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I enjoyed this Humans on the Loop essay which considers various layers of social, capital, psychological, and technical predictive engines. In general, I’m less optimistic about our ability to secure agency while existing in spaces run by and for surveillance capitalism, but the point about improvisation will stay with me for some time. I often consider various forms of marginalisation as a reciprocal process: being an “edge case” outlier to statistical norms, existing amid constructed norms that centre the privileged, and being pushed even further to the margins in response to those norms. -
I/we (still) need queer disabled online art
I got a big rejection today - of course, it’s part of the work, but this one in particular has me ruminating on what space I’m trying to carve out in the world. I keep coming back to my thoughts on the need for interactive, online, live art made by and for queer, disabled people. I wrote about this last year, and it’s as true as ever. I feel drawn to make work that serves those of us at these intersections, and that addresses the need for a flourishing online arts and culture sector. -
More info on test performance of It's Just What You Do
The TL;DR is that at 7pm on 23rd March at Barnsley Civic Theatre, there is going to be a live reading of an interactive play that I'm working on. This is a hybrid event that you can also join online - either way it's free, with an opportunity to donate. It's part of a night of test performances covering themes such as Long COVID, mental health, and speculative fiction - I've pasted some information about the other pieces below, all of which I'm really excited to see. -
Test performance of new interactive play
I'm currently working on a new piece of interactive theatre that uses the tool that Squinky built in our collaboration together a couple of years ago. There will be a test performance on 23rd March at Barnsley Civic theatre, alongside other live works covering themes such as chronic illness and dystopian science fiction - the event is going to be hybrid online and in-person, and tickets are currently available for in-person attendees. -
NEoN Digital Arts 2021
A quick note to say that I'm going up to Dundee for a few days this week to help out with NEoN Digital Arts Festival - if you fancy it, check out the event programme here! -
Paper on livecoding and collaboration
Through a strange turn of events, I’m one of the authors on a collaborative paper about collaboration in livecoding performances that was made public this week. I’m a total novice in this field, and my main role in this paper was assisting the discussion and organising the information in the Google doc - the really cool thing about the paper is that it synthesises (haha) ideas from a very large number of people who are at the forefront of an incredibly exciting live digital art scene. -
High Fidelity Emotional Tools on Soundcloud
[soundcloud url=“https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/871239124” params=“color=#ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true&visual=true” width=“100%” height=“300” iframe=“true” /] Zoya Street · High Fidelity Emotional Tools (audio documentary) The audio documentary that Montez Press Radio published last week is now up on my Soundcloud, for you to enjoy at your leisure. -
Montez Press Radio
I kind of threw together an hour-long audio documentary over the past couple of weeks. It turns out this is very difficult! You can listen to it at radio.montezpress.com tomorrow at 6pm New York time (that’s 11pm here in the UK). It’s about VR and emotions, and also the body, and there’s a bit about the ethics of mindfulness technologies, and another bit about being inside of a dollhouse that your friends can furnish… it’s pretty unprofessionally-made, but I think it’s a good time. -
Call for participants: UK interviews with transgender people for interactive documentary installation about experiences of waiting
I am looking to interview more transgender people across the UK for my next art project. Details are below, but if you need any more information please do not hesitate to reach out. Please share this with anyone who you think might be interested! Project information Overview "Cis Penance" aims to use videogame-like installations to draw attention to issues affecting transgender people in the UK, with a particular focus on how institutional and social structures alter our relationship to time and our life paths, through lengthy waiting processes. -
SPACE Ilford grand opening
The lovely folks at SPACE studios in London have opened a new space in Ilford, and have kindly let me come and do a residency with them in Spring of next year, as part of their Art + Tech programme. In the mean time, events are already happening, as other artists-in-residence get started exploring and playing in this new location. This Saturday there will be a Grand Opening event at the Ilford location: -
Postmortem: Hanging textile for Interactive Portraits by Anne Smithies
[gallery ids=“3216,3215,3214,3213,3212,3211,3210,3209,3208,3207” type=“rectangular” link=“file”] In the post about Festival of the Mind Futurecade, I mentioned this collaboration with Anne Smithies on a gorgeous, huge textile to accompany my interactive portraits. I first approached Anne about this because of a chat I had in Tokyo with Zep, the maker of the Pico-8 platform that I’ve been working with to make these small software pieces - we were chatting about how a particular graphics feature he’d introduced to the platform a few months earlier was giving works a textile-like quality to them, as you could now build landscapes out of 4x4 repeating pixel patterns. -
