Hit a creative impasse? Bereft of original ideas? Seeking a radical new perspective for your problem-solving methodologies?
Oblique Fucking Strategies is an adaptation of this well-known 70s card set by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt (which, itself, appears to be a remix of the heuristic ideas of George Pólya). May be used for inspiration, motivation, or simple fucking tedium.
Can also be found on Twitter, with one strategy appearing every few days.
In an abominable act of oversight, one of the major projects keeping me occupied in 2010 has yet to receive an official announcement here. So, I'm belatedly pleased to herald Variable 4, an environmental installation taking place on the other-worldly shingle plains of Dungeness in May 2010.
In partnership with James Bulley, and with kind support from the PRSF and Campbell Scientific, we're building a system which will be embedded into the desolate landscape and equipped with an array of meteorological sensors. Using algorithmic compositional techniques, it will then respond sonically to the real-time weather conditions, transforming and recombining a bank of precomposed movements and recordings via a multi-channel all-weather soundsystem.
It is taking place over a single 24-hour period, from noon till noon on 22-23 May, and so encompasses one complete daily cycle of solar and environmental conditions. For those not living in the Romney Marsh area, there will be a couple of coaches operating from London - booking info coming soon.
It's been a bit of a baptism of fire as far as project administration goes; who'd have thought that licensing and insurance concerns could occupy so much time? Current top of the anxiety checklist is ensuring that local fisherman aren't somehow entangled in wiring as they begin their 3am working days. Anyhow, we're finally well into the composition phase - leveraging Max For Live and the endless generative musical possibilities that it offers.
We'll be documenting the compositional and technical development on the Variable 4 blog and twitter @variable4, releasing relevant sourcecode and patches wherever possible.
It's the last month of the last month of the last year of the decade. The list of good intentions that I have failed to accomplish this decade would probably take the entirety of the remaining month to recite; instead, I'd like to commit to spend at least some of it doing these things.
Most prominent on my to-read list is Bedau and Humphreys' Emergence, a reader of seminal philosophical and scientific texts in the field of emergent phenomena. It's occurred to me that I could apply the same brute-force methods of the hackpact to a kind of public read-through of the book. Noticing its 24-chapter girth, I am thus proud to begin:
Over the first 24 days of December, I will be reading each of the 24 chapters that comprise the Emergence reader, and writing a brief critical overview of each. It's partly a sustained research project, partly an exercise in self-discipline, and partly an ongoing secular-academic Christmas gift.
five takes a reductionist approach to the similarly obsessive practices of blogging and listmaking, presented as an open series of short and often playful lists.
It's a project that I started in 2006 but then left dormant for some time. I really liked the idea, so I'm happy to say that it's recently been rekindled with a handful of new authors.
Accompanying text and images are now available for Subtext, the major project that I've been working on over the past few months. It's the first time that I've been involved in creating real, physical objects for an exhibition - not to mention the first complex electronic project that I've built - and so required a significant number of skills that were formerly alien to me. Thanks to all of the people who assisted in picking up said skills.
The images documenting the process should give an insight into what the installation looks like in action, in the absence of a good-quality video.
After months of good intentions being ousted by other priorities, I'm pleased to have finally found the time to finish cleaning up and documenting the core classes of AtomSwarm, a Processing-based framework for musical improvisation based on swarm behaviours. It's perhaps not the cleanest set of source in the world, but provides a useful basis for other swarm work and contains information on the genetic and metabolic constructs that co-determine the swarm's behaviours.
As part of an effort to gather together material on all of the various things that I've been involved with over the past couple of years, I've expanded or created a handful of new project pages:
