User:C3/T2 assessment
SI contributions
SI25
During SI25 I took part in 3 radio shows.
Radio Week 3 "Underwater Exploration"
We depicted our radio show as an exploration underwater. I made a custom tool in Touchdesigner to mix and modify different audio material we collected from archive.org, Aporee and Youtube. The day of the radio show we mixed everything in real-time on two computers connected to the mixer, it was mostly done by making choices on the spot and listening at what each other was playing.
Structure
- Intro: Text to speech intro read
- Part 1: water ambient noises
- Part 2: Text to speech readings of the answers to two questions we asked "what is a protocol/ experimental"
- Part 3: Songs/ texts/ memes that relate or mention water
Radio Week 4 "Protocols to Freestyle"
This radio show was mostly focused on freestyling. The hosts of the show read Generous Practises by Femke, intermitting every chapter with music selected by Sevgi. I was not hosting directly that time, I was reading and writing into the chat. There were also other elements like typing comments we got through the online chat into a VCV rack project that turned keystrokes into.
Radio Week 5 "Protocols for Bad customer service"| VJing with one hand, typing with the other
We setup a fictional call center, which referred to itself as The Company. Its main objective was to sell the Product. The Contents, questions and the discussions in between the different hosts were as generic and non-specific as possible role playing the emptiness of workplaces where protocols are not loose suggestions but strict rules that impact people on both sides. Every script reading was intermitted by really annoying hold music.
There was a lot of writing, we had read a number of stories on reddit about customer support complains, and we derived from them fictional scripts of how these calls have played out, and then these were read live during the radio show.
I wrote the Terms and conditions and the Cutting script.
https://pad.xpub.nl/p/ideas_for_PCP_21_Cuttin_Script_and_Boss
Then I got sick and was not able to join the day of, Eleni filled in for me, but the show turned out great.
I never did any performance work but this one was very low key, so me likes. I was part of the // project, though I don't remember doing something specific, I was an all rounder.
I enjoyed a lot writing the project's presentation text with Zuhui.
We also wrote together the text that is present on the Sounds of Making website. We generally had a pad were we wrote together asynchronously during the same days. We read each others' entries, copied them, re-wrote them, re-organized them... quality writing time.
Finally, together with Charlie, we curated the wiki pages of the radio shows, reaching out the rest of the class to gather the materials that were used as a database for the people that did the post-production work of the event and the SI: The website and its print version.
Takeaways:
In retrospective having radio shows weekly forced a sort of adrenaline rush that brought out a lot of ideas quickly, by looking back at these I see the potential expansion of some bits, for example it was very nice to see that the customer service radio show then sort of turned out in the "Press 1 for" project. I also like how in the course we got to know each other through making something together.
SI26
At some point during this SI Doriane invited us to bring old devices that have a native browser, to explore how things would have displayed on them rather than modern laptops. At some point a joke about making a 3DS only website was made. Initially I got intrigued by this idea and so I started researching software and hardware specifics, and I summed them up in this pad:
https://pad.xpub.nl/p/SI26_nintendo_DS-3DS
After that we gathered with Tessa, Charlie and Eleni and started doing some navigation discoveries by browsing websites and taking notes in another pad (which now is our main one):
https://pad.xpub.nl/p/3DS_Browser_Investigation
We started making our own small webpages but noticed that most CSS we were writing was not working, so Doriane helped us to organize a methodical test and we have written collectively a page to navigate with the 3DS to check which properties actually worked, and which did not.
Inspired by Tactical design, we noted down a list of things that we know that don't work on the 3DS, and from those we derived strategies that allow us to create content that is visible only on the 3DS.
JS nightmares (I'm being sarcastic[maybe])
For a while we were sure that JS was not supported, until I double checked everything we did so far to write a dry recap of our journey. After finding out JS worked some extra interaction elements found their way into our project.
I found out that even though I don't like writing JS, I enjoy using the browser's console to write code in general, I feel like being able to use JS to target HTML elements, assign CSS rules and adding small functions for interaction LIVE is a great feat, though there are a lot of inconsistencies that I find painful to discover...
General infrastructure of the website
Training with bash lead to a big relief on this one, instead of manually creating pages to manually edit by copy pasting, changing tabs, getting confused, I made use of something I started doing for myself. I created multiple files with touch.
