Blog posts from 2011

SVK is at the printers…

Here’s what several thousand ultra-violet torches and comic bags look like, which will join with the printed book imminently.

If you haven’t signed-up yet, you can at http://getsvk.com.

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Stand-by for action!

So, week 312, and we’re into the first week of June. We’ve got a very full studio this week, so a lot of weeknotes… here we go.

It’s Simon’s first week here! He’s our new Project Manager, and has been getting to grips with everything we’ve got going on in the office – having lots of meetings with everyone to work out where we are, and working some magic to get us all in order. This is a good thing.

We’ve got Tom Stuart working with us for a few months too. He’s currently working on turning Dimensions 2 into a real life thing, which is totally fantastic to watch as it grows and develops. He’ll be working on a few other bits for us in the coming months.

Matt Jones has been working with Jack & Timo on various aspects of Chaco, keeping an eye on Dimensions 2 as we make progress, and speaking to a lot of people old and new for various projects.

Denise has been working on the production and operations of SVK, which is tantalisingly close to being an actual product in the world. She’s also been working on various bits and bobs for Barringer which continues to bubble along nicely. It’s so nice seeing people smiling at the things on her screen.

Joe finished work on Uinta last week, so we went to the pub. This week he’s got his head stuck into certain aspects of Chaco – drawing a lot and looking at nice books… it’s already looking very, very interesting. That’s why I love this place.

Kari is working on what we now know as ‘the usual’… which turns out is a massive, important, complicated list of things that keep the office and the company running, and us all sane. She also baked some cakes for Simon’s first day on Tuesday which were pretty tasty.

Matt Webb’s been chatting to Simon a lot as we start to hand over project management to his capable hands. He’s also catching up with Dimensions 2, and doing a sterling job keeping us as a company running along.

Nick’s been speaking to a lot of people about Chaco and working with Jack, Timo & Andy on the next few weeks, and working wonders with Availabot & Weminuche.

Jack’s been working on Chaco with Timo, Joe and a few others, and with Timo on a new bit of work.

Andy’s been working on Chaco as well, doing a lot of wrangling with hardware manufacturers, and prodding people about PCBs.

Timo’s also been working on Chaco… doing a lot of prototyping and design exploration which is looking incredible. He’s also been working with Jack on the upcoming bit of video work.

I’ve been working on a couple of last bits for SVK, and getting back into Dimensions 2 – working with our researcher and Tom to help pull everything together, and a bit of Chaco. I also popped out on Tuesday to the LCC for my last session on the project I set some 2nd year FdA students, which I’ll hopefully be writing about on here when it’s all handed in.

James has been working on various aspects of Weminuche in the back room with Nick, Tom and Andy – which I hope we’ll see in our Friday demos. He’s also got a snazzy new pair of trousers.

That’s week 312. A busy studio, a bit of sunshine, and a lot of work. All is well.

So I’m terribly pleased to announce that this week we are formally joined by Andy Huntington. We’ve known Andy for many years and began working with him as “Schulze & Webb” on the Olinda project. More recently, for the last year or so, he’s been designing and prototyping products with us.

Andy’s joining us as a Hardware Producer & Designer. He’ll be shifting between the design landscape and the dark pit of component sourcing, board design and manufacture. No doubt he’ll rub shoulders with Nick too in embedded software stuff. Initially his focus will be split between physical prototyping on Chaco and internal new product development on Barringer.

I first knew Andy during our studies at college. I sat at the next desk. Much of Andy’s work is around design of sound installations and musical instruments. I can only hope that his indentured servitude here can pay back a small percentage of the psychic debt he incurred at college during the development of his tappers project.

tap tap tap……..

tap…

tap..

*solder solder*

tap tap tap…

I still wake up screaming from the taps.

He’s a great force and I can’t wait for him to punch products into the world.

It’s Friday. Here are links to some of what’s been blowing around the studio this week.

