Nevolution

Mixbook 2011

There’s never enough time to read anything properly these days, especially something on the internet. Even with Instapaper I need another step to filter and save what I’ve already filtered and saved. So, after a year of keeping the important stuff it only seems fair to do something with it. Printing out the internet seemed like a good approach to this problem. And yes, using a service such as Blurb fits perfectly with this project, living only on the internet. I didn’t want to spend too much time typesetting this or giving page numbers, just enough to make it a useful object. One of the problems I find with reading on screens is there’s no possibility for patina. Nothing can be dog eared, it can’t be taken into the bathroom (without pangs of guilt and shame) and yet the text is discarded too quickly.

After trawling through hundreds of saved posts and articles, a mild theme began to emerge. One that wasn’t just somewhat of a retrospective of the past year, but the way in which we’ve been thinking in 2011. Or, how I’ve been thinking this year at least. The overall shape of the 21st century is finally beginning to emerge and some of these pieces should point in that vague direction. While there’s somewhat of an underlying thread here, the most important thing was that this would be an interesting read. Something for the holidays. This meant loosening up the structure: taking out pieces that were too dry or specific. Editing is always the hardest part. I don’t want to ramble too much, so I’ll let you get on with it. Consider this my mixbook for 2011.

I should stress that I lovingly stole this idea from Christopher Butler (who lovingly stole it from Emmet Connolly). Chris is up to his third book so far (volume one, two, three) and I hope to continue the trend. He has much smarter things to say about this whole process, so read his and then come back here to read me waffle on for a bit. I've been planning on doing this for a year or so, when an email came in from Blurb that they were having one of their many sales, I quickly stopped everything for two days and got it done. Making it used parts of my brain that needed stretching, but also made me realise how much more time should have gone into it.

I wanted to include something by Dan Hill, which seems to be the running gag that any of these sorts of things should have one of his incredibly long blog posts. There's always next year. I couldn't help inserting my own private joke in here: having Bruce Sterling close the whole thing. Considering he's always called upon to close just about every conference it seemed fitting to let him do the same thing here. 

I didn't have time for any illustrations, page numbers or links in the text (two days is clearly not long enough), so next year should be much more of a finessed object. The other tip I've learnt is to actually hand them out between xmas and new years. It's holiday reading but not everyone has them despite everyone going back to work. In needing a front cover I couldn't resist a photo of my first 3D printed object: because, well, it's a print out. The icing on the laser sintered cake is that it's a generative piece which I made during the Generative Design intensive this semester (I DID mention I was doing my Masters this year didn't I?). Lots of algorithmic logic in some of these articles, I couldn't resist. Looking forward to seeing the amount of batshit that goes on in 2012 just so it can be squeezed into the next book.

 

Is 2011 a year that will change the world - John Harris

For Mason, all this is also pretty clearly manifested in this year’s most iconic archetype: the tent community which springs up in the midst of the city, usually home to the flickering blue light of laptops and the incessant hubbub of intense conversation. “One thing that there has been in common between the Arab spring and the European and American events is this drive – which is almost pathological – to secure space, and live in it,” he says. “In one sense, it’s a meme … and I think it does satisfy a desire. Once you’ve lived and experienced this sort of spontaneous, communal, utopian sort of existence online, which is what you do if you’re a net-savvy young kid … well, put it this way: if you were to ask yourself, what is the real-world equivalent of being in a 200-strong World Of Warcraft horde? It’s probably sitting in a square, in a tent.” 

 

Network Realism: William Gibson and new forms of fiction - James Bridle

So, if Gibson was originally writing “on top of Firefox”, he’s now writing on top of Twitter. The stream contains references, mixed up, to Prada shoes and Idoru dancers. All links. All references, premade scenes waiting to be pulled into the flow of fiction. When the Festo drones appear in the text, they appear in the same location, same architecture as in those product videos. The network’s readymades. 

