I was asked at the beginning of the year to curate a show at 107 Projects in Redfern. I knew that ISEA2013 was on the near horizon in Sydney (I’m speaking at the conference, and will bore you with those details separately) and thought it would be great timing to hold a [...]
Bret Victor has become a little bit of a hero for me. Previously an interface designer at Apple, it seems that Victor was successful at the tech giant, but realised that his vision and theirs didn’t quite fit together and he left in 2010. He’s now best known for his provocations toward the [...]
This is probably the longest break between posts I’ve ever had on this site. But here’s why:
Distilling the last 12 months of wildly tangental and strictly (self-imposed) literary research into something resembling a clear direction for the next 2-3 years in just 7500 words was tough. But I made it: I’m now a confirmed PhD [...]
Recently, myself and a couple of friends were asked to create an installation piece as part of 107 Projects‘ end of year show. The group exhibition, titled The Christmas Show, was built around the theme of what the Christmas tree means to us in Australia.
For those in the northern hemisphere that are [...]
I have a sign placed prominently above my mailbox: “NO ADVERTISING MATERIAL PLEASE”. It’s regularly ignored, particularly by real estate agents and pizza shops. I decided that a public shaming would be the most effective means of ending the tyranny of wasteful advertising and obviously best served by making some ‘art’. First step is always [...]
There is a potential exhibition in the works, for which I’ve been doing some simple line drawing studies. These are all fairly self-explanatory; I just thought I’d put them up along with their Max patches for others to use.
The first video of each ‘lineDrawer’ is a screen capture of the Max patch, the second [...]
Last month I was asked to present at the fastBREAK event, put together by Vibewire at the Powerhouse Museum on the last Friday of each month. Each fastBREAK is built around a single topic and asks a group of speakers to present their own thoughts on the topic in just five minutes. [...]
It’s been a while since I created anything tangible, so I was chuffed that the HAHA Industries guys asked me to come up with some visuals for their D&D’s Beat Ballroom night at the Sydney Fringe Festival this month. Given creative freedom, I thought it would be a great opportunity to try [...]
I’m posting this purely because I hope it will help someone else with a similar problem. I’d searched high and low online for a solution to a WordPress hacking problem I’d had for the past month or so, and it took a while to piece together what was going on. Hopefully this will take [...]
From what I’m told, this is one of the most difficult stages of PhD study: the literary review. The bounds of knowledge, whilst not infinite, are most definitely not discoverable; the more you seek, the more you realise is out there, waiting like a kraken in the murky depths. Not to mention that the [...]
I’ve been playing with a few different methods of tracking over the past weeks. For now, this has mostly been using the screen coordinates of a mouse to indicate movement, but in time it will be camera tracking which is driving the system (probably via the Kinect). All built in MaxMSP, they’re quite [...]
I had a chat with a friend recently about coming up with a system that drives a lighting rig (more on that another time, hopefully). This system would compliment a music performance, but not in an in-your-face VJ kind of way. It would have more of an abstract, sensory focus and probably be a sit-down [...]
I bought myself a Kinect sensor this week; I haven’t had much chance to really experiment thus far in 2012, and thought this might be a good place to start. That, and the Kinect is one of the less invasive interactive tracking instruments I can think of. I am likely to be creating interactions [...]
…though I’m not sure what it is. It’s the beginning of an idea; one that I need to start speaking out loud before I either forget it, or it’s entirely drowned out by the snowballing, tangental research I’m doing at the moment in an attempt to place my own work in an academic context, as they [...]
Following on from my last post, I recreated a couple more of Josef Albers‘ colour plates from Interaction of Colour. The following Processing sketches give the illusion that they are made up of just two colours. Clicking either will show that the overlaid shapes are in fact a third, different colour [...]
My research has lead me into the dangerous world of perception. So much of how we interpret the world is based on experience, language, culture, and so on – all very subjective words. If this is true, how would someone that cannot communicate through verbal or written means see the world? Do they see, hear, [...]
I think it’s worth my time responding to some of the papers I’m reading at the moment. Not that they particularly need responding to because of any inaccuracies or points of contention, but I’m hoping that it might help to solidify my own position as I start work on my PhD. In short, express my [...]
In 2010, the Finders Keepers markets asked us (Eli Murray, Lukasz Karluk and myself) to create a promotional video of sorts for their talk at Creative Sydney. We used a segment of Eli’s music (otherwise known as Gentleforce) for the clip and I posted it to YouTube. A few days [...]
Not much time for a full-length rant today: I’ve got to come up with an ingenious way to teach the kiddies about variables tonight. Big concept for those starting out with code, and a very important one.
Something that popped up on my Twitter feed that I thought worth noting is an announcement that March [...]
One of the best things about doing a PhD is being able to ‘audit’ classes. This means I can participate in just about any subject I wish, but I’m not bound to complete assessments and the like. Talk about bi-winning.
One of the classes I’m auditing this semester is The Art of Scientific [...]
