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.

What really slows me down, however, are compliments.

Weirdly, if somebody says that they enjoyed something I wrote, then I get a sort of blockage that takes a few days to pass. Actually it’s not a blockage, but more a written version of diarrhea where I try and use all my fanciest words at once. I have some sort of internal editor that runs along the same aesthetics as Henry Rollins, so the combination of trying to write like a man holding a quill whilst thinking like a DC punk causes me some problems.

I regard fancy words (or ‘long words’, as some people refer to them) to be used as a weapon of last resort OR a shortcut across academic terrain. Seeing as I’m in the process of completing a Masters of Research (now on hiatus for obvious reasons), and with my stated aim of talking about technology and scifi, I figure I’m allowed to use a few of the longer words in my vocabulary.

The trick will be in making it not dull…

This is a small amusement (it’s not a game, it’s too stupid) where you click the mouse to make something happen. This stems from Jamie asking us how we could make the exercise of drawing a five-pointed pentagram ‘more evil’. Actually, correct me if I’m wrong, but I do believe that (in the West) the pentagram was originally a Christian symbol that represented a man standing looking at the stars, but it’s connection with Venus – the Morningstar – in Eastern philosophies later caused the symbol to change meanings.

Anyway, I’ve ‘eviled’ things up a bit. Download the correct version for your operating system (Windows users, you’ll need to have Java installed) after the jump.

1. Click, Mortal (Windows version)
2. Click, Mortal! (Mac OSX version)
3. Click, Mortal! (Linux version)

(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)

Back when I had a tv, I saw a program where Cheetah – the monkey from the 1940′s Tarzan – was in his ape retirement home. He wears pants and smokes cigars, which means it’s a significantly better retirement home than most of the one I’ve been to. Like cats and dentistry, there is no way that you can convince Cheetah to stop smoking those stoogies.

Hey, smoking’s a right.

You can, however, communicate with Koko, the gorilla fluent in sign-language. She’s even demanded that she sees the dentist before; she’s also demanded that people show her their nipples.

I’m not expecting any nipples in my Basic Techniques module, but I do expect the same sort of cross-species confusion. How are those with artistic backgrounds going to get on with the logical thinking processes expected of programmers? Badly, I suspect, from knowing some of my cohort.

Personally, I would like to completely avoid any timewasting with patcher languages. I’m going to nod wisely at your arguments and then point to the smoking chimp wearing a diaper, because there is no way on earth you’ll ever get me to use a patcher language out of choice.

Continuing on, I’d also like to say that I feel this module is going to eat my time right when I don’t have any. I think this should have been the first module in the course, and Theoretical Foundations of Digital Media should have been either special sessions or otherwise shifted. Why?

When I finish this course, people aren’t going to ask me about my views on cyberfeminism. They are going to expect me to work some kind of art-magic, which is what this module is heading towards.

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.

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.