Gibson’s been talking a lot lately about atemporality, this idea that we live in a sort of endless digital now. In “Zero History” we have an echo of “No Future”: everything compressed into the present. This idea is what Zero History is really about. (This is the Order Flow: the future is defined by the present; who pinpoints the present controls the future.) ... it’s undeniable that something is happening, a network effect produced by the sudden visibility of just how unevenly distributed those futures are.

 

Thinking in Tumblr - Alexandra Lange

Which is why I recently found myself discussing with a designer why I thought his industrial design client should not publish a commemorative book, but should start a commemorative Tumblr. (I couldn’t believe it when those words came out of my mouth.) Considering this history project, my mind reassembled its pieces as a blog, asynchronic, motley, sketchy. Rough rather than smooth. An archive of affinities rather than a resolved history. There’s a reason so many archives are using it. On a Tumblr, every kind of memory could be collected and streamed, linked, as so many of the “f*** yeah” genre are, by a single word.

 

The Elusive Big Idea - Neal Gabler

And that’s just the point. In the past, we collected information not simply to know things. That was only the beginning. We also collected information to convert it into something larger than facts and ultimately more useful — into ideas that made sense of the information. We sought not just to apprehend the world but to truly comprehend it, which is the primary function of ideas. Great ideas explain the world and one another to us. 

 

Innovation Starvation  - Neal Stephenson

SF has changed over the span of time I am talking about — from the 1950s (the era of the development of nuclear power, jet airplanes, the space race, and the computer) to now. Speaking broadly, the techno-optimism of the Golden Age of SF has given way to fiction written in a generally darker, more skeptical and ambiguous tone. I myself have tended to write a lot about hackers — trickster archetypes who exploit the arcane capabilities of complex systems devised by faceless others. Believing we have all the technology we’ll ever need, we seek to draw attention to its destructive side effects. This seems foolish now that we find ourselves saddled with technologies like Japan’s ramshackle 1960s-vintage reactors at Fukushima when we have the possibility of clean nuclear fusion on the horizon. The imperative to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale no longer seems like the childish preoccupation of a few nerds with slide rules. It’s the only way for the human race to escape from its current predicaments. Too bad we’ve forgotten how to do it.

 

Inside the Mind of an Octopus - Sy Montgomery 

Another measure of intelligence: you can count neurons. The common octopus has about 130 million of them in its brain. A human has 100 billion. But this is where things get weird. Three-fifths of an octopus’s neurons are not in the brain; they’re in its arms. 

But new evidence suggests a breathtaking possibility. Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory and University of Washington researchers found that the skin of the cuttlefish Sepia officinalis, a color-changing cousin of octopuses, contains gene sequences usually expressed only in the light-sensing retina of the eye. In other words, cephalopods—octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid—may be able to see with their skin. 

 

How Algorithms Shape our World - Kevin Slavin

And that’s the thing, is that we’re writing things, we’re writing these things that we can no longer read. And we’ve rendered something illegible. And we’ve lost the sense of what’s actually happening in this world that we’ve made. And we’re starting to make our way. There’s a company in Boston called Nanex, and they use math and magic and I don’t know what, and they reach in to all the market data and they find, actually sometimes, some of these algorithms. And when they find them they pull them out and they pin them to the wall like butterflies. And they do what we’ve always done when confronted with huge amounts of data that we don’t understand -- which is that they give them a name and a story. So this is one that they found, they called the Knife, the Carnival, the Boston Shuffler, Twilight. 

 

A Critique on the Critical - Patrick Keating

Critical design cannot predict the future.  Our ideas of the future are often less radical than the reality. Design however, can invent worlds giving us freedoms to explore various branches of reality. Speculative design is a dreamlike exercise – manufacturing alternate worlds, ones which feel every bit as real as the “real world” we inhabit day-to-day (whatever that is!).  It cannot predict the future, but it can shape the present. 

 

The Movie Set that Ate Itself - Michael Idov

One of the twins admiringly touches my head. Before coming to wardrobe, I’d stopped in hair and makeup. My nape and temples are now shaved clean in an approximation of an old hairstyle called a half-box. All to help me blend in on the set. Only, from here on, I can no longer call it that. According to a glossary of forbidden terms posted right in front of me on the wall, the set is to be referred to as the Institute. Likewise, inside the Institute, there are no scenes, just experiments. No shooting, only documentation. And there is certainly no director. Instead, Ilya Khrzhanovsky, the man responsible for this madness, is to be referred to as the Head of the Institute or simply the Boss. 

