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11-Nov-24
Dead Hand Radio Hour is scheduled for next week. I think it marks a year of us doing these weird shows.
Two brilliant local spaces are fundraising right now: Two Queens and Modern Painters New Decorators. There are only a few days left on each of the campaigns and they look to be doing ok. Spaces like these are where good things happen. I hope they continue.
14-Oct-24
Quick reminder that Dead Hand Radio Hour is tomorrow evening (Tuesday 15th). Thanks to any readers that listened to the extended show last month. That was nice to do. A recording might find its way online soon.
There are a few shows around that are really worth getting to- Jas Singh, 1984, Sarah Al-Sarraj, Separated by Millennia and over in Nottingham, Donald Rodney, Visceral Canker.
No tech for apartheid.
Stop the genocide.
12-Sep-24
A few weeks back I sunk a bunch of time into trying to configure a local server.
I tried LibreServer https://libreserver.org/ first of all, but wasn't able to follow the documented instructions completely which might have caused something to be off once it was installed. Next I tried Yunohost https://yunohost.org/#/. This seemed to install more cleanly although it still took a couple of attempts. As usual my ISP router adds some extra wrinkles to the process. This has also, for now, knocked out the locally hosted clone of this website that I had running. I should be able to adjust the port settings and get it back online, or build something new through yunohost. Ideally I'd like everything to be on the one device, but I can't install Icecast through Yunohost, so for now I'll keep them separate. As it is now the Icecast2 stream is still working, which is the only thing I actually need to run right now.
It also seems like the Raspberry Pi I've installed Yunohost on isn't really up to running the applications I'm interested in.
I have also been working on a p5 based art-game-tool. It isn't quite stable enough to share anywhere yet, but it was prompted by a conversation with a friend who has been playing a lot of Minecraft. Having the regular coding-book-club meets has made this kind of coding really accessible to me. The coding-book-club might also have a new home now, as New Media Art Club have just taken on a space which they are keen to use for events like this.
Next week we'll be streaming a longer edition of the Dead Hand Radio Hour. It falls as part of the Sound season hosted by LCB depot. I've spent some time walking around the exhibition recording sounds that will feature in the show. It'll mostly just be a longer version of the current stuff we've been doing. And maybe some talking. Who knows.
Meanwhile, I've had another couple of rejected funding bids. Project grant and a local council thing. It isn't a good way of thinking about and developing work (for me) and even when the bids are successful they're often then so worn down by the reworded, time-shifted application process that they aren't as good as they could have been. Going to give it a rest for a while and try to just move some things on without funding.
Uncertainty and stress as always pushing me towards distraction and tinkering. I'm rewriting this website. It's going to have drawings and a homepage manifesto.
A few things on locally at the moment: Sound at LCB and Phoenix, featuring some good work, including The Shortwave Collective, Kwame Phillips, Patricia Azevedo and Clare Charnley (to name just a few); Jas Singh's 1984 at Phoenix; and the last show in the current MPND space, A Quieter Place by Tayler Fisher.
And lastly, Two Queens are in the last few weeks of their fundraiser, which is aiming to secure the future of the building.
30-Jul-24
I recently finished an edit of an article that will hopefully by published at some point soon - picking up some new ideas from my early stage PhD work. Part of the work for this included a proper read of Christina Dunbar-Hester's Low Power to the People, a fantastic book about radio activism and the specifics of Low Power FM stations in the USA.
Last week I spent a day in London. I was trying to pick up some hard copies of texts I'm trying to build a literature review around. The LSBU library isn't particularly well stocked for my needs but it is a nice space to work and a few gems can be found. I picked up a copy of Illich's Tools for Conviviality.
I had travelled to catch Adam Greenfield talking about his new book Lifehousewhich took place at the radical bookshop Housmans. Lifehouse is good and proposes something very clear and relatively easy to imagine. It was exciting to hear a bit more from Adam about what shaped the ideas and how he responded to some of the audience questions. The book draws from several key events and movements, some more familiar than others. I need to do a lot more reading into Rojava (and to that end have Revolution in Rojava (Ercan, Flach, Knapp) queued for when I get a chance).
I also visited artist paula roush at her incredible msdm (mobile strategies of display & mediation) space. It was really inspiring and exciting to share library practices and talk through games and play within research contexts.
The coding book club continues... although we haven't properly committed to our re read of Aesthetic Programming yet. We've taken a side road via hardware and sound. Hoping to host a more open book club session during September at LCB Depot which will include some Arduino knobs and buttons interacting with p5 to manipulate simple synthesiser things. Although we've missed a few meetings along the way, the simple routine of them has made space for some great things to start emerging, sparked by the text.
I missed the Dead Hand Radio Hour for July as I hadn't realised quite when the third Tuesday would fall. But it'll be back this month, and September should follow with something a bit more expanded for the LCB Depot sound season.
