I’m George’s Blog

Just a few quick links that’ll let you know what I’ve been up to:

http://flickr.com/photos/imgeorge/
Penance to Kris Cohen who gave me a free Pro account only to be dismayed at how long it was taking me to use it.

http://www.rcainteractiondesign.org
Congratulations to all the second years that have just passed their final exams, an invitation to come see The Show for everyone else.

http://www.imgeorge.org/wiki/index.php?n=Topics.J2MEDevelopment
A wiki page I’ve started to document writing J2ME applications for mobile phones.

http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/archive/CuratingImmaterialitySystems/
The webcast of the Curating, Immateriality, Systems conference I attended at the beginning of the month, some really good presentations I will be working into my dissertation. I recommend the final questions panel if you want a quick overview of the day.

http://www.submerge.org.uk/industryawards/
Lucy and I have entered Pindices and Making a Difference at the University of Plymouth. Here’s hoping.

http://www.imgeorge.org/blog/assets/leavingparty.jpg
For all those following the R.C.A. Interaction Design shake-up – it’s official. For all the staff that have seen us through the past year – a very big thank you! For Lucy and Nina – there’ll always be a blog category here for you.

Just a quick post before I dash off for the bank holiday weekend…

Blogradio is now online!

This is only the version 0.1 release but I’ve completely rebuilt it using Open Source ready to release the code and installation instructions to the world. For those that don’t know what Blogradio is…

Blogradio combines the most recent Blogger.com audio posts into one online radio station to provide an answerphone for the world.

Better yet, visit the site, click the big banner at the top that says ‘Click to play’ and listen in using iTunes or whatever application you prefer.

If you hear something you like, you can find the author’s blog by clicking on the link under ‘Currently Playing’ or ‘Recently Played’.

There’s lots more to do but take a look, have a listen and see if you like.

Being really interested in phenomena that engage their audience in their mode of production (e.g. Open Source Software, Flickr, generative production, net-art, etc.) I spend most of my time at college contemplating software and online communities. I often get a lot of grief for this practice and I’m still not quite sure why, maybe it’s because it reminds people of the course’s old name – Computer Related Design. So imagine my delight to discover that for my latest brief I had been paired with Kris Cohen, a research fellow at the University of Surrey’s Sociology Department, Incite. Kris is currently researching photography on the internet, in particular photoblogs and Flickr and was effectively looking at my research (and dissertation) topics from a different angle. It was hard for us to stop talking during the 4 day project but the expectation that we would present something last Friday pushed us into quite an interesting experiment.

We spent most of our time looking at the difference between successful and unsuccessful attempts at making creative production more open or public and decided to create an experiment designed to extract people’s aversions to things like public publishing and Copyleft. Choosing Sociology as the test field for it’s strong academic ties and history as a peer-reviewed science we transferred a 1970s sociological study (including coding) from an impenetrable online archive to this Flickr account. We then interviewed several sociologists to see how they felt about the process of tagging (which is already common practice for many sociologists), interlinking and then publishing their data in a public space. We also wanted to get some feedback from the Flickrati to see how they felt about Flickr being used to tag text in this way. There are some comments over at Flickr and some on Kris’ blog and we have started to collate the responses for further study. Hopefully when we’ve both had time to digest last week’s conversations and interviews you’ll hear from us again.

I’d also like to give a big thank you to Kris for upgrading my Flickr account to a Pro account – I’ll be moving my old photo archive (colour and black and white) over just as soon as I get a chance.

As college winds up for easter and the freelance work dips down briefly in-between jobs the to-do list has cleared out and it’s time to fill you in on what’s been eating my time for the last month.

Pindices

Pindices.org is my second time working with Lucy Kimbell, the last time was back in Plymouth while I was working on the Arch-OS: Software for Buildings project. This time round we’ve made something a bit more complex and a lot prettier. I’ll let Lucy explain what the site aims to do:

Personal Political Indices (Pindices) is a project by sociologist Andrew Barry and artist Lucy Kimbell. It tries to design ways to make political or citizenship activity visible, by asking individuals what acts they perform week to week. Through a gallery project and a website, participants are invited to make public their own activity and how they make sense of it.

You’ll see one of the outputs of the site to the left of this post – click the badge to see a more in-depth analysis of my political activity.

I have to give out a big thank you to a really good friend of mine, Lee Parry, who’s responsible for all of the client-side design and construction. I’ve wanted to work with him on an interesting project for a while now and I think you might be seeing some more interesting stuff from us just as soon as we can make the time.

Interaction Design Interim Show

So, before I’ve even had time to put up some documentation of my BlogRadio project, let alone its appearance in the Interim Show Regine from we-make-money-not-art.com has beaten me to it. Now all I need is a couple of days to fix up the code (after only two and a half days of production it’s functional but rests somewhere between the alpha and beta stages) and a machine external to college to host it on – the R.C.A. is following the popular trend of tightening its firewall so tight that I can’t get a signal out without a bit of a rethink.