 

Twenty Years Fore and Aft - Bruce Sterling

Twenty years from now is 2031. That year is not Utopia or Oblivion, it’s not made of sci-fi hologrammed tinsel; it’s just another year among many, and most of its working parts are already scattered around. Like any other year, it offers novelties, but also huge absences. 1991 had many thriving elements denied to 2031. Film cameras. Newspapers. Bookshops. Print magazines that were simply, entirely and utterly print. National analogue broadcast television networks. Young people.

 

Heterochronia

For the past few months I've been toying around with a side project, and it's somewhat about time that I attempt to make it somewhat public. I've had it on the sidebar for some time as well as slyly using it as a category on this blog, but I feel it's time to announce it. Heterochronia. It's a somewhat lazy attempt to collect examples of something that I can't exactly put my finger on, I'm not exactly sure I understand it, but it's there. I'm hoping that if I make this post long enough I'll be able to get a handle on it. I'll ramble on for a bit before hopefully either making sense to my self or getting around to making a point. The term, heterochronia, is a biological one, that refers to a different timing in the development of organisms. For a more useful and relevant definition, we should turn to the source from where I got it from, the semi recent Tate Triennial Altermodern.

Hetero – different or other, chronos – time. Within the framework of Altermodern, it describes artists’ work which cannot be easily anchored to a specific time; which asks us to question what is contemporary. Without nostalgia, artists trace lines and connections through time as well as space. It is not the modernist idea of time advancing in a linear fashion, nor the postmodern time advancing in loops, but a chaining or clustering together of signs from contemporary and historical periods which allows an exploration of what is now.’It is significant that a number of today’s artists operate in a space-time characterised by this “delay”, playing with the anachronistic, with multi-temporality or time-lag.

This doesn't exactly get across what I'm toying with, but Bourriaud does go someway towards explaining it. I spent some time toying around with what to name the blog, in the end going with Heterochronia. Yet the roots of this idea isn't with everyones favourite french super curator. Instead, I'm shamelessly exploring a few of the thoughts that Bruce Sterling and William Gibson have been toying with for the past two years or so: atemporality. To paraphrase Sterling, I'm playing with their ideas but "shaving off the serial numbers". I wanted, badly, to call it Atemporality or Zero History. Not only would it have been too obvious and easy but the SEO would have been nigh impossible.

Perhaps another explanation would be through a semi incoherent rambling email I sent trying to explain the darn thing:

It's a symptom of the network culture that we live in, that the idea of time, and progress, that we used to have has changed. We're not looking down the barrel of a single point perspective of progress, nor are we pissing on it because it's a product of - what's that word? The annoying one? Deals with power struggles. Annoying and PoMo - anyway, [I think I meant hegemony] it's not those two approaches to time, but this really fragmented version of progress. Where it makes total sense to use instagram or hipstamatic on an iphone. Or that camera that you have is a model of an older camera, that borrows the styles of yesteryear of the Olympus Pen line, but then doesn't keep on replicating the styles as it continues, but branches out from it. And how we're all toying around with the idea of utopia and progress ad futurity, but it feels different than any other time. It's not a grand statement or vision of the future, but a smaller, more pragmatic approach. We're not going to solve the problem that will be the twenty teens with large monolithic solutions, but we'll branch out, and try a million different possibilities and see what sticks. And also how we've got guys with jets coming outof their back, which is kinda the future, but we're not responding to it the way we should. Or, we can't, because there's too many things going on and we have to go look at cats or look at gizmodo instead. 