As they keep getting rejected I keep having to write Arts Council applications. A couple back I made a quick tool for counting characters which matches the application portal. It's here and open for use. This tool appeared necessary as all collaborative online editors I'd tried and my local document editors counted characters differently (always counting less than ACE) which makes drafting applications even more frustrating than it might be.
18-Jun-24
Dead Hand Radio Hour is tonight! I have a new track to play from Nathan. I hope my server holds up - it has been pretty flakey of late.
I've been preparing a presentation for a CSNI event next week. It has been a pretty intense dive into the Loughborough Job. My exhibition with MPND had scratched the surface of this, but a few details had been making me keen to pick at it a bit more.
I was also very excited to support Linda Hilfling Ritasdatter and Kristoffer Gansing with the installation of their project, The Great Netfix by a Video Store After the End of the World, at Borough Road Gallery. This included the transport of 1000 vhs tapes from Birmingham to London via a short stay in Leicester, and several days of stacking tapes. I was again reminded of the best bits of tech work - working alongside the artists, performing strange rituals and deciding to make an art. The show runs until 2 July open daily 2-5pm.
I also worked on an exhibition of works by Jenny Holzer which are visiting Attenborough Arts Centre as part of Tate's Artist Rooms project. This was tech from a different angle. The exhibition is stunning and monumental but somehow sterile and trapped within its canonised art status. This is particularly jarring with the ongoing student encampments and activism around the campus and wider city.
I even visited some exhibitions in Nottingham. The Contemporary has an excellent trio of shows from Hamid Zénati, Claudia Martínez Garay and Juian Abraham 'Togar'. At the castle is a brilliant show co-curated by my friend Christopher Samuel and Jennifer Gilbert. It includes the work of Siddharth Gadiyar, James Gladwell, Thompson Hall, Richard Hunt, Nnena Kalu, Cameron Morgan, Michelle Roberts, and Leslie Thompson.
The Two Queens Members Show will open next Friday. I'll have a small anti-war, anti-genocide, BDS related piece in it.
Gon' Luddin'
20-May-24
Teaching a workshop about artist websites tomorrow. Looking forward to it, as it has been a while since I've run this kind of thing. Luddite/permacomputing focused as always - which might go against the grain of the 'professional development' purpose of the series its a part of. Looking forward to meeting artists and finding out what they think is important in a website.
Dead Hand Radio Hour will be live tomorrow evening, 10-11pm.
I installed an interesting show last week, John Beck and Matthew Cornford: The Art Schools of the Midlands which is open at Loughborough University. It's really interesting to think about the importance of the art school in the development of the arts.
As precarious as it is, tech-work is an excellent way to spend time with artists and get an insight into what is important to them within their work, possibly because a lot of it is non-verbal, it's standing around, moving things, making things.
7-May-24
The Reveil stream happened this past weekend. I was listening in at different times during Saturday and up early on Sunday to add my own microphones to the stream.
Art Meets Radical Openness starts today. It looks like a fantastic lineup. I think they've livestreamed talks in the past but can't see a link yet for this year. Will be following remotely if I can though.
I've been working on a project organising film screenings in solidarity with Palestine. It's happening this Thursday. Details are at kufiyyahkino.org
24-Apr-24
I had noticed that the streetlight outside my house was seemingly on day and night. The city council has now published a statement saying that this is happening across the city, affecting an unknown number of lights. It's part of the fallout from the recent cyber attack. There are currently 1.3tb of documents published online from this, and many services were affected. Unsurprisingly it is those already most vulnerable and dependent on such services functioning that have experienced the results of this. The streetlights being on is a surprising result that highlights the interconnectedness of the systems and infrastructure.
I'll be streaming in a couple of weeks for the Reveil broadcast of the dawn chorus around the world. Details are here. I've managed to listen to the stream for a couple of years, and was glad to remember about it in time to set up my own contribution this year.
The first of the monthly Dead Hand Radio Hour sessions happened last week. It was nice to have a bit more time in between the shows, and it allowed me to get a few more sound sources connected to the rig. This included a shortwave radio and a couple of old 'toy' keyboards. It was a really nice way of experimenting with the broadcast and I'll hopefully practice a bit before the next show (on May 21st).
8-Apr-24
Now Play This festival is happening this week. I am really happy to have a new piece of work exhibiting there. It's called Service Set and involves a bunch of wifi networks, a riddle and a very small dungeon crawler. I'll post something about it to this page, /service-set
A few weeks back I restarted the Luddite bibliography/linkdump that has been on my site for a while. It can now be reached at luddite.wiki
19-Mar-24
Dead Hand Radio Hour is back today. We're aiming for monthly shows going forward, as we'd like to be spending a bit more time thinking about the shows. So, bookmark third tuesdays of the month as DHRH.
