Category DM Course

Don’t talk to me about your fucking arduino*

I just realised that I’ve been living with new media technologies as the locum of “what I’m doing in the art world” for the past seven years. And that I’m totally sick of them. So I deleted 97 feeds from my RSS reader. What I’m bored of is people who don’t understand the difference between [...]

Loose Writing on Suburbia, Computing, Design, and a Lack of Variance

“Eighty percent of everthing ever built in America has been built in the last fifty years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading” James Howard Kunstler What are hackerspaces? I don’t mean in terms of physical location, but in terms of what societal function do they have? Deyan Sudjic’s new [...]

Adam Curtis on the Media:

“…what I ache for is a world where people really dream of incredible things, and above people who are in charge of the media, people who paid a lot of money, actually use their imagination and intelligence to take me places and tell me things I don’t know.” Adam Curtis, 2007

Ballard Quote:

I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that’s my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again… the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.

Basic Tech V – Mostly Harmless

The title of the fifth book in Douglas Adams’ series, “Mostly Harmless”, comes from a fictional description of the earth as a civilisation. It’s a great pairing of words – the innocuous framed with a hint of threat. Isn’t that what the world of programming is like though? It’s ninety-five percent unthreatening typing activities, with a [...]

Basic Tech IV – So Long, and Thanks for All the String[]

Yesterday was Towel Day, which is an unofficial holiday to mark the anniversary of the death of Douglas Adams. I had no idea when I started writing these blog posts that there was such a thing, and it’s not why I chose to title them after the novels in Adams’ Hitchhiker series. But it is [...]

Basic Tech III – Life, NCL.AC.UK and Everything

I realised today that I could have titled this “Life, the University, and Everything”, which would have worked a lot better. Hey ho. The grandiose title of this piece could be read as a sign that I’m going to write about things other than relevant to the course. In general, I’m going to steer clear [...]

Basic Tech II – The Poptart at the End of the Universe

I’m eating a lot of pop tarts at the minute. So let’s have a quick diversion into the history of pop tarts. 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 [...]

Basic Tech I – (The Hitchhikers Guide to Regex)

The current state of my Basic Techniques project is this: 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 [...]

Upcoming: Star and Shadow Placement

I’ll be doing a placement at the Star and Shadow cinema from the 1st of June. Above? That’s course-mate Oliver and his SDF Collective, playing at the Star and Shadow whilst supporting Ariel Pink.