As I mentioned, these aren't my ideas. I'm merely using the medium of a blog to explore them. I'm not such a fan of tumblrs, sucking and scraping thing's off the internet with no real attempt to create something new. It does suit the project (as exploration) and the topic (contemporary understanding of time and our time period) rather well. I don't provide any commentary on any of the links I've put up; it's more of a public archive for my own sake. I kept on noticing these vaguely coalescing ideas and felt the need to do something about it. Shamefully, the front end needs quite a bit of work. I've stabbed at it here and there, but I just can't wrap my head around the CSS and HTML that Tumblr use to construct templates. No matter, it's a rough approximation of the heroic modernist aesthetic that seems appropriate for what I'm collecting. 

At this point I need to mention the starting point for this project. Sterling's talk Atemporality for the Creative Artist is a near perfect explanation for some of the ideas that I'm playing around with in my assortment of links. The whole talk is mesmerising in only the way Bruce can be:

So what makes an atemporal situation different from a post-modern situation, or a modernist situation, or a classicist situation, what’s really different about it?

Well, let me take a guy who I am very fond of, a very immediate, hard-headed scientific thinker - Richard Feynman, American physicist. Richard Feynman once wrote about intellectual labor, and he said the following: ‘Step one - write down the problem. Step two - think really hard. Step three - write down the solution’.

And I really admire this statement of Feynman’s. It’s no-nonsense, it’s no fakery, it’s about hard work for the intellectual laborer… Of course it’s a joke. But it’s not merely a joke. He is trying to make it as simple as possible. I mean: really just confront the intellectual problem!

But there is an unexamined assumption in Feynman’s method, and it’s in step one - write down the problem.

Now let me tell you how the atemporal Richard Feynman approaches this. The atemporal Richard Feynman is not very paper-friendly, because he lives in a network culture. So it occurs to the atemporal Feynman that he may, or may not, have a problem.

‘Step one - write problem in a search engine, see if somebody else has solved it already. Step two - write problem in my blog; study the commentory cross-linked to other guys. Step three - write my problem in Twitter in a hundred and forty characters. See if I can get it that small. See if it gets retweeted. Step four - open source the problem; supply some instructables to get me as far as I’ve been able to get, see if the community takes it any further. Step five - start a Ning social network about my problem, name the network after my problem, see if anybody accumulates around my problem. Step six - make a video of my problem. Youtube my video, see if it spreads virally, see if any media convergence accumulates around my problem. Step seven - create a design fiction that pretends that my problem has already been solved. Create some gadget or application or product that has some relevance to my problem and see if anybody builds it. Step eight - exacerbate or intensify my problem with a work of interventionist tactical media. And step nine - find some kind of pretty illustrations from the Flickr ‘Looking into the Past’ photo pool.’

In one way it's the triumph of the new over the old. On the other hand it doesn't really care about the distinction between the new and the old, in a manner that's dissimilar to the postmodern notion of the pastiche. In this regard we return to Bourriaud's idea that our understanding of time, and thus the future (and the past), are about how we cluster various signs together. By branching out in different directions instead of moving from step one to two to three. Having quickly flipped over to check my mail and messages it occurs to me that a tidy example is the use of threaded and branching messages on facebook, gmail, twitter etc. 

Sterling continues:

History books are ink on paper. They are linear narratives with beginning and ends. They are stories created from archival documents and from other books. Network culture, not really into that. Network culture differs from literary culture in a great many ways. And step one is that the operating system is an unquestioned given. The first thing you do is go to the operating system, without even thinking of it as a conscious choice.

Now, a new master narrative could arise on paper. That would be easy. On paper, if it were just a matter of paper, we could do it. But to do that via the Internet is about as likely as the Internet becoming a single state-controlled television channel. Because a single historical narrative is a paper narrative.

To reiterate: our understanding of temporal sequence is affected by the dominant medium of the day. The sequential nature of the book forced upon us the idea of the lone subject reading a singular argument from beginning to end. After the Renaissance and single point perspective, the Industrial revolution gave us steam travel, and with it the ability to move continuously through space in a single line. There's also the Judeo-Christian notion of time either moving towards or away from an ideal. Let's not forget my favourite time period, the Enlightenment and the sumptuous idea of progress. But the dominant form of our time is not a sequential argument, it's a series of links that (hopefully) add up to something cohesive. Or there's no argument to be had at all, merely the experience of moving through different points. The network image has been seared into our collective consciousness. I'll be damned if Deleuze gets credit for any of this; rhizome is such an ugly word. We'll all just agree to use the term network structure and leave it at that.