A couple of related artists talks I've seen in the last week: Graham Dunning, speaking at LSBU about his Phd research. He showed us footage of the incredible machines he builds, in the studio and at a gig. Plenty of links on his website here. It's great to see this work and connects to the way I'm trying to think through and play with radio and microcontrollers. There's a lot more space for analog things to happen with Graham's work though - and I think that's something I need to aim for... it's possibly part of my interest in the DHRH stuff - the antenna feed changes things.
Secondly, there was a talk presented by the Computer Arts Society with 90 year old artist Jack Tait. Jack has spent much of his life building drawing machines. They are incredible sculptural things, that he makes generously available for others to program and run. Some of them are documented here. It was interesting to hear him speak of his time in the RAF bomber command forming his understanding of imaging machines and computation. This is a seemingly common thread amongst the early generation of generative artists. This of course fits with the history of computation, imaging and radio as the result of colonialist-capitalist-military imperatives. I'm interested in this precedent, and how it fits with emerging tech today, the luddite angle, is to interrogate whether this use of the machine is furthering the harms caused. Jack's machines suggest an other kind of computation or machine-human relationship. A bit like Graham's turntables, they are things to be performed with. Doing so makes space for things to happen.
A few days ago I picked up a radio from a junk shop, which I'd hoped might serve as a control for when I'm building other things. Switching it on I realised it had a setting for short wave. I didn't really know anything about this band but it has been amazing to scan the frequencies and pick up broadcasts from stations in Europe, Asia and Africa. This site lists what stations are active across the different bands, so can be used to cross-reference received transmissions. I didn't particularly need another part of radio to be interested in, but here we are.
4-Mar-24
Dead hand radio hour isn't running this week or next, so expect us back on the 19th.
This week I'm looking forward to meeting up with the CSNI folks and seeing a talk with Alexandra Anikina and Stephen Cornford. The talk is open to all and details are here.
Friday is the TRANSNATIONAL ANTI-COLONIAL TRANS★FEMINIST COUNTER CLOUD ACTION DAY. No ludd walk this year, but we'll be running the book club session with the strike in mind.
The multi-headed page with strike statement and details can be found here.22-Feb-24
Earlier this month I participated in the APRJA workshop which produces a newspaper (or similar) each year to be distributed at Transmediale festival. The workshop was a great experience. I enjoyed meeting the other participants and learning about the research. The newspaper can be downloaded here (or I have a few paper copies I can post out).
I've also officially completed my MRes now, so I'll link to that as well. It's buried on my own website here or through the official university here. I'm beginning work on continuing this research as a PhD project. Whereas the MRes focussed on the VLF antenna, the PhD will expand to other frequencies and devices.
Radio experiments continue, as I've finally visited the local Radio Society, ordered a small handheld transceiver (a QUANSHENG), and have been working on some LoRa tests with Chris Samuel. I'll post some more about each of these at some point.
Finally, the book club I mentioned a few posts back started last week. We're reading/coding Aesthetic Programming by Geoff Cox and Winnie Soon. We meet again tomorrow, and I'm looking forward to seeing what people bring to discuss. I've made a page for that here.
16-Jan-24
After an unexpected, extended break the Dead Hand Radio Hour will return this evening. As usual we'll stream between 10-11pm UTC. The link can be found at /deadhand.
I've been missing the weekly streams and listening to the antenna so I'm looking forward to it. The weather is much colder now and snow is possible, so the VLF might sound different to usual.
10-Jan-24
A strange start to the year. I was ill for a few weeks. Not clear of it yet, but better.
I'm participating in the next edition of APRJA which I'm really looking forward to. I've been playing with the local networking of the Wemos D1 Minis again. I've been using these boards for a few years now and only ever in the most primitive ways, but it still feels like an exciting manipulation of code, software and hardware - bringing close.
I have a couple of Computer Drawings in an exhibition of Generative art at LCB Depot. It runs 12th - 26th January.
I'm planning to restart the Dead Hand Radio Hour next week if I have a bit more energy, and will wake up the previously mentioned coding book club plans.
I was also planning to write some kind of summary of my experience last year as a freelance technician/artist. Maybe I'll put something longer together at some point, but the TLDR is probably, that I was lucky it worked. The timing coincided with a handful of projects and crucially I had the DYCP. I am very proud of the things that got done. Especially supporting Everest Pipkin's Fragment Ecologies, the Virtual Textual exhibition, the Choosing Children tour and my project with MPND. However, I don't have much lined up now. I should be writing funding applications if that's the route I'm going to take. The tech gigs are less predictable than imagined and my specialisms aren't in much demand. Luddism is definitely practiced at the expense of certain gigs - but whilst I can I'll still remove my labour as much as possible from those areas I believe harmful (even as that list grows).
19-Dec-23
I passed my amateur radio Foundation Licence today. I revised independently using a range of resources. Some of the notes I needed in the final few days of revising are here, /radio-foundation. I was really pleased to pass and am looking forward to experimenting more and connecting with some local clubs.
