Month: August 2011

Events and things

Posted in events, livecoding - 26 August 2011 - 0 Comments

Had a really great time at dorkcamp, and have a couple of more things coming up…

Despite now living in three different cities, slub will manage to perform together on 30th September in La Maison Rouge Paris, as part of the Sony CSL 15th anniversary. Really looking forward to this one.

Then on 28th October I’m honoured to be invited by Aarhus University to give a talk on Artist-Programmers.

On the 15th March 2012 I’m doing some kind of live coding performance at the Life Centre in Newcastle although details aren’t set for that yet.

I’ll also be co-organising another dorkbotsheffield in the next month or so.

That’s it for now..

Attending to presentation slides

Posted in misc, papers, visualisation - 26 August 2011 - 0 Comments

I had some fun with my talk at ICMC earlier this month.

I started in the usual way with an outline slide, going through bullet points one by one outlining the structure of my talk.  Importantly, I tried to talk continuously while the slide was up.

On the next slide was a picture of a boy throwing a stone into the sea, I talked about it for a while, making the point that it was easy to perceive the image while listening to my voice.  The audience hopefully found they could attend simultaneously to the visual scene and my linguistic speech.

I then skipped back to the previous slide and pointed out that the outline slide actually had little to do with what I had been saying.  Here’s the contents of that first slide:

  • A live coding talk towards the end of the conference
  • Some strange programming languages were shown
  • He made a point about cognition that I didn’t quite get
  • The demo didn’t work out too well
  • I was a bit tired but he seemed to be trying to say something about syntax

This got some laughs.  There were quite a lot of people in the room, and the slide had been up for a while, but as far as I could gather no-one had managed to read any of it.  My contention was that they couldn’t read it while listening to my voice, it’s too difficult to attend to two streams of language at once.  I didn’t really know what would happen, but from talking to audience members afterwards it seems at least some people got a sense that something was wrong, but couldn’t work out what it was until I told them.

This was a nice practical demonstration of Dual Coding theory, and lead into my argument for greater integration between visual and linguistic elements of computer languages.  However there’s probably a point in there about the design of presentation slides.  If you want people to listen to what you’re saying, put short prompts on your slides, but not real sentences, because the audience won’t be able read them while listening to your voice.