There’s an interview Geoffrey Hoyle about his 70’s book 2011: Living in the Future looking back at looking forward with some lovely, yet not altogether pleasing to the author, illustrations. via @futuryst

Jones pointed us to filmonpaper.com, Eddie Shannon’s extraordinary archive of film posters.

Datamoshing rears it’s glitchy head again with Yung Lake – Datamosh via @philgyford and kottke. ‘sCool because it’s nerdy…. And made better by a bit of context in the form of a how to and David O’Reilly’s first compression transitions in 2005.

Timo points to Bluefin labs, an ambitious initiative growing from the Speechome project, building on Deb Roy’s work. Couple that with this and we should be about ready for an O’Reilly Baby Hacks book.

Glorious hues are revered from the golden age of comics and despised in 10 modern movies that are better in black and white.

And if you’re trying to make the most of your space too just be glad you don’t have this much stuff on your desk.

Of course, no week would be complete without an elaborate machine, and this human powered helicopter is quite something.

Happy Weekend!

So. Week 311. A full studio, even without everyone here. Not too full to prevent the entertaining of visitors though.

Timo is away today in Berlin, braving the ash-related disruptions which threatened to keep me out of the studio for the last part of the week. Ash hasn’t kept Chaco away either – here for another couple of days workshopping with Jones and Jack.

Joe has been fleshing out some lovely UI ideas for Uinta bringing this phase to a close. This might leave him with some spare headspace for Jack to fill gleefully. It’ll be great to get his eyes on more things in the coming weeks.

Denise and Alex are valiantly making those final shuffles towards pressing the big PRINT button attached to the SVK machine. There’s black light at the end of the tunnel. Not. Long. Now.

Kari mentioned in our weekly all hands meeting, that this week, like most others, she’ll be doing the usual. We asked her to elaborate. A (partial) explanation followed: year end considerations; ordering parts; chasing project activity; payroll; contracts; property searches; insurance admin… leaving us all somewhat stunned and wholly grateful – spontaneous applause followed.

Nick’s engaged in high and low level project discussions in addition to briefing early-riser Tom Stuart who’s here to add some additional code sauce for a while.

Matthew’s been in contract negotiations, meetings around town, working through project timelines and architectures while bemoaning the lack of a compiler on his laptop. Still, he’s got iTunes and he’s not afraid to use it. Thursday morning’s BPM have nary been so high.

There has been more material exploration, sketching and treatment writing at the hands of Jack and Timo. Jack’s also been working with myself and collaborators to map out the next few weeks for Barringer. Lots of little pushes on a project with many, many parts. Such plans cause me to think in lists – something which has infected this week note.

Jones? Well, in addition to his (extensive) usual, he’s mostly been having his picture taken with William Gibson. Visitors are good.

If you’re the type who makes up a summer reading list, here are a few that you may want to add to it. (Disclaimer: I haven’t read any of these books yet, so including them here does not constitute a personal recommendation.)

The Most Human Human by Brian Christian came to the studio’s attention via Matt Jones. In his review of the book, Peter Merholz says, “It’s a delightful and discursive book, wending its way through cognitive science, philosophy, poetry, artificial intelligence, embodied experience, and more. The author, Brian Christian, writes with a deft touch, in an episodic and occasionally meandering style that feels like you’re taking part in a good conversation.”

The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory, and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School is unlikely to come as a surprise to any adult who would describe their teenage self as a geek. In the book author Alexandra Robbins explains “Quirk Theory”: “many of the differences that cause a student to be excluded in school are the same traits or real-world skills that others will value, love, respect, or find compelling about that person in adulthood and outside of the school setting.” She also looks at how school teachers and administrators may be complicit in propping up conventional ideas of who is popular and who is not. Listen to an NPR interview with Robbins and read the prologue to the book here.

The Great Night by Chris Adrian takes the story of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and retells it, in a manner of speaking, in a San Francisco park setting. The San Francisco Chronicle’s review described it as “droll, dark and challenging”, adding that “through his own form of magical realism, Adrian boisterously and bravely tests the limits of our capacity to ‘actually understand anything’ about suffering and joy.”

