Eleanor Dare PhD journal new location

Retired this blog, join me at nice new address:http://nicenewblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/nice-new-blog.html

2011-04-21T05:52:00.000-07:00

http://nicenewblog.blogspot.com/
Yes nice new blog at the above address, sorry Phil - the old one had to go.
Goodbye old followers - why not join me in a whole new world of post-doctoral lovelyness, new design schema, hopeful typeface, uncynical and shiny...spring cleaned, fresh and fragrant..

Corrections accepted

2011-04-15T13:22:00.000-07:00

Corrections accepted, phew...not sure what to do with this blog now....retire it and start a nice new shiny one?

2011-03-29T14:50:00.000-07:00

Passed PhD viva with minor corrections..
:-)

2011-03-25T12:12:00.000-07:00

Lee and I have had our paper accepted for the Istanbul ISEA 2011 in Spetember, the paper is about our VAINS collaboration. No idea how we are going to fund it...we might have to hitch-hike and sleep in ditches. But it's pleasing to get through, apparently there were thousands of applicants, so that's a bit of validation for our project.

"ISEA2011 Istanbul is the international festival of new media, electronic and digital arts. The 17th International Symposium on Electronic Art, a leading world conference and exhibition event for art, media and technology, is scheduled for September 14 to 21, 2011 in Istanbul, Turkey. The ISEA2011 Istanbul exhibition will coincide with the Istanbul Biennial and will provide a fantastic opportunity to showcase contemporary new media arts. "

My viva rehersal on Monday seemed to go ok, but I've got to work on making it clearer exactly how the software works with the book and egg. No one liked my film much so I dont think I'll bother to show it, probably wont have time anyway..

South film

2011-03-23T07:20:00.000-07:00

Other places to load South content, just as good on a kindle or mobile phone...

Our beautiful robot

2011-03-23T07:08:00.000-07:00

So today we built our first Buridan's Robot prototype, now it responds to light, next we will give it conflicting desires. Below very simple Urbi code to make it communicate when light is a certain brightness:

load("/home/student/creativerobotics/urbi-for-bioloid/dynamixel.u");

 var Global.d = Dynamixel.new;

class Thing
  {

   function init()
   {
      /* var this.shoulder =
Dynamixel.Device.new(d,1,Dynamixel.DeviceDesc.AX12);
       var this.elbow =
Dynamixel.Device.new(d,2,Dynamixel.DeviceDesc.AX12);
       var this.wrist =
Dynamixel.Device.new(d,3,Dynamixel.DeviceDesc.AX12);
       var this.hand =
Dynamixel.Device.new(d,4,Dynamixel.DeviceDesc.AX12);
*/

         var this.sensorH =  Dynamixel.Device.new(d,100,
Dynamixel.DeviceDesc.AXS1);
         var this.sensorRead = 0;



    };

    function start_feedback(){
      detach
      ({
           every(0.1s)
             {
            this.sensorRead = this.sensorH.lightLeft;
              }
      });

     };


     function startReact(){
        whenever(sensorRead10)
        {

echo("lighjt");}
         };



};
var  thing2 = Thing.new;
thing2.start_feedback;

thing2.startReact;

Creative Robotics Basic plan for Buridan's Robot a robot that needs help to make choices

2011-03-16T04:01:00.000-07:00

Basic plan for Buridan's Robot a robot that needs help to make choices
//we are finally getting somewhere with Urbi in Creative Robotics

loadModule("urbi/qt-for-urbi");
load("thing.u");

var thing = Thing.new;

function conv(a){

var res = ((a* 3.4/100.0) -1.7);
res
}|

function gui_stuff()
{
var window = Qt.Widget.new;//create a window
var layout = Qt.GridLayout.new;//create the layout to display the
// things in the window
window.setLayout(layout);//set the layout in the window !notice the comment is longer than the line ....

//here you create the sliders
var shoulder_slider = Qt.Slider.new;
var elbow_slider = Qt.Slider.new;
var wrist_slider = Qt.Slider.new;
var hand_slider = Qt.Slider.new;

//here you add the stuff to the layout
layout.addWidget(shoulder_slider, 0, 0, Qt.Alignment.AlignHCenter);
layout.addWidget(elbow_slider, 0, 1, Qt.Alignment.AlignHCenter);
layout.addWidget(wrist_slider, 0, 2, Qt.Alignment.AlignHCenter);
layout.addWidget(hand_slider, 0, 3, Qt.Alignment.AlignHCenter);

//the following is how you catch an event, notice the event?(var msg) construct
at (shoulder_slider.sliderMoved?(var msg))
thing.shoulder.targetPos=conv(msg);

at (elbow_slider.sliderMoved?(var msg))
echo(msg);

at (wrist_slider.sliderMoved?(var msg))
echo(msg);

at (hand_slider.sliderMoved?(var msg))
echo(msg);

window.show;//here you make the window visible!!!!

};
//hmm interetsing http://support.robotis.com/en/product/bioloid/beginnerkit/download/bioloid_beginner_app.htm
this is our simple idea:

react to sound - wants to turn to sound - we have a sound sensor

react to light - wants to turn to light - we have a light sensor

if it detects both it will signal need for our support how - by moving head - signs of panic

we might use attack duck example - simple movements

we activate proximity sensor to give it permision to make a random decision

decision( Tag)

Another good android example with rotation

2011-03-12T15:43:00.000-08:00

Another good android example with rotation from http://bestsiteinthemultiverse.com/2008/11/android-graphics-example/

Executed in Eclispe

package com.android.drawdemo;

import android.app.Activity;
import android.os.Bundle;

import android.app.Activity;
import android.content.Context;
import android.graphics.Canvas;
import android.graphics.Color;
import android.graphics.DashPathEffect;
import android.graphics.Paint;
import android.graphics.Path;
import android.graphics.Rect;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.view.View;

public class DrawDemo extends Activity {
DemoView demoview;
/** Called when the activity is first created. */
@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
demoview = new DemoView(this);
setContentView(demoview);
}

private class DemoView extends View{
public DemoView(Context context){
super(context);
}

@Override protected void onDraw(Canvas canvas) {
super.onDraw(canvas);

// custom drawing code here
// remember: y increases from top to bottom
// x increases from left to right
int x = 0;
int y = 0;
Paint paint = new Paint();
paint.setStyle(Paint.Style.FILL);

// make the entire canvas white
paint.setColor(Color.WHITE);
canvas.drawPaint(paint);
// another way to do this is to use:
// canvas.drawColor(Color.WHITE);

// draw a solid blue circle
paint.setColor(Color.BLUE);
canvas.drawCircle(20, 20, 15, paint);

// draw blue circle with antialiasing turned on
paint.setAntiAlias(true);
paint.setColor(Color.BLUE);
canvas.drawCircle(60, 20, 15, paint);

// compare the above circles once drawn
// the fist circle has a jagged perimeter
// the second circle has a smooth perimeter

// draw a solid green rectangle
paint.setAntiAlias(false);
paint.setColor(Color.GREEN);
canvas.drawRect(100, 5, 200, 30, paint);

// create and draw triangles
// use a Path object to store the 3 line segments
// use .offset to draw in many locations
// note: this triangle is not centered at 0,0
paint.setStyle(Paint.Style.STROKE);
paint.setStrokeWidth(2);
paint.setColor(Color.RED);
Path path = new Path();
path.moveTo(0, -10);
path.lineTo(5, 0);
path.lineTo(-5, 0);
path.close();
path.offset(10, 40);
canvas.drawPath(path, paint);
path.offset(50, 100);
canvas.drawPath(path, paint);
// offset is cumlative
// next draw displaces 50,100 from previous
path.offset(50, 100);
canvas.drawPath(path, paint);

// draw some text using STROKE style
paint.setStyle(Paint.Style.STROKE);
paint.setStrokeWidth(1);
paint.setColor(Color.MAGENTA);
paint.setTextSize(30);
canvas.drawText("Style.STROKE", 75, 75, paint);

// draw some text using FILL style
paint.setStyle(Paint.Style.FILL);
//turn antialiasing on
paint.setAntiAlias(true);
paint.setTextSize(30);
canvas.drawText("Style.FILL", 75, 110, paint);

// draw some rotated text
// get text width and height
// set desired drawing location
x = 75;
y = 185;
paint.setColor(Color.GRAY);
paint.setTextSize(25);
String str2rotate = "Rotated!";

