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Here’s the first full solo performance I’ve tried with scheme bricks – I missed Alex’s sounds but it’s great footage, thanks go to the goto10 streaming/recording crew.

As I’ve been researching the ideas of Jane McGonigal lately, I was interested to find out the real history of the Monopoly board game from Dmytri Kleiner at the weekend. From wikipedia, thanks to the research of Ralph Anspach:

In 1903, the Georgist Lizzie Magie applied for a patent on a game called The Landlord’s Game with the object of showing that rents enriched property owners and impoverished tenants. She knew that some people would find it hard to understand the logic behind the idea, and she thought that if the rent problem and the Georgist solution to it were put into the concrete form of a game, it might be easier to demonstrate. She was granted the patent for the game in January 1904. The Landlord’s Game became one of the first board games to use a “continuous path,” without clearly defined start and end spaces on its board. A copy of Magie’s game, dating from 1903–1904, was discovered for the PBS series History Detectives. This copy featured property groups, organized by letters, later a major feature of Monopoly as published by Parker Brothers.

While the official history on the Hasbro monopoly website picks up the story a little bit later on, and leaves off all details of its original, critical nature:

It was 1934, the height of the Great Depression, when Charles B. Darrow of Germantown, Pennsylvania, showed what he called the MONOPOLY game to the executives at Parker Brothers. Can you believe it, they rejected the game due to “52 design errors”! But Mr. Darrow wasn’t daunted. Like many other Americans, he was unemployed at the time, and the game’s exciting promise of fame and fortune inspired him to produce the game on his own.

Heres an image from Lizzie’s original patent:

A simple test filling arbitrary shapes with particles:

Code here

Back from Groningen, and my mind is full of all sorts of crazy ideas after GOTO10’s mini festival. Although mini in size, the quality of this event was very high.

The day after arriving, Gabor and I did our best to introduce our workshop participants to livecoding and fluxus, from the basics of scheme to some more visually juicy aspects:

The next day the roles were reversed as we took part in workshops lead by some of the previous day’s participants. This was the ’speed geeking’ event, we had 30 minutes to learn about a new project and contribute something towards it before moving on to the next. We looked at games as explorations of the struggle between supermarkets and open markets, by playing and helping to refine the rules of a boardgame prototype designed by Selena Savic. There was also a creative strategy involving recycling digital trash by Loredana Bontempi called ddump. I recycled a presentation using open office into a glorious piece of digital art. Then Emanuele Bonetti showed us a new way of sharing image references called pickpic which promoted online collaboration. This was a good format for fast presentation of ideas – I think the time was short enough to keep it slightly chaotic and therefore giving it a fresh, informal feeling.

The evening ended with ‘Petcha Gnucha’ mixing up presentations of work from the Piet Zwart Institute with Groningen’s Frank Mohr Institute.

On Saturday there were talks themed around ‘Hocus Pocus’. Martin Howse discussed the concepts surrounding his island2 installation which was being shown in the sign gallery. He took us on a journey through ideas of protected or hidden spaces including stenography, kernel security rings and software design tied to themes of vampirism, pornography, plague and classical concepts of concealment. Dmytri Kleiner gave a talk looking at how political ideologies tend to attach to different network topologies, what it could mean to be a venture communist and why the world needs them. Finally Florian Cramer made a passionate call for digital art to return to the critical, comparing the work of Constant Dullaart (superb name for an artist, can’t be real) with Heath Bunting’s Own, Be Owned, or Remain Invisible.

In the evening it was our turn (IOhannes Zmölnig, no copy paste and I) to livecode for the enjoyment of those equipped with headphones at the placard concert.

I have some footage of my performance, but it’ll have to wait for the moment. I should also mention Breakfast club – which was an approach to try and document discussions about the previous day’s events the morning after. The theory being that you can lure people into a situation involving cameras and microphones by the deployment of freshly baked croissants first thing in the morning. This worked well to get discussion going between the different groups, and is something I’d like to see used more at other events.

Augmented Foraging Combining the ancient skills of foragers with the newest mobile media. A mobile phone guide to edible urban wild-food sources. Created in first instance for Amsterdam urban_edibles as a LAYAR app for the Iphone 3GS, T-Mobile G1, HTC Magic and other Android phones. We are considering Boskoi as a name for the mobile app because it translates as 'grazer' or 'browser' from the Greek 'βοσκοί'.

