It’s a beautiful edition, waaaay sexier than the US version. You can get it from amazon japan.

“I think the craziest idea I have heard in the last few years is that everyone should learn to code. That is the most bizarre and regressive idea. There are good reasons why we don’t want everyone to learn nuclear physics, medicine or how financial markets work. Our entire modern project has been about delegating power over us to skilled people who want to do the work and be rewarded accordingly.”

- Evgeny Morozov, The Observer Sun 9th March 2013

Is it wrong to nurture a future where everyone can code? Is this really the craziest idea you’ve heard recently Mr Morozov? Yes, a workforce consisting of nothing but expert coders would be an unhelpful distribution of talent in a complex society, but is it really “bizarre and regressive” to argue for every citizen being given a rudimentary understanding of the 21st Century’s defining skill?

Self-Medicating Societies

There is a grain of sense in Morozov’s position, a society doesn’t need everyone to study nuclear physics, medicine or finance. Nor gardening, burger-flipping or governance. But there are very good reasons for educating our children to a certain standard in all the above.

Take one of Morozov’s parallels, medicine: could a society function if it’s masses knew nothing of the workings of their own bodies. If they were blissfully oblivious to how sugar and carbohydrate consumption might effect their long-term health, or how smoking could potentially reduce their lifespan. If they all thought they were dying the day they experienced their first nosebleed.

This is not too far from how a digital society might behave with a mass citizenship of code-illiterates. A world where everything is touched by code, from algorithmically-generated shopping recommendations to the timer on their cooker, but it’s people don’t understand the underlying logic. This is not a future scenario, it is the present. It is the past. It is the world which panicked over the Y2K bug, to the hilarity of the techno-literate, as they invoiced their equally hilarious consultancy fees. You want bizarre and regressive, look no further.

Rudimentary biology, unlike coding, is taught in both schools and the home, so every citizen has at least an entry-level knowledge of the field of medicine. This means that if you suffer a headache, you have the confidence to risk self-medication. You do not need to hire a specialist to make the diagnosis. And you do not need to spend your recovery contemplating why the cost of those specialists is so extortionate.

This is how we coders make a living. We have an un-general knowledge. We don’t panic when an automated system misbehaves. We understand the problems, because we understand the language. It is a language too few speak, but on which too much depends. Which is why our day-rates are so high. We do very well out of it, but even coders don’t argue that this is a good model for the future.

Bastard Over-Specialists

If you think medicine might be a slightly extreme analogy, lets try another of Morozov’s three comparisons: the financial market. We are currently suffering the fallout of a banking crisis. Every western working-class man, woman and child is feeling the consequences of the misuse and exploitation of a financial system few fully understand. This is a perfect example of what can happen when the complexity of a subject evolves too far beyond what the averagely-educated can digest. The main reason the bankers have been able to act with such an unhealthy self-interest for so long is because there aren’t enough non-bankers to review their actions. A nation of armchair-financial-analysts may be a fantasy, but such a scenario would have created pressure for regulation much more effectively than any of our world governments have.

No, we don’t need everyone to be a financial expert, doctor or programmer. But we also should not promote a future where we over-specialise these skills. The coders need to be kept in check just as much as the bankers, the doctors and the nuclear physicists.

Fortunately the coders, with their adorable geeky iconoclasm, tend to be better self-regulators than most. Coders open-source. They teach, and they share. The good ones do anyway. By these self-initiated peer(and non-peer)-review mechanisms they are subconsciously ensuring they do not go unchecked. They aren’t cocaine-fueled city-boys. They don’t want to become an all-powerful über-class. They’re they ones who read all those distopian sci-fi novels remember.

But are we going to rely on their beatitude forever? It’s still breakfast-time in the long summers day of our logic-based future. And the world is full of bastards. Who’s to say if the open-source philosophy will survive?

How The 21st Century Works

Ultimately, your feelings on this matter will depend upon your politics. If you have utter faith in top-down hierarchies, where “better” men (usually men), however they earned their positions, are trusted to make the decisions that effect your life, then you are probably more sympathetic to Morozov’s position than I am. A super-class of hyper-skilled über-nerds taking care of all that math stuff you don’t want to think about sounds fine to you. And if our society became perverted by the coders being more self-interested than intended, that is an acceptable side effect.