// draw bounding rect before rotating text
Rect rect = new Rect();
paint.getTextBounds(str2rotate, 0, str2rotate.length(), rect);
canvas.translate(x, y);
paint.setStyle(Paint.Style.FILL);
// draw unrotated text
canvas.drawText("!Rotated", 0, 0, paint);
paint.setStyle(Paint.Style.STROKE);
canvas.drawRect(rect, paint);
// undo the translate
canvas.translate(-x, -y);

// rotate the canvas on center of the text to draw
canvas.rotate(-45, x + rect.exactCenterX(),
y + rect.exactCenterY());
// draw the rotated text
paint.setStyle(Paint.Style.FILL);
canvas.drawText(str2rotate, x, y, paint);

//undo the rotate
canvas.restore();
canvas.drawText("After canvas.restore()", 50, 250, paint);

// draw a thick dashed line
DashPathEffect dashPath =
new DashPathEffect(new float[]{20,5}, 1);
paint.setPathEffect(dashPath);
paint.setStrokeWidth(8);
canvas.drawLine(0, 300 , 320, 300, paint);

}
}
}

Example of simple animation and touch events in Android via Eclipse

2011-03-12T15:21:00.000-08:00

Example of simple animation and touch events in Android via Eclipse

package amdroid.TransformationalActivity.com;

import android.graphics.Canvas;
import android.view.SurfaceHolder;

import android.app.Activity;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.view.Window;
import android.content.Context;
import android.graphics.Bitmap;
import android.graphics.BitmapFactory;
import android.graphics.Color;
import android.graphics.Paint;
import android.graphics.Rect;
import android.view.MotionEvent;
import android.view.SurfaceView;

public class TransformationalActivity extends Activity {
/** Called when the activity is first created. */
@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
requestWindowFeature(Window.FEATURE_NO_TITLE);
setContentView(new Panel(this));
}
}
//////////

class Panel extends SurfaceView implements SurfaceHolder.Callback {

private Bitmap mBitmap;
private ViewThread mThread;

private int mX;
private int mY;
private int rad; //my variable for radius and movable x and ys

public Panel(Context context) {
super(context);
mBitmap = BitmapFactory.decodeResource(getResources(), R.drawable.lotus);
getHolder().addCallback(this);
mThread = new ViewThread(this);
}

public void doDraw(Canvas canvas) {

/*because of the thread this is looping like draw() in Processing*/

//simple way to make circle grow then go small again

rad++;
if(rad>300){
rad=3;

}

canvas.drawColor(Color.BLUE); //background colour

Paint paint = new Paint();

canvas.drawLine(33, 0, 33, 100, paint);
paint.setColor(Color.RED); paint.setStrokeWidth(10); canvas.drawLine(56, 0, 56, 100, paint);
paint.setColor(Color.GREEN); paint.setStrokeWidth(25);
for (int y = 30, alpha = 255; alpha > 2; alpha >>= 1, y += 10) {
paint.setAlpha(alpha);

//canvas.drawRect(cx, cy, radius, paint);
canvas.drawLine(0, y, 100, y, paint);

}

paint.setColor(Color.CYAN);
//canvas.drawCircle(mX-20, mY-20, rad, paint); //use my rad variable for radius
canvas.drawBitmap(mBitmap, mX, mY, null);

//strange solution to drawing a stable sized moving rect
paint.setColor(Color.RED);
Rect simplr = new Rect();
simplr.set(rad+120, 130, rad+156, 156);
canvas.drawRect(simplr, paint);
////////
paint.setColor(Color.CYAN);
canvas.drawCircle(rad*2, 220, 30, paint); //faster circle

paint.setColor(Color.RED);
canvas.drawRect(rad, 67, 68, 45, paint);
//////////////////
paint.setColor(Color.GREEN);
canvas.drawCircle(rad, 125, 45, paint); //move circle across screen
//////////////////////

paint.setColor(Color.MAGENTA);
canvas.drawCircle(125, rad, rad/2, paint); //move circle down screen

paint.setColor(Color.YELLOW);

canvas.drawRect(rad, rad, 45, 45, paint);
}

@Override
public void surfaceChanged(SurfaceHolder holder, int format, int width, int height) {
// TODO Auto-generated method stub
}

@Override
public void surfaceCreated(SurfaceHolder holder) {
if (!mThread.isAlive()) {
mThread = new ViewThread(this);
mThread.setRunning(true);
mThread.start();
}
}

@Override
public void surfaceDestroyed(SurfaceHolder holder) {
if (mThread.isAlive()) {
mThread.setRunning(false);
}
}

@Override
public boolean onTouchEvent(MotionEvent event) {
mX = (int) event.getX() - mBitmap.getWidth() / 2;
mY = (int) event.getY() - mBitmap.getHeight() / 2;
return super.onTouchEvent(event);
}
}

/////////
class ViewThread extends Thread {
private Panel mPanel;
private SurfaceHolder mHolder;
private boolean mRun = false;

public ViewThread(Panel panel) {
mPanel = panel;
mHolder = mPanel.getHolder();
}

public void setRunning(boolean run) {
mRun = run;
}

@Override
public void run() {
Canvas canvas = null;
while (mRun) {
canvas = mHolder.lockCanvas();
if (canvas != null) {
mPanel.doDraw(canvas);
mHolder.unlockCanvasAndPost(canvas);
}
}
}
}

simple android touch screen move image, draw lines

2011-03-12T14:32:00.001-08:00

//again thanks to these excellant and clear tutorials:
http://www.droidnova.com/2d-tutorial-series-part-i,770.html

package amdroid.TransformationalActivity.com;

import android.graphics.Canvas;
import android.view.SurfaceHolder;

import android.app.Activity;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.view.Window;

import android.content.Context;
import android.graphics.Bitmap;
import android.graphics.BitmapFactory;
import android.graphics.Canvas;
import android.graphics.Color;
import android.graphics.Paint;
import android.view.MotionEvent;
import android.view.SurfaceHolder;
import android.view.SurfaceView;

public class TransformationalActivity extends Activity {
/** Called when the activity is first created. */
@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
requestWindowFeature(Window.FEATURE_NO_TITLE);
setContentView(new Panel(this));
}
}
//////////

class Panel extends SurfaceView implements SurfaceHolder.Callback {

private Bitmap mBitmap;
private ViewThread mThread;

private int mX;
private int mY;

public Panel(Context context) {
super(context);
mBitmap = BitmapFactory.decodeResource(getResources(), R.drawable.lotus);
getHolder().addCallback(this);
mThread = new ViewThread(this);
}

public void doDraw(Canvas canvas) {
canvas.drawColor(Color.BLUE);
Paint paint = new Paint();
canvas.drawLine(33, 0, 33, 100, paint);
paint.setColor(Color.RED); paint.setStrokeWidth(10); canvas.drawLine(56, 0, 56, 100, paint);
paint.setColor(Color.GREEN); paint.setStrokeWidth(25);
for (int y = 30, alpha = 255; alpha > 2; alpha >>= 1, y += 10) {
paint.setAlpha(alpha);

canvas.drawLine(0, y, 100, y, paint);
}

canvas.drawBitmap(mBitmap, mX, mY, null);
}

@Override
public void surfaceChanged(SurfaceHolder holder, int format, int width, int height) {
// TODO Auto-generated method stub
}

@Override
public void surfaceCreated(SurfaceHolder holder) {
if (!mThread.isAlive()) {
mThread = new ViewThread(this);
mThread.setRunning(true);
mThread.start();
}
}

@Override
public void surfaceDestroyed(SurfaceHolder holder) {
if (mThread.isAlive()) {
mThread.setRunning(false);
}
}

@Override
public boolean onTouchEvent(MotionEvent event) {
mX = (int) event.getX() - mBitmap.getWidth() / 2;
mY = (int) event.getY() - mBitmap.getHeight() / 2;
return super.onTouchEvent(event);
}
}

/////////
class ViewThread extends Thread {
private Panel mPanel;
private SurfaceHolder mHolder;
private boolean mRun = false;

public ViewThread(Panel panel) {
mPanel = panel;
mHolder = mPanel.getHolder();
}

public void setRunning(boolean run) {
mRun = run;
}

@Override
public void run() {
Canvas canvas = null;
while (mRun) {
canvas = mHolder.lockCanvas();
if (canvas != null) {
mPanel.doDraw(canvas);
mHolder.unlockCanvasAndPost(canvas);
}
}
}
}

