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.