Public Domain Day 2015 – The death of the Authors, 1943

Posted on 29/01/2015 by hellocatfood

On 7th February I’ll be back in Brussels for a performance at Public Domain Day

The Public Domain Day is celebrating works of art which enter into the public domain because their copyrights have expired. These works can be freely enjoyed, used, changed, republished by everybody. Worldwide, this The Public Domain Day is celebrated on the first of January, and this year we celebrate, with a slight delay, the works of authors and artists who died in 1944. In Brussels, the Public Domain Day is celebrated by a yearly event that is organised by Constant, CRIDS (Centre de Recherche Informatique et Droit, FUNDP Namur), Cinema Nova and the Royal Library of Belgium.

The afternoon takes place at the Royal Library and is dedicated to Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the writer of Le Petit Prince. He
is a special case because he ’died for the fatherland’ and that delivered him a copyright extension of 30 years according to the French law. In Belgium as in the rest of the world, his work is free of rights since 1th January 2015.

The evening programme takes place at Cinema Nova.

For this performance myself, Michael Murtaugh, Anne Laforet, Gijs De Heij, and An Mertens will be performing in the Botopera.

botopera

Fats Waller, Nicolas Tesla, Beatrix Potter, Sergei Rachmaninov and Henri La Fontaine are some of the many artists who have left this world during the second world war. These authors will be reanimated in the form of a “chatbot”: a small software program that automatically intervenes in a chat conversation pretending to be human. The bots, the public, the printers and the projected images work together in this interactive performance.

With : BotsWaller, NICKola tesla, Beatrix Plotter, Rachmanibot, henrIRC lafontaine & their plotter

It’s all free and starts from about 20:00

OSP Print Party

Posted on 23/10/2014 by hellocatfood

For OSP’s Print Party on October 18th I made a bunch of new software and modified some old software that did sonification of text, bitmap, and vector images. I saw it as a way to differently engage with the usually static images featured throughout the festival. Here’s some of the visual output from a Processing sketch that, when combined with Pure Data, would redraw an SVG and convert it to sound:

ospprintparty_1

ospprintparty_3

ospprintparty_2

ospprintparty_4

And here’s an example of a fish being sonfied. Expect lots of bleepy noises:

If you’re interested in using the software the repository is located here and this particular code resides in the listetoSVG folder. The Processing sketch for that piece is a modification of this sketch by emainorbit. I may revisit and develop this software but for now there will be no detailed writeup of how to use it.

As an experiment it was really interesting to “bring to life” a static programme. There is a danger that the performances – whcih I’m sure OSP will write about at some point – deviated too much from the idea of a print party, but in isolation I felt they worked really well!

Libre Graphics Research Unit article on Furtherfield.org

Posted on 23/03/2012 by hellocatfood

Last month I attended the Co-Position meeting in Brussels of the Libre Graphics Research Unit. I’ve already talked about one of the work sessions in a bit of depth. Today I was alerted that an article I wrote for Furtherfield that gives an overview of the meeting went live!

Libre Graphics Research Unit on Furtherfield

Click to view the article

How can designers and programmers work more harmoniously? How can the tools being created better meet the needs of users? There is a need for designers to have a greater role in the production of the tools that they use, aside from just reporting bugs, requesting features or designing logos for open source projects.

Head over to further field to read the whole article.

Here’s some of my favourite photos from the meeting from myself and Tom Lechner

Almost all of the LGRU attendees

At the roundtable discussion (there was no table to speak of)

Preparing the roundtable discussion

Toonloop performance by Alexandre Quessy

More can be seen on the LGRU Flickr tag

For the Spanish amongst us there’s two more articles about the Co-Position meeting

Libre Graphics Research Unit – Co-Position meeting

Posted on 16/02/2012 by hellocatfood

I’ll be in Brussels from 22nd – 25th February for the Libre Graphics Research Unit Co-Position meeting.

The Co-position research meeting focuses on digital tools for arranging texts and other graphic elements: How can we re-imagine lay-out from scratch? What tools do we need to support decentralized collaboration? How can we understand what workflows, distributions of work and media are coded into our tools? Can we bring canvas editing, dynamic lay-outs, web-to-print and Print On Demand together in more interesting ways? What kind of messages do we propagate and how does this change the tools we need?

I’ll be taking part in two of the sessions:

Wednesday 22nd February: Visual Versioning

I’ll be doing a brief presentation of my work – focussing more on the open source software side of things – somewhere between 19:30 and 22:00

Saturday 25th February: Prototypes

I’ll be part of a roundtable discussion, chaired by Angela Plohman and featuring myself and Stephanie Vilayphiou, Camille Bissuel, Ricardo Lafuente and Ana Carvalho and Lieven Van Speybroeck. Disucssion and presentations take place from 13:30, ending 15:00

The whole programme and schedule can be found at the main LGRU website.