Mozilla Festival
My work is being displayed at Mozilla festival, for the Art + Data exhibition. The Art+Data experience — part of the Mozilla Artists Open Web project — engages artists, designers, technologists, and researchers in an artistic exploration of a healthy web. With an online gallery (https://foundation.mozilla.org/opportunity/artists-open-web) and an exhibition during MozFest, Art+Data will also feature artists in residencies (on site and online) and creative, interactive sessions. Thirty-six art projects will be showcased, and all (including digital and analogue processes) will focus on data knowledge and usage. -
Festival of the Mind
[gallery ids=“3178,3177,3176,3175,3180,3197,3198,3199,3200,3201,3202,3203” type=“rectangular” link=“file”] Last month, the first five of my interactive portraits were included in Futurecade in the Sheffield Millennium Gallery, as part of the University of Sheffield’s Festival of the Mind. These are kind of like a cross between Tamagotchi and an RPG dialogue system, and they present dialogue taken verbatim from interviews I carried out with transgender people in Japan as part of the Creator Ikusei residency. I’m going to make 13 in total, six of which are supported by Arts Council funding via the Making Ways project. -
Work in progress on the Open Theremin
Open Theremin is an Arduino shield that produces, at relatively low cost, a great quality Theremin with lots of room for digital play as well as a nice analog sound if you want it. I’ve been messing around with it since October, though I wasn’t practising as much while I was in Japan. Here’s me playing something just with an unmodified analog signal back in the Winter: www.instagram.com/p/BdyTrQy… So, a fairly charming instrument on its own without doing anything fancy to it. -
Interactive Portraits updates from February-May
www.instagram.com/p/BfXicvX… www.instagram.com/p/BfaxCSJ… www.instagram.com/p/Bg6wCw4… www.instagram.com/p/BiezI0Y… www.instagram.com/p/BikfqWj… www.instagram.com/p/BimriEf… -
Replicast Studios Facebook page
This year my studio building Replicast is participating in OpenUp Sheffield, the largest open art studios event outside of London. We had our big launch party this weekend, attracting around 200 people over the course of the weekend. As part of our promotion for the event, I wrote a series of artist bios for the Facebook page - I’m going to try to keep up content in this vein, combining lots of images with short write-ups that are grounded in the critical and historical context of artists’practice. -
I'm bringing a virtual petting zoo to Orchard Square!
I’m excited to announce that I’ve been granted a four-week residency in the Orchard Square shopping centre in the centre of Sheffield, which has been organised as a collaboration between the Making Ways project and the retail property investment firm London and Associated Partners. The project is what you might call a “virtual petting zoo”. From 5th August, I will be taking my fleet of recycled computers to a small retail space on the first floor of Orchard Square, and showing some little virtual pet programs. -
Psychological landscape #theartassignment
www.instagram.com/p/BVCSoW4… www.instagram.com/p/BVCTEoo… Pompous? Empowered? Overwhelmed? The “psychological” bit of the assignment name threw me slightly - even after I was happy with the images I’d made, I was looking at them wondering exactly what sort of psychological state they are meant to be in. [gallery type=“rectangular” columns=“2” size=“medium” link=“none” ids=“2695,2694”] This assignment comes from Sarah Urist Green and PBS Digital’s The Art Assignment - a series that began in 2014, and has now given 60 assignments for people to try out and publish on social media. -
The quietest place #theartassignment
www.instagram.com/p/BU2dcfl… This video was taken while walking with my girlfriend through Hebden Bridge: every time there was a choice of directions to walk in, she chose the quietest path. The quietest place we reached was the hillside where I took the panning shot, but in the video they all sound equally quiet, which is interesting to me. I suspect that this is because the microphone in my phone was automatically recalibrating to create a consistent level of sound. -
Off #theartassignment
[su_tabs][su_tab title=“Instagram”] www.instagram.com/p/BVVD3Wb… [/su_tab][su_tab title=“Image gallery”] [gallery type=“rectangular” size=“large” link=“file” ids=“2769,2768,2770,2767”] [/su_tab][/su_tabs] These are photos of a party balloon with an LED inside, taken in the reflection of a broken tablet. I was trying last year to get some photos of this type of balloon that take advantage of how cosmic it looks - it turns out the effect of the black mirror was exactly what I needed. [gallery type=“rectangular” columns=“2” size=“medium” link=“none” ids=“2695,2694”] -
Intimate, indispensable gif #theartassignment