But if you believe society is better governed by and for the people, you will see the appeal in an evenly distributed future. The irony is that having an understanding of coding may make it easier to grasp concepts like emergence; this grass-roots, self-organised, “wisdom of crowds” type stuff; as it can be beautifully demonstrated in code.

Yes – learning to code may change your politics. I could see the conspiracy theorists seizing upon this as a reason for the patriarchy’s lack of enthusiasm for curriculum coding, for fear of undermining their archaic power structures. I wouldn’t go that far, but I wholeheartedly disagree with Morozov’s opinion that the modern project is reliant on “delegating power over us to skilled people who want to do the work and be rewarded accordingly”. To progress we need to move forward together, en-masse. It’s neither prudent, practical, nor morally acceptable, to leave stragglers trailing behind while strivers push hard at the forefront. Try walking your human-centipede that way and see how far you get.

As William Gibson, one of the patron saints of hackers, famously said, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed”. It is the distribution of these skills that is the essential next stage in our stumble toward an enlightened, democratic, technological future. Everyone should learn to code. Just as everyone should learn mathematics. Or their native tongue. Not to become mathematicians, or novelists, but in order to understand how the 21st Century works.

His face too had suffered, remodelled to accommodate his diminished pride. Concentrations of hair had shifted around his skull like continental drift. The retreating coastline of scalp, the new uneven brush of stubble. His forehead was an eroded cliff face, his chin a prothesis of neglect. The features between huddled awkwardly, as if his nose were the only bus shelter in a storm.

His swagger was the one thing behind the curve, still playing catchup. He walked with the confidence of a much hotter man, one with bigger, more virile, balls. Not these shrivelled, receded lumps; twin mushrooms in the fungal darkness of his Marks & Spencer creased acrylic trousers. The boldness of his stride, preceding the stomach-led shopping trolley of his frame, made him a perpetual disappointment to everyone who met him.

But luckily this was 2013, a time that was kind to his ilk. Interaction was rarely something which needed a physical presence, so he devoted his attention to grooming his social media presence instead. In this more dignified virtual reality he maintained an illusion of grandeur. He spoke wisely on the subject of web standards. His CSS templates were very popular. He didn’t need friends. He had followers.

Great title sequence. Pontypool (2008)

Related posts: Limbo – The Organised Mind, Punch Drunk Love, Enter The Void.

Many options = hard choices. Few options = easy choices. Reduce options, increase happiness.
Mon Aug 24 15:20:42 +0000 2009

… if increasing options reduces happiness, then freedom/capitalism/democracy are our biggest sources of misery.
Mon Aug 24 16:03:19 +0000 2009

It’s logically sound, but am I arguing in favour of Totalitarianism here? Would the happiness we’d gain from simpler choices be negated if we knew someone or something was limiting those choices? Do we overrate freedom of choice, or is the right to have more options than are good for us more valuable than happiness?

May need more thought.

Forever unfinished.

Milly had never really known anything apart from how to talk to people. It was her superpower. She was popular, likeable and quick witted, all of which would have been highly saleable skills in simpler times. Milly died, at the relatively young age of 67, still eighteen years shy of the official state retirement age, having been redundant for the previous eight years. Her health had declined from a lack of meat space transactions, ‘real’ social interaction. Her confidence had taken a knock with the redundancy, and she had found solace in the virtual support networks of her empathic implants. There was little reason for her to leave the house. Technically, the cause of death was Strain216, that year’s most devastating mutation of the common cold, which was becoming a worryingly accepted way for society to auto-correct its excesses of expired matter, shed its dead leaves. Like carbohydrates were to the 20th C. But I thought of it as death by inertia. She had slowed to a stop.

I was DMing Maersk, the Danish traffic megacorp who now owned Milly’s FaceBox, along with a billion others, following the liquidation of ZBerg Data Holdings in the 30s. The social networks from which the early boxes had been created still existed somewhere in MetaSpace, populated now only by a hardcore of nostalgic retro geeks, and the billion ghosts of ageless millennials. No significantly connected people hung out there any more, it was purely for the data tourists. These networks had the air of abandoned holiday camps, from a brighter time of optimism, sharing, and a different set of freedoms.