Simplest possible android graphic example

2011-03-12T13:31:00.000-08:00

Simplest possible android graphic example - display an image (i.e lotus in the drawable-hdpi folder) make liness create the canvas, use paint, for loop for alpha channel etc
done in Eclipse. Second example below that draws image where user touches screen

//thanks to http://www.droidnova.com/2d-tutorial-series-part-ii,772.html
I've also been reading O'Reilly's Android Application Development, its got a little bit on Graphics and Matrix Transformations...
add this line for text - easy!!! paint.setColor(Color.RED); canvas.drawText("Android", 125, 30, paint);

package amdroid.TransformationalActivity.com; //my silly spelling. still works!

import android.app.Activity;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.view.Window;
import android.content.Context;
import android.graphics.Bitmap;
import android.graphics.BitmapFactory;
import android.graphics.Canvas;
import android.graphics.Color;
import android.graphics.Paint;
import android.view.View;

public class TransformationalActivity extends Activity {
/** Called when the activity is first created. */
@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
requestWindowFeature(Window.FEATURE_NO_TITLE);
setContentView(new Panel(this));
}
}

class Panel extends View {

private Bitmap mBitmap;

public Panel(Context context) {
super(context);
mBitmap = BitmapFactory.decodeResource(getResources(), R.drawable.lotus);
}

@Override
public void onDraw(Canvas canvas) {
canvas.drawColor(Color.BLUE);

Paint paint = new Paint();
canvas.drawLine(33, 0, 33, 100, paint);
paint.setColor(Color.RED); paint.setStrokeWidth(10); canvas.drawLine(56, 0, 56, 100, paint);
paint.setColor(Color.GREEN); paint.setStrokeWidth(25);
for (int y = 30, alpha = 255; alpha > 2; alpha >>= 1, y += 10) {
paint.setAlpha(alpha);

canvas.drawLine(0, y, 100, y, paint);
}
//add this for text - EASY!! no need to import a font for this
paint.setColor(Color.RED); canvas.drawText("Hello Androids everywhere", 125, 30, paint);
canvas.drawBitmap(mBitmap, 100, 100, null);
}
}/////////////////

//////////////////////////////

Second example - draw image where user touches screen:

package amdroid.TransformationalActivity.com;

import android.graphics.Canvas;
import android.view.SurfaceHolder;

import android.app.Activity;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.view.Window;

import android.content.Context;
import android.graphics.Bitmap;
import android.graphics.BitmapFactory;
import android.graphics.Canvas;
import android.graphics.Color;
import android.view.MotionEvent;
import android.view.SurfaceHolder;
import android.view.SurfaceView;

public class TransformationalActivity extends Activity {
/** Called when the activity is first created. */
@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
requestWindowFeature(Window.FEATURE_NO_TITLE);
setContentView(new Panel(this));
}
}
//////////

class Panel extends SurfaceView implements SurfaceHolder.Callback {

private Bitmap mBitmap;
private ViewThread mThread;

private int mX;
private int mY;

public Panel(Context context) {
super(context);
mBitmap = BitmapFactory.decodeResource(getResources(), R.drawable.lotus);
getHolder().addCallback(this);
mThread = new ViewThread(this);
}

public void doDraw(Canvas canvas) {
canvas.drawColor(Color.BLUE);
canvas.drawBitmap(mBitmap, mX, mY, null);
}

@Override
public void surfaceChanged(SurfaceHolder holder, int format, int width, int height) {
// TODO Auto-generated method stub
}

@Override
public void surfaceCreated(SurfaceHolder holder) {
if (!mThread.isAlive()) {
mThread = new ViewThread(this);
mThread.setRunning(true);
mThread.start();
}
}

@Override
public void surfaceDestroyed(SurfaceHolder holder) {
if (mThread.isAlive()) {
mThread.setRunning(false);
}
}

@Override
public boolean onTouchEvent(MotionEvent event) {
mX = (int) event.getX() - mBitmap.getWidth() / 2;
mY = (int) event.getY() - mBitmap.getHeight() / 2;
return super.onTouchEvent(event);
}
}

/////////
class ViewThread extends Thread {
private Panel mPanel;
private SurfaceHolder mHolder;
private boolean mRun = false;

public ViewThread(Panel panel) {
mPanel = panel;
mHolder = mPanel.getHolder();
}

public void setRunning(boolean run) {
mRun = run;
}

@Override
public void run() {
Canvas canvas = null;
while (mRun) {
canvas = mHolder.lockCanvas();
if (canvas != null) {
mPanel.doDraw(canvas);
mHolder.unlockCanvasAndPost(canvas);
}
}
}
}
//////////

Cartesian Theatre

2011-03-11T05:33:00.000-08:00

Cartesian Theatre:

So far I've mapped the 'characters' to Alpha and Beta channels, so they move on and off the stage as those two of my brain frequencies fluctuate. Would be great to map it to a paper theatre with servos etc via the EEG unit...

EEG controlled theatre of the mind, different characters and stories will unfold depending on brain wave activity, could be in physical realm use Phys Comp, servos etc, or purely screen based...each viewer framed as the homunculous. See Dennett:
Cartesian materialism is the view that there is a crucial finish line or boundary somewhere in the brain, marking a place where the order of arrival equals the order of "presentation" in experience because what happens there is what you are conscious of. [...] Many theorists would insist that they have explicitly rejected such an obviously bad idea. But [...] the persuasive imagery of the Cartesian Theatre keeps coming back to haunt us - laypeople and scientists alike - even after its ghostly dualism has been denounced and exorcized. [p.107, original emphasis.]
also reference:

http://www.opticalsweets.com/

The problem of Buridan's Ass

2011-03-11T01:45:00.000-08:00

The problem of Buridan's Ass (thanks to Msc Cognitive computing student, Alex, for this reference), which will be very useful in framing the indescisive robot we are building in Patrick's creative robotics class

"It refers to a hypothetical situation wherein an ass is placed precisely midway between a stack of hay and a pail of water. Since the paradox assumes the ass will always go to whichever is closer, it will die of both hunger and thirst since it cannot make any rational decision to choose one over the other.^[1] The paradox is named after the 14th century French philosopher Jean Buridan, whose philosophy of moral determinism it satirises.

The paradox did not originate in Buridan's time; it dates to antiquity, being first found in Aristotle's De Caelo, where Aristotle mentions an example of a man who makes no move because he is as hungry as he is thirsty and is positioned exactly between food and drink.

Buridan nowhere discusses this specific problem, but its relevance is that he did advocate a moral determinism whereby, save for ignorance or impediment, a human faced by alternative courses of action must always choose the greater good. Buridan allowed that the will could delay the choice to more fully assess the possible outcomes of the choice. Later writers satirised this view in terms of an ass which, confronted by both food and water must necessarily die of both hunger and thirst while pondering a decision.

A common variant substitutes two identical piles of hay for both hay and water and advances that the ass, unable to choose between the two, dies of hunger alone.

Some proponents of hard determinism have granted the unpleasantness of the scenario, but have denied that it illustrates a true paradox, since one does not contradict oneself in suggesting that a man might die between two equally plausible routes of action. For example, Baruch Spinoza in his Ethics, suggests that a person who sees two options as truly equally compelling cannot be fully rational:

[I]t may be objected, if man does not act from free will, what will happen if the incentives to action are equally balanced, as in the case of Buridan's ass? [In reply,] I am quite ready to admit, that a man placed in the equilibrium described (namely, as perceiving nothing but hunger and thirst, a certain food and a certain drink, each equally distant from him) would die of hunger and thirst. If I am asked, whether such an one should not rather be considered an ass than a man; I answer, that I do not know, neither do I know how a man should be considered, who hangs himself, or how we should consider children, fools, madmen, &c." etc

2011-03-11T00:54:00.000-08:00

Monday's symposium at the Scrolls Museum was special and quite challenging, I'm used to presenting my work to other academically institutionalised people, and take for granted a certain mutual language and theoretical framework. It's useful but quite appalling to realise the ideas and modes of language we take for granted might be alien and meaningless to other people. I was shocked that some people viewed our work as not connected to things that other people find important in their lives. I thought we were all dealing with quite common themes of belonging, loss, abandonment. It's unsettling to think that doesn't always come across, that people might think we are just trying to be clever or abstract etc...
The museum is unique, small and very well designed so you get a sense of proximity to the objects and a sense of individual lives. Evelyn and Ariel who run the museum extended great hospitality and kindness to us in hosting this event. It felt like something very special.