We'll be streaming the (probably) last DHRH show this evening. The process continues to be really interesting. New technical things seem to crop up each week with the VLF antenna setup that I'm using.
Finally, here's a link to +972's article on the use of AI by the IDF. TMK also did an episode going through the article, which they've added to their main feed- ep. 303.
28-Nov-23
Four weeks in to the Dead Hand Radio Hour. We've played mostly the same show each week, but with some changing sounds. I think tonight will be the last playthrough with the current tracklist. I'm enjoying spending time running the stream and hearing from folks who've tuned in.
I had been working on an interactive-theatre type show, which had a mini midlands tour over the last few months. We finished the last of the shows this weekend with the tech all finally working as we'd hoped.
I finished Brian Merchant's Blood in the Machine. A good history of Luddism. I've added it along with some of his sources to my /luddites page.
Some good local shows at the moment: a nice works in progress members exhibition at MPND, Loughborough where the works are assembled very nicely together and overlapping; and Joey Holder's Cryptid at Two Queens, which is really stunning and unnerving. The Virtual Textual exhibition continues at Phoenix, and I think there are a couple of events still coming up. I'm hoping to join the Wandering Workshop with v Buckenham's Downpour.
I've been trying to put plans together for a reading/coding group to go through Winnie Soon and Geoff Cox's Aesthetic Coding. It's likely to be in person mostly, but possibly a hybrid online element too. Fortnightly starting in January. If you're interested drop me a line.
Final link - there are a couple of sessions left in the Algorithmic Pattern Salon. Details here. Talks are recorded too, so worth checking back anyway. There is a nice variety in the things folks are presenting and the ways different disciplines/thinking weave together.
8-Nov-23
Started up a new (hopefully) regular Dead Hand radio show yesterday. We'll be playing out almost the same show at the same time next week, which is Tuesday 10-11 GMT. It has been fun thinking about how we can experiment with Dead Hand again. We're always talking about stuff, but it's been a while since we shared anything. Info for that is here.
A few folks had issues accessing the stream so I spent some time today trying to switch things across to a different machine and having a fresh look at the config. I've written a bit about that on the /stream page.
I think I've been thinking a bit about long projects recently, and certainly ways of building spaces/tools/routines that are sustainable for art making whilst fitting around other bits of life, and that are also less contingent on other bits of life (i.e. cheaper so not needing to be funded through regular work or arts funding rounds)... Anyway, maybe that's what reminded me of the film The Man With The Eye At The End Of His Finger by Guy Newmountain. Someone has posted it online, so you can watch it here. I screened it as a part of a local filmmakers event I used to run occassionally at Phoenix. It's a really astonishing work that was produced over 27 years, using the Comodore Amiga 1200 and the software, Deluxe Paint IV. I remember the audience at the screening being completely stunned by it. It's such an intense and extended engagement with a piece of software. The film itself is also filled with details from the artist's life. The protaganist meets many people and they are all based on friends of Newmountain. To a Leicester local, there will be other details that are familiar as well.
31-Oct-23
I hosted a second Ludd walk this past weekend as a closing event for my exhibition at Modern Painters New Decorators. It was a really nice event and I'm very grateful to everyone who showed up. This included local historian and blogger, Lynne Dyer, whose website I had used to form part of my research for the walk.
It has been a great experience working with MPND over the last year. They are a good bunch. On the day of the walk Josh and Josie were helping keep the group together as well as making notes and drawings. I'll share some more documentation of this when it's published.
There is also a recording of the talk I did, which can be accessed here. I'd actually suggest you check out this talk by artist Sheila Ghelani instead though. It was part of the same conversation as mine and very good!
A nice project has just been published by The Photographers Gallery. They are assembling a glossary. I was invited to invite someone to respond to one of the words and reached out to Dhruv Jani of Studio Oleomingus. He composed a beautiful response to the word History which can be read here.
11-Oct-23
A short post to note the next Counter Cloud Action Day, happening on 12th October.
It's been exciting following discussion for this and seeing the development of the web pages and web-to-print sections.
The multi-hosted call is available here- https://diagram.institute/12o/
The timing almost matched up for the second Ludd walk, but not quite. I'll be trying to be more off the cloud than usual and also asking folks I encounter what they think about it. Good luck to those hosting events and actions.
19-Sep-23
A few new pages up around the site - reminds me I should update the /tree.html page.
Carrier Bag Fictions opened a week and a bit ago. It was a really nice time. Lovely to see a lot of folks there (despite the crazy heat). MPND were also hosting a one-night installation of Ama Dogbe's Alien Invasion. This was a multi screen video game work, with some really nice design and great sound. I believe it will be hosted online at some point too.