Maersk’s English speaking customer relations department was, of course, automated. Locating and purchasing Milly’s box was a pleasant and smooth transaction, dealing, as I was, with a FaceBox perfectly suited to both the task and my personality type. I found myself almost accidentally flirting with it, which it politely reciprocated. The purchase wasn’t cheap. I’m sure if I were a corporation buying boxes by the million I would have got her for a fraction of the cost. But I was paying the sentimental old fart rate, an entirely arbitrary transaction fee that had been calculated based on what the system knew I could afford. You were always welcome to negotiate with a FaceBox, it would happily play along for however long you needed to satisfy your pride. But the price wouldn’t budge.

Delivery was instant. I opened the link and she danced behind my eyelids. “How are you today?” I asked. “Good. Pretty good. Looking forward to a night in with a bit of telly”. I asked her what was on and she picked a few interesting sounding downloads from the schedule. I switched mode and asked the same question with original cultural references. She whispered a list of barely remembered names, smiling at the bewilderment on my face. I tried a random update instead. “I know it’s trash, but I can’t stop reading the bloody DaVinci Code”. I reached for the book’s text from the classic cloud, selected Milly for both narrator and the French heroine. Chose my own box for the voice of the lightly sketched professorial hero. Closed my eyes and listened.

There are two tests of a good theory. From a strictly structural angle the standard for theoretical quality is how easy it is to disprove, how testable are the hypotheses. From a creative angle it is the neatness and/or elegance of the supposition that matters. Many of our best, Darwin’s Theory of Evolution perhaps the most controversial example I could nonchalantly pluck from the sky, survive mostly on the latter criteria. The rarer beast is a theory that satisfies both.

In 1995 Iain Spence published his Sekhmet Hypothesis, a book length proposal that the 11 year cycle of sunspot activity exactly mirrored a similar cycle in youth culture. Every 11 years, in periods starting roughly a year after the solar minimum, our youth culture flip-flopped between two extremes. At one end is a state typified by punk – short/severe haircuts, speedy drugs, spiky/poppy music and an appreciation of the more materialistic pleasures of life. At the other extreme was what might be loosely termed ‘hippy’ – psychedelic drugs, long hair, freeform music and other art forms, baggy clothing and a trend toward the spiritual. In these 11 year periods the magnetic polarity of the Sun reverses, an extinction event were it to happen to a planet, from one cycle to the next. The cultural shift of the West appeared to be doing exactly the same.

Spence traced this correlation starting in 1955 – the birth of rock and roll. Speed, bikers, leather jackets and three minute guitar riff driven sounds. This was a year after the solar minimum of 1954, the start of Solar Cycle 19.

The next Solar Cycle, No. 20 (the twentieth since measurement began in 1755), started 11 years later. By 1966 there had been a complete reversal in cultural polarity, with the long-haired, flared-trousered LSD generation. Flower children. Psychedelics. Hour-long sitar solos.

Another 11 years bought us around to 1977, and the punk explosion. Amphetamines. Leather and poly-plastics. Spitting. Pogoing. Tight jeans and the spiky, angry pop of The Sex Pistols and The Clash.

Eleven years later came the start of Cycle 22; 1988 and the second summer of love. Ecstasy, acid house, and the loved up rave scene. Baggy hoodies, floppy fringes and shoegaze.

Eleven years after that: 1999, and … well. This is when Spence got to test his proposition. He had created a theory of quality in that it was a testable hypothesis, with an expected outcome predicted four years earlier. But Spence felt 1999 hadn’t delivered the “Stormer” movement, the punk maxima he was expecting. He felt his theory had collapsed. He has since modified his original proposal.

But just because a theory is provably bollocks, that doesn’t mean it isn’t any good. If we separate out the mathematical prediction of an 11 year cultural cycle and the now irrelevant Fortean pseudo-science of the solar cycle correlation, there is still clearly something of interest. I like mathematical predictions of the future, such as Moore’s Law, predicting that technology will halve in size every two years, which has pretty much held true since the 60s. Even if it’s creator has disowned it, the idea of culture endlessly repeating on an 11 year cycle is actually a pretty good one.

