(click for more notes)

Notes from Super Supervisory Meeting

Atau: AHRC funding conveys level of respectability, and means that the research can be referenced in the future by other organisations.

Audience for the report drawn from the sector, ie, people who are developing their own hacklabs and similar enterprises. Also, secondary audiences of universities and arts funding bodies.

To read: Policy documents, (also see: John O’Shea)
models from the 70′s that
film workshops (see Side cinema) which came from a funded model to establish centres of production and distribution. What happened to this policy? What happened to the centres funded by this policy?

Research thoughts: Most interesting and useful is to describe practice of hacklabs:
(arduino, mindstorms, lazers, processing… and more!)
This research is being done from a practitioners viewpoint for other practitioners, with the aim of creating a model from the practice of previous artists working in the area.

Inquiry one: Historic approach is not a goer, in that it is by itself PhD level research. This should be reformatted as a pracicioner led inquiries that are sector based…. Arts Council ’10 turning point’? strategy (which might not be effective) and Digital Economy funding, which was the focus of the Sheffield research conference I attended recently.

Inquiry two: reduce number of case studies to more feasible number. False outcomes would come fom not taking funding into account: for instance, funding for Access-Space would be entirely different to the funding from NYC Resistor… any research is not definitive.

Outcome: license (how can CC license be fostered? What other examples of books on a wiki can be found? Game Culture book? Lessig? Goto10?)

Next actions: define who I’m researching, methods of data colleciton, case studies (why, how, then data collection)

As part of that course, we are occasionally required to write essays, and I wanted to post up my essay that I’ve just completed. The full title is “I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE: How are the use of memes and tropes by those within online communities
building a self-critical approach to contemporary cyber-culture?”

I’m also going to post up the proposal for the essay, which was radically different to the actually essay (in my opinion). This was mainly due to the fact that, upon really reading some of the authors namechecked in the proposal, I found my skin crawling at their apparent misconceptions of contemporary internet culture. This is one area where I find that the value of fiction writers such as Charles Stross far outweigh the perceived academic value of authors such as Paul Virilio. Why?

Where this essay goes into a academic discourse about the effects of a convergent culture on socialisation, and how networked lives will be different to what has gone before, Stross has written a novel called “Halting State” that looks at the dramatic knock-on effects of today’s technology. Some of the questions he poses are what will it be like when the police start to use networking in a realistic way, and how will the future economy cope with online gaming?

I am planning to post a longer article about Stross’s work and other sci-fi authors who are influencing and predicting the changes related to technology, but that will have to wait.

I-see-what-you-did-there (Essay)

online-essay-proposal (Essay Proposal)

Topics covered in these essays include 4chan, twitter, and social networking. All constructive comments are gratefully recieved.

1. project-proposal-dm-pete-hindle-v2
2. weeks-project
3. feasibility-study

These files relate to the ongoing work of Unnamed Laboratory, and to my coursework within the Digital Media unit. As such, they are here as much for reference as for reading. If you decide to use them in your own work, or reference them in some manner, they are licensed under the Creative Commons Share-alike Non-commercial Attribution License, and you should check that you are using it within those terms.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

Thankfully, I have two database experts on hand. My parents – even my mother is known to crack the odd database joke (most often at the expense of Microsoft). And as far as I’m concerned, that’s awesome.

One of the things I was concerned with was putting multiple entries into a single field, and how that would affect my dealing with those entries in the future. And, as soon as I starting thinking that relational databases of my research were a lot more possible, then I started realising that all my research could be put into relational databases.

Of course, I do have some previous experience in databases…

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=146296&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=ffffff&fullscreen=1
Spreadsheets and Databases – An Informal Lecture from petehindle on Vimeo.

(RSS subscribers go here to see the video)

Now I should have to ponder the question of sharing those databases… it’s possible to embed them, of course, in frames, but is that the best way? Ben Fry likes to share his as CSV format, which is a pretty standardised format. We’ll cross that bridge later though: it’s time to start pounding the spreadsheet program first.

However, with that hand in comes the period where I can actually readjust and get back to work. And I kind of think that there is a lot of work that can be done now.

Firstly, the main core of my work this year – my university project that will feed into and fuel the Unnamed Laboratory project. Over the next few days I’m supposed to be doing a lot of reading, related to a definition of New Media, and then after that I’m heading off to Berlin for a period of research.

This is all very exciting, but the Unnamed Laboratory project is something that’s going to take longer than just a few months at a university. And that means that I’ll be sorting out this website to make sure the aims of the project can be represented in the best way.

I’m also pleased to announce that I’ve been joined in the project by Brian Degger, who is a long-term collaborator. While the description of the project is still a bit nebulous, we’ll be drafting a document to explain what’s going on, the work we’ve already undertaken, and what we plan to do next.

1. 1. Give artists wine until drunk
2. 2. Make them play Halo
3. 3. ????????
4. 4. Profit!

We’ll have to see how this one pans out… I’m still working on that third part.