Embassytown, the latest from China Miéville, came out earlier this month. Reviewing it in the Guardian, Ursula LeGuin called it a “fully achieved work of art” and said, “In Embassytown, [Miéville’s] metaphor – which is in a sense metaphor itself – works on every level, providing compulsive narrative, splendid intellectual rigour and risk, moral sophistication, fine verbal fireworks and sideshows, and even the old-fashioned satisfaction of watching a protagonist become more of a person than she gave promise of being.”

The Quantum Thief is the first novel from Finnish author Hannu Rajaniemi. It came out in the UK last year but has just been published in the US by Tor Books. In a science fiction round-up in the Guardian, Eric Brown said, “No précis does real justice to Rajaniemi’s unique, post-singularity vision. Nothing is as it is now, and the author makes no concessions to the lazy reader with info-dumps or convenient explanations. Patience is required and rewarded: the author knows his future and reveals it piecemeal with staggering intellectual legerdemain… A brilliant debut.”

It was a busy week last week, so Friday links have rolled over to Tuesday.

Lots of historical things this week. A brilliantly curated and annotated collection of movie title cards and trailers. A work of incredible devotion by Christian Annyas via @LukeScheybeler:

An early colour autochrome photograph of equally early airshows, via Claes Källarsson:

Some early photos of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, Matt Webb says: “There’s something uncanny about these unstudied portraits of people taken before they got to be such presences in the world.”:

And another historical artefact from Steve Jobs on marketing, branding and values, this is why Steve is absolute #1 mind-gangster. Via O’Reilly radar / gnat:

In one of the stranger moments last week Durrell Bishop reminded us of Maggie Thatcher killing a multi-million pound British Airways branding project with a simple gesture:

Week 310 from BERG on Vimeo.

Adam Curtis’ new documentary, All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, drops next Monday (May 23rd) on BBC2. In an interview with Kath Viner in the Guardian, he promises an exploration of the way that power functions in self-organising systems and whether, in fact, systems can self-organise at all in a way that is sustainable.

The documentary’s title comes from a poem of the same name by Richard Brautigan:

I’d like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace

Looks like it will almost certainly be worth a watch. Here’s the trailer:

Consider this a little bit of a call-and-response to our friends through the plasterboard, specifically James’ excellent ‘moodboard for unknown products’ on the RIG-blog (although I’m not sure I could ever get ‘frustrated with the NASA extropianism space-future’).

There are some lovely images there – I’m a sucker for the computer-vision dazzle pattern as referenced in William Gibson’s ‘Zero History’ as the ‘world’s ugliest t-shirt‘.

The splinter-camo planes are incredible. I think this is my favourite that James picked out though…

Although – to me – it’s a little bit 80’s-Elton-John-video-seen-through-the-eyes-of-a-‘Cheekbone‘-stylist-too-young to-have-lived-through-certain-horrors.

I guess – like NASA imagery – it doesn’t acquire that whiff-of-nostalgia-for-a-lost-future if you don’t remember it from the first time round. For a while, anyway.

Anyway. We’ll come back to that.

The main thing, is that James’ writing galvanised me to expand upon a scrawl I made during an all-day crit with the RCA Design Interactions course back in February.

‘Sensor-Vernacular’ is a current placeholder/bucket I’ve been scrawling for a few things.

The work that Emily Hayes, Veronica Ranner and Marguerite Humeau in RCA DI Year 2 presented all had a touch of ‘sensor-vernacular’. It’s an aesthetic born of the grain of seeing/computation.

Of computer-vision, of 3d-printing; of optimised, algorithmic sensor sweeps and compression artefacts.

Of LIDAR and laser-speckle.

Of the gaze of another nature on ours.

There’s something in the kinect-hacked photography of NYC’s subways that we’ve linked to here before, that smacks of the viewpoint of that other next nature, the robot-readable world.

Photo credit: obvious_jim

The fascination we have with how bees see flowers, revealing animal link between senses and motives. That our environment is shared with things that see with motives we have intentionally or unintentionally programmed them with.

