Pop tarts are a form of sugary pastry sold by Kellogg’s. The achieved a small amount of notoriety in the early 1990’s, in the UK at least, for burning the hands of a kid who’d microwaved his. The site of this child, waving his bandaged hands at the camera, was probably a sigte of great pathos for many people. I never saw it. I did, however, hang out a lot in Stevenage, with people who knew the poor pop-tart scarred kid, and therefore pop tarts are forever linked in my mind to people doing unpitying renditions of the words “I didn’t know it was going to be hot” in the most moronic Stevenage accent possible.

According to wikipedia, the US Forces dropped 2.4 million pop-tarts on Afghanistan in 2001. Currently, you can only buy two out of the total of forty-three flavours of pop tarts in the UK, those being Chocolate and Strawberry. There is no information on wikipedia as to what flavours native Afghan’s received in 2001.

My presentation was done with the entire aim of reproducing my thinking structure. I did consider adding a distracting audio element to it as well, in order to allow people to experience the jarring cuts in concentration I seem to suffer, but I thought that it would be taking it a little far, and anyway, I needed to be talking about my program, rather than anything else. Sadly, as noted in part one, I didn’t have a great deal of success to talk about.

In terms of the presentation and it’s marking, I have to feel some regret that I couldn’t have produced a working version of the program at that point. Nor that I could show a clarity of aesthetic; however, I think my aesthetic sympathies during the course of the taught module have run more towards the conceptual idea as represented by text rather than the visual. What use is the visual in the age of repetitive machine-produce images? And how can the aesthetic idea compete against the barrage of the new?

I think that the best of communication in this period is to resort to clear thinking and simple communication. To that end, showing text to others is the clearest way, so that your thought processes can be evaluated in a simple way at the leisure of others. Whilst I have some issues with essays as a form of academic measurement, I do not have a problem with a longer or shorter form of idea and expression; where original thought can be laid out for the use of others.

It is this projects aim of laying out original thought in a special way that I have been aiming for. My lack of ability to achieve that with programming is not the issue for me, except in terms of earning marks (and without those marks I’ll not pass the course, something which does give me ‘the fear’). What I have achieved is an ability to deal with and understand lumps of text that I have generated. You can read the presentation as I planned it in the attached file, and I’ll discuss the knock-on affects of this text assimilation in part three, the grandiose titled “Life, NCL.AC.UK and Everything”.

PDF Download of Presentation:

basic_tech_pres
ADDENDUM: The reason that this article/blogpost talks about poptarts – as I forgot to mention why I spiralled off into such a diversion – is stress. During times of biological and physiological stress our bodies seek out sugary and fatty foods, which are not necessarily the best thing for us to eat at such times. However, having just moved, I treated myself to a packet of Pop Tarts whilst restocking my kitchen, and found myself hooked on their sugar content. In between starting woefully at code that I was growing to loath, I occupied the vacant space in my belly with glucose and inverted syrup, and felt almost like a true hacker (although the last true hacker I met was just coming off a vegetarian rice-only diet, which is far away from the stereotypical programmers food consumption as depicted in media).

It doesn’t work.

However, this is a defeatist attitude. Not quite as defeatist as I’ve been considering (it doesn’t work, I’m never going to understand regex, and I’m going to stop bothering with programming being the other considered viewpoint).

On the other hand, sometimes the ways that it doesn’t work make no sense to me. For instance, one piece of code I wrote matched the string being read to a specific string, and incremented a counter once using the ‘++’ function. Except that it didn’t, it decided to increment the counter 559 times, and then it decided that all the words I was looking for were all there, 559 times.

Back to the drawing board from that code then. I really thought that loop was going to work as well; it had all the indications of when and where, as it cycled through the newly created string array that contained the compartmentalised (granulised?) longer string.

