Last June I got an e-mail from Amuseevous, an organisation that organizes activities in museums. They saw the installation in the exhibition of De Canvascollectie and they asked whether I wanted to display it during the Museumnight in the extraordinary location of the Middelheim museum. (I am a fan of the The Braem Pavilion)
Click on the image for the flyer:
For the CanvasCollectie exhibition I asked Ludivine Loiseau from OSP to design the adjoining texts. I also asked her to try and capture the way your code looks in a simple code editor (it colour codes certain commands).
I sent her this screenshot (click to enlarge):
To get the code in these colours she had to whip out her scripting talents – because it’s not easy to extract these colours from the text editor. For the rest of the text she worked in Scribus“, this pdf is the result: Softwearables text file and code
This was all done last April. In the meantime I got an invitation to show “Do(n’t) stand so close to me” in Middelheim. As Ludivine is in Iceland at this moment, I had to accept the challenge to work this lay-out software myself.
OSP (including Ludivine) design with only free software tools. The free-ness – as in liberty – goes further than that. From the first .pdf she has made, I also got the .sla scribus files, the workfiles to make the pdf., which enables me to edit these myself. (I use Ubuntu 10.04)
A few obstacles were encountered whilst trying to edit the .sla file (Scribus salad).
- The regular Scribus did not like the file -> I had to install the NG version (the unstable version, luckily also in the regular repositories)
- Missing fonts! where to get them?
– Four fonts were missing, Droid Serif Regular was available through Synaptic (easy!)
– Two other fonts come from the OSP foundry
– This font I did not find anywhere:
LMTypewriter12 Regular Regular
For this font I had to dig around a bit: whereby I found the history of the latin-modern font.
– lmtypewriter12-regular.otf changed name and became::: lmmono12-regular.otf
– .otf’s are not easy to install
– .ttf’s are easy to install ——->
– fontforge changes otf’s into ttf
– (and lmmono12-regular is part of teX fonts – which are in the regular repository)
Then I could start working in Scribus. There is one very basic aspect of the programme which was very frustrating, the lack of the undo button in the text editor.
pfew…
One wrong move and…
<< BLAM >> all text + styles gone…
(luckily there was “revert to original” where you still lose quite a lot but not everything…)
Here are the results:
This file is just a regular translation of the text in English, keeping Ludivine’s design as much as possible:
Softwearables text in Dutch
Here I made a little poster with instructions:
Softwearables mini poster
If you want the .sla files, drop me a line – they were to big for this blog.
Most of the time I’m not a very concentrated person, my attention span can be very short (it can also be very long). I quite easily get distracted because I feel my senses are very open for impulses most of the time.
I like reading on how a mind works, remembers, relives, lacks or gives attention, and of course there are many contradictory theories out there. One of the current visions on what a brain is and how it works is the plasticity of it. Where in previous theories you were doomed if you had brain damage, because your brains functions were pre-mapped on what region stood for what senses, the current scientific voices now sing another song. And it’s an interesting song. Neuroplasticity challenges the idea that brain functions are fixed in certain locations.
“According to the theory of neuroplasticity, thinking, learning, and acting actually change both the brain’s physical structure (anatomy) and functional organization (physiology) from top to bottom. Neuroscientists are presently engaged in a reconciliation of critical period studies demonstrating the immutability of the brain after development with the new findings on neuroplasticity, which reveal the mutability of both structural and functional aspects.”
It’s quite beautiful, daunting and hard to grasp that your gray matter can be so flexible.
Jonah Lehrer is a science journalist and author who writes primarily about the brain and how it functions, in layman’s terms. I came across this very nice book review in The New York Times written by him entitled “Our Cluttered Minds” – back to the topic of concentration. He’s reviewing this book: “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” by the technology writer Nicholas Carr, and basically Lehrer does not agree with Carr. Whether Carr or Lehrer are right or wrong, I will leave up to them – and you, but some of the quotes in the article are just hilarious and put things into perspective.