Doing simple Android apps

2011-03-06T13:49:00.000-08:00

Doing simple Android apps, not with Processing as that can only work with Android 2.2 onwards, but with eclipse and the android sdk, and today playing with Appinventor - a bit like Lego Mindstorms,quick and v easy. Should be revising but this is too much fun. Thanks to my sister for the lovely G1 phone!

2011-03-04T12:17:00.000-08:00

http://www.doc.gold.ac.uk/~ma501ed/south/south_Download.html
Trying to organise all the extra bits of south code at the link above. The text photo program produced this image today - apologie sto Jenny Holzer but I'm not sure if I agree with the statement, or really understand it - if a metaphor is a transport perhaps its more useful than a description?

2011-02-24T04:58:00.000-08:00

Hooray, I've had a paper acepted for the GLITS e-journal (an electronic journal of literary and cultural criticism produced in the Department of English & Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths, University of London. ) about the South project and Ivan Dar's illness...an exciting week all round - with Alexandra and I doing a Thursday Club talk and presenting my EEG paper on Saturday at the Amnesia conference...a whirl of academic chatter...the panel discussion on the Social Web was very exciting in light of events in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia etc. It's a good point that once you knock out the internet and mobile communicvations the only place people can find out what's happening is on the streets..

God and Geometry film

2011-02-21T07:16:00.000-08:00

The sound and light are coming from the box...

God and Geometry

2011-02-21T06:56:00.001-08:00

Interesting that the film came out backwards, I take this as a sign of well founded resistance to figuration...

potentiometer to motor

2011-02-19T13:01:00.000-08:00

int sensorPin = A0; // select the input pin for the potentiometer
int ledPin = 13; // select the pin for the LED
int sensorValue = 0;

int motorPin = 9; // define the pin the motor is connected to
// (if you use pin 9,10,11 or 3you can also control speed)

/*
* setup() - this function runs once when you turn your Arduino on
* We set the motors pin to be an output (turning the pin high (+5v) or low (ground) (-))
* rather than an input (checking whether a pin is high or low)
*/
void setup()
{
pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT);
pinMode(motorPin, OUTPUT);
}

/*
* loop() - this function will start after setup finishes and then repeat
* we call a function called motorOnThenOff()
*/

void loop() // run over and over again
{
// motorOnThenOff();

sensorValue = analogRead(sensorPin);
// turn the ledPin on
analogWrite(ledPin, sensorValue);
// stop the program for milliseconds:
digitalWrite(motorPin, sensorValue);
// turn the ledPin off:

//motorOnThenOffWithSpeed();
//motorAcceleration();
}

/*
* motorOnThenOff() - turns motor on then off
* (notice this code is identical to the code we used for
* the blinking LED)
*/
void motorOnThenOff(){
int onTime = 2500; //the number of milliseconds for the motor to turn on for
int offTime = 1000; //the number of milliseconds for the motor to turn off for

digitalWrite(motorPin, sensorValue); // turns the motor On
delay(onTime); // waits for onTime milliseconds
digitalWrite(motorPin, LOW); // turns the motor Off
delay(offTime); // waits for offTime milliseconds
}

/*
* motorOnThenOffWithSpeed() - turns motor on then off but uses speed values as well
* (notice this code is identical to the code we used for
* the blinking LED)
*/
void motorOnThenOffWithSpeed(){

int onSpeed = 200; // a number between 0 (stopped) and 255 (full speed)
int onTime = 2500; //the number of milliseconds for the motor to turn on for

int offSpeed = 50; // a number between 0 (stopped) and 255 (full speed)
int offTime = 1000; //the number of milliseconds for the motor to turn off for

analogWrite(motorPin, onSpeed); // turns the motor On
delay(onTime); // waits for onTime milliseconds
analogWrite(motorPin, offSpeed); // turns the motor Off
delay(offTime); // waits for offTime milliseconds
}

/*
* motorAcceleration() - accelerates the motor to full speed then
* back down to zero
*/
void motorAcceleration(){
int delayTime = 50; //milliseconds between each speed step

//Accelerates the motor
for(int i = 0; i < 256; i++){ //goes through each speed from 0 to 255
analogWrite(motorPin, i); //sets the new speed
delay(delayTime); // waits for delayTime milliseconds
}

//Decelerates the motor
for(int i = 255; i >= 0; i--){ //goes through each speed from 255 to 0
analogWrite(motorPin, i); //sets the new speed
delay(delayTime); // waits for delayTime milliseconds
}
}

forthcoming colloquium 7th march

2011-02-16T02:10:00.000-08:00

2011-02-15T11:34:00.000-08:00

Notes after meeting with Sarah today, re viva:

Viva notes Sarah asked some very good questions, so I'm really grateful to have time to think carefully about my responses..

The main focus of work – subjectivity and representation and the acquisition of knowledge (epistemology)

when making software agents, I also needed to understand agency.

These themes emerged as they are linked to core problems in artificial intelligence – state clearly what those problems are -

what is propositional knowledge, what is symbolic representation – how else do we humans

know things? Tell this as a story that relates to my practice – how did I identify these themes?

How did my practice develop in relation to these themes?

Why connect artists's books and narrative? This is not a link that all book artists would make, we might think at first, but the focus of book art is to use the book as a medium the way other artists might use paint, and also to interrogate the book form, this often encompasses an exploration of the meaning and form of narrative, whether it is Sol LeWitt's algorithmic books, some artists also refer to themselves as narrative artists, but I not much of their work is unswervingly orthodox, and rooted in the auratic domain of the art object. William Blake is perhaps the best known book artist, although Drucker et al define book artists as essentially a late twentieth century phenomenon (60's onwards) . The Livre d'Artiste commmisioned by Anbroise Vollard from Bonnard etc were also illustrative , such as the loosely narrative pornographic poems of Paul Verlaine's , Parallèlement, 1900

But if I can return to Sol Lewitt and also Dieter Roth (daily mirror book 1961) and Ed Ruscha 26 gasoline stations (1963) we see a concern with seriality and sequence provided by the turning of pages -

'Roth's distinctive contribution to the emergent genre was his examination, through his bookworks, of the formal qualities of books themselves. These formal qualities such as flat pages, bound into fixed sequences were deconstructed and investigated, for instance in 2 Bilderbücher (1957) which comprised 2 picture books of geometric shapes, with die-cut holes cut into each page to allow glimpses of patterns from the pages beneath. Structural investigations such as these became the subject matter of the book itself.'

Many artists have taken up the challenge to experiment with the content and physical structure of the traditional book form.

(Tate Modern site tp://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/prints_books/features/artists_books/definitions/index.html.)

also Guy Debord and Asger John making artsist books of found narraitives – narrative derives from

news papers, eg Memoires (1959)

unreadable books such as Dieter Roth's Literature Saussage (a pulped book sausage) Literaturwurst 1961 – 1974

Legendary, Lexical, Loquacious Love by Eve Rhymer (Karen Reimer), 1996, an alphabetical re-ordering of the text in a romance novel

More explicitly, as identified by Katherine Hayles in Writing Machines, such books as House of Leaves , and Tom Phillip's A Humument, 'Hayles examines the ways in which literary texts in every genre and period mutate

Hayles explores works that focus on the very inscription technologies that produce them, examining three writing machines in depth: Talan Memmott's groundbreaking electronic work Lexia to Perplexia, Mark Z. Danielewski's cult postprint novel House of Leaves, and Tom Phillips's artist's book A Humument.

A Treated Victorian Novel. 'One day, Phillips went to a bookseller's with the express intention of buying a cheap book to use as the basis of an art project. He randomly purchased a novel called A Human Document by Victorian author William Hurrell Mallock, and began a long project of creating art from its pages. He paints, collages or draws over the pages, leaving some of the text peeking through in serpentine bubble shapes, creating a "found" text with its own story, different from the original.' (wikipedia/) explicit playfulness with narrative and the book form.

Hayles concludes by speculating on how technotexts
affect the development of contemporary subjectivity.

"Writing Machines is a major addition to the scholarship on hypertext and, in general, on the relation of technology to literature. As this volume so clearly demonstrates, Hayles is a subtle reader of texts, a knowledgeable critic of new technology, and a fine theorist of culture... I am certain readers of Writing Machines will place it near the top of their list of books on hypertext."
--Mark Poster, University of California, Irvine

http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/mediawork/titles/writing/writing_book.html

notes – further Suchman, Braidotti,

where have I not succeeded? South requires intensive involvement, its fragmentation may also be problematic (like much digital fiction) though I see this as a necessary quality may annoy some, as might the intrusion of the software – this came out in the evaluations, also there are techniocal problems – the small screen requires small computational input, but I think this constraint may be beneficial, I am not averse to Twitter's constraints. I would now write the sofwtare for Mobile phones. I would make a device myself, I now have the the skill, with a voice and bio sensors, I would use technology for more deeply embodied interaction – eeg and GSR, as I have now done for new projects.