Then, when that failed I was back at regex. And I now hate regex deeply and purely, for being such a dense science that needs introduction. A big ‘thanks’ to everybody who pointed me at the same damn impenetrable tutorial. I sort of wish I’d chosen to do a project with Arduino controlled rockets instead, because whilst rocket science might have a reputation for being hard it never involves typing a string of impenetrable characters into a search box and hoping against hope that this would be the last leap. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XBwWAu2a5U)

Even the more seasoned programmers threw some askance glances at my code when they saw the way that splitTokens() works – ie, you throw all the tokens you want to use to split up the text together in a big line. For me, this was the lump of code ” ,.?!;: “, which I’d inherited from Daniel Shiffman’s example code in “Learning Processing”. This actually made a lot more sense to me than the output of match().

According to it’s documentation, Match() outputs an array if the sequence searched for matches what is in the inputted string. It outputs a an array “if the sequence did match, an array is returned. If there are groups (specified by sets of parentheses) in the regexp, then the contents of each will be returned in the array. Element [0] of a regexp match returns the entire matching string, and the match groups start at element [1] (the first group is [1], the second [2], and so on).”

Okay: first problem. Putting parentheses in doesn’t make it work with multiple choices. I guess we can swap over to matchAll() for that, but without multiple parentheses and therefore multiple choices, what point is the items returned as an array? It could, surely, be a yes/no answer? In fact, it returns an array which flummoxed me for several days as I realised that no matter what I put into the string as input, it always returned the same value. Two.

Searching for the word ‘will’ in the phrase “Inside will a tag, you will find will will content” will only ever return the value of two. Or rather, the value of ‘yes’ transmuted into ‘two’ by way of the length of an array, which is an entirely erroneous way of doing it. Almost as erroneous as the previous way of counting through the text as a string and looking at each individual part and then counting them (again, erroneously – to the tune of 559). Balls.

In my presentation – which I guess I’ll be covering in Basic Tech II (The Poptart at the End of the Universe) – I was told by Atau that I was only a half step away from solving a few of the problems. Maybe. I can see a functioning end to this problem, just not from here. Should I use the match function and the logic structure that I’ve been working on? There’s no guarantee that the logic structure will even work (559!) Five-five-nine! My least best guess is that my Macbook wants to emigrate to the People’s Republic of China and move to computing division 559.

In his essay, “DIY: The Militant March of Technology”, Marcin Ramocki links the means of production in the information age to the classical Marxist model, and then goes on to posit that New Media art works are one way of countering the alienation of labour that Marx claimed as an effect of the industrial age. He writes:

“The work happening right now comes from the first generation born into a world with personal computers, video games and the internet and on-line media. Their first frame of reference is not the linear narrative of a film but an algorithmic one of a game or a website. There is no more reverence toward technology: there is a need to question and make sense of it.”

This new generation’s attitude toward computers, media, and technology is one that is seen in the willingness to deconstruct and reconstruct the tools of the information age for individual purposes. Sometimes, these purposes serve the community of makers and doers that enable modern interaction with technology, leading to Open-Source tools such as programming languages. Sometimes, these purposes are artistic, in which case they can be presented in a gallery (or other arts-related) setting.

In one sense, the willingness of artists to work with these tools was predicted by Nam June Paik, an early adopter of technology within the artistic milieu, when he said “ Some day artists will work with capacitors, resistors and semi-conductors as they work today with brushes, violins and junk”, although he could not have known from his vantage point in the sixties the importance of computers half a century later.

But those working today do; whether in art or any other field, the computer is a ubiquitous object, both at home and in the workplace. It is this ubiquitousness that makes them invisible (when they work) and therefore give no reason for the lay-person to investigate them further than as objects for work or leisure, depending on the location they encounter a computer.

Ramocki refers to hackers – by which I mean the people who do investigate computers, rather than in a criminal sense of the word – as “individuals who rise above the proletarian alienation of labor (sic) and fully embrace… the means of production, their hardware and software.” Political context of his language aside, his writing mirrors a growing trend in contemporary culture to return to the making of things, as opposed to the packaged product that consumer society provides.

Examples of this include the magazine Make, which exists to educate it’s audience about DIY technology projects, encouraging it’s readers to “void the warranty” in order to make something new, and a raft of new books encouraging creative actions such as cupcake making, textiles, and other activities.

