I’ve had an incredible couple of weeks, too much to blog.. So here’s a brief recap.
Maker Faire UK was incredible, so many stalls, huge robots, so much enthusiasm, and surprisingly diverse, my 6 year old Son loved it.. I joined some other TOPLAP representatives (Shelly Knotts, Holger Ballweg, Chad McKinney) to run some live coding activity there and did a live coding performance outdoors which was invaded by a clown making explosions. Shelly did a performance as well and was given the same clown treatment apparently. Something to be explored further, I think. We also took part in an algorave that weekend, late in the Old Police House in Gateshead.. Good times.
Torque in Liverpool FACT was mind-blowing in a similar way. The keynote from Lambros Malafouris, introducing his Material Engagement Theory rang a lot of bells, unifying many approaches while taking a long view on culture. There were a lot of great talks that day, and I enjoyed doing my bit on live coding. There’ll be a Torque performance evening in London on the 6th June, I’ll be performing there with Kate Sicchio.
Then Sonic Pattern and the Textility of Code in London. I had the pleasure of working with Karen Gaskill on this, curator with the Craft Council, and I think this is up there as amongst the best events I’ve had the pleasure of co-organising. A full day of excellent talks and discussion exploring the correspondences between code, craft and sound. It was an all day event, on a Tuesday, but was sold out with many people travelling from afar.. Really can’t wait to get started with the Weaving Codes project now.
Then I gave a talk at a British Academy event “External Engagement in the Arts and Humanities”. It was good to be in a room with a lot of other early career researchers, and share my view of engagement as something that should take place throughout all stages of research, in order to breathe meaning into the work. As I’ve been reading a lot of Tim Ingold lately, I argued against the word “external”, and that we should think about research as a strand running through life, rather than in terms being a separate space.
Then back up to Newcastle for Thinking Digital Arts, which was excellent and part of the huge Thinking Digital conference, always good to see these vibrant activities in the North. Although our Slub performance was slightly compromised by problems with the sound, Dave went on to do a well received talk at the conference and I sneaked off to meet with the Newcastle culturelab folks, to distract them from the show they were installing for thinking digital arts. Great people!
I haven’t done any of these activities justice above, each could easily be its own blog post, but I wanted to get something down for a change. In the coming months I’ve resolved to travel less (although you wouldn’t know it), so I might have time to think about and document what I do more..
