A night inspired by John Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows
Painted over 180 years ago and now considered a masterpiece, this event is inspired by John Constable’s painting Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows.
Join a mix of artists, DJ’s and creatives to respond to the painting and discover what it means to you today.
Salisbury Cathedral has stained glass windows dating back to the medieval times. What would digital stained glass look like? Join New Media artist Antonio Roberts to find out.
Digital Cultures is a quarterly meeting of North East England arts and culture professionals, producers, researchers and technologists. The group’s focus is the creative application of technology and novel digital practice across arts, culture and heritage public programmes.
Digital Cultures is collaborating with Culture Bridge North East to explore the creative application of digital technologies in work by, for and with children and young people. If you have an interest in digital projects and innovative activity relating to young people’s creativity, or how young people produce and consume ‘culture’ digitally, we’d love to see you there.
Guest speakers will explore new projects, opportunities and invitations to collaborate.
Speakers include:
Lucy Arias- Young People and Learning Manager, FACT
Antonio Roberts – New media artist and curator
Kate Bradnam- The Agency, Contact Theatre
Suzy O’Hara – Little Inventors
At every Digital Cultures, there is time for attendees to briefly talk about relevant recent work and to invite ideas, collaborations and feedback.
Due to limited capacity we kindly ask that a maximum of 3 staff per organisation attend
Back for the seventh year, the Digital Design Weekend brings together artists, designers, engineers, technologists and the public to celebrate and share contemporary digital art and design. Participants take over the Museum with pop-up installations, robotics, creative electronics, talks, workshops, family-friendly events and more.
The Digital Design Weekend explores human-machine interaction, making and collaborative work. The event coincides with the London Design Festival at the V&A.
Digital technologies have a major impact on how we work, communicate and engage with our community, with citizens, with the world , and the arts sector in Canada is no exception. How can the arts be amplified, adapt and thrive in the digital world? The Canada Council for the Arts is organizing The Arts in a Digital World Summit to answer these questions and more.
On Saturday I went along to the Digital Inclusion Unconference hosted by We Share Stuff. I went there tot try and gain more ideas for fizzPOP as part of it is about getting new people in who may not have otherwise dabbled with technology.
Of the four discussions that I took part in two really caught my attention. The first was the talk on what digital inclusion actually is and what it means. After an hours discussion and lots of note taking I still don’t think I was any closer to deciphering what it means to be digitally included
My notes. Still makes little sense
Although there are government plans afoot to get more people online in some way (access to TV, PC or mobile phone Internet access) does that mean someone is digitally included? Is it measured by the amount of comments people leave on blogs or if they even have a blog or Internet presence? What does digital mean anyway? Most of the things in my kitchen are in some way digital, so does that mean I’m somehow more digitally included than my neighbour? Also, what about those who just simply have no desire to go onto the Internet?
For me, digital inclusion is first about inclusion and then about the technology second. For example, having a hyperlocal blog doesn’t mean that suddenly all of the community will start to become active members. However, these are just one aspect to encourage inclusion.
The second discussion that caught my attention was the one about open source software. Possibly before the inception of Linux there’s been an ongoing effort to get more people to use open source software and for more manufactures to supply products that use it. What we were discussing in this session focussed on the benefits to individuals, commercial companies and voluntary organisations. We also tried to highlight success stories.
It seemed like everyone at the discussion knew what open source software was and the benefits of it, so I wont go over that again. For that, wikipedia does a great job of explaining:
Open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product’s source materials—typically, their source code
What was interesting to hear was the reasons that they haven’t changed over to using open source software. Many have switched to Firefox/Chrome or OpenOffice already either because it’s faster and has more features than the commercial alternative or because it’s free. For some the move to OpenOffice was spurned by it’s cost but also out of frustration of the new Microsoft Word 2007 interface and native .docx format, which was initially unreadable by anything other than the 2007 package.
That last point brought about an interesting point. Some had gone to OpenOffice, with it’s familiar pre-Offce 2007 interface because they didn’t like the change that came with a new version, even though some have agreed that after a bit of tweaking it’s better than its predecessor. Perhaps people haven’t moved over to using open source software or operating systems because it’s a change from the norm of Windows. Costs involved with retraining staff has often been cited as a reason for not moving to any new software, proprietary or open source. Afterall, many of us, including me, have gone through 18+ years of education system using Microsoft products. Any change, however slight, will cause disruption
Of course there are technical reasons for not moving to open source. Sometimes it’s incompatible with hardware and, unless you buy a preconfigured system, there’s never any guarantee that all will work as expected (for example, on my Dell 155 laptop, after a time I cannot change the brightness of the screen).
However, as with most technology it can only change and get better. No operating system is without its bugs. The main issue seems to be how to encourage a shift over to open source software.
We didn’t come up with one answer but a few ideas, some of which are already in progress:
More adoption in the voluntary sector
When needing an upgrade, use open source software on computers in schools and government services
Present open source as an option when buying a computer
After seeing some of my recent work I was asked to do a family portrait. The last time I did a portrait on such a large scale was in 2007 in Adobe Illustrator and the last time I did a realistic portrait was probably back in 2006 of an old photographer buddy. I’ve been using Inkscape for just over a year now and whilst I’ve been doing little bits and pieces I haven’t actually done a major illustration.
As always I started with the outline first and filled it in with basic colours. I used GIMP and a very useful cutout filter to help me visualise how I was going to layer the colours and shapes that I needed. From there it was a simple case of refining and perfecting! Have a look at some of the progress shots:
The finished product looks like so and is probably my favourite piece this year:
The finished family portrait
The finished result was printed onto a canvas and is mounted on their wall. Yay!
If you’re that kinda person you can have a look at the wireframe of the image:
Overall working in Inkscape was quite easy in terms of drawing. One bit of praise I often hear about it is its drawing and node editing tools, and it really did feel quite easy to draw this. However, there are two areas where I feel Inkscape hindered my creativity in creating this piece.
The first is how it implements brushes. Inkscape does this by using the Pattern Along Path Live Path Effect, which in some instances can be more useful than Illustrator’s brush tools. What I feel some users want is for the pattern to act as the stroke of a path and to still be able to edit the fill of a path. This would’ve been very useful for me when drawing the hair.
The second is it’s lack of extensive layer blending modes. Currently Inkscape has five layer blend modes, which includes normal/no blend and these can only be implemented on layers, not individual objects. As far as I know you were able to set the blend mode for each paths in 0.44, but it was removed for technical reasons. I achieved the effects in my earlier work by, at times, combining over ten different blend modes on individual objects. Take a look at this walkthrough by popular vector artist verucasalt82 and you’ll see why it can be quite handy. So, in the absence of blend modes for individual paths could we see a few more blend modes, overlay in particular?
With all of that said, you can see that Inkscape is still a very capable program. I overcame many of the problems I described by just doing things a little different than usual.
…an experiment in sharing art, text, and code–not just sharing digital files themselves, but sharing the process of making them. In place of the single-artist, single-artwork paradigm favored by the overwhelming majority of studio art programs and collection management systems, The Pool stimulates and documents collaboration in a variety of forms, including multi-author, asynchronous, and cross-medium projects.
Once you work your way around the interface why not add your thoughts to it!