If the computer, as a packaged object, becomes the modern-day locus of alienation, then it is not surprising that there is a backlash against that which comes pre-packaged. It is to be expected that there are those questioning the relevance of technology in their creative lives, and that as a flip-side, those reclaiming the technology by making it the site of their creativity.

Richard Colson’s introductory text to digital art lists six major themes of the field: history, using responses (which he also refers to as live art), data, coding, networking and digital hybrids. And yet even these deliberately wide-open themes still have trouble containing all of the varied approaches to art and technology happening in the contemporary artworld.

As part of my basic techniques module I wanted to work on something quite simple. I’ve broken it down into lots of smaller chunks, and this chunk that I’ve been working on refers to how you would move the data gathered from counting words within a text to a graphical display.

Here I’ve used a ellipse to represent a number between zero and three-hundred and sixty. The finished project won’t have that sort of word limit, and the use of an ellipse would not be a good design feature, but for the purposes of this sketch it works pretty well. Some of the important parts are that the sketch communicates the values from inside a for loop (which, in the final project, will count through the words of the document as an array), it uses rollover style data display, and it has a selection of choices from which you can pick to display different data.

Obviously, this is a mock-up in several different ways, and the data doesn’t actually mean anything – it’s more an experiment to see the data and see how it would be crafted in Processing. Some things that I’m not happy with are the immense amount of code that it takes to do the rollover affect (should that be a class by itself?) and the placement of the text above the smaller arcs. I also think that the actually main display could be better, by rounding off the value to a straight int rather than a four-point decimal.

Click on the image above to see the sketch in action and to download the source code.

What is the best way of storing a number next to a word?

I want to scan through a document and look for specfic words. I’ve stored the words in a string array. I thought that the best way to deal with the storage of the words would be to create a two dimensional array and store the words in the first array, and the amount of the word searched for in the second array.

This is not so good, actually, because I made a fatal misunderstanding about two dimensional arrays. The first array is more like an index, so where I thought I was creating…

word searched for     count
(and) (one)
(if)    (six)
(or)    (two)…

etc

I was actually creating a grid like so…

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 (number of words in conjoiner)
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 (first thing)
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1  (second thing)

I’m still not at the stage where I’m understanding what is completely going on, but after a brief chat with Tom Schofield, whose project is doing much the same thing as mine (but perhaps more complicated) he pointed me to some examples in the Orange processing book.

Still not quite getting it to match though. Will have to work on that.

One of the things that I’m worried here is that I’m not getting enough room to play. I’ve come into the project with a defined outcome already, and that means that there is very little exploration. In some ways that is a good thing; I don’t end up messing around with for loops again, but in other ways it’s bad as I don’t get to, say, spend time creating a lovely fading display of all the words in the “pieces” array.

On the other hand, the side project with the buttons has made some forward progress. Using the same void bigtext() that I’ve written for the main project, I’ve linked the program together in a way that allows the buttons to change colour. So far, so plain… but! I’ve also solved the horrible slow text problem.

You see, I had two different types of text font, and I think that was slowing down the program immensely. I might do some tests to work out if this is so, but if it is the case, I might use a png file to generate the larger text wanted for the project, and fade that in and out using transparency.

orange_text_example-090428a

buttons_test-090428a

printreader_again-090428a

James Hugonin is an artist who lives in Northumbria, and makes paintings that reflect his surroundings by taking the predominant colour for each day and painting a square in that colour. This is very procedural art, and therefore it lends itself very well to make a computer program that does the same thing.

This would probably annoy the bejesus out of Hugonin. Sadly, this is not my concern, as this is another exercise set my Jamie Allan, my tutor. Obviously, if you’ve seen my last piece of work for him, you might be getting concerned that Jamie is actually running some form of art world Project Mayhem, and that all graduates of the DM course will be changing their name to Bob soon. This is probably not the case.

I am Pete’s complete lack of surprise.

If you’re going to procedurally fake something, why just fake one? Therefore I set the program to stop cranking out fakes at a thousand. The colour’s a bit off, as if Hugonin had suddenly found his Northumbrian idle surrounded by flesh tones, but it holds together. The video ends up being 8.20 long, with two “paintings” every second.

(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.