As Kevin Slavin puts it – the things we have written that we can no longer read.

Nick’s being playing this week with http://code.google.com/p/structured-light/, and made this quick (like, in a spare minute he had) sketch of me…

The technique has been used for some pretty lovely pieces, such as this music video for Broken Social Scene.

In particular, for me, there is something in the loop of 3d-scanning to 3d-printing to 3d-scanning to 3d-printing which fascinates.

Rapid Form by Flora Parrot

It’s the lossy-ness that reveals the grain of the material and process. A photocopy of a photocopy of a fax. But atoms. Like the 80’s fanzines, or old Wonder Stuff 7″ single cover art. Or Vaughn Oliver, David Carson.

It is – perhaps – at once a fascination with the raw possibility of a technology, and – a disinterest, in a way, of anything but the qualities of its output. Perhaps it happens when new technology becomes cheap and mundane enough to experiment with, and break – when it becomes semi-domesticated but still a little significantly-other.

When it becomes a working material not a technology.

We can look back to the 80s, again, for an early digital-analogue: what one might term ‘Video-Vernacular’.

Talking Heads’ cover art for their album “Remain In Light” remains a favourite. It’s video grain / raw quantel as aesthetic has a heck of a punch still.

I found this fascinating from it’s wikipedia entry:

“The cover art was conceived by Weymouth and Frantz with the help of Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Walter Bender and his MIT Media Lab team.

Weymouth attended MIT regularly during the summer of 1980 and worked with Bender’s assistant, Scott Fisher, on the computer renditions of the ideas. The process was tortuous because computer power was limited in the early 1980s and the mainframe alone took up several rooms. Weymouth and Fisher shared a passion for masks and used the concept to experiment with the portraits. The faces were blotted out with blocks of red colour.

The final mass-produced version of Remain in Light boasted one of the first computer-designed record jackets in the history of music.”

Growing up in the 1980s, my life was saturated by Quantel.

Quantel were the company in the UK most associated with computer graphics and video effects. And even though their machines were absurdly expensive, even in the few years since Weymouth and Fisher harnessed a room full of computing to make an album cover, moore’s law meant that a quantel box was about the size of a fridge as I remember.

Their brand name comes from ‘Quantized Television’.

Awesome.

As a kid I wanted nothing more than to play with a Quantel machine.

Every so often there would be a ‘behind-the-scenes’ feature on how telly was made, and I wanted to be the person in the dark illuminated by screens changing what people saw. Quantizing television and changing it before it arrived in people homes. Photocopying the photocopy.

Alongside that, one started to see BBC Model B graphics overlaid on video and TV. This was a machine we had in school, and even some of my posher friends had at home! It was a video-vernacular emerging from the balance point between new/novel/cheap/breakable/technology/fashion.

Kinects and Makerbots are there now. Sensor-vernacular is in the hands of fashion and technology now.

In some of the other examples James cites, one might even see ‘Sensor-Deco’ arriving…

Lo-Rez Shoe by United Nude

James certainly has an eye for it. I’m going to enjoy following his exploration of it. I hope he writes more about it, the deeper structure of it. He’ll probably do better than I am.

Maybe my response to it is in some ways as nostalgic as my response to NASA imagery.

Maybe it’s the hauntology of moments in the 80s when the domestication of video, computing and business machinery made things new, cheap and bright to me.

But for now, let me finish with this.

There’s both a nowness and nextness to Sensor-Vernacular.

I think my attraction to it – what ever it is – is that these signals are hints that the hangover of 10 years of ‘war-on-terror’ funding into defense and surveillance technology (where after all the advances in computer vision and relative-cheapness of devices like the Kinect came from) might get turned into an exuberant party.

Dancing in front of the eye of a retired-surveillance machine, scanning and printing and mixing and changing. Fashion from fear. Quantizing and surprising. Imperfections and mutations amplifying through it.

Beyonce’s bright-green chromakey socks might be the first, positive step into the real aesthetic of the early 21st century, out of the shadows of how it begun.

Let’s hope so.