It was very exciting to see folks interacting with the Carrier Bag Fictions works. It felt like it was kind of doing what I had hoped it might. It felt clearer than ever the distinction between the art objects/gesture space and the texts about the thing (here, Luddites). Although they push up against each other and overlap - have fuzzy edges. Maybe what I'm thinking about is the way an audience or reader is prepared for a thing - and the expectations they bring meet whatever is in the space. The gallery allows for the generative, collective reading and acting.
I've been working on planning the walk at the end of October. I should have a page up about that soon.
I finally have a rig set up for doing a Dead Hand stream mixing the VLF stuff with Dead Hand pieces and other recordings. I'll be doing a test stream tomorrow (Wednesday 20th ~9pm).
6-Aug-23
I'm really happy to share that details of my exhibition with Modern Painters New Decorators are now online here. The show is called Carrier Bag Fictions and opens on 9th* September. MPND have written up a nice description about it so I won't post much more here. Slightly nervous to be referencing Le Guin so directly, but I think it makes sense. We're hoping to have another Ludd walk as well, probably as a closing event.
It has been nice and also quite strange to be thinking about work for an exhibition. I don't usually think of myself as having a practice as such any more - but being able to have space to think about the things in this way and trying to make some objects or gestures for a particular place and in dialogue with the MPND team has been very good.
In my research I've been exploring this idea of the hobbyist and what that might mean in the context of an arts practice. It is a malleable and often pejorative term, like Luddite. But similarly I think it can be turned to interesting, productive (towards refusal/resistance) ends. Preparing these works, as the install dates draw closer, I've been thinking more about this time as hobbyist.
I'm also in the middle of a few weeks helping teach on a kids film camp. I've always enjoyed the process of filmmaking. It's very interesting to see young folks navigate the collaborative process of developing an idea and shooting scenes. I'd like to find a way of making the webring/low tech workshops as collaborative, and physically present in space.
Finally - a good podcast episode I enjoyed recently linking Buddhism and Marxism, Upstream w/Breht O'Shea. Some very Luddite adjacent thinking in here.
edit - date of exhibition opening changed
28-Jul-23
Quite a gap since my last post as I've been fortunate enough to work on a couple of nice tech jobs, (including a week of technician training with CVAN EM) and also took a trip to explore Northern Portugal.
Everest Pipkin's Fragment Ecologies, which is open at Phoenix until 17 September, was a real joy to work on. I don't really imagine I'll work on something like that again. Everest's work has been so important to me over the last few years and it was very special to be able to be part of the team building the exhibition. I worked closely with Gino Attood. I used to be lucky enough to work regularly with Gino on things but it had been a while so it was great to be back with him. He's incredibly generous with artists and I enjoy seeing him work and always learn a bunch. Hopefully we'll do more stuff together going forward.
An interview with Everest was published just before the show opened which can be read on Hyperallergic here.
Attempting to adjust to looking at screens again - I just posted the previously mentioned entry on a piece of meteorite I was gifted. It's here.
Whilst in Portugal we visited the Côa Valley Archaeological Park and saw some of the paleolithic rock art. I think I'll make a page about that somewhere too. The deep time of the meteorites and the rock art connects with the radio, very low frequency stuff I've been thinking about, and through to the present use of technology. Or at least the way I enjoy thinking about it all, it does.
Some cool birds we think we saw:
- Griffon Vulture
- Bonnelli's Eagle
- Golden Eagle
- Egyptian Vulture
- Booted Eagle
- Hoopoe
- Golden Oriole
15-Jun-23
Ok, so continued from the last post - the funding application was rejected. So, it'll be a smaller event than hoped.
I'm going to rant about UK arts funding for a bit here, so skip if you like.
After a nine week wait, after logging into the arcane web interface I opened the letter that a lot of folks will have received today saying that my project isn't being funded. They include a line of feedback and in this case I hadn't In this case the feedback was that "Further detail on how your project contributes to the Outcomes and Investment Principles of Let’s Create, including further exploration of the impact and reach of your project, could have strengthened your application." This is the impact and reach of the project I'm yet to do, and which is designed to engage and interact with people in the process of its creation and exhibition and the events alongside it. But ok.
This system of funding is horrible. If the application had been successful it would have been equivalent to a minimum wage job for a couple of months. During which time I'd presumably be preparing the next application or booking in more pieces of work cast-off from other successful applications (i.e. tech work, assisting, workshops etc.) But it would have been just enough to work on it properly, which is something I wanted to do, and think would have been a good thing for the community there and other folks who might have been able to engage with it.
The last few months the project with MPND has been in stasis, waiting to hear what would happen, and now things will be a bit rushed and less ambitious than I'd hoped. I'll draw much more on in-kind support and family and friends that is already so erased from formal arts funding. On paper the budget from MPND, which is partly ACE funded equates to about a weeks work - according to the AN rates of pay, which are often cited in applications. This isn't unusual, probably the norm, at least here in the midlands. It's also an incredibly unrealistic way of accounting for the time you spend with ideas as an artist.