Ways of Working 2 conference

And right in the thick of freelance and Interim Show panic what did I do? Booked myself into a conference of course! Thankfully this one was quite good and I managed to recognise some friendly faces through my bleary, wired eyes. I got to meet Prodromos Tsiavos from creativecommons.org.uk who assured us that the U.K. versions of the creative commons licenses should be online really soon, Stewart Home pointed out that you didn’t really have to worry about Copyright if you’re a Communist or don’t have enough money to be worth suing and Lawrence Liang made clear how advanced the appropriation markets are in India.

Data Browser contribution

Which leads nicely onto the news that a page from my Wiki will soon be appearing in DATA Browser 02: Engineering Culture. The page is the precursor to a series of workshops demonstrating how to appropriate consumer technology which will hopefully highlight the power relationships of the consumer=producer marketing model. Explore the Wiki for a more in-depth explaination.

Dissertation

So in amongst all the above I also had to squeeze out another project at college that I haven’t even mentioned yet and a proposal for my dissertation. I’ll save the project for when I’ve done some proper documentation and just give you my dissertation proposal:

Free, Libre, Open Source Software and Creativity in Programming

Through an in-depth look at the history of how the Free, Libre and Open Source software (FLOSS) publishing models have developed and several case studies of how particular FLOSS projects have mutated during this time, this paper will look at the state of creativity in software production.

By making objective predictions as to what this history points to, the intention is to answer the question: Will the cultural impact of FLOSS result in software programming being seen as a more creative act?

If you have any recommendations of essays, books, papers, etc. I should read or people I should talk to please let me know.

A few people have asked me what I’ve been up to at the R.C.A. recently and as it will probably be a little while until I get a chance to properly document the projects I thought I should provide a little synopsis for each. So starting with the most recent, here we go:

Blogradio

This is the project I’m currently working on, due to be presented this Thursday. It has the preliminary strap-line An Answerphone for the world and builds on the work of Andy Carvin and Blogger.com in the field of Mobcasting.

For those that don’t know, Mobcasting allows you to call a number from your mobile phone and leave a short message that is instantly posted as an mp3 blog entry. See Andy’s essay When Mobile Podcasting Leads to Mobcasting or the Mobcasting blog to see how it works (scroll down for some audio posts).

The idea behind Blogradio is to aggregate (without any editorial process) all of the current day’s audio posts and stream them as an online radio station. Quite a simple republishing of existing content you might be thinking but the desire is to remove the burden of discovery for the user. By creating a stream of the posts you can listen in to many disparate and often very personal views of the world. If you hear something you like then you’ll be able to visit the Blogradio website and follow a link to the original post and blog.

Geekclock

A one week project that produced a product I really want to explore further, the Geekclock. It’s simply an alarm clock with two buttons and it’s own programming language based on E.C.M.A. Script.

By using the bundled programming environment you’re no longer restricted to setting your clock to the exact time or as I personally prefer 5 to 10 minutes fast, you’re free to create as many rules and conditions as you like. As an example using Geekclock I can set my clock to be 10 minutes fast in the morning but always show the right time on the hour so I don’t miss the news. I can set one button to turn off the alarm but only after it has been ringing for 20 seconds (I have the ability to turn off my normal alarm clock in my sleep). Time scaling is also possible allowing you to make 1 hour last 2 or vice versa.

But the Geekclock isn’t just a revolution in personal timekeeping, you can use it to explore emergent properties by building in so many rules that you can no longer predict the outcome. Or, you can use it to teach yourself Procedural Literacy within a highly simplified environment.

HelpLinux

The HelpLinux project was a response to a case study of Grizedale Arts in the Lake District, UK. Like many small arts organisations the staff have a fairly progressive attitude towards Free/Open Source Software (F.O.S.S.) but lack the technical ability to manage a shift that would result in more public money being spent on creative output. HelpLinux was devised to support an online community of non-technical computer users that wanted to move to and support F.O.S.S.

Using processes currently in place for specific F.O.S.S. projects such as Ubuntu Linux and the Firefox browser, the HelpLinux website allows small organisations to post bounties for programming work, offer usability testing or contribute to a Wiki discussion of what is needed in Linux in order for them to switch from proprietary software.

For those that want to support F.O.S.S. with the absolute minimum amount of effort I also designed a small application that would monitor computer use and post application usage statistics to the HelpLinux website so developers can see which proprietary applications need a F.O.S.S. alternative in order for people to migrate.

iPod Notes for the Serpentine

iPod Notes for the Serpentine started out by looking at how the Serpentine Gallery could promote itself to the numerous people that can be seen jogging or walking through Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens wearing iPods. It ended up producing four different uses for the iPod’s Notes feature (If you have an iPod navigate to Extras – Notes to see the Notes feature).

Apart from the obvious replication of publicity text in the Notes format, I also prototyped a method for distributing audio interpretations of work currently on show in the gallery, an archive of audio pieces previously commissioned by the gallery and an extension of the gallery’s curatable space to the iPods of the public passing through the park.

Using a similar method to Podcasting I also constructed an application that would automatically load audio and note content onto an iPod as soon as it is placed in a dock so that the distribution of the content is as simple as possible.

Electronics Week

I’m still trying to find the video footage of the superb project that I made with Yumiko Tanaka during our first week of electronics at the R.C.A.

Called Second Guess, it’s a simple game where you have to lower and then raise a handheld strip of LEDs that show you how close you got to guessing exactly one second. Hard to explain but you’ll get it when I find the video.