zodomatica

Processing

Hmm, perhaps of interest to fellow geeks: "Processing is a programming language and environment built for the electronic arts and visual design communities. It was created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as an electronic sketchbook. " - processing.org

Media coverage of art

Russel Bell asks "Why is it that the broadcast news media have such a hard time understanding what art is? They feel an uneasy social responsibility to "cover" it — which means making reference to it whenever a large sum of money is involved."

As a result, news channels and public broadcasters feel (at least in this country), that they must make a brief visit to the church of art from time to time, even though it distracts from real news. It is received wisdom among TV and radio producers that you can talk about artists (indeed you must, at least once a month; it's sort of like a Cancon requirement) and you can talk about arts business news and you can talk about a controversy, but you can't really talk about art...

Just to belabour my ecclesiastical metaphor a little: It's as if you may describe the church from the outside -- you may talk about the building of the church, the fundraising required, the changes to the zoning laws that enabled it to be built -- and you may even talk about the CV of the new priest, and you may interview him about what he's planning to do to get more parishioners and ramp up his own fundraising, but you may not televise the service, you may not quote from the hymns, you may not summarize the prayers. In other words, you must avoid everything that brings people to churches; you miss what churches are actually for.

Mystery Solved!

Every year we wait in anticipation while our two trees' cherry blossoms fade and cherries gradually emerge and ripen. And every year, we watch as the birds come along and EAT ALL THE CHERRIES just as soon as they can be considered kinda-sorta-red.

But not this year. We have literally hundreds of pounds of cherries on our trees. The branches are drooping under the weight. Where are those damned starlings?

I wondered if it was one of those things I heard about after the Chernobyl accident: the birds steering clear because they know some horrible pollution has occured. To top it off, all day long there were crows squawking in the evergreens. That really noisy squawk that sounds like an expletive yelled by one really pissed off bird.

But no, this is far more sinister...

A cherry-pickin' raccoon! So cute, climbing through the tree stuffing his/her cheeks full. Sadly my photo does not do it justice...

Kenton said he saw it grabbing several branches together to get from place to place where the limbs are too flimsy. Clever bugger.

KenFest

Vancouverites: If you're familiar with the fire that destroyed Ken Gerberick's studio, or even if you just want to come to a cool art event, KenFest may be for you. See the invite or see way more details and images at gipsymermaid.com.

On the road again

Alas if you're missing my brilliant posts (ha!) I'm a little preoccupied by business on the road (in Edmonton). I'm facilitating usability testing on some software I've been working on. Very interesting. It's great to take a fresh look at an interface I designed months ago, and which engineers have tweaked since then. Also neat to do it as formally as we're trying to do here. We had scripts written up, but until you get it all set up and run through it you don't notice glitches. Also I realized that a lot of the scenario instructions were using the same words as the interface, such as 'share a printer', instead of things a person is more likely to say like 'I want to print this on that printer'. I think it might have made those tasks a little too easy. So we'll see how users do on those tomorrow now that I've edited the scripts. Mwaa ha ha. Must sleep now.