I rely on other folks successful applications for most of my paid work now (possibly some that my own application was competing with) and it feels incredibly precarious. Trying to follow my own practice through those routes increasingly feels far more harmful than good. And this is all with the generous support of the DYCP (developing your creative practice) grant that I did receive, am thankful for, and gave me enough of a buffer to really develop my practice for a few months. It has done that, for sure, but within these months I've also been unsuccessful in several applications that would have continued that development.
None of this detail above is unusual or unexpected. The ACE letter ends with the platitudes that it doesn't mean the idea wasn't worthy of funding, but that they don't have the funds, and they have to make decisions about the combinations of what gets funded.
So it goes. I'm looking forward to doing what I can with MPND. They're a really good, supportive and caring space that I'm lucky to have been invited to spend time with.
12-Jun-23
I hosted a couple of workshops this past weekend with Modern Painters New Decorators. These mark the beginnings of an exploration of the Luddite history in Loughborough. In the Autumn I'll be presenting a small exhibition of works. The scale is dependent on an ACE application - but I'm hopeful we'll be able to run some more workshop sessions and a walk as well.
I was interested in finding out what the young people knew about the Luddites already and how they felt about the digital technologies they use in their daily lives.
I will be trying to think about how to tell the story of the Luddite raid on Heathcoat's Mill and connect the Luddite resistance to the present moment. In this workshop we made some small zines using pieces of Luddite letters, old computer magazines and technical drawings of looms to explore some of these ideas.
For the family workshop session we tied together a net, inspired by the collective practices of quilt making and particularly, Lygia Clark’s Rede de elásticos (1974). It provided a nice 'weaving' together of the histories of computing, textiles, automation and the social realities of networks today.
22-May-23
Published a new web ring page; loom cat. I still plan to formally write-up some of the workshops I've run in the past to make it easier to suggest them to folks in the future, and the webring workshop is a format I enjoy a lot.
To populate the web ring beyond this site, I made a quick page on the Avantwhatever server to place some of the ASCII cellular automata I've been drawing. It has been nice to get back to thinking about some drawings. I'm doing so in hopeful preparation for a small exhibition with Modern Painters New Decorators in the Autumn.
I was at Two Queens last week, and helped hoist some solar panels up to the roof. The panels are part of an exhibition by Sean Roy Parker that opens there this Friday. It looks like it will be a nice time exploring permaculture and low-tech resourcefulness. Details are here.
A couple weeks back I helped with Christopher Samuel's new exhibition at Attenborough Arts Centre. It runs until 16/7 and includes the Archive of the Unseen piece which I've written about here before, along with some new audio recordings, and really nice drawings.
A surprise part of the install process was working alongside meteorite expert and artist, Graham Ensor. He even gifted me a piece of one. Making a page for that is close to next on my list so expect it sometime soon.
10-May-23
I configured an Icecast server for streaming audio. It's live as I write - streaming low noise and distortion from the little SDR dongle/antenna I have. The stream link and some details about the setup are posted here.
I've been adding a few pages across the site and documenting some things I've been meaning to get to for a while. This includes a tree view of the whole site for quick reference of what pages actually exist. Also. the silly video I made for the Two Queens Two Screens event is now linked on /machinima.
26-Apr-23
Implemented a version of Everest Pipkin's screenshot garden today. It's here.
24-Apr-23
I'm enjoying browsing the Solar Protocol exhibition. It includes work by some of my favourite folks. honor ash writes about expiring data. Marloes de Valk compiles an ecofeminist dictionary. And Everest Pipkin creates an beautiful text-based point and click adventure thing which I'm currently enjoying too much to peek ahead at the rest of the exhibition.
The tabletop sale was good. It was nice to share some (mostly by now quite old) stuff that I had, that hadn't really been shared much before. I was pleased with how the print 'n' play zines turned out. I'll get them posted up soon. Got Grits was popular with folks and the scale of Car Game seemed to amuse some. They're all fun and silly things and it was nice to see people enjoying them - though I did spot some ammendments I need to make to the Pizza x Rat rules. The zines are also now all in the Leicester Zine Library which is very nice too.
13-Apr-23
I've just added short posts about two tiny things I've made; bool and viewer. Both silly, minimal methods for exploring specific behaviours, patterns or routines with the computer.
I've been preparing a couple of things for the Two Queens tabletop sale (22/4) and Two Screens moving image night (28/4). I'll have a few prints and zine versions of all my print n' play games. I'll upload these here and/or itch afterwards. For the moving image night I'm hoping to screen a machinima piece I made which has been kind of on my mind to have a go at for years (which is you wouldn't be able to tell from watching it...)
