Project Something

Protected: Aims

jonnybase — Mon, 14 Mar 2016 19:59:28 +0000

Protected: Introduction

jonnybase — Mon, 14 Mar 2016 19:54:17 +0000

Protected: Square Roots – Digital

jonnybase — Mon, 14 Mar 2016 19:46:18 +0000

CODE/Analogue Play – Workshop

jonnybase — Sun, 13 Mar 2016 09:56:04 +0000

The workshop aimed to open up the possibilities of digital play to a group of level 5 undergraduate graphic Arts students. More often that not the complexities code and programming environments are a barrier to experimental creative exploration. In order to break these barriers down we filled the room with projectors, Laptops, analogue titling machines, over head projectors. Using simple PHP programming techniques and the Twitter API, we generated some random textual strings. Then we threw some processing.org code into the mix, allowing the audio in the room to control the scale and colour of the projected canvas.

Very much in the spirit of David Carson, we allowed the process to drive the work and embraced the mistakes and visual glitches. It was very much a collaborative effort, documented using Digital SLR’s and Mobile phones.

Digital Waste

Ben Hall — Thu, 10 Mar 2016 15:00:24 +0000

A persistence of video-card failures captured before the crash. These digital offcuts – self-sufficient, abstract authors – inform themselves and lead their own narrative. Their pixels plotted in MIDI return a soundtrack and editing rhythm for 16 by 9 slices.

Watch the film here.

Flickr-ing

jonnybase — Thu, 10 Mar 2016 14:52:09 +0000

A Form of digital concrete poetry. The visuals were derived by constantly looping through (every 60 seconds) the latest upload to the Flickr.com global public feed. The resulting data was plotted on to a portrait canvas and constantly plotted over the previous result a kin to digital screen printing .

The outputs we’re limited to varying exposures in order experiment with the aesthetic of the visuals. You can read into the contents and derive your own narratives. Like Sophie Calle’s ‘Address Book’, it’s sort of private detective work, where you construct your own narrative within the image or view them as Wienghart esque, constructed type-as-image, where the composition is a typographic representation of negative space.

G.R.E.I.G. Exhibition

Ben Hall — Thu, 10 Mar 2016 11:22:41 +0000

An exhibition of digital understandings and misunderstandings by tutors from the Graphic Arts and Design degree at Leeds Beckett University. My role was to curate and to collaborate in the fulfilment of contributors’ digital exhibits. Submitted works spanned analogue and digital formats, including: Sophie’s ARM an Acorn Archimedes with a programmed dialogue written in BASIC [Dr Kiff Bamford] and A Bit – Something That Is Or Isn’t A Film of a blind digitess being led through the woods [Dr Liz Stirling].

Exhibition website: http://greig.cagd.co.uk.

Generative Font – Ben Hall and Dave Beckett

Tile Game – Ben Hall and Mick Marston

Digital Clock

Project Something – Exhibition 2016

jonnybase — Thu, 10 Mar 2016 10:22:35 +0000

Private View
29.05.2016
5pm – 8pm
Free Drinks *while they last*
Everyone is Welcome, Artists will be present to answer questions.

Part of The Leeds Digital Festival

Exhibition Opening
1st – 3rd of May
9am – 5pm

Exhibition Overview

The themes of the exhibition are ‘What is (can we create) a sense of place in a digital landscape?’ [Jonathan Briggs] and ‘Chance and Authorship in Analogue and Digital Storytelling’ [Benjamin Hall].

The Exhibition aims to combine digital and analogue data, created by ourselves and others (the public) in order to generate new pieces of artwork. The exhibition will demonstrate individual characteristics of human experience within the gathered content, offering some kind of visual feedback as reward for the endeavour of creating the data.

Project Something is a one-week exhibition, which explores location, chance and storytelling within a post-digital landscape. This will consist of a series of interactive, narrative engines presented as projections, interfaces and print material. The engines will be harvesting data at both a local and global level to generate new, dynamic narratives by combining existing stories from Leeds with internet feeds and APIs. These projections will be centred around a machine, which dispenses printed strategies on card, which can either be used as prompts for interaction or records of contribution.

Aims of the Exhibition

Participation

Visitors to The University and website will be able to contribute to and influence how the narratives develop and evolve. Contributions can take the form of text input, simple decisions and interacting with the conductive interface in person at the exhibition. We will explore different forms of chance in order to create new narratives.

Innovation

The exhibition will be an opportunity to show case new methods in the practices of writing. Both our practices have explored technology for generative, interpretative, responsive and visual means of creating stories. The works will bring together multiple means for presenting stories: design, film, sound and literature.

Creating A Living document

Following the exhibition, the website will be a document of activity and a creative work in its own right.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a printed publication, which will offer a cultural and technical insight in to the engines and outputs featured.

Simple Non-linear Narrative Engine

jonnybase — Mon, 29 Feb 2016 19:43:23 +0000

“A text is a lazy machine that expects a lot of collaboration from the reader.” Umberto Eco (1992)

The Simple Non-linear Narrative Engine is an ongoing, collaborative story framework which turns third-party text [Ogden’s Basic English] into a non-linear narrative. It is an online application built in PHP using a database to deliver a pseudo-random narrative. Users can either contribute to the story or read it by making certain choices. Drawing upon a culture of interactive fiction, this engine explores the short-form potential of text and the onus of interpretation upon the reader.

Magnet Fishing

jonnybase — Mon, 29 Feb 2016 19:42:33 +0000

A haul of submerged magnetophors from the Leeds – Liverpool canal. There is a concept in computer programming which is taken for granted and that is that of the object. An object is a piece of memory that you can allocate values to. An object is variable: you can call it Pauline, assign a value of 6 to it or give it a cat’s face. An object can be anything, or it can even be a container for other objects. It can even be empty. An object is essentially a metaphor representing an enormous potential in terms of narrative and interpretation.