Grant Morrison, the writer from whom I stole the unexpectedly sticky name for my web presence sometime around the beginning of Cycle 23, remains a great believer in the theory. He wrote about its influence on his career in his recent book Supergods. Morrison didn’t consider it disproved in ’99, instead citing Nu-Metal, Marilyn Manson, the return of cocaine and the caffeination of our high streets as evidence. I too am kind to the theory, positing that perhaps the manifestation was simply not quite as it was expected. The paradigm shift in youth culture of 1999 was the explosion of mobile phones, and the internet. I’d argue that Napster, founded in ’99, had a bigger impact on the young than any musical trend of the time. Perhaps the punk maxima of 1999 was a technological one.

Anyway, my point is that a disproved or discredited theory is not necessarily a bad one. Darwin went through six editions of On The Origin Of Species, and still never felt he got it spot on. Yet his theory is now a bedrock. Just as other since-disproved creation myths were before it. The continued moral usefulness of long discredited theories is one of the best arguments in favour of most of the organised religions of the 21st Century. Religious moral codes surviving thanks to the baby not being thrown out with the bathwater.

So. If we’re happy to subscribe to a bastard theory, 2010-2021 marks Cycle 24 of the Sekhmet Hypothesis. A period of cultural change that has started at the hippy pole, and is evolving toward the punk. The next ten years are going to get angrier, tighter-trousered, more corporate and more compact. In the vaguest of senses. But really, for it to be useful, all that really needs to be defined about Cycle 24 at this stage is that it will involve a shift from something to something else. And it’s already started.

I wish you a productive decade.

For years our survival, as a race, had depended upon the breeders. Not just the babies they were having, but also the secrets they kept. The new parents kept it quiet, they didn’t tell their cool, carefree, single friends how hard it was having kids, and the dangerous truth – that being single and childless was actually a lot more fun.

But the meme was growing, multiplying exponentially, and by 2009 it had found a hold within the forums of mumsnet. This was the turning point. For years the idea had remained contained, within the pages of women’s fashion magazines, Hollywood films, TV dramas, the kind of places the young cool, fertile people didn’t have all that much time to hang out. But when the meme infected mumsnet it was a significant defection. The message was now being propagated by “knowledgeable sources”, parents who knew both sides, breeders who’d had their offspring, but hadn’t learned to keep their mouths shut. Young couples, around the time they usually came over to the breeder cause, were stumbling across this information in their google searches and were talked out of having children.

The counter-message, the “happy family” meme which had successfully kept selling us toilet paper, cleaning products, and keeping the human race alive until then, was suddenly on the ropes. Its traditional evangelists – the church, the politicians, light entertainment, had all been discredited. The war was lost by the early 2010s. The last human baby was born in 2035.

1981 – Developing motor-reflex skills by playing two colour Donkey Kong on a TRS-80 Model III.

1982 – Talking to bearded nerds on Prestel Bulletin Boards, trying to pretend I wasn’t nine.

1983 – Typing “10 Print ‘COCK ‘ / 20 Goto 10” into all the display model ZX-Spectrums in WH-Smiths, then running away. Repeating said act in every other shop in Wolverhampton Town Centre every Saturday.

1985 – A glorious hot summer spent not riding bikes with friends, but alone in a darkened room playing Elite.

1986 – My first published Digital Artwork. Crash Magazine printed a picture of the Pet Shop Boys I had created with OCP Art Studio. The ZX Spectrum allowed only two colours within any one 64 pixel square. “Attribute Clash” it was called, and it required creative workarounds. Music taste still under development.

1987 – Hacking, when it was still a dirty word, into the school’s BBC computer network and retrieving a plain text file containing all the teachers passwords. Their choice of words alone were enough ammunition to last me a term.

1988 – Noticed girls.

If you’re interested in HTML5, I’ve written a brief tutorial for CreativeApplications.net which discusses porting ideas between languages, and steps through the making of the little JavaScript animation in the header of this site.

Hellblazer #274 Peter Milligan / Simon Bisley February 2011

Written Images is an experimental publishing concept, funded via kickstarter. The idea was to have a 400 page GenArt book where, true to the concept, no two copies are the same, but all are within a tight enough possibility space to be regarded as the same publication. And we’re not just talking individualised covers here, every single page of the book is a one-of-kind artwork.