[su_tabs][su_tab title=“Instagram”] www.instagram.com/p/BUklo9a… [/su_tab][su_tab title=“Full size GIF”][/su_tab][/su_tabs] [gallery type=“rectangular” columns=“2” size=“medium” link=“none” ids=“2695,2694”] This assignment comes from Sarah Urist Green and PBS Digital’s The Art Assignment - a series that began in 2014, and has now given 60 assignments for people to try out and publish on social media. Each assignment is created by a different featured artist - this one was by visual artist Toyin Odutola. youtu.be/wgTWPkK5w… -
Meet in the Middle #theartassignment
[su_tabs][su_tab title=“Instagram”] www.instagram.com/p/BUfrcyv… [/su_tab][su_tab title=“Youtube”] www.youtube.com/watch [/su_tab][su_tab title=“Map”] [/su_tab][/su_tabs] [gallery type=“rectangular” columns=“2” size=“medium” link=“none” ids=“2695,2694”] This assignment comes from Sarah Urist Green and PBS Digital’s The Art Assignment - a series that began in 2014, and has now given 60 assignments for people to try out and publish on social media. Each assignment is created by a different featured artist - this one was by Douglas Paulson, and Christopher Robbins of the brilliant Ghana ThinkTank. -
Stakeout #theartassignment
[su_tabs][su_tab title=“Instagram”] www.instagram.com/p/BUMr9vT… [/su_tab][su_tab title=“Twitter”] twitter.com/zoyander/… [/su_tab][/su_tabs] [gallery type=“rectangular” columns=“2” size=“medium” link=“none” ids=“2695,2694”] This assignment comes from Sarah Urist Green and PBS Digital’s The Art Assignment - a series that began in 2014, and has now given 60 assignments for people to try out and publish on social media. Each assignment is created by a different featured artist - this one was by Deb Sokolow, a Chicago-based artist who uses sleuthy observation and massive diagrams. -
Sentient Games
Last year I made a Twitter bot to tweet “great again” slogans, out of frustration at the number of marketing campaigns I had seen echoing Trump in the run-up to the US elections. I recently let Great Again Bot go to pasture, and overhauled the account for another purpose. Now I’ve got it tweeting about media - specifically, parroting the way we talk about games, films and other media as if they had a will of their own. -
ビデオゲームの翻訳に適している表現は?
A post I wrote summarising discussions by Japanese bloggers about the words used to describe games has been translated back into Japanese! Check it out here: ビデオゲームの翻訳に適している表現は? ゲームからは他にも沢山の楽しみを得ることができます。ゲーマー文化の中心では「面白つらい」ゲームに対してある種の文化的ステータスができており、そのステータスは上がる一方ですが、だからと言って必ずしも「つまらな楽しい」ゲームが良くないというわけではありません。ゲーミングにおいては、苦痛な要素を持つゲームを非難することのない、楽しみと痛みの相互関係というものが存在し得ると思います。良いゲームを作成するには、そのゲームの体験が「つまらない」または「つらい」ものとなり得る可能性を無視してしまう必要はないのです。このような苦痛面があっても良いのです。良いゲームであるために「面白い」と「楽しい」の両面を持ち合わせる必要はありません。 Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here. -
Great Again Bot
twitter.com/greatagai… I’ve been disturbed lately by the uptick in marketers' use of the phrase “make [noun] great again” or “make [noun] [adjective] again” in the wake of the Trump campaign. I get it, people are overworked and they don’t have much time to think about how that catchy phrase they’re using to sell networking solutions or beer or whatever is giving legitimacy to fascism. But it’s ugly to see it happening. -
Advice for using servos
This summer I worked on a technical solution for Jan Barcentewicz, a vehicle designer who wanted a unique way of displaying his work at the RCA show. His model vehicle would rotate in time to an animation being overlaid with a projector.
I want to share good news about how that went, but it was kind of stressful and sadly things broke after the first day on display. If you want to see a happy story of technical excellence, read this thing about a watch I made. In this post I thought I’d share some things I learned about working with servo motors. -
Custom-made watch - trading time
I help artists and designers bring their work to life using digital technologies. If you want to bring electronics into your art or design work, let's have a chat.
RCA Architecture Master’s student Simon Moxey hired me to make a watch for his show. The catch was, this would be no ordinary watch. It was to tell the time in microseconds, display stock market indexes, indicate increase and decrease in stock value and show international time zones. I advised him on hardware and then programmed it, and he created the casing.
The watch was an artefact from a fictional future in which the stock exchange is moved from London to Slough. Simon was proposing a scenario whereby the financial sector existed apart from the cultural and historical burden of the City of London. How would Slough adapt if the town’s main cultural entity was the stock exchange?
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Wired disconnection
Arduino and LEDs showing results of an internet search
This is a quick write-up of an Arduino art consulting job I always intended to find photographs of, to no avail. Given the lack of lovely graphics to encourage your eye down the page, I'll keep it brief.The internet is growing, but as it grows, it is falling apart. This was the message of a communication designer, who came to me asking for an Arduino script and circuit that would fit inside a modem case, and flash LEDs upon receiving an output from other programs, which I didn’t write. The other program was set to search the internet for dead links and other signs of network degradation. It kicked out a file containing the number discovered of each of four types of errors. My component would flash a different light for each type, each time a new fault was discovered in the web.
