Category: Programming

Algorithms are Thoughts, Chainsaws are Tools on Vimeo

Steve Ramsay has put an interesting video essay about live coding up at Algorithms are Thoughts, Chainsaws are Tools on Vimeo. He provides commentary to the live coding of Andrew Sorensen which in turn is controlling electronic music. Very neat!

Note (April 2020): The video is no longer available. There is an Electronic Book Review essay Critical Code Studies Week Five Opener – Algorithms are thoughts, Chainsaws are tools that talks about the original video essay, but it too links to the missing Vimeo video.

Workshop On Application Programming Interfaces For The Digital Humanities

This weekend I was at a workshop on Application Programming Interfaces for the Digital Humanities. See the philosophi.ca wiki conference report.

The workshop looked at the possibilities and issues around APIs for digital humanities resources. I think it is fair to say that lots of projects have been exposing APIs but they aren’t being used much. We need to encourage projects to develop mashups that take advantage of the APIs.

This workshop, more than any other I’ve been at was heavily twittered (#apiworkshop) which was interesting and annoying. At times people seemed to space out and not participate as they rushed to document what was happening or contribute some bon mot. I should admit that I am part of the problem – I posted a few and was writing my conference report live which was just as distracting. I guess we all have develop an etiquette for situations where you are not just part of an audience, but are expected to participate.

Mozilla Labs Jetpack | Exploring new ways to extend and personalize the Web

Picture 1

Peter sent me a link to Mozilla Labs Jetpack, a project to develop a way that makes it easy for people to extend the power of their browsers using Javascript. It strikes me that there is a desire and need for an easy programming extension that provides, as HyperCard did years ago, a way for amateurs to extend their environment with widgets. Widgets, gadgets, and other small utilities have their place, but we need a common ground for them for the paradigm to take off.

Rock-afire Explosion Clip – Rockafiremovie.com

rockafire

Shannon pointed me to The Rock-afire Explosion, an animatronic band from the 80s that was one of the entertainments at Showbiz Pizza. Rock-afire Explosion has been resurrected by a fan and one of the original creators of Creative Engineering who are programming tunes and uploading video to YouTube. See, for example, Madonna’s 4 Minutes. They take bids on New Shows to Program at a strange and not very clear site. If you bid high enough and it isn’t “dirty” they will program the animatronic band to do a song you want. (Would they do Plato’s dialogues?)

I cannot begin to describe how strangely captivating this all is. Perhaps the documentary made about it (see Rockafiremovie.com) captures the passion. Or, for a computing perspective, see the clip about Programming the Rock-afire Explosion.

Whatever happened to animatronics? Will it make a comeback now that we all carry around smartphones that can control things?

Hacking as a Way of Knowing: Our Project on Flickr

Photo of Projection

I put a photo set up on Flickr for our Hacking as a Way of Knowing project. The set documents the evolution of the project which I’ve tentatively named the “ReReader for the Writing on the Wall”. Thanks to all those who made the project and the workshop a success. Now I have to think a bit deeper about making as knowing and things as theories.

Taco Lab Blog: Siftables and American Shanzhai?

Two images of cellphone cigarette package

The Taco Lab who are probably best known for the Siftables (small cookie-sized tile computes that sense each other) shown at TED have a blog with some interesting posts like this one on American Shanzhai?. Shanzai literally means “mountain fortress” or the hideout of bandits and it refers to pirate activities like hacking cheap copies of consumer goods (that are heavily marked up.) It is now beginning to refer to a creative subculture of improving or altering electronics outside state (and IP) control. Thus the image above is from the Taco Lab blog and is a example of this creative shanzai – in this case a cell-phone/cigarette pack whose value is in its uniqueness. This got me thinking of all the open projects out there that make it easier to hack things like:

  • TuxPhone – a project to develop open hardware and software for a cell phone.
  • Arduino – an open electronics prototyping platform that’s great for interactive art projects
  • LilyPad Arduino – an open device that is light enough for wearables and e-textile projects
  • William Turkel’s Fabrication Lab – a unique (to my knowledge) humanities lab