Sean Clark's Blog
The video of Ruth Gibson's Computer Arts Society talk at Phoenix in Leicester on 13th April 2016 is now available. This will be of particular interest to people who follow Virtual Reality art. You'll find the talk on Vimeo at https://vimeo.com/166949759.
The talk was arranged by the Computer Arts Society Leicester and the IOCT.
At the beginning of the year I began to use the name "Interact Digital Arts" as a focal point for all of my arts activities. As part of this "rebrand" I have now pulled my personal seanclark.me.uk website in to the fold, as well as the long running nemeton.com.
You'll see that both sites now share the Interact Digital Arts look-and-feel and all three sites now share a common navigation. The update also gave me an opportunity to improve the "responsiveness" of both sites so that they should now work fine on phones and tablets. It should ensure that both sites remain to be accessible and appear in search engines.
It would be easy to think that maintaining a collection of websites like mine is a simple thing to do. After all, the older sites don't change very often. However, in almost 23 years of web design I have found that this is far from the case. Web technologies change, as does browsing hardware and software, and links and plugins stop working.
I think that in the long term this is going to be a real problem. I actively maintain my archive, but it is relatively small and I'm still about to look after it. What will happen to all of those 1990s and 2000s sites that were created before web technology really settled down and made use of highly non-standard technologies? Many will become increasingly unusable and even archives such as the UK Web Archive will struggle to render them. It's something to think about if you want your websites to last.
I also wonder if future archaeologists will need to be experts in early Internet and web technologies as much as language and digging skills. In fact, perhaps "Internet Archeologists" even exist now?
Running from the 1st until 18th June 2016, Fight War Not Wars: The Art of Crass will be a unique exhibition of artwork from members of the anarcho-punk band Crass. Putting the show together is a real labour of love for me, I've been a long-time fan of the band and most of the items being exhibited are from my own collection. As well as the exhibition at LCB Depot's Lightbox, there will also be some live events and an all-day D.I.Y arts festival See http://theartofcrass.uk for the latest news.
It's been a busy weekend with two great events taking place in the Leicester.
The first, on Friday, was the third annual "Image Is The Servant" music/multimedia event organised by Honest Dave. The year's event was subtitled "Playful" and took place at The Venue at DeMontfort University.
The event featured multiple musical contributions with live visuals and assorted other attractions. As with the previous two events, most of the vial material was gathered during the event and projected on and around the performance area. Unlike the previous two, the new location provided space for interesting angled screens to be hung across the hall, making for a an even richer visual spectacle.
Then, on Saturday, Rich Myoptik held his "Leap Year Jamboree" at The Font. A full house was treated to music and arts from numerous Leicester artists. Opening at 1pm and going on until 1am it was a truly marathon event (one which I, admittedly, did not complete).
My contributions to both events were the various drawing machines I have been working on over the past six months. They went down well at both events and engaged lots of people!
Weekends like this really bring out the best of the creative aspects of Leicester. Real diversity of people, music, arts and interests coming together to make great things happen.
At the end of last year I was lucky enough to be awarded an Arts Council England grant to enable me to further develop my "digital art systems" artworks. The grant will allow me to develop a new collection of artworks and then exhibit them towards the end of 2016. I hope to have two exhibitions - the first in Leicester in December 2016 and the second in London in early 2017.
The artworks are concerned with ideas relating to flow, connectedness and self-organisation and will take the form of dynamic computer-based images, interactive lights, audio pieces and responsive video.
I am putting all of these elements together to form what I am calling a "Cybernetic Ecology" - a term borrowed by Richard Brautigan's poem "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace". I expect to start showing some of the new pieces in the summer and will start posting some images here before to long.
The Silent Signal exhibition opened on Friday at QUAD in Derby. It featured six animated films that were created by six pairs of artists and scientists who have been working together to create new work about and inspired by their mutual interests. Topics covered included Sleeplessness, the spread of malaria in monkey populations and the immune system.
It nakes for a very interesting exhibition. There is a wide range of animation styles and the presentation of the exhibition - with the films being shown in multiple rooms and locations - works really well. The background information in the supplied literature (and on the website) was also very useful in adding a full context for the work.
The exhibition runs until the 6th March, and will be going on tour after. The full list of participants in the project is boredomresearch and Dr Paddy Brock, Samantha Moore and Dr Serge Mostowy, Ellie Land and Professor Peter Oliver, Charlie Tweed and Dr Darren Logan, Genetic Moo and Dr Neil Dufton and Eric Schockmel and Dr Megan MacLeod.