I’ll leave you with the introductory paragraph:
“Socrates started what may have been the first technology scare. In the “Phaedrus,” he lamented the invention of books, which “create forgetfulness” in the soul. Instead of remembering for themselves, Socrates warned, new readers were blindly trusting in “external written characters.” The library was ruining the mind. “
Go read the article now
(O, and about my attention span – quite often is was very short – in the pre-internet era!)
I was preparing for Dorkbot@iMal and one of the possible topics was going to be how to visualize some home made analog sensors, made with textile. This is a clear roundup on the topic: http://protolab.pbworks.com/TutorialSensors#Workingwithanaloginput
You rediscover lots of things. A bit more than a year ago I saw and filmed how they make cycling paths signs on the road. Here’s a little movie on how they do that in Brussels.
Some summer zen..
I have just filled in a questionnaire by the excellent http://www.kobakant.at/DIY/.The difference between crafting and engineering was one of the questions asked. I realize that in my answer on this question I shifted the focus from crafting to tinkering, without a second thought as I do not consider what I do as to be crafting. So on tinkering versus engineering, a little story:
An artist friend of mine organized a visit to an engineering school. The engineers had set up a lot of very nice experiments (we learnt a lot: on different types of batteries, on power, on solar and wind energy…) and at the end we were supposed to build a circuit, a set-up by the engineers. The engineers totally rely on a set of skills (formula’s, math, physics, proof, understanding) and they get well documented results – within a certain timespan following the “scientific method”. We, the tinkering artists, seem to work the other way round, we start with an idea and we try. Failure is an inherent part of this. The engineers were baffled on how much we accomplish without knowing the ins and outs of the physics and the math.
One big difference I think, is the applicability of topics we work on. “Useful”, applicable, sellable, patentable are criteria which an engineer has to take into account. We realized that quite often the industry is funding a particular research topic and they expect results. We can start a whole discussion on whether art should be “useful” or “usable”, but let’s not fall into this trap. Your whole starting point is just very different.
We – artists and engineers – were kind of fascinated by each other. The artists by the knowledge of the engineers – it would be nice to have all that knowledge available in your head from time to time – and the engineers liked our freedom, I think (well, I like it a lot anyway!). But I don’t think the artists want to become engineers or vice versa…
When the Arduino people decided to make Arduino open (put the plans online for example), there was no specific license which was applicable to hardware. Open licenses started out in the software realm – they have for example been adapted and modified for text (GNU Free Documentation License) and art (the Free Art License). The Arduino makers decided to use a Creative Commons license because there was nothing else, which was broad enough to cover the load.
At this moment there is an Open Hardware summit going on, where anOpen Source Hardware definition is being written (not to be confused with an open hardware license). A first draft is available here. What makes hardware open?
Here are a few criteria:
- the importance of opening up the documentation (from the plans on how to construct an object to instructions on how to make it)
- including the software you need to make this project work
- of course the derivative works, attribution and distribution are an important part as well
The wikipedia entry on open hardware mentions a few open hardware licenses, I wonder wether this definition will influence these open hardware licenses.
Next to that there is this kind of, how should I call it, blunt? very direct? video on how you can make money with Open Source Hardware. Because in essence you decide to share all the info on how you build a specific apparatus (the building plans, the necessary components) and by doing that you obliterate the element of scarcity. Yet even by doing so, it seems to be livable.
Nice video on how the lack of copyright (in the US) in the fashion industry actually works.
A Ted Talk by Johanna Blakely, who also worked on a research entitled Ready to share.
Each month iMal is organizing Codes Arts and Crafts with some excellent guidance. It’s quite refreshing to be able to go and get some help on Arduino code. So for the next session I will prepare my questions in advance…
Ebooks with Open Source Licenses
I got an e-mail today from my favourite graphic artist on eBooks with free licenses about programming.
Here goes: Best and Free Programming Ebooks with Open Source Licenses