

Manovich is famous for putting together two things. First, his book, the Language of New Media, which was an early foray into series notions about the academic reception of New Media artworks. It’s aligning of the concepts behind computing as being analogous to early cinema was a masterstroke of metaphor, allowing humanities departments the world over to finally get their head around the fact that yes, really, we are going to be using these computer things for artistic purposes and we better get used to it.

The other thing that Manovich is famous for is his de/reconstructed film software “Soft Cinema”, which puts into practice the more theoretical notions that he talks about in his book. This work was, in fact, shown in the Baltic at an early stage in it’s gestation, where I walked in and then promptly walked out again (having a very low tolerance for the sort of abstract narrative found in most art films).

But these are not the features of Manovich’s practice that I’m going to discuss here. In his recent work, Manovich has looked at the way that society is pressurising all information onto a digital plane, and concluded that as more raw data is available in this form, it is the practice of data-mining that will become valuable. This is a conclusion actually being reached independently in several different structures at the same time, by researchers working in different fields.

This polyphyletic idea is ideally suited to Manovich’s position as somebody who can talk about the practice of art and computers in a way that those working in other fields can’t. For instance, whilst both Martin Wattenburg and Ben Fry are creating, promoting, and even working as artists in these fields, they still do not have the necessary academic chutzpah to propel the idea under discussion out of the ballpark. They are, essentially, knocking the idea around between a few like-minded friends.

Franco Moretti is not a like-minded friend, nor is he particularly interested in what we would term “New Media” (from what I can make out, which should be regarded as limited). However, what he is interested in, as a leading left-wing literary critic, is a method of understanding texts. And, as Manovich would point out, these texts are merely data awaiting transmutation into a computerised form. Therefore, coming to the point and the birth of yet another instance of our polyphyletic idea, Moretti suggests the use of quantitative data analysis for literature in his book “Graphs, Maps, Trees”.

I find the fact that infovisualization is being suggested as a research tool in the humanities as particularly interesting, and when I attended a recent afterparty for a Newcastle University conference on Crime Fiction I had a chance to quiz those doing stylistic analysis of texts in other fields. It was regarded as impossible that a visual program could be analysed by a computer (not so, either by using jit.cv or by web services such as Mechanical Turk). But I’m not sure that these people were participating in leading edge research, and besides, I was being plied with mohitios at the time.

The final point of this is, however, that there will be an expanding bubble of interest around these themes of data-mining and the humanities, and that Newcastle University already has some projects and researchers that are interested in this field (by which I am not referring to myself, but rather people working within the English department whom I’ve met very briefly). There needs to be a way of gathering the tools, or creating accessible tools for these researchers, and as soon as possible, so that Moretti’s idea of quantitative tools for qualitative purposes can become a reality.

Having said that, I’m now ready to share my own set of quantitative tools. Be aware that this is a rough and ready – but working – version, and merely produces a small line-graph and a text files that counts specific words. In the next section of this (essay? Series of blog posts?) I’ll discuss the road not taken, by which I mean the false starts and horrific crushing disappointments of working in code.

orange_text_test