Back to the idea of the paper narrative. I'm intrigued at this idea, and despite the obvious and inherent problems with it, I'm attempting to turn the blog into a paper narrative. It's a bit of a silly and self indulgent project; I've been toying around with the idea of making a small run risograph book, mostly to flex my print layout muscles. But as Mr Geddes pointed out to me the other day, the risograph is a technology that doesn't make sense. It's a printing method that doesn't belong in this time frame, nor any other time frame at that. And with that in mind, I'm attempting to create this book and send it out. I'm hoping that after a year I'll be tempted to make another one. It's partially to unashamedly play around with aesthetics. The other reason is to kickstart me into paying more attention to the blog; to fine tune my antenna.

My main fear is that the end result will be a silly attempt at shoehorning some ideas into a medium that doesn't play well with the content. So, how to organise a non linnear narrative according to a medium so intent on remaining linear? Perhaps, and this is a side thought, the next edition could be a newspaper. To just play around with dead media. It is at this point that I realise that I am toying around with the designer equivalent with the hipster fascination with dead mediums, the tape cassette being the immediate substantion of that. I've recently been wondering when fashion will catch up, properly, to rave culture. To the heady days of pre Y2K, (ok, fine, when I got into rave culture) and the cd as the equivalent of the cassette tape and vinyl before that. I'm intrigued at how that particular object will play into the vernacular in the same way. As an object, it's useless. Far too thick to be used as a phone case. Beige computer boxes will have to make a comeback at this point. Mark my words, expect to see old pentium computers being hollowed out to be used as speaker boxes. I must find that scene in Idoru, or is it All Tomorrow's Parties, where a bar (I think) uses the boxes as an interior decorative element. Pardon that tangent. I must learn to focus, or edit.

One method I've been toying with is by going through the blog and tagging everything. I find tagging slows me down when all I want to do is copy a link or text and throw it up before I get distracted. But there's an argument to be made that the act of naming something helps to clarify oneself. Even if I don't get around to tagging the blog (or using these tags specifically), breaking down the posts into these components helps me work through a few disparate thoughts.

Modern Ruin looks at the built ruins of modernism, the architectural decay of the dreams of the twentieth century. Taking the name from an exhibition at GOMA, it's ruin porn, plain and simple. Yet I'm not looking back at this past with scorn, or through rose tinted glasses, although there are tinges of admiration. It's more about looking at a foreign past. A past whose ideologies seem foreign to us now. A past in which the idea of utopia and progress don't match with how we view our uncertain future. And looking at the result that entropy has had on those ideologies and their material substantiations. It's a deep and respectful nostalgia for the absolute, without the warfare.

As a flip to this are the unbuilt attempts and ideas of what the future was to be like. I'm trying not to toy around with this too much, as there are plenty of paleofuture blogs out there that have this niche cornered extremely well. Besides, it would be too easy to spend all my time on youtube looking up Jetsons snippets and world fair videos. But this sort of stuff is good ol' fashioned light hearted fun. Especially when they get it so wrong.    

It seems that while the idea of futurity has mostly fallen in the west, it seems to be alive and well in other parts of the world. In the heroic sense at least. I need to put up more examples of this. The recent world fair in China is a perfect example of how the idea of progress is alive and well in other parts of the world. The unbelievably bland American exhibit was in stark contrast to the rest on show. There is still a sense of the heroic, but it's not coming out of the west, not as strongly as it used to, anyway. That's what I'm attempting to do with Rise of the Rest: document the excitement coming from other areas of the globe, without looking at it through the (somewhat whiney) lens of Post Colonialism. 