Each of the 42 artists featured submitted their work as an applet, a chunk of code, which could be added to an automated print process. The idea couldn’t be realised cheaply, which meant the first edition was priced at $200 a copy, but the pledge target was reached rapidly, probably because so many wanted to own a book where even the artists themselves, theoretically, have never before seen the final works that have their name next to them.

My submission, Twill (above, and below), was one of my fave AbandonedArt experiments, that I adapted for print. I had wanted to use it for my own book, to make an infinite set of covers, but this was vetoed early by my publisher (which is why my book ended up costing $20 rather than $200), so I was glad to have the opportunity to realise it as intended in WI. From what I can tell, the WI printing of Twill is much larger and more defined than the single iteration of the system that ended up on my cover, so I’m very glad to see it done justice.

I get one of the 230 copies as a contributing artist, but I’m not sure if this is going to satisfy me. While I’m keen to get my unique copy, I’m also keen to see other folks’ copies, to see how individual/alike they all are. Will the lucky 230 copy-holders form an exclusive club, a global network, who all carry their copies with them on their travels, just on the off chance they might run into another holder with whom they can compare prints? Will they congregate once a decade at remote mountain retreats for Written Images parties, where copy-holders, or their heirs, pass around their prints and recite the words of Bruce Sterling‘s introduction in a reverential sub-glottal murmur?

If not, they should. And there should be a lot more of these bold publishing experiments too. Print isn’t dead. It’s evolving. And Written Images is what it’s future looks like.

Charles Bukowski died in 1994, aged 74. His gravestone reads “Don’t Try“. The reasons for this were explained in a letter to his fellow poet John William Corrington :

‘Somebody [...] asked me: “What do you do? How do you write, create?” You don’t, I told them. You don’t try. That’s very important: not to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It’s like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or, if you like its looks, you make a pet out of it.’

I don’t have Bukowski’s patience or stoicism, but I do agree with this flavour of zen to a certain extent. To spend a lifetime chasing ideas or ambitions is the fool’s approach, to stand any chance of being happy sometimes you just have to go with the flow a little and if it happens, it happens. Otherwise the likeliest outcome to any endevour is disappointment.

There are probably more proactive approaches you can take than just sitting on your arse and catching flies though. If there is something you want to do, something you feel the urge to realize, the best way to make it happen is to just steam ahead and do it. And if you require the imposition of arbritary goals and schedules upon yourself, that’s just what you have to do. You can spend as long as you like planning, discussing, promoting, weighing up consequences, and negotiating excuses, but none of these are a substitute for just trying something and seeing if it flies.

I firmly believe that if you find something you love doing, and have passion for, you should allow nothing to stop you doing it. With the possible exceptions of incest and/or line dancing. If you really need to get paid for your art in order to keep doing it, it’ll come with time. If you do anything for long enough, eventually someone will try to pay you for it.

If the possibility of never getting rewarded, or recognized or appreciated for your work is sufficient detererent to stop you doing it, then there’s probably not enough love in your work anyway. Go back to your salaried job and your TV and devote your time to being a good consumer.

If you love something, do it. If you don’t, stop. Life doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that, does it?

I’m very happy to say (you don’t know how happy) that my book, after many months in the makeup chair at my publishers being beautified, is finally out. Go get. Now. Go.

I’m going to quote you one of my favourite passages. It’s from the copyright page:

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the publisher, with the exception of the Introduction, Chapter 1, Chapter 6 and the source code throughout, which are available under a Creative Commons (Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0) license. See creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/. Note that Creative Commons distribution of the images in the Introduction and Chapter 1 is limited to those by Matt Pearson only.

In short, this means large chunks of the text, imagery and all of the source code is Creative Commons licensed. The total CC licensed content amounts to over 25% of the total page count. If it were entirely up to me I’d have CC’d the lot, but this is actually a very generous amount to have been granted by a publisher as traditional as Manning, and (as far as I know) a first for a book of this kind.