$ touch room_{01..20}.html
I wrote one html page template with what we need for the infrastructure (a elements, scripts, etc.) made a loop that cat the template in every file.
$ for i in {01..20}; do cat template_html > room_$i.html; done
Then manually edited just the links, took 20 mins to come up with a working skeleton of the way we layed out the pages to be linked together.
I'm also writing the presentation text of the project + a statement by us + the text of the webzine... not the best time to talk about this project.
Tools
I have started using a lot of the things that we got introduced to during classes, and I am very happy about it :).
- graphviz: Fleshing out the outlines of something I want to make, I never though that after being introduced to flowcharts for so many years I would start using them at xpub.
- python, bash: Scripts! I love scripts, I feel like they're small thoughts that also do something, they don't stop at being just text.
- yt-dlp :handshake ffmpeg: Archiving documentaries all over that will inevitably be removed from the platforms that host them, turning them into audio, compressing them etc.
- termux: terminal emulator for android
- linux: I don't know how to sum this up, I have approached linux on multiple machines (@lattina, @cerealbox, @muletto, @mulino, @termux,) by doing various things, the tools we use in class help a lot in getting used to it.
- imagemagick: smol images, procedural images.
- free thesaurus
- internet archive and the wayback machine
Extra
Failures
"objects in mirror are closer than they appear"
A backup of my user on cerealbox.
I want to do it but I keep making copies of cerealbox as a whole, then manually deleting everything other than my user folder (I tried using curl, wget and httrack).
I know this is beyond my current knowledge reach, so I'll do it wrong and then look into web scraping at some point.
Riviera challenged me to install archlinux
Riviera gave an old thinkpad and challenged me to install archlinux on an LVM, for the first 20 minutes after wiping the system with the USB stick I was typing commands in the void, I did not understand the fact that the usual commands we learned in class work only on a filesystem.
Also after installing GNOME I was stuck for a week because I did not understand that I needed to manually enable it.
I tried wiping a microSD card
...with what I learned by wiping hard drives and installing linux. I tried different methods (shred, wipefs, dd if=/of=, recursive shred of all files in every folder, chmod on all files to make them rwx... but nothing) but it seems that the sd is stuck in read only mode, after multiple wipes and new makefs now it also is not readable at all times.
The cerealbox scripts
Observations
After 2 trimesters at xpub I noticed that:
- I am definitively a (selective) learning junkie. Thought it is not always clear to me why something create that brain itch.
- I am generally more comfortable with taking more time on things.
Reading a whole book on a topic, doing exercises step by step, making proposals and then trying to do them are some examples to some examples of how I am approaching code.
Learning takes time and is all about iterations, so I am walking this journey peacefully for now.
- I lurk a lot more. During the breaks we had, I took various dives into the wiki and zulip, at the beginning I was looking for interesting topics from the past, then it became something I usually do when I have some vague idea or when some interesting topics come up during class.
It feels weird to say, but one example is the Cookbook, which I forgot of even though it was the first thing I looked at before being admitted into the course.
- As we are constantly exploring alternative tools, I am asking myself one question from time to time: what tools do I use, which ones do I feel I need? Scaling down is something that I am intrigued by, I am also actively trying it with linux on different machines, the only reasons that prevents me from wiping windows from this computer are Touchdesigner & Houdini
-Overall, approaching something I know I don't know all about has been an interesting opportunity to practice and learn.
- I think that the wiki mediation is what makes the iteration less frequent, every time I approach the wiki I think a lot at the way information is displayed, which blocks me.
I am writing a lot more on @cerealbox and on @lattina because the lack of interface elements just work for me.
- There is definitely a pleasure in challenge that appeals to me.
Future developments
scripting text manipulation
scripting procedural graphics
self hosting (@mulino)
workshops/laboratories of device explorations, trying to get closer to abstract systems questioning them, making them concrete objects.
Towards scaling down, caring of individual and shared spaces.
Keywords
some keywords that I have noted down overtime.
- distribution
- sharing-knowledge
- trouble-shooting
- trouble-making
- processes
- infrastructure
- space
- investigation
- care
- repair
- maintainance
- scripting
- resize
- scale
- compression
- deletion
- myth
- narration