Objects out of time plot some of the points of the consumer landscape that don't seem to exist in the right time frame, aesthetically at least. I mostly blame the hipster for this one, and their love of nostalgia. I'm still trying to determine if there is an element of pastiche with some of the products, but I'm more impressed when they bring something out of retirement and then move it into new directions. Directions that couldn't have existed then, and can only exist now, as extensions of their former selves, either through technological or branding means. Exploring the new map with old objects, pushing the form or the function or the market niche for todays situation. 

Design Fictions are quite useful as they help to push through ideas of futures that we may inhabit, to act as probes (pardon the use of that term, I'm feeling lazy and it always feels apt). I find them to rather hard to spot without resorting to the usual suspects. The really good ones always look plausible, and I always have to question if they're fun playthings or genuinely attempt to map out and explore future scenarios or to extrapolate on situations that we're already inhabiting. 

Leading on from that are genuine attempts at future making. I'm getting lots of this stuff from kickstarter, the best place for pushing out ideas of the distributed and clustering future that we're headed for. Except most of the real juicy bits from kickstarter are all centered around a very specific future. Minor tangent: I'd love to see a compendium of interesting ideas on kickstarter that didn't make enough money for the project to start. Surely there'd be a few super interesting ideas that didn't get enough attention.

And then there's been a recent spate of juicy spacefaring goodness, and the death of the shuttle program. Nothing speaks to the raw vein of wanting to live in the future than spaceflight. The prohibitive costs of it meant that it just wasn't sustainable until we move a few parsecs above the level of technology we have now. Shame. 

I haven't poked around with Network Culture stuff too much; the ways in which our newly networked mediated culture affect us and our comprehension of time. A halfhearted attempt to map the false histories and possible futures that a network culture enables. In other ways it looks at how the network culture is surpassing the twentieth century. A superficial example of this are the delightful photos of the smoke trails of space shuttles taken out the window of an airplane, using a cameraphone, with all of the poor image quality that this brings. To see the trails of these hulking machines lift through the cloud, the dreams of a faded future. And then watching these images zip through the internet, one retweeted twitpic at a time. 

Another gaping hole that I should really get around to tending to sooner rather than later is the new form of heroic modernism as it relates to generative structures, objects and systems. This is a useful avenue to go down as it provides an even starker vision of modernism than the original. I'll need to tip toe down this route; too much of it or the wrong examples and the point will be lost. Sitting next to Design Fiction should be something about Alternative Universes but the concept hasn't had enough time to crystallize for me to say anything worthwhile about it. 

So far these are just some of the threads that I've been able to name. There's much more stuff in there that I haven't been able to get a handle on. Perhaps what's needed are more examples of similar links, enough for it to make sense to me at least.

Returning back to Bourriaud, it's the way in which our time is not linear as it used to be, nor is it endlessly cycling back on itself. Instead, it's how our attempts at progress are spreading out in different directions, and clustering on those different futures that seem plausible, or even hopeful, for different groups of people. In another way - and I can't really back this up with any sort of a cohesive argument - it is an attempt to pretend that Post Modernity never happened. Instead, we're faced with a void of time between the end of heroic modernism and now. Just a small thought. 

As I've mentioned, it's a way for me to get a handle on a few things. As such, there isn't much cohesive thought put into it, and I'll get distracted by a few things that aren't necessarily what I'm looking for, or appropriate. But that's fine. In some way, I wanted to do this blog to get away from the fear of having to write for a blog. Twitter has taken away all of the short form posts I used to do, and thus after redesigning this place I was left without a place to just put stuff up online without it disappearing in a twitter stream.

Having gotten this far, I haven't really completed step 3 - solve the problem. I haven't really thought hard enough about some of these topics, missing large areas that require deeper thought than what I've been able to attend to. On the other hand I find it much easier to take Feymans atemporal approach. Which, if you've paid attention so far, is mostly the point.

 

 

From the desk of...

 

It's been a fantastic three years but it's time to finally put the old guy to rest. 

This new redesign has been floating around my to do list for longer than I'd care to admit but I finally bit the bullet and decided on a redesign. I'm not sure how finished it is at this stage, but I'm happy enough with where it's at to leave it like this for now. The masthead doesn't compete with the old one, but it's a start. Consider it a temporary placeholder at the moment. I've got a few ideas with how to spruce them up a little bit, but they'll have to wait. For now I'm more concerned with the increased text size to make reading longer format posts gentler on the eye; a problem that became evident once I uploaded a few essays. 

