The BBC web site has an invitation to send photos in (part of Have Your Say). After the Two Queens visit, I did just that and had this reply:-
“Hello Ernest,
Thank you for sending us your picture of the QM2. I thought you might like to know that we featured your photo as our picture of the day on the Have Your Say part of the website.
Kind regards
Sally
BBC News website”
This is the picture featured last Friday (do I get DEST points?)
Warnings about the heatwave are announced as temperatures lift, even to 32C in parts of England. It’s a crisis. “The old, young and chronically ill have been warned to take care as parts of England are expected to be sweltering in a heatwave lasting until Wednesday.”
Then there are the floods …
I have been asked back by the Mitteleuropa Foundation to speak at one of their conferences, Becoming Information held in Bolzano, Italy. This one is to be about “Phenomena belonging to open systems such as … artistic ones (which are) … difficult to analyse in terms of … information (theory).” It will try to discuss “sensory and emotional usability” in that context.
We will see.
The London conference HCI 2006, which by a strange chance has used the name Engage, as we have for our 2006 Symposium, has invited me to be a Keynote Speaker. Perhaps we can link the meetings in some way?
As Francis Wheen points out (in How Mumbo-jumbo Conquered the World) to be trendy you must add at least one “post” in front of any ism. What a relief, then, to see a large and fascinating exhibition called Modernism at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
See the revolutionary Frankfurt Kitchen by Grete Lihotzky, which is still a huge influence. See the evolution of modernism from its early pioneering start through to the weaker and rather dissipated late 1930s, from which came the later negative views of modernism. Its a not to be missed show and, fortunately, it will be on in Washington during Creativity and Cognition 2007.
In London at the same time, and also overlapping in content, was Albers and Moholy-Nagy at Tate Modern.
This was a very interesting show in that it brought these two together and showed the parallel development of their work of many years. Albers following a slightly winding but deep path, Nagy exploring all that the new media had to offer.
Leonardo is the pioneering journal in our area.
As a result of discussions that many CCS people had with Roger Malina when he visited us I have been able to arrange that CCS becomes an Organisational Member of Leonardo.
As part of the arrangements Leonardo is starting a new section, Transactions, which will publish fully refereed short papers of recent results, ideas and developments. We hope that this will be particularly attractive to PhD students. I have been appointed to the Leonardo Editorial Board and as Editor-in-Chief of Transactions.
As part of Transactions, Leonardo is introducing Research Announcements which will publish on-line un-refereed short papers. These will be papers submitted to Transactions but still under review or, for some reason or another, not to be published in the Journal. Greg has been appointed Transactions Co-Editor responsible for Research Announcements. Congratulations Greg!
The “Drawbot” project, based in Sussex University and driven by Paul Brown, met at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and held an open meeting on Computational Models of Creativity in the Arts. Paul, Margaret Boden and Charlie Gear were among those from the Drawbot project. Janis Jeffries from Goldsmith facilitated the meeting and spoke about her work. I made a presentation arguing that as art systems seem to become more autonomous, in fact it is just that the level of concern of the artist is getting higher or, perhaps deeper: more deeply concerned with the structures of the works and their behaviours.
The project is trying to make a creative drawing robot (see the picture) at the same time as investigating the philosophical and hhistorical context of such a venture. The workshop was an opportunity for quite a fiery debate on the subject.
The night of the 13th was a lively public event that I mentioned before in my Cyborg blog . The philosophy, however, was in my opinion better in the workshop and certainly created more debate.
Lizzie, Greg, George and I have a paper accepted in
Information Visualisation 2006 (London)
Creating Affective Visualisations for a Physiologically Interactive Artwork
Lizzie Muller, Greg Turner, George Khut & Ernest Edmonds
Abstract
This paper describes an action research project based on the process of designing the visualisation of heart and breath rate data for the interactive artwork Cardiomorphologies. The project aimed to realise the affective goals of the artist as closely as possible by studying the audience experience of the visualisations and incorporating the findings into an iterative design process. The qualities of richness and ambiguity were found to contribute to the achievement of the artists’ two major aims: 1) to create a sense of integrated physical and mental engagement with the work and 2) to create a reflective state in which participants consider correlations between their thoughts and specific physiological states
I am taking part in Creative Cyborgs at the Dana Centre, Science Museum, London next week.
“How have computers become an increasingly significant part of our imaginative and physical being? Come face-to-face with natural born cyborgs as we explore how computer technology impacts on us and our creativity. In a specially commissioned film, philosophers of science Andy Clark, author of ‘Natural born cyborgs’, and Mike Wheeler discuss the fundamental role of tools in human behaviour. Clark argues that humans became cyborgs the moment they picked up their first tool - when he is using a tennis racket Bjorn Borg is as much a cyborg as the Terminator.”