My pictures from the show are here on Flickr.
At this time of year I tend to have a sort through the photographs I've taken over the past 12 months. Totting them up I see that I've been quite busy - taking over 1,500 (all on my iPhone). If you're interested in some of the things I've been involved with in 2015 then I've selected 100 of the most representative ones and posted them in an album here on Flickr. It's quite a diverse mix.
You may have noticed that I've been getting quite in to computer drawing recently! Over the past few weeks we've had the Computer Drawing: DP Henry and Beyond exhibition running at Phoenix and LCB Depot Lightbox and I've been running a number of related workshops and events.
It's helped reignite my interest in drawing machines and generating machine drawable images and it's led to me building up quite an interesting collection of drawing devices. I've had the WaterColorBot and my own Etch-a-pi Raspberry Pi controlled Etch-a-sketch for a while and these have recently been joined by a high-quality Makeblock XY Plotter (pictured) and a homemade mini-plotter based on the Tiny CNC design.
The thing that all of these machines have in common is that they are digital. A computer of some sort controls X and Y motors that in turn control the pen, or mark making device. Drawing machines need not be digital like this. Both DP Henry and Jack Tait's work (featured in the exhibition) are created by analogue devices based around pre-existing machines (in Henry's case) or made with custom components (as in Tait's case). The pen is controlled not by a program as such, but instead by combinations of gears and cogs.
I can't see myself heading down the analogue route yet, but it has made me wonder if hybrid analogue/digital drawing machines might be an interesting thing to explore. Perhaps with an Arduino being used to alter the configuration of a mechanical device? Or maybe even the creation of a machine that allows a drawing expert to drive a machine through a connected pen?
It's definitely something I need to think about in more detail. I'm not in a rush to build something, but one thing is sure though, you can expect to see at least the occasional use of a drawing machine in my future work.
Tonight was the third annual Light The Night event at Orton Square in Leicester's Cultural Quarter. Arts events group Inspirate put together another great event with a range of activities, including Gavin Morris' Digital Funfair, Creative Manifesto's MegaGamer joystick running Audiosurf 2 and OMAI's Tag Tool running through a giant projector pointed at the Athena building.
As per usual, the event followed the switching on of Leicester's Xmas lights. Unlike the previous years, though, there wasn't a procession from the switch-on to the Cultural Quarter. However, this didn't seem to affect the attendance too much. Many hundreds, or even thousands, of people came to Orton Square and they seemed to have fun playing on the attractions and enjoy the food and drink available in local cafés and bars.
I thought the fair-like format of the event worked really well. I particularly liked Gavin's big LED wall in the funfair - and was very impressed with Tag Tool. The projection on the outside of the Athena building was huge!
You can find my pictures from the 2015 event here on Flickr. I also have galleries of the 2014 and 2013 events. I'm already looking forward to 2016.
As part of my preparation for workshops that will accompany the Computer Drawing: DP Henry and Beyond exhibition in December I've been building a number of drawing machines.
The latest to roll off of my 3D printer is a small Arduino powered "Tiny CNC" machine. This device, designed by MakerBlock, is effectively an XY plotter that you can construct yourself using an Arduino, two motors and six 3D printed parts. I built the 0.18 version, which you can find described in detail on the creator's website here. The 3D printed parts can be found on Thingiverse.
Once I'd printed the parts (they took my 3D printer about 3 hours) it was simply a case of attaching the motors, snapping the bits together and attaching a pen. To control the machine I used a pack of Dagu DC motors and a Dagu Arduino Mini Driver MkII that I purchased from Dawn Robotics in their closing down sale for around £12. Almost any type of Arduino and servo/motor combination can be used.
I then had to write a bit of software to drive the machine. As a test I programmed it to draw concentric squares. Despite the drawing area being small (about the size of a mobile phone screen), the machine is surprisingly good! It whirs away following your instructions just like a full-size plotter, albeit less accurately due to the slack in the gears and motors and generates quite pleasing results. I've put a short video of the machine in action here on YouTube.
My next job is to build the updated version of the project (version 0.29) that uses a third motor to allow you to move the pen up and down. Both machines (together with my computer controlled Etch-a-sketch and full-size MakeBlock XY Plotter) will be on show during the workshops on the 5th and 12th December at the LCB Depot. Feel free to come along and have a play.