It is a mystery to me why all tech books don’t do this, especially regards the source code. I cannot understand the logic in a book demonstrating a technique to a reader, while elsewhere stating that the reader will be breaking the law if they were to copy it word for word? Copyright is a crazy dinosaur, and I am not a fan (as you will probably already know if you’ve been reading awhile). This small concession makes me feel just slightly less of a hypocrite in publishing under the “old media” model.

So, on both my page and Mannings, there are now a number of links to free content you can try before you buy. The Foreword (by Marius Watz), Preface, Intro and Chapter 1, introduce what the book is about, with lots of lovely imagery – which, I should make clear, looks much more gorgeous in print than it does on a screen. Chapter 6, is a slightly more advanced, but more typical, example of the “stealth learning” approach of the book.

Any CC licensed portions are free to be redistributed, repurposed, even re-published, if you want to. If anyone wants to make a free Kindle version, a Kinect based interpretive dance version, or a Commodore 64 text-based-adventure from this content, please feel free (and send me the link). Note that it is only my content that is covered by the CC license, any text or imagery credited to others is copyrighted to them in the usual way.

However you come to read it, I hope you like it.

Thanks then to my artist friend Shardcore for recommending his book “45” to me, which I was reading in the garden today as the Royal Wedding was being endlessly replayed on the TV inside. There is a great passage where he talks of a visit to Beograd, capital of Serbia, to show the K Foundation film, in 1995 when a war was happening in the Balkans:

“Gimpo, video camera in hand, filmed the proceedings. ‘Close your eyes and you can see me better,’ Fleka intoned as he rode the rumbling rhythms of Can, Captain Beefheart and The Fall, free-associating in broken English and Serbian. A bottle of plum brandy was passed around the studio, which was littered with broken mikes and packs of Lucky Strike. Fleka had opened the show by holding a 50-million sloto note close to the mike and tearing it in half, then asking ‘Zombie Town’ what they thought of that. Four years earlier, 50-million sloto would have bought half a house; in September 1995 it would have bought a coffee. Whatever our money-burning act meant to Jimmy and me, it took a marked twist as we were confronted with the reality of a people living in a state of hyper inflation. Those black-and-white photographs of German citizens burning mounds of almost-worthless Weimar Republic banknotes to keep warm had always been a boyhood inspiration, up there with that shot of Jack Ruby pulling his gun. Whenever asked why we burned a million quid, ‘to keep warm’ was the answer we wanted to give.”

While I still remember seeing the K Foundation film, their act did absolutely nothing for me. It was completely devoid of shock value. And when I went inside today I realised why, as the nation was gathered around watching the ceremonial burning of £20million, in a beautiful, spectacular event we had paid for, but were not really invited to. It had all been done before. So many times.

It is difficult to be shocked by the burning of obscene amounts of money as a public spectacle, simply because we are so hardened to it, seeing it daily – be it wars fought on foreign soil, bonuses paid to business men who profit from our taxes, or multi-million dollar Hollywood blockbusters so awful we want to claw our own eyes out. If we cannot be shocked by these wastes of money that should appal us, how can we be moved by seeing it burn in the name of something that’s actually quite good, like Art. Ok, the K Foundation were hardly building a hospital with their elegant attention seeking, but it was still evidently a more sensible use of a million pounds than, say, paying to make one more episode of Two and a Half Men[*].

The Royal Wedding, whether a good thing or a bad thing (and I really don’t give a toss whether it is either to be honest), was just another bit of Prime Time TV. Okay, it had upset the advertising model a bit, meaning we were paying for it via taxes, rather than being sold shit, but essentially it was just more harmless entertainment rolled out by an out of touch institution. Not ITV this time, but the Windsors. Of course it was a little odd seeing a show aimed more at the old folk in such a Prime Time slot, but wasn’t it all the more interesting just for this? Imagine if the BBC announced they were making a special edition of Last Of The Summer Wine, with a £20million pound budget, loads of nutty, obscenely rich celebs were going to be in it, and they were going to be screening it across all channels, endlessly repeated for a week. You’d watch it. Of course you would. Just for the mad spectacle of the thing.

And today, thanks to the William and Kate Show, someone, somewhere both invented and popularised the acronym QILF. How else could this have happened? Money well spent I think.