Augmented Foraging Combining the ancient skills of foragers with the newest mobile media. A mobile phone guide to edible urban wild-food sources. Created in first instance for Amsterdam urban_edibles as a LAYAR app for the Iphone 3GS, T-Mobile G1, HTC Magic and other Android phones. We are considering Boskoi as a name for the mobile app because it translates as 'grazer' or 'browser' from the Greek 'βοσκοί'.

Augmented Foraging Combining the ancient skills of foragers with the newest mobile media. A mobile phone guide to edible urban wild-food sources. Created in first instance for Amsterdam urban_edibles as a LAYAR app for the Iphone 3GS, T-Mobile G1, HTC Magic and other Android phones. We are considering Boskoi as a name for the mobile app because it translates as 'grazer' or 'browser' from the Greek 'βοσκοί'.

Mobile phone applications with an ecological focus * pollution * waterprint

Mobile phone applications with an ecological focus * pollution * waterprint

Mobile phone applications with an ecological focus * pollution * waterprint

This week it’s finally time for:

At Sign gallery Groningen, the Netherlands. I’m going to be doing a fluxus workshop with Gabor and a scheme bricks placard performance – the first one I’ve tried solo, I think!

chmod +x art The computer as theatre, as writer of love letters, the computer as world, a place for revolution, art as executable. chmod +x art presents artists that turn our ideas, dreams and fantasies about machines and code up side down and show programming as an infinitely intriguing way of creating. Code is a medium. Whether it is used to formulate instructions for a machine, ideas for people or both. The writing of it influences and shapes the creative process of the artist. For that reason, ghost programmers may be left at home. Besides the importance of writing code yourself, it is essential to show that code. Without source, software art remains a magic trick. Do It Yourself and show us your sh*t!

I’m amazed when I have to do any windows programming now how much you can do using GNU software – the whole lot is available these days. I’ve been sorting out the windows version of fluxus so it actually releasable, and using MinGW and emacs (which I’m a recent convert to).

I’ve managed to get the script loading gui working, fix a load of crash bugs and most importantly get the more advanced rendering code working – here’s a screenshot of the GLSL shader example script running:

Jeruzalemgarden ---------- Aardpeer - Helianthus tuberosus – Jeruzalem artichoke knollen uitzaaien in de winter, 30 cm from each other ---------- Achillea Milefolium - Duizendblad -Yarrow Familie: asteraceae Leefomgeving: Volle grond, zon, houdt van humus Hoogte: 0,2 - 1.m lang kleur: platte trossen, wit-roze bloempjes Compagnion plants: wortel , bes zaaien: juni, september in volle grond? Oogsten: Najaar Eetbare delen: bladeren en bloeiende toppen Tuinman:

Jeruzalemgarden ---------- Aardpeer - Helianthus tuberosus – Jeruzalem artichoke knollen uitzaaien in de winter, 30 cm from each other ---------- Achillea Milefolium - Duizendblad -Yarrow Familie: asteraceae Leefomgeving: Volle grond, zon, houdt van humus Hoogte: 0,2 - 1.m lang kleur: platte trossen, wit-roze bloempjes Compagnion plants: wortel , bes zaaien: juni, september in volle grond? Oogsten: Najaar Eetbare delen: bladeren en bloeiende toppen Tuinman:

Jeruzalemgarden ---------- Aardpeer - Helianthus tuberosus – Jeruzalem artichoke knollen uitzaaien in de winter, 30 cm from each other ---------- Achillea Milefolium - Duizendblad -Yarrow Familie: asteraceae Leefomgeving: Volle grond, zon, houdt van humus Hoogte: 0,2 - 1.m lang kleur: platte trossen, wit-roze bloempjes Compagnion plants: wortel , bes zaaien: juni, september in volle grond? Oogsten: Najaar Eetbare delen: bladeren en bloeiende toppen Tuinman:

Restaurant Guide erratic and unoffical suggestions and misdirections.. , offline / / by region bxl / belgium * 'mirante' Pizzeria * Les Ateliers du grand ille / / russian place (gone downhill) * falafel place (greek) * fritjes by the beurs -> still any good?+ * jamato noodles (.jp) * disappeared into thin air 'estruria' and fabrizio * 'pekin tea' chinese place on antwerpse steenweg (?), ma-po beancurd, no beef. * la caneva - italian. rue des Grande Carmes * scirocco - ital…