Another thing I wanted to write about somewhere but for now will mention here- is general epub first aid. I was tracking down some more obscure references in the last week and came across the kind of strangely formatted epub that sometimes appears. It contained strange broken gif files, every page was formated as a table etc. So I opened it up in Calibre's Editor mode and started slowly removing the extraneous stuff and repairing it. Beginning this process actually revealed that an essay I hadn't been able to find anywhere was included in the collection. It hadn't shown up in searching the libraries/databases and the broken state of the collection had meant the entire text of that particular essay was cropped from view.
I might write a bit more about the tools I've been using for this kind of thing, but the primary one is Calibre. It is a really joyful thing for organising a library, editing metadata and editing epubs.
10-Mar-23
8th March Ludd Walk took place and was a good time. Will be thinking about how it all went, but definitely planning to do another. Probably in the summer!
It was exciting to participate in the cloud strike. Others on the walk had prepared much better than me, and seemed to be making it through the day more effectively off-cloud. Being in a physical space with others it was easier to notice the moments when we'd be reaching for the cloud and think about evasion.
I met with the team at MPND today in preparation for some work later in the year. I facilitated a small webring exercise which was a nice moment of collective writing and publishing.
I've also added a small page with some notes about low-res video streaming stuff I've been thinking about: /webcam
20-Feb-23
I've published the new wikilike version of this website.
I'm planning to spend some time over the next few weeks tidying it up and creating pages. I hope it encourages me to write up more pages on different things - but we'll see.
The prompt to publish was the need to share details of a Ludd Walk I'm hosting on 8th March as part of the International Trans*Feminist Digital Depletion Strike.
The page is available here.
Also encouraging in the writing of these pages over the last few weeks was reading Everest's recent post about their own website writing process, which you can read here. Everest also hosted a recent Screenwalks which I listened to as I took a long s-bahn towards Transmediale. The recording is available here. It's nice to see that Screenwalks is back to their fortnightly schedule. They have such a great archive of talks now - well worth a deep dive.
27-Jan-23
Last week we finished the install of the first exhibition in the new gallery space at Phoenix. It's a nice exhibition with work by good pals: Object Memory.
I'm now fully freelance - it seemed like the best way of making time for my research project. But it is strange. I'm part way through re-building the website and it will include a page about creative tech stuff I can do.
Avantwhatever residencies are already a couple of weeks in and it's nice to be meeting regularly again.
I participated in this workshop/newspaper-writing event, Minor Tech which was good. I took along a VLF antenna and did a bad demonstration. The paper we published can be found here!.
And also this week I helped Tom build a website for the Small File Photo Festival. The festival runs this Saturday with workshops and talks and will be a good time if you can make it.
Whilst in at the Minor Tech workshop, we attended Tung-Hui Hu speaking at The Photographers' Gallery about his latest book, Digital Lethargy. It was really good. Here's a link to him talking about the same book with Kate Crawford.
1-Dec-22
Have been feeling a strange sense of drifting the last few weeks, as the online-social spaces I visit have been growing busier. I need to remind myself that I like the slow movement, and that's fine there too. Lurking.
I've been thinking about two works that I think are always on the edges of my thinking:
The slow motion walking as participation and resistance within a protest of Cuban artist, Raychel Carrion's Fallas de Origen and the necessary dancing, movement, holding of space within Egyptian artist Hassan Khan's Jewel.
At my day-job we supported Everest Pipkin to release their new work, The Barnacle Goose Experiment. It's available here and is really beautiful.
Avantwhatever has opened up for a new round of server residencies. I'm now acting as a caretaker, and am so happy to be able to continue spending time with the folks there. The callout can be found here.
28-Oct-22
I've been listening to the VLF receiver when possible. A storm passed over last weekend and it was possible to watch the lightning through the window and hear it simultaneously through the receiver. This morning I captured the whines of a garbage truck manouvering outside.
The receiver will be displayed as aprt of Two Queens members show in November.
Preparing to begin uni research (pending a successful proposal) I've been trying to understand more about the processes involved in PCB manufacturing. Routing lines in KiCAD looks like a good time.
I think I'll re-build this website pretty soon. In the meantime, I made a mini projects page to link things, and removed the main page links to the fiction stuff. I think the resources section is probably quite outdated now as well.
I visited the Poetry Games exhibition at National Poetry Library last week. It's open until January and has some really good work included. A visit is recommended if you're in London.
12-Oct-22
Strange day between a couple of different things. Trying to quiet the usual demons.
I picked up my attempts to get DokuWiki running from my home server - and actually got past the problem I'd had before. I just got lucky unpicking the several parts of the error - to the point that I must have fixed each part in the right order.
So, I do have a wiki running now. There are some strange permission issues persisting but mostly it's done. I'm not sure what I'll be using it for but it's a step towards a kind of self-hosted note system (possibly with multiple users) that I wanted to get to.
Next I continued work on a friend's project that involves Raspberry Pi, Python and Arduino all working together nicely. I made some progress, but it is exhausting trying to brute force solve every step.