The basic problem of representation is not fully resolved in this project, but I have been able now to move forward with works that have sprung from this, involving bio sensors, motion capture and physical computing. There are still hard coded rules in the system, but I think the hackablity of the code goes some way to opening up the issue of representation.

Why do I say the digital can 'enliven' ?? I argue book art is in danger, as Lucy Lippard has also noted, of reverting to the rarefied and antiquated Livre d'artiste, instead of the medium that interrogated the meaning and form of books- it must address the digital if it wants to remain current, and vital. Encompassing the digital and save it from fetishistic and anachronistic, auratic craft objects. I am not against craft at all, but I am against stasis and stagnation in art form particularly an art form that has as rich and radical a history as book art.

Explain situatedness – Suchman, sailors, Brooks, etc reread Haraway.

Need for a sucessor science, realist, relational, not a god trick or a view from nowhere.

Site specificity and situatedness.

What are my agendas? If I have them they emerged from practice and research. Alternatives to rigid a priori structures that lead to an impasse in AI, and disembodied models of knowledge.

What does the digital add to books? Potentially - dynamism, learning, mutability, adaptation, intersubjectivity, multi-media, growth, sensitivity, knowledge of situations and sites and subjects.

///////////

Lemurs and storytelling

K Dautenhahn

www.aaai.org/Papers/Symposia/Fall/1999/FS-99-01/FS99-01-010.pdf

non-human primates do have symbolic representations and K Dautenhahn sees human primate storytelling as evolving from intersubjective expression of knowledge about family members, primates do remember reationships among groups, and do exhibit evidence of referring to a past - a proto-storytelling behaviour.

The Neural Art Navigator

2011-02-11T11:02:00.000-08:00

oops will have to be The Neural Art Navigator as the Neural Navigator is being used by a medical imaging system in Utrecht, its an exciting phase for VAINS, as we will get a chance to demonstrate a radical new system for online art interaction..curtesy of the EEG headset and christmas holiday hack.

The Neural Navigator

2011-02-11T10:59:00.001-08:00

Abstract

The Neural Navigator: a novel navigation and collaborative filtering system for retrieving online art content.

The problem of suitable and innovative means for filtering and navigating online art content has long been acknowledged by influential figures in the domain of digital art practice, for example Beryl Graham (1999), Edward Shanken (1992) and Lev Manovich (1996) have all critiqued the fragmentation and anachronism of many online art contexts. This paper will describe the development, testing and evaluation of the Neural Navigator, an embodied system for navigating and collaboratively filtering online art content that addresses many of the core problems in the field of online art interaction.

The Neural Navigator is a physical computation system that deploys EEG (electroencephalography) to sense the electronic brainwave frequencies of individuals while they are visiting online art sites. The system analyses the patterns of electroencephalographic signals and matches them to suitable art works based on a collaborative filtering algorithm developed over the last two years by Eleanor Dare and Lee Weinberg, doctoral students at Goldsmiths (University of London) in the departments of Computing and Art.

The paper will describe the reasons for pursuing an embodied form of online navigation, framing this goal within the context of increasing interest in embodied interactive systems, while acknowledging the contribution of cognitive scientists such as Francisco Varela, Eleanor Rosch, Evan Thompson (1993) Alva Nöe (2009, 2004) and significant art practitioners such as Jeffrey Shaw (2002) and Robert Lazzarini (2001).

The proposed paper will describe the empirical testing of this system and the reactions of users to the experience of a seemingly sub-symbolic, autonomic process of interaction with the Computer Fine Arts Collection, which has been the focus for the development of the Neural Navigator. The architecture of the Neural Navigator has been influenced by an enactive and situated methodology that privileges action over a priori goals, and instead seeks an emergent, fluid and constantly changing set of navigational pathways. The paper cites Lucy Suchman (2007) and Alva Noe (2009, 2004) as key theoretical figures in the decision to pursue an enactive methodology, this will be clearly outlined and justified, as will the contribution of this work to the field of online art navigation, filtering and content retrieval.

Key words: Content retrieval; collaborative filtering; bio-sensors; social content and tools;

2011-02-09T06:58:00.000-08:00

2011-02-04T07:26:00.000-08:00

Alexandra made this poster for our Thursday club appearance, it brings back losts of good and funny memories about this project. I am glad we are going to do a sort of retrospective of it, leading up to our more recent work with getures.

A Strange House in Stockholm

2011-02-04T06:40:00.000-08:00

This is ED and AA in Nils Bohr's house in Carlsberg city where we presented our individual doctoral research last summer...

Look A, the door! To nowhere...In Stockholm. We will talk about this place at The Thursday Club, a house that generated stories while we were there.

some Arduino blinks

2011-02-02T13:12:00.000-08:00

note to self
//blink light number of button presses
int count = 0;
const int ledPin = 13; // the number of the LED pinconst int buttonPin = 7; int buttonState = 0;

void setup() {

Serial.begin(9600);
pinMode(buttonPin, INPUT);
pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT);
}

void loop(){

buttonState = digitalRead(buttonPin);
if (buttonState == HIGH) {
count++;
doBlink(count); //method for blinking
delay(200);
}

if(buttonState ==LOW){
// turn LED off:
digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW); }
Serial.println(count);

if(count>7){
count = 0; }

}

//pass button presses as arguments for number of blinks:
void doBlink(int aa){
for(int i =0;i//stupid blog wont allow me to
//write a for loop, but this is a for loop while i is less than aa

delay(200);
digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH);
delay(200);
digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW);
}
}

2011-02-02T07:37:00.001-08:00

15 minute version of longer paper here for safe storage:

Tensers and detensers; lost memories and embodied traces in the Marriage of Eliza Dagworthy 1915

Abstract

Like many people I have gaps in my memories, and thus in the symbolic narrative of my life. Before the age of nine my childhood memories are largely without detail. By and large those years may therefore be described (at least by convention) as ‘lost’. As a visual artist and artist-programmer the notion of such an aporia or cognitive deficit is particularly problematic. In the absence of representation what, if anything, can be retrieved, and what exactly can be communicated to others? In a wider philosophical sense such questions of representation and stable meaning have a high degree of cultural urgency. Marita Sturken (1999) urges us to examine the ‘cultural encoding of forgetting as a loss or negation of experience’ (1999: 252). Her question ‘what is an experience that is not remembered?’ (234) is one of the fundamental riddles of my own childhood. Sturken asks us to question the presumption that unmemorised experiences should be framed as a ‘loss of self’, and a ‘loss of subjectivity’ (243). These are critical questions in the context of my own research into amnesia.

Lost Memories and embodied traces is an idea for a computationally based project about the representation of my missing childhood memories. The focus of the project will be to explore the notion that memory is not an exact replica of events but is pieced together in a dynamic process that is strongly influenced not only by past experiences but by social contexts and sensory responses.

A core conceptual focus of the project is the idea that memory is not located in individuals, objects, or social systems alone, but is spread across complex social, technological, cognitive and biological systems. The project therefore aims to develop a conceptually innovative methodological and practice based focus for the exploration of memory.

Introduction

Proust wrote in relation to the past: ‘it is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect’ (Proust, 1913).

I have not accepted Proust’s assertion at face value but instead have used it as the catalyst for my core research questions, which are as follows:

• In light of Proust’s assertion what representative realm does the past (here taken to mean memories of the past) inhabit?

• If it is beyond symbolic/intellectual representation what other forms of articulation are available?

• Is there such a thing as somatisation of memory, or, less contentiously, embodied memory?

• Is memory itself an idealised notion – like that of the stable, originary subject?

•What is the relationship of time to memory, can we even be certain that a rigidly tensed time exists?

My attempts to address these questions have so far taken the form of generating two artist’s books and writing image manipulation software that uses EEG (Electroencephalography, the detection of the electrical signals emanating from the head) and GSR (Galvanic skin response, sometimes known as a ‘lie detector’) biosensors. The research has also drawn upon Philip Ausslander’s notion of ‘the performativity of performance documentation’ (the title of his 2006 paper), Peter Fritzsche’s paper ‘The Case for Modern Memory’ (2001), and, of course, Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (2000) among many other sources, including populist texts and Wikipedia articles about improving memory, losing memory and theories of forgetting.