[* no, I'd never heard of it pre-CharlieGate either]

I spent some time trying to work out what the Jehovahs Witnesses were saying with their stark juxtaposition of image and text. We appear to be looking at a man in a suit, who may or may not be wearing high-heels. He stands in cyberspace, glowing like the Ready-Brek kid, before a towering representation of the Earth, painted in the style of a Jean Michel Jarre album cover. It’s kinda how I’d imagine an eighties film adaptation of Neuromancer would have looked, had it been made as a corporate training video.

But, looking again, is it actually a giant skyscraper shaped spaceship, hurtling towards our fragile ball in the sky. Is this what will bring about the end of days? The figure standing on its side, whose glow now clearly betrays him as a member of the Green Lantern Corps, is clenching his buttocks with the sheer concentration required just to stay attached. This must be what explains his odd posture. Or possibly the high heels.

Gerry Anderson Does The Matrix (not actual title) is just one in a series of these pamphlets the JoHos (as I like to call them) produce. I have been building my collection ever since I moved to the godless wastes of suburban Brighton, which seems to be a key target in their evangelistic campaign.

So far I am yet to sign up, but I have to admit they make religion look so cool, like in this action packed imagining (right) of how The Fonz might have turned out, had he not made so many bad life choices. I’m happy to assume their particular eschatological, evangelical, millenarian, restorationist, nontrinitarian branch of Christianity is the one true way, and isn’t half as secular as those other, lesser permutations. But really I’m wondering if I were to write to the PO Box number would I be granted access to the back catalogue of commissioned artwork? Might there be t-shirts even?

I’d love a chance to see a decent sized print of this cover (right) for example, in which a brother is about to receive a ritualistic five-way bitchslap from representatives of a consortium of world religions. It demands of the viewer: if you don’t intervene, who will?

Again, there are so many interpretations. Might it also be seen as a fancy dress party gone horribly wrong, capturing the moment the microwave exploded during the country dancing. The brother is clearly the centre of attention because of his brilliant, and subversive idea to come dressed as a white guy. Either way, it’s a bold scene, with a palpable sense of horror.

And talking of horrors – Yay, it’s the rapture (right). Everyone’s gonna die. Except us, hahahahahahahah.

It would have took some serious balls to have distributed this particular pamphlet the week of the Japanese earthquake? But perhaps the world needs these positive messages of disaster. Disasters are not a time for the world to unite and help those who need it, no they can be a time for celebration, for they are signs of the end days, the World of Satan is almost over. Not long now kids.

The happy message here is thus: join the JoHos and the worse it gets, the smugger you can be. Join today and never feel miserable about world events, dead puppies or other people’s misfortunes ever again. Hallelujah.

Everything in the video, even the edit, is audio reactive. You’ll have to excuse the slight delay due to the screen capture, and the loss of detail from web compression. It runs a smooth and crispy 300-400fps on my MacBook when it’s not being captured.

I allowed myself a slight cheat in building visuals that fit this particular song (the track is Linear by Monolake), rather than a generic system. I experimented with encoding the audio waveform into an image, so I could visualise it in non-real time if I needed to. I didn’t need to in the end, but that process itself produced some interesting aesthetics (below). You can quickly see that different styles of music have very different looks. Right-click “Save Link As..” on the images if you want to examine the (1M) full detail versions.

Radiohead – 15 Step:

Sleigh Bells – Infinity Guitars:

Autechre – rew(1):

Mogwai – Sine Wave:

“Also strolling in was the great director, Manz Loeb, who had directed such films as The Rat Man and Pencilhead. Along with him was the famous actress Rosalind Bonelli. So we had to go over and be introduced. Loeb and Bonelli smiled nicely and were polite but I got the terrible feeling they felt superior to us. But that was all right because I felt superior to them. That was just the way it worked.”

Charles Bukowski Hollywood 1989

Even though they clearly didn’t hit it off, it’s nice to know Charles Bukowski and David Lynch (then dating Isabella Rosellini) did at least meet during their respective lifetimes.

Giant-Size Man-Thing #2 John Buscema 1974

I heartily recommend it.