And the last few hours I finished assembling a new VLF receiver - more carefully made than the last, so should be easier to take out and get some good recordings. Nathan has already started crafting some wonderful stuff with the recordings I've been sending his way - so looks like we'll continue to Dead Hand along that way.
A sawtooth passing of minor-achievements and failure.
24-Sep-22
I've just published a page on a project I was working on during the residency, which can be found at /forest.html.
Also - built a very quick VLF receiver today. It is suprisingly effective - picking up interesting hums, pops and tones from things around the house - and like the AM receiver I made a few months back, picking up broadcasts from the nearby transmitter very clearly. Would like to take it out of the city and make some recordings.
12-Sep-22
Excited to share that the although the official residency period with avantwhatever.net has now passed, both myself and fellow resident, Rory, will be continuing to reside there. My local server is running now - but missing a few bits I'd like to sort out to make it stable enough that others can visit.
I visited Chris Samuel's The Archive of an Unseen at the Wellcome Collection last week. I was lucky to help Chris work on this, and it's incredible to see it realised.
And - the new Dead Hand is out now -here.
23-Aug-22
It has been a minute. The server with avantwhatever.net is going really well. It has been a great opportunity to spend some more focussed time within the server system, and be able to talk about it with the other users of the space. I will miss our weekly calls. I've been writing a lot of things on a subdomain there, motes.avantwhatever.net.
Working on some bits for a new dead hand release by Nathan. Included adapting my flat sketch tool to include music notation...
I have been continuing to spend as much time as possible reading and writing for my uni course. This also linked to a workshop I ran a couple of weeks ago at Vivid Projects with members of their Black Hole Club. This was a good opportunity to test some of the things I'd been thinking about - and felt like a great day.
This Friday I'm showing the google maps film I made last year, with Nathan, at a Two Queens event, Two Screens. Looks like it will be a good time.
11-Jul-22
Some time since my last update. I've been working on the same things, and reading a lot - but the day job has been busier and more distracting for a while.
I am really excited to be taking part in a server residency with avantwhatever.net. I'm not too sure what the outcomes will be at this stage, but meeting the team, Ben, Patrick, Bec and fellow resident Rory has been great.
30-May-22
First version of nightwalk webring published. I'm hoping to use this in a couple of workshops - so it was a good chance to refamiliarise myself with the code and check things worked as I expected. I'll announce the webring in some places soon and am inviting folks to join.
I'll give it a couple of days though, as I would like to at least catch it at the night time hours.
I've written a bit about the webring at /nightwalk.html but it is essentially just a webring that is only visible to visitors at certain times. In this case- between midnight and 3am.
25-May-22
Refreshed pages across the site - so things might be broken.
The CSNI related pages are now accessible from the sitemap.
15-May-22
The drone jam entry is accessible at bruise.in/drone.html or itch.io/twisted-wire.
Lot's to continue working on.
Small updates to /reading also.
11-May-22
I've been spending time building small AM radio receivers. It's something I've wanted to try for a while - but hadn't known where to start. I'm writing something up regarding this as part of dr((((((o))))))ne jam.
29-Apr-22
Collected Poems will be exhibited at GLOAM, Sheffield from today through May 8th. It's part of a Two Queens re-exhibition of the members' show. The poems are existing here as a slightly different version though, without drawings as this is what GLOAM requested - but there are some new poems added in.
12-Apr-22
Big gap in the log.
In the background I've been building some online documentation of my research project for CSNI.
/csni is the link. It's very loose at the moment and mostly a sketching out of ideas. But I am enjoying it immensely.
17-Feb-22
The new dead hand piece, Walking backwards to see you is now up at bandcamp.
I've added an archive page here to start linking back to some older projects. First up is eyes, which was another collaboration with Nathan from last year.
A few small updates across the site. I've abandoned the md->html approach for the most part and am just merrily writing things out as html.
8-Feb-22
I'm very pleased to share that I'm now developing the Careful Networks project as part of an MRes at the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image.
The research produced at and around CSNI is incredible, and I am looking forward to seeing how this shapes the project.
Read about CSNI here.
4-Feb-22
Now with RSS. Perhaps. I was prompted to look at this more closely having only recently watched The Internet's Own Boy.
31-Jan-22
Constant, a film by Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner is screening at several festivals, now. Nathan and I (mostly Nathan) did some dead hand work on the sound. We will be releasing some of these as a small collection soon. It was a really inspiring process and fascinating window into the practices of Sasha and Beny. Screening info here.
12-Jan-22
The site is now moved over and seems to be working. I'm excited to have some new pages to tend to, which I had been hoping to implement for some time. I'd like to look again at mirroring this to gemini or parts of it anyway. I still have my page on the brilliant flounder.online but have been absent from it for a while.
8-Jan-22
I’m beginning to re-assemble the website into something a bit more manageable and flexible. I’ve moved the hosting to Greenhost.
~gg 02/23
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