The new categories are being introduced over time (and resized imagery) and reflect the shift in direction I've been working on for the past year. Not too much, but enough to warrant a spring clean. Expect to see some interesting stuff going up here in the near future. 

So long, old masthead, you will be sorely missed.

Update: Seems I was saying goodbye to my hard drive as well. Somewhat prophetic opening line there. Going to take a little bit longer than I thought in posting again. Ho hum.

I've been busy

I never thought it would come to this, but with no updates in more than a month, it clearly has. Turns out, I've been busy. Really busy. I went back to school this year, to get my Honours in Design Theory. I've been hard at work writing my thesis and other essays and I just haven't had the time, nor the energy, to post anything. I had grand plans to get up a little bit earlier each morning to put something up here; it seems sleep is kinda important. I was hoping to become super organised and balance everything out, but with uni and a few important jobs coming in it's been a tad tricky. For this, I apologise. 

What's this you're writing about? I hear you ask. Well, funny you should ask. I hinted at it on this very blog a little bit over a year ago, but you'll have to wait until I've got something finished to put it up here. I went so far as to start a thesis orientated blog and had grand plans to dump everything mildly related to it over there, but that hasn't really worked out. Perhaps, after this semester finishes (in two weeks and counting), I'll be more active here, I promise. I've got a few essays and presentations which I'm planning on posting up here, once they're formatted and edited for this format. I'll start putting up tidbits of my research on here as well. I wanted to keep this place separate form the thesis, but in hindsight, it seems a bit silly. Meanwhile. I've got homework to do.

UPDATE: Finished up for the semester and I've given my brain a week off. I'll be starting up again tomorrow, posting somewhat edited versions of essays I've written this semester. Seems like a bit of a waste to not put them up here considering I've structured this year to end up with a massive blog post, and possible direction change. 

Keeping Busy

I've been keeping myself busy with a few little projects lately - having enjoyed the more tactile experience of using my hands on something other than a keyboard. I've been working on this kitchen bench for 18 months or so, finding scraps of wood within walking distance of mum's place. Waiting for serendipity to work it's magic can take a significant amount of time, but it gives me the warm and fuzzy feeling that all of this wood has been saved from the scrap heap. It also means that Ikea doesn't get 79 of my dollars, even if I did rip off their Bekvam trolley design almost wholesale (there should be an umlaut on the 'a', but I'm not going to spend ten minutes figuring that out). 

It felt nice to be working with solid pieces of wood, as opposed to previous attempts at crafting something out of cheap mdf. I only used a power tool twice to cut the wood used for the tabletop. Sometimes my stubbornness can get in the way of getting the job done, but I'll be damned if I wasn't going to spend a year screaming and swearing at wood that refused to be sanded with ease, and by screws who refused to turn. What makes me most proud about this bench is tat it's sturdy. Solid as rock. And castor wheels for when I decided to roll it around (which I never will). It's been finished for a few months, but showing it off now is fairly timely: it was constructed mostly in anticipation of the iPad. As soon as that bad boy is in my hands I'll be enjoying my cup of java with the interwebs and the breakfast island.

Meanwhile a stack of timber flooring samples that was gaining dust was turned into this rather nifty table that I made at a music festival. I'd forgotten how enjoyable the odd spot of carpentry can be, even if it involved large amounts of wood glue. Fairly early on I made the decision to use the modular aspects of the timber to create something a tad different. After spending a few hours mocking it up in photoshop I realised that there was an opportunity to make the table a little bit more social than usual. The irregular shape provided for novel uses and social interactions by nudging people to allow the table to create semi-random social interactions. I'm quite fond of this aesthetic, and I'm planning to take it further somehow incorporating the modular properties of timber flooring.

I'm not going to into too much detail into this work in progress, other than to say that it's final use will be typeface related and there are dinosaurs involved. Yes, dinosaurs.