Craft Hackers

I got excited this morning when I revisited the Rhizome site to see a featured event called Craft Hackers.

Craft Hackers is a panel discussion among artists who use crafting
techniques to explore high tech culture and the relationship between
needlework and computer programming.

Alas, it seems that the contributors to the panel are more interested in illustrating themes of computing and networks using traditional practises rather than considering any crosses between the two.

This is a bit of a theme with lots of the work I have looked at: artist/maker is inspired by aspects of the computer, that they then use to turn back to their easel/loom/workbench and create pieces that explore them conceptually. Which is fair enough, but I'm interested to see what would happen if they tried to expand their practise onto actually using the computer as a medium, rather than an inspiration.

The one speakers work that caught my eye was Cat Mazzo's KnitPro, which turns digital images into knitting patterns. Although it doesn't engage with the computer a great deal, it still asks questions about where the creativity occurs in the project, effectively truncating the conception and planning stages of creation.

Another intreresting aside is this, Embloggery, where each post is a handmade cross stitch. Yet the posts are composed of the same nonsense that most blogs are. Hmm...

Teething

I meant to update this on Friday, but I've been debating over a few things. Firstly, I was originally going to write about the progress of what I'd been doing with Minim and Capture, a library to help capturing video. But I'm aware that the point of this blog is to be an opportunity for me to be critical about my own practise of learning craft on a digital medium: reporting the results of my experiments should only be an ancillary function of writing here.

So whilst I enjoyed a modest success in that I have got video reacting to a sound input, however primitively (the size of the capture window is affected by the volume of a sample from the minim library), I fear that I haven't been self critical enough about what I was thinking whilst completing this.

I fear this may be a theme I'm developing with learning a craft, digital or otherwise, that it subscribes to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: that even the act of observing a process renders the outcome different.

What I can discuss is the problems I now face in varying the program. Initially I thought that Processing would offer a good basis for doing a project like this, however, now that I am past the basics, its becoming clear that I will have to polish up my coding knowledge of loops and arrays and the like in order to make something which is visually interesting.

Although this may be interesting for me, it's not ideal when the program I was writing I hoped would be able to be editable and 'tinkerable' for school students. For this reason I'm going to move the 'tinkerability' aspect of it to the backburner, and try to learn a bit more about processing before trying to think of the teaching element.

Although this is just in reference to the project I was proposing, the problem with processing remains: for the computing novice, it is a daunting prospect of having to learn such alien concepts of recursive loops, variables, constructors and the like that make up the basis of computing.

A bit of research (which I should really started with) into processing reveals that its original purpose was to give a visual representation of the fundamentals of computing and software. And although they then go onto list creative applications of processing, there's no real exploration of the problems faced by these people, or if they even solved them at all, or shipped the issue onto specialists.

I think that what I'm trying to do here is still valid, and I'll press on with it, even if only to ask my interview subjects what their experiences of this was.

Hopefully I'll have something working up here by next friday.

Processing Processed

We had Java in first year, but the only thing I remember about it was dragging myself out of a semi-drunk coma, into a lecture theatre I didn't know, with people from outside my course, to be taught a subject I didn't only fail to understand, but failed to see the relevance of.

Fast forward 4 years, and I'm now studying for a PhD looking at the intersection of art and computers. And what comes up, my old friend Java.

In particular, I'm referring to Processing.

I'll only post a few examples:

Videos by a coder/artist called Robert Hodgin.


...but the interest for me in Processing is that it is wholeheartedly and unashamedly a coding language, complete with classes, constructors, libraries, the works, but it is aimed squarely at artists and information designers.

This interests me: how do you build a coding intensive architecture for artists? How do you cross the notational/visual divide?

Another reason to try and understand processing a little more is that I am studying peoples craft practises whilst not producing anything on my own. It's easy to fall into the trap of simply believing what perceived experts say on a subject without trying it yourself.

So in an effort to understand the meaning making processes in using digital technologies in relation to craft, I am planning to try to pick up some Processing, and all the Java related fun that that will entail.

I propose to try and create a small Processing program to take into schools to show potential applicants to the IMD course what can be done is such fields as ubiquitous computing and reactive environments, using either video or sound and a projector to show them how something like Processing can manipulate an image on screen, or perhaps on a projector. Hopefully it will be visually impressive enough, whilst also being accessible enough to keep some wannabe rebellious teens entertained from both an art and computing perspective.

Next steps then. I think, even though this is a self set brief, I'll want to set down goals before simply diving into processing. Who's it for, what will it do, what hardware requirements are there, can we make it so the little 'darlings' wont break it etc. etc.

Should be fun.