Amassing data is easy. Filling a harddrive is easy. Just like amassing a garage full of junk is easy. It’s managing and disposing of the stuff that’s the hard bit. Deciding you can live without it, and dragging it to the trash. Which is the only way you’ll ever clear that bloody garage too – by chucking the whole lot. But this casting off of the old is a very healthy process. Our possessions are a part of us, often a long dead part of us, which we wear like the dead ends in our hair. They must be pruned to allow growth.

Reinvention is something teenagers do all the time. Well, the cool ones do anyway. Hippies become Punks, Goths become Grebos, Indie Kids become Emos become Hipsters become Twats. It’s part of growing up, trying a few looks, and stances, and ideologies, running with the ones which suit, denying you ever tried the ones that don’t. The day the kid comes home with the haircut or piercing or boyfriend or whatever it is that succeeds in appalling mom and dad, that’s the day the kid regenerates, closes one chapter and starts a new one. That’s what a kid growing up looks like.

It worries me that reinvention is so much more difficult these days, with social networks preserving every stupid utterance we ever make, every transaction logged by a loyalty scheme, every movement captured on camera. How can a kid reinvent themselves, when the photos of how they looked last week haven’t all been tagged yet. How can they grow into anything other than what everyone else is? And how can our culture grow without such iconoclasts propelling it?

When I was 15, my mom took the scruffy overcoat I had taken to wearing (which I thought made me look like I was in The Bunnymen, she thought made me look like a tramp*) and set fire to it at the bottom of the garden. I’m sure it gave her great satisfaction, but it left me without a coat, in winter. So I had to go out and buy a new one quick. I replaced it with a leather bikers jacket, and army boots to go with it. In the weeks that followed my girlfriend of the time completed the look by piercing my nose with the back of a badge, and for a while I wore the uniform of a Black Country Grebo. I doubt this was my mom’s intention, but she had helped me to evolve that little bit faster.

I wouldn’t be seen dead in any of that clobber now of course, I’ve shed skins many, many times since then. I’m a grown man, so it’s harder to get that reinvention kick, having kids to feed and a mortgage to pay. The best I can do to give my life a fresh coat of paint is reskinning my blog, or deleting my facebook account, or just emptying a recycle bin full of mp3s (which I fear may already have been the most rock and roll thing I do this year). But I’m past the age when I’m ever going to burn down the school, so these kind of things are what keep me feeling good about myself.

The day we stop reinventing ourselves, is the day we stop growing. And start decaying.

[* she was right btw]

Many more beautiful gifs at “If we don’t, remember me.”

There’s no shortage of clever stuff already out there, you’ve probably already seen much of it on YouTube. Check out Robert Hodgin’s experiments in particular, some of which Aphex Twin incorporated into his New Year show in Rome. My main interest has been in what the Kinect is capable of aesthetically though, so I took it into FutureDeluxe yesterday, for a day of (what we loosely call) “R&D”. Below is a little of what we came up with.

I was prototyping in Processing and it was all captured in realtime, at a slower framerate than in the video though. If I were to port the code to OpenFrameworks it would be much faster.

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UPDATE 25/1 – If you’ve got access to a Kinect, it’s probably more fun to actually play with one of these apps, rather than just watch the video. So I’ve made two of them available for download: zenbulletsKinect.zip.

They’re standalone Java apps. Mac only I’m afraid.

More experiments to come, as soon as I have another free day. Unless someone fancies paying me to play with this stuff …

Just delivered: my first gallery interactive (my first solo one anyway). Broken Mirrors 1-4 is a large-scale reflective projection, that only exists while a spectator is interacting with it. Each viewer’s movements control one of four generative animations, so no two visits will produce the exact same visual. The experience is made more immersive thanks to a specially written soundscape by my, now regular, collaborator Tim Diagram (of Hessien fame).

The interactive will be at The Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, Stoke-On-Trent from January 29th until Easter, as part of their Erasure exhibition – a particularly bold and farsighted exhibition by this large, but distinctly regional, gallery. Erasure has been years in the making, and has been a labour of love for the curators Alec Morrison and Jean Milton, so it should definitely be worth the trip.

More/bigger pics on Flickr. I’ll post some video of the thing in action as soon as I’ve been up there to take some.

Opening Titles:

Visual Effects (by BUF):

Opening Scene: