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Ars Ingenero

[The above images are produced by the same code which I ran three times for exactly the same amount of time (3 seconds) in the Processing environment. They are all different and although I wrote the code, I had no idea what the final outcomes will look like. ]

Creative coding or creative data - the latest obsessions of the creative industries in the digital economy. Cannes launched a new Innovative Lion award this year dubbed “Creative Data��. Also intriguing sounding job descriptions and titles are popping up in top tech places or agencies e.g. ‘Creative Technologist’ or ‘Creative Coder’. The order or hierarchy of the art and science implied in these descriptions is still unclear. They could mean an artist who uses code as another ‘drawing tool’ or they could mean programmers who uses code creatively. The output is also unclear as these could be data vis or actual applications or an ‘art piece’ or a performance or all of those??

‘Generative Art’ provides a useful practice-research framework of operationalising and working through all of these questions in a more sustained way. It refers to both a category of art and a process. It involves, I think, approaching creativity with computational thinking. It can apply to visual or sound arts and a key feature is its emergent property. In the design world, it has been deployed productively with Casey Reas and Ben Fry’s Processing environment. The images above are produced in Processing: I wrote the code as a set of instructions about drawing randomised rectangles, circles and colour and Processing did the rest!

David Cope, a scientist-musical composer, uses its principles for his “experiments in musical intelligence”. He has a nice explanation for Generative Art which provides some food for thought:

In Latin, 'ars ingenero' means 'generative art.' ... The complex systems used to produce it develop self-organizing behavior in the digital realm in many ways like the life we experience in the biological realm; beginning simple and developing over quadrillions of generations producing a kind of evolution. Thus, these pictures do not represent CGI (computer-generated images) as the term is usually meant. CGI uses algorithms to achieve particular end results that could not be produced by non-computational methods. Generative art involves the emergence of unpredictable outcomes. In other words, outcomes over which the user has little or no control except in choosing the starting conditions for their creation and picking the output I prefer to exhibit. In essence, this art originates from a computer rather than a computer acting as a tool to produce to a particular result. Like any art, visual or otherwise, the images here are meant to evoke responses from viewers. Like any art, there exists no one-to-one correlation between intended and actual responses. Some viewers, of course, will react predictably by predetermining them as senseless simply by knowing their process of creation. They will decide that what they see results from random behavior, even when the opposite is true. Every color, line, and shape is completely determined.

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Winchester March: A strategic alignment with the 'creative class'.

Winchester, being one of the poshest towns in the UK, is no bastion of socialist schemes. So seeing so many at the march this morning against the Silver Hill development felt exciting and strange in equal measure. I think people were surprised at the high turnout [over 1000]. The irony of a protest march made up of largely upper middle class folks was not lost on some - a very nice lady in her 60s muttered "I've got my hand grenade in my purse just in case".

In a nutshell, Silver Hill is a hack job /scheme of urban regeneration devised by the Council and predatory developers for a substantial area in central Winchester. It comprises of nearly 300 luxury homes and mall-style retail space which will lead to the destruction of the bus station and damage to archeological Roman remains dotted around area. And like so many regeneration schemes in London, e.g. the Heygate estate, affordable housing is but one broken promise after another. In contrast to earlier plans to ensure at least 100 affordable homes, Silver Hill developers' affordable provision (rents below market levels) is now dependent on achieving "a profit level of 15 per cent" and there are absolutely no plans for social housing on the site.

What I found interesting is the march's emphasis on 'context'. During the march's speeches, there were a lot of noises against the monolithic ugliness of Silver Hill and its jarring with the historic 'face' of Winch. A lot of the issues mentioned during the march, in contrast to the media discourse, seemed to hinge around design and architecture rather than say, schools, or where to rehabilitate and house offenders released from the horribly inadequate prison on Romsey road. In the Winchester Deserves Better campaign website, I found a document that outlines what the site should contain instead of Silver Hill. This list includes: "a permanent indoor market, small independent and artisan shops, an art gallery, outdoor performance space, low cost office spaces including a 'business incubator'". These are obviously seen as more fitting with the 'context' of the city. There was a lot less mention of social housing during the march as compared to local media coverage of Silver Hill. And I wondered why. Whose context is it?

A lot on the list wouldn't be entirely out of place with Richard Florida's ideas about creative class and creative cities - a topic I taught last week. Many of the vociferous criticisms of Florida urban planning schemes debunk his recommendations [upping the 'bohemian index', artsy scenes, street markets, irregular quirky architecture etc] as disguised neoliberal hogwash that ultimately leads to social displacement (gentrification), cultural exclusion/intimidation (hipsterisation) and inequality. So the question is, with all that emphasis the non-monolithic and the beautiful, are Winch campaigners demands doing more to drive the city towards the 'Florida Way' than bring about social justice and equality? It wouldn't be difficult for property developers to make those concerned with 'context' happy by bringing in faux-old, quirky and charming architecture, pave the streets with artisan markets and hip art galleries, whilst at the same time aiding the exclusion of affordable housing in the name of profit.

Having lived in Hackney's now-famous Chatsworth Road both before and after it became labelled the "frontline of gentrification", I feel hugely ambivalent about gentrification. Personally I don't miss the fear of walking down home at night after drive-by shootings and at the same time, since Chatsworth's dramatic overhaul, even if I decide to move back to Hackney I am pretty sure I cannot afford to rent there now. Thus I also hold no romantic illusions about street markets and artisanal shops; indeed, small and independent does not necessarily mean inclusive and 'authentic', whatever the latter means.

My conclusion is this: urban regeneration x social justice involves messy and uncertain politics. For now, building a coalition of resistance around design and architecture - i.e. the geography and 'scene' of the creative class - is probably far more likely to gather critical mass needed to make the Winch Council pay attention. As Max Nathan said, Florida is not always wrong, that some of his arguments are "right in the wrong way". Neither creativity or creative class should determine a city's significance but it doesn't mean creative class-like 'things' don't matter. The deeper and more important long term goal of the march is this: democratic process. Amongst the divided voices of the march's organisers, they are united in their anger that "public consultations" on such regeneration schemes increasingly played out merely as performative exercises for rubber stamping decisions already made by the Council. Until the public is actually really consulted in workings of the Council, the march may have to be strategically Floridian. There is a trade-off in that the politics of an event like today's march becomes politically conservative, but I guess it is better than no march at all.

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David Foster Wallace on Native Advertising

[DFW's reflections on a promo cruise liner essay, sans disclosure]

"This is extremely bad.  Here is the argument for why it is bad.  Whether it honors them well or not, an essay’s fundamental obligations are supposed to be to the reader. The reader, on however unconscious a level, understands this, and thus tends to approach an essay with a relatively high level of openness and credulity. But a commercial is a very different animal. Advertisements have certain formal, legal obligations to truthfulness, but these are broad enough to allow for a great deal of rhetorical maneuvering in the fulfillment of an advertisements primary obligation, which is to serve the financial interests of its sponsor. Whatever attempts an advertisement makes to interest and appeal to its readers are not, finally, for the reader’s benefit. And the reader of an ad knows all this, too – that an ad’s appeal is by its very nature calculated – and this is part of why our state of receptivity is different, more guarded, when we get ready to read an ad.

An ad that pretends to be be art is – at absolute best – like somebody who smiles at you warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what’s sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwills’s real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill.  It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared.  It causes despair."

David Foster Wallace, 1996, Harper's Magazine

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Painted Eyebrow Trends in Tang Dynasty

This is a chart showing different eyebrow trends in the Tang Dynasty. It’s based on a chart in Chinese Clothing by Hua Mei and Gao Chunming (2004), on pg 37. I wanted to create a chart that had the eyebrows on faces. Interesting notes "Women of the Tang Dynasty paid particular attention to facial appearance, and the application of powder or even rouge was common practice. Some women’s foreheads were painted dark yellow and the dai (a kind of dark blue pigment) was used to paint their eyebrows into different shapes that were called dai mei(painted eyebrows) in general. There were literally a dozen ways to pait the eyebrows and between the brows there was a colourful decoration called hua dian, which was made of specks of gold, silver and emerald feather.” (5000 Years of Chinese Costume, 77) "…during the years of Yuanho in the reign of Xuanzong the system of costumes changed, and women no longer applied red powder to their faces; instead, they used only black ointment for their lips and made their eyebrows like like the Chinese character ‘八’." (5000 Years of Chinese Costume, 77) The black lipstick style “was called the ‘weeping makeup’ or ‘tears makeup’.” (Chinese Clothing by Hua Mei, 37)

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Academic style characteristically avoids the use of the pronoun "I". It substitutes "I" with the bombastic (although apparently modest) "we", or by "one," a pronoun that makes no commitments. I will not deny it has its own beauty. It is the beauty of rigor, which is not necessarily rigor mortis.

Flusser, 1967

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My Facebook network

Did a bit of practice-research today and was playing around with data visualisation tools today and made one of my FB network! You're looking at all my 209 friends and 998 connections. Blobs are people. Lines are friendships. The bigger the blob, it means that this particular friend of mine knows a whole load of friends in my network too. Kind of like a hub. It kind of makes sense that the biggest blob [that purple-ly pink one in the middle] in my network is a very old friend from my old university in Singapore who also moved to the UK around the time that I did. So he knows most of the people in my world. The colours represent sub-communities:

top right light blue bit is most of my friends from living in Hackney;

far left in darker blue are work colleagues;

bottom cluster of red are my uni friends;

bottom green secondary school mates.

I haven't really worked out how to 'weight' these friendships on Facebook in terms of the range and quality of interactions - this would affect the thickness and direction of the lines. Might try it out for class next time.

Beyond producing a pretty picture and being a spectacular way to procrastinate on more important things I should be doing - like writing my research paper - it's actually quite a useful exercise. Fiddling about with the Gephi application helped sharpened my thinking about the overall structure of networks and more specifically, it helps me to understand the logic of how, in any given social network, analysts derive quantitative measures of individuals based on connections, degrees of separation, intensities, and spread. Basically what a so-called network effect looks like.

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Relations of power are not something bad in themselves...I don't believe there can be a society without relations of power, if you understand them as means by which individuals try to conduct, to determine the behaviour of others. The problem is not of trying to dissolve them in the utopia of a perfectly transparent communication, but to give one's self the rules of law, the techniques of management, and also the ethics, the ethos, the practice of self, which would allow these games of power to be played with a minimum of domination.

Foucault, 1984. 

[good to remember: power not the same as domination]

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"the content of any medium is always another medium" - McLuhan

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Here’s How ‘Big Data’ Can Really Hurt The Poor Eileen Sullivan (@esullivanap), Huffington Post, 26 April 2014 "While big data is revolutionizing commerce and government for the better, it is also supercharging the potential for discrimination."

Big Questions for Social Media Big Data:...

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Sad Selfies

I love this. Got this zine in the post from Pete today. It was only a matter of time before selfies got trans-remediated by zines. And the bar is set HIGH. :) "One can outwit the camera's rigidity. One can smuggle human intentions into its program that are not predicted by it. One can force the camera to create the unpredictable, the improbable, the informative...Freedom is playing against the camera"

- Flusser

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Breakfast Sundays are the best.

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this video is getting me through marking essays. 

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"Happy low resolution pixels take over the production"

Apparently by the end of 2015 you can buy drones on leashes that look like this. Helps journalists take aerial photos. Reminded me of heads / pixels dancing around a screen.  More interesting questions: is this a selfie game-changer? is that leash calibrated for the correct distance for a good resolution capture of your mug? Face-o-graphers all over the world wanna know! 

[Image from Rhizome. From Hito Steyerl's show at the ICA - well worth seeing btw. ]

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Doodle scatter plots my student tutorials. 

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So, one thing we can learn from Thatcherism is that, in this day and age, in our kind of society, politics is either conducted ideologically, or not at all. Thatcherism has put in play a range of different social and economic strategies. But it has never for a moment neglected the ideological dimension. Privatisation, for example, has many economic and social payoffs. But it is never advanced by Thatcherism without also being constructed ideologically ('Sid', the 'share-owning democracy' etc). There is no point in giving people tax cuts unless you also sell it to them as part of the 'freedom' package.

Stuart Hall, 1988. The Hard Road to Renewal. 

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I am not a writer, a philosopher, a great figure of intellectual life: I am a teacher.

Michel Foucault, 1982

yes

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blogs access key features of communicative capitalism: the intensification of mediality in reflexive networks (communicating about communicating), the emergence of “whatever beings”; (beings who belong but not to anything in particular), and the circulation of affect (as networks generate and amplify spectacular effects). This access not only draws out the challenges to political organization under current conditions but also highlights the imperative for actually undertaking such organizing rather than presuming it will simply emerge: the very practices of media we enjoy, the practices that connect us to others and ostensibly end our alienation, appropriate and reassemble our longings into new forms of exploitations and control.

Jodi Dean, 2010 Blog Theory.