The first action I decided to take in attempting to examine my own amnesia was to create a book, arguably the reactive behaviour of a book-artist. But in the absence of coherent material what was I to put in such a book? Of course I am not the first person to try and represent absence in lexical form. Georges Perec’s novel, La Disparition (The Void, 1969), is a book without the letter e. These gaps represent, or so we might conjecture, the absence, and indeed, the murder in Auschwitz of his own mother. In a similar vein Austerlitz (2001) by W.G Sebald is a 428-page book without paragraph indentations. The book articulates absence through an embarrassment of riches or non-sequiturs – architectural and historical details as well as mystifying photographs that painfully magnify autobiographic lacunae. For my own book, Method of Loci (2011), the only content I have been able to draw upon is that which is publicly available, as I have no childhood photographs apart from one passport image dated 1971.

The child who looks out at me from that old blue passport is apparently lost to my adult self and to my adult memory structures. In the absence of other materials I have resorted to documenting web-based images of places, feelings and textures, symbols of fragments that have traveled with me into adulthood. These include low-resolution images of a church hall play group on One Tree Hill in South London which I attended in the mid 1960’s, the first road I lived in, swarming ants, black and white kitchen tiles, and Tom Thumb cigarillos, which my grandmother used to smoke while knitting, engulfed in a musky blue miasma. It was in documenting generalized memories into this book that I re-discovered online the old photograph that has become the loci of memory for this project.

The book, with that one exception, is therefore constructed from generalities, which might be characterised as ‘frames’ or ‘scripts’ in the language of artificial intelligence – declarative attempts to logically reconstruct human processes of remembering. These are contrived sets of structures amidst the chaos of missing data, not unlike the lexical structures assembled by Perec and Sebald.

Having constructed a book solely consisting of photographic images, some of which represent non-visual qualia such as postures, smells, sounds and felt textures, I then constructed a second book, Loci of Memory, which consists only of texts, though I have subsequently added a few drawings. These texts represent academic, populist and fictional accounts of memory loss and memory retrieval, as well as my written responses to them. Thus these books represent both reconstructed subjective memory fragments sourced from public data and collective accounts of memory also sourced from publicly available information.

I drew upon the data contained in Loci of Memory to try and construct a morphology of my own amnesia which I do not have time to elaborate upon now. But I can briefly state that a bio-chemical account of my own amnesia is more compelling then the trauma-memory argument. In a study of 10,000 trauma survivors (Pope, Hudson, Bodkin & Olivia, 1998) found there were virtually none who suffered from trauma-amnesia. Indeed my own memory of the ‘private’ trauma of maternal abandonment is clearer than the events that surround it (though never conforming to full a blown narrative, but more akin to an unedited film without a script (Sturken, 1991: 235), in which I am always an external observer). This is in keeping with models of memory that posit (in certain circumstances) the negative and traumatic as more memorable then the neutral or pleasant [3].

The cognitive neuroscientist Michel Gazzaniga has stated “Everything in life is memory, save for the thin edge of the present” (Foster, 2009:2). However, Gazzaniga’s assertion is not without ideological significance and should not be taken as an unassailable statement of fact. When he says everything is memory, this is perhaps an over generalised memory of memory. Likewise there are pressing theoretical arguments for tenselessness that refute Gazzaniga’s belief in a thinly edged present, let alone a past represented through memories.

Serious doubts about the absolute value of time were implicit in Einstein’s conception of simultaneity (1905), in which time is dependent on both observers and on space, thus undermining Newton’s absolute belief in its ontological independence. Hilary Putnam (1967) extended this theory into tenselessness, the counter intuitive refutation of our belief in a tensed temporality. Instead he proposes a transitive and relational coordinate system of unprivileged observers situated at different coordinate points in space and time.

The thin edge of the present: memory and the concept of now

Michel Gazzaniga’s statement “Everything in life is memory, save for the thin edge of the present” (Foster, 2009:2), is at odds with other neuro-scientific accounts of experience, in particular those of Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch (1993). It is also at odds with philosophies associated with Varela and Maturana’s enactivism, including Bergsonian Process philosophy, Buddhism and Nils Bohr’s principle of complementarity (1933-), the idea that items can have contradictory properties and subsequent conceptions of quantum level behaviour and the influence of observers on events. Between them these bodies of thought may be drawn upon to support a conception of human experience that is contingent, unfolding and for want of a better term, always occurring, or entangled within, the present. In Bergsonian terms time is a non-discrete, flowing duration (which is not, perhaps as radical as Putnam’s detensing).

My work with biosensors aims to explore a more process based conception of memory, and to test the distributions of agencies that relate to the way we remember what we call the ‘past’ through what we call the ‘present’ through the body. The Marriage of Eliza Dagworthy, 1915 has become the focus for my work with sensory technologies and image manipulation techniques. But of course an image is not a memory or a fixed reality and to treat is as such is to enter perilous theoretical territory, but as W.J.T Mitchell (Mirzoeff, 1998) warns in relation to the post-modern presumption of the non-naturalness of images, the naturalistic fallacy should not become an ‘unexamined dogma, it threatens to become a fallacy just as disabling as the naturalistic fallacy it sought to overturn’ (Mitchell in Mirzoeff, 1998).

The photograph entitled The Wedding of Eliza Dagworthy is the Loci of memory for an investigation into the ontological integrity of both memory and photographic images, enabling me to test their distributions within both cultural and non-cultural dimensions. The image is particularly significant in light of Marianne Hirsch’s (1997) concept of post-memory, or ‘the experience of those who grew up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth’ (Hirsch, 1997:23). My paternal grandparents, and to a slightly lesser extent, my own parent’s lives were temporally and experientially anchored to the second world war, events were defined as having taken place before, during or after it. The war was their compass point, indeed, I think of my own birth date as ’20 years after the end of the war’, something my grandparents must have instilled in me by example.

The Wedding of Eliza Dagworthy 1915, was taken one year into another defining war, and arguably represents the entangled nature of the personal and the historical, family history and national history. Within my practice this photograph also relates to the performativity and dynamism of documenting events and to the embodied nature of both photography and memory.

The Wedding of Eliza Dagworthy apparently presents a hackneyed trope of yokels in their best clothes standing outside their family farm in South Devon, it is superficially reminiscent of Lark Rise to Candleford (1945) or Cider with Rosie (1959). A quick troll through the world-wide-web will reveal many such images of wedding groups standing stiffly outside English farms. However on close examination only one or two members of the Dagworthy wedding party can bring themselves to present full smiles. Perhaps the subjects are bored or aching, having stayed in the same stiff postures for several minutes? Everyone has long sleeves and the flowers are restricted to white roses or carnations, an indication that it is early spring and that there is an uncomfortable chill in the air? Or perhaps there is a deeper reason for their half smiles. The clothes are not fashionable, the ugly outsized hats are from an earlier era and the women’s dresses are also unfashionably long, indicative of both the economic situation of the family and the fact that the war has been going on now for a year.

We can see then that the counter-narrative of this image is rapidly emerging, and is quite separate from the ostensible theme of a happy rural marriage. As Roland Barthes writes, it presents ‘an altogether different ‘script’ from the one of shots, sequences and syntagms’ (Barthes, 1988:57). But the punctum of this image (that which both wounds me and connects me to it, as opposed to the studium or intellectual content) is not the economic restraint of the situation or the stereotypically unfashionable dress of rural families. It is historical and personal, the knowledge that many of the young men in the villages of Woodbury and Woodbury Salterton are away at war. Those with the Devonshire regiment are stationed in India, Egypt, Iraq and Italy, undoubtedly their first trips abroad. Perhaps even their first time out of the county of Devon. An additional punctum or piercing element in this image is also represented by the absence of my great grandfather who I presume has just died in his late thirties or forties, and by the forlorn presence of my own three year old grandmother, Amelia Dagworthy, who will one day have to look after myself and my siblings after we are suddenly abandoned by our own mother. She is standing unsteadily at the front of the group, frowning at the photographer.

This impression of loss is at odds with the national image of its time, of necessary sacrifice and patriotic fervor. It is at odds with a telelogical picturing of history, as a path towards progress despite wars and premature, violent deaths. But are these false divisions –between the punctum and the studium, the pain of the punctum is informed by my socio-historical and cultural knowledge of what this image represents. I am not convinced the division is real, nor am I yet to be convinced that they meet in a via media such as Bergson’s conception of intuition. (But I’d really like to know what other people present here think about this.)

In relation to the conditions of my own childhood a deep-seated cultural suppression is at play. In spite of the shock and incomprehension that was customarily offered to us as a response to our own childhood abandonment, (this was in an era just before the liberalisation of Britain’s divorce laws) such abandonment is not historically rare, or biologically inconsistent. Indeed there have been what Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (2000) describes as ‘epidemics’ of both infant abandonment and infanticide:

For the past millennium, Europeans under legal and religious constraints preventing them from killing their children have still opted to abandon them whenever opportunities arose. By 1640, 20 per cent of baptised babies in France were being left at state orphanages…..It seems that women's desire to abandon their children has always been underestimated.
(Thomas Sambrook, 2000).

Amnesia relating to children’s experiences is not limited to my own childhood memories; it has deep seated implications for our understanding of the historical realities of family life and the conditionality of parental attachment.

The photograph of Eliza Dagworthy’s wedding seems similarly ambivalent, withdrawing and denying an umbilical nexus, in this case, with the past. However, despite its ambivalence and the generality of its composition, I still recognize myself in the image of my great aunt Eliza’s marriage, and also likenesses to my father, my uncles, my younger half brother, my sisters, and my grandmother. But should I ask myself as Barthes does, ‘who is like what?‘ (Barthes, 2000:100). Am I imagining an identity in these fragments of myself and my living relatives - scrying a ‘truth of lineage’ as Barthes calls it (103), a generalised ‘persistence of the species’(105), an identity that is at odds with reality of this image? For, in addition to my own memories the photograph, like all photographs, in its ‘seizing of a moment always, even in that very moment, assures loss’ (Kuhn, 2002).

As Fritzshe states ‘in this view photography is the very expression of Terdiman’s “memory crisis”, at once creating a documentary record of the past to fashion a sense of continuity and performing the anxiety about the durability and authenticity of the connections that have been established’ (2001).

And yet my own reactions to this image fluctuate; I observe that they are in process. Do these fluctuations point to the contingency of memory itself or the subject who ‘holds’ these memories, if they are even seperable? I suspect the obvious answer is that it points to the contingency of them both. One day while looking at this image I felt a kick in my stomach, a moment of visceral shock. It was not a moment of logical analysis. I realised that we were both, in a sense, abandoned and betrayed by our parents at about the same age, the age my grandmother is in that photograph. So much made sense to me after I felt this, perhaps even my choice to work with this image out of all the many images I had amassed for this project.

What else might my body tell me? Was I remembering or reconstructing? Was this deductive logic, embodied knowledge, or Bergsonian intuition? More importantly, what might my body tell you about my memories and about the nature of memory itself? In other words, what is there beyond a textual reading of this image, beyond my previous exegesis? I wonder if there are other responses that might disrupt my own narratives of family history as reflected in this photograph from nearly a century ago? What is there now, or indeed, is there only the now in which to articulate memory?

Conclusion: Point-Instant, sensing and making memory traces

In keeping with Plato’s Pharmakon my work with images and memory supports the idea that symbolic representations of memory are at once both poison and remedy. At the same time, I would like to test the notion that memory has neither meaning nor autonomy outside of the present. Of course I am not alone in questioning the tensedness of time, belief in the totality of the present moment as Michael Eido Luetchford explains (2004) is a core tenet of Buddhist philosophy:

According to Buddhist thought, the past is not real, because it no longer exists, and the future is not real because it has not yet come into existence. Only the present moment is real existence. Early Buddhist philosophers developed a theory of existence as a point-instant
(Michael Eido Luetchford, 2004).

This is supported to some extent by Bergson’s resistance to the mathematical reducibility of time as an experience, but to instead a non-linear and flowing, mathematically unbounded experience of time or duration. However, Bergson clearly does believe in the past (as well as the future) but it is one that is activated as memory by action in the present.

Again this notion of memory accords it an agency, but can it really hold such power and if it does, is amnesia also agential? My use of biosensors, in the form of EEG and GSR sensors enables me to perform the dynamism of my relationship to my own memories and my embodied responses to the photograph of my Grandmother and her family. I propose that the photograph has the potential to be both symbolic and sub-symbolic, offering a complex complementarity, in this case, that they are both culturally and biologically received and conceived, signifying absence and presence, that like memory they are embodied and dynamic, indexical and generative. As my relationship to this image unfolds the image itself is transformed, when the GSR sensor detects a significant drop in resistance I am shocked, and at the same time the software generates a new image of Eliza Dagworthy’s wedding photo.

The shock to my body triggers a re-imaging and dissolution of Eliza’s wedding, one that is ontologically entangled with its own documentation. Phillip Ausslander highlights the paradox at play in two notable and even more extreme works of performance documentation, Chris Burden’s Shoot (1971), a ‘notorious’ work in which the artist enlisted a friend to shoot him (with a gun) in a gallery setting, and Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void (1960), in which the artist appears to be flinging himself out of a window. My work with Biosensors and photography aims to similarly destabilize the originary event while questioning and inverting the status of documentation and the conventional notion that an event precedes and authorizes its documentation. As Ausslander points out, our perception of these processes is taken for granted:

the presumption of an ontological relationship between performance and document in this first model is ideological. The idea of the documentary photograph as a means of accessing the reality of the performance derives from the general ideology of photography, as described by Helen Gilbert, glossing Roland Barthes and Don Slater: “Through its trivial realism, photography creates the illusion of such exact correspondence between the signifier and the signified that it appears to be the perfect instance of Barthes’s ‘message without a code.’ The sense of the photograph as not only representationally accurate but ontologically connected to the real world allows it to be treated as a piece of the real world, then as a substitute for it.’”
(Ausslander, 2006).

At the same time, the vulnerability of biosensor technology (even medical grade EEG sensors) to environmental noise and false readings adds another element of ontological doubt to the technologies of representation at play in this work and arguably blurs the boundaries between subjects and objects, originary and documenting events.

This is in keeping with my conception of the Lost memories and embodied traces performance / installation (loosely diagramed below). The roboticist Rodney Brooks wrote ‘In AI, abstraction is usually used to factor out all aspects of perception and motor skills…When we examine very simple level intelligence we find that explicit representations and models of the world simply get in the way. It turns out to be better to use the world as its own model’ (Brooks, 1987). But what happens if you try to factor out abstraction and leave only perception and motor skills in an arts context? Not at the level of Brook’s very simple situated robots, but at the level of human interaction with such a performance/installation?

This is the core methodological framework for the project. To participate in this work subjects will be finely calibrated via their bodies to the corresponding state diagram of my own body at varied times of memory retrieval. Calibration will be facilitated via heart rate (using a treadmill), galvanic skin response and EEG readings. I am also considering the use of urine and hormone tests to establish both a biological and psychogenic calculus of my unfolding experience of memories. Participants will experience mild electric shocks when near exact states are matched. The shock will also trigger and impact on the documentation of our corporeal synchronization and a reconfiguration of Eliza’s wedding photograph.

In effect I would argue that this is a type of sub-symbolic time machine in keeping with a detensed and embodied theory of time and special relativity. Whether this type of spatiotemporal synchronisation and performativity is possible, or indeed, is in violation of physical or logical laws will become apparent at the time of its implementation. At the same time the project seeks to explore Maria Sturken’s question (1999) ‘what does the act of forgetting produce?’(243). The project acknowledges the possibility that forgetting is, to quote Sturken, a ‘primary means through which subjectivity is shaped and produced’ (243). I would also suggest that representation, in the form of memory may be a way of separating ourselves from the world, and that amnesia, in contrast, has the creative potential to erode conventional notions of the ontological split between ourselves, others and our experiences.

[1]Available at http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/putnam/Accessed 20/01/11.[2] J.E. McTaggart (1908), among many other physicists and philosophers, questioned the existence of time, although he recognized the value of tenses, he also asserted the logical incompatibility of the past, present and future. The biggest challenge to Newton’s conception of a stable, independent and absolute time was Einstein’s emphasis on relativity or simultaneity, in which the order of events is dependent on an observer’s reference frame.[3] An anecdotal experience of vivid trauma memory was the witnessing of a multiple high-speed car crash a few years ago. I was with several friends who all reported afterwards that, like me, their view of the event had unfolded in slow motion. As we witnessed one car somersaulting over another it felt as if we could have made phones calls, drank coffees or chatted about the weather before it finally landed and smashed into the other cars. An experience that illustrates the strangeness of both memory and time, and, perhaps, their non-linear co-dependence and arguably the way they are both entangled with our biochemistry.[4] ‘Recruiting for the Devonshire Regiment in 1915’Available at http://www.devonheritage.org/Nonplace/DevonReg/RecruitingfortheDevonshireRegimentin1915.htmAccessed 11/01/11[5] Before relativity the main theoretical approaches to time included absolutists (such as Newton) who believed that time exists independent of material objects or anything external and on the other hand, relationists, who believed time was dependent on physical movement. Conventionalists such as Poincaré, did not believe in an absolute time as Newton did, but were committed to the convenience of a general agreement upon time. [1] Sullivan, G. (2005) Art Practice as Research, Sage). [2] Available at http://artpracticeasresearch.com/ accessed 28/01/11

Panel idea:

More than at any previous time in history, we are continually engaged in the simultaneous living/authoring and reporting/critiquing of our lives. To what extent does the click-here label culture of the internet, social media, and 24-hour blogging prescribe rather than describe the present moment?

First I would challenge this statement, and argue, that perhaps, since the invention of written language, and probably even since our conception of ourselves as subject to a mind body split – that necessitates an infinite regress of self-checking homunculi, we have passed into a state of near continuous self-filtering, self-consciousness and self-representation, or re-presentation. Discourse of ‘the gaze’ (from Lacan to Laura Mulvey and Annette Kuhn) has also described the way in which we, and arguably, women in particular, are engaged in continuous acts of self–conscious self re-presentation, that we our encoded with "to-be-looked-at-ness", in Mulvey’s words. So I would not want to hark back to an idealised, pre-networked past in which we were not engaged in some form of living/authoring schism. Though of course the question of who were being looked at or scrutinised by is contentious and contested.

I like Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen’s notion that that the gaze, which here I read off, to apply to an invited readership, is a relationship, one that moves ‘between offering and demanding a gaze’, entailing a more complex framing of the power relations ay play in self-presentation.

More importantly I would also argue that we need to explore alternative forms of communication that are mindful of the dangers inherent in re-presentation. Any practice of representation is to quote Donna Haraway ‘a boundary making’ practice, representation is generative of an a priori ontological split between ourselves and the world, between ourselves and events. We put the world at arms length in re-presenting it, so, as I hope my paper has made clear, I would emphasise that blogging’s limitations and prescriptions are no less sedimenting then other forms or representation, they exist within a continuum, and that what we are looking at here are differences in degree, not significant differences in kind (thanks to Bergson and Sarah Kember for this insight). In keeping with my own doctoral methodology I would recommend a performative turn in such self-authoring, and point to embodiment (as I do with amnesia) as an opportunity for more fluid, dynamic, becoming.

The roboticist Rodney Brooks wrote ‘In AI, abstraction is usually used to factor out all aspects of perception and motor skills…When we examine very simple level intelligence we find that explicit representations and models of the world simply get in the way. It turns out to be better to use the world as its own model’ (Brooks, 1987). But what happens if you try to factor out abstraction and leave only perception and motor skills in this digital context? Not at the level of Brook’s very simple situated robots, but at the level of human interaction with such self authoring?

I’d point as at Karen Barad and Fransico Varela, Alva Noe, Haraway and Rodney Brooks…to conceive of an intra-active critique – something closer to the diffraction Barad and Haraway discuss as a more generative, dynamic, alternative to reflection.

link to nice android tutorial

2011-02-01T12:24:00.000-08:00

http://blog.blprnt.com/blog/blprnt/processing-android-mobile-app-development-made-very-easy

Starting to learn programming for Android phones in Processing....

link to Brock's evernote

2011-01-27T02:43:00.000-08:00

http://www.evernote.com/pub/thatbrock/is71013aphysicalcomputing

Also check out PC tarot machine
http://www.faludi.com/2010/01/26/fun-of-physical-computing/

2011-01-26T09:57:00.000-08:00

This is a link to the south sampler I put together today in anticipation of the workshop/seminar I'm presenting in February for the GLITS literature thingy:

http://www.doc.gold.ac.uk/~ma501ed/South_sampler.pdf

stuff like this:

Before following any of the exercises contained in this sampler readers are urged to discover what ‘type’ they are by downloading a free version of the South book from this location:
http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/south/13520786?showPreview

Every good book needs a protagonist and luckily you’ve come along just in time to fulfil that role. According to How to Write a Blockbuster ‘characters provide readers with the emotional key, the route into your story’. This principle seems equally applicable to any decent guidebook or gazetteer, but the authors of this book also warn: ‘if your characters are flat and lifeless, no one will want to read it’.
Are you feeling flat and lifeless? You’re in for a pretty boring read if you are. Your job is ‘come alive’ so that I can just sit back and type. You should expertly discover who you ‘really’ are and help the rest of us to get to know you. You might of course be shy or introverted and reveal yourself just a little bit at a time, facet by facet as it were, or you might on the other hand just burst into life like a New Years Eve firework display along the Southbank. It’s up to you.
Other characters will be fleshed out by the people you’ll meet while reading this book, by friends and family, passing strangers and by me, the typist.
So what is South? South is an instrumental discrimination borne out of the fact that without a North there is no South. It is a navigational system created by your own networks of meaning. South is a reference axis emanating from the Southbank area of South London. It is perfectly possible to find a slippery surface, lay this book down upon it and spin it round to create a new orientation; perhaps we could call it Weast or the South East Pole as my Grandfather put it. Whatever name you choose, the particular form that your journey to this destination will take is the subject of this book. The author and publishers wish you great luck on your journey, however they would also like to point out that they cannot accept legal responsibility for any strangeness, temporal or subjective dislocation, psychogenic slippages or other oddities that might result from it.

How This Book Works
South may be represented as a radical form of construct elicitation or subjective geometry. The history of the South East Pole which is spread throughout this book as a distributed chapter (there is also an enhanced, computational version available on the web) describes the background to the development of the mysterious South system, explaining how it was formulated in the turmoil of the 1930’s and in the personal turmoil of its creator, my grandfather, Ivan Dâr. For those of you, who would like to read this history a complex navigational exercise will ensue, those of you who would like to jump straight into the South system can avail themselves forthwith of a rapid introduction:

The South software and a free download of the South book are all available on the web here: http://www.doc.gold.ac.uk/~ma501ed/south/south_Download.html

Quick start:
Before undertaking the core algorithms presented in this book the reader should complete a series of processes, these processes will help the South system to construct a hypothesis about you, or, what my grandfather called a psychogenic topology. Some of these processes take the form of ‘repertory grid’ tests, the investigation of your own networks of beliefs, which may also be called constructs. (Exactly how you use these tests will be explained in great detail) Other processes may be more familiar, such as multiple-choice questions involving five level Likert scales such as:
Please indicate how much you like bananas:
Not all 1 2 3 4 5 very much
Most of these processes use bipolar scaling methods, identifying the magnetic attraction of dichotomous concepts, discovering which pole a particular notion pulls you towards. Oddly numbered scales do not allow for equatorial malingering. Your ontological commitment is required at all times.

Inventory:

Before you depart it is crucial that you collect useful items to take with you, these items, if chosen well, MAY SAVE YOUR LIFE, so proceed with care.

Each of you should pick a word associated with the Southbank and the River Thames. It’s a good idea to test this word out loud before finally committing to it. The sorts of words I have found useful in the past have been BASTULE, RIVERINE, POWER-STATION, WATERLOO, SEA-CONTAINER and OXO. These are purely subjective choices and may be wildly different from your own word preferences. Unfortunately there is only room for one word on this expedition. On the whole, the better the word the greater its relative atomic mass.
You will also need to choose a colour out of RED, GREEN, VIOLET, BROWN, YELLOW, BLUE, GRAY and BLACK.

You should also choose between a FERN, a ROSE and a SUNFLOWER.

Expedition Inventory:

Date:

Word:

Colour:

Plant:

Spare entries:
Date:

Word:

Colour:

Plant:

Date:

Word:

Colour:

Plant:

Please write in this book whenever instructed to do so. It will increase its second hand value as you are adding new content. Obsessive collectors will have an excuse to hunt down multiple copies. Others might swap copies on the Internet or sell them on Ebay etc. In no way should writing in this book be seen as damaging or undermining it. If the book is a library book however, you are entreated to use only the pages marked ‘Library Users’. Those who do write in library books should be aware that there is a special circle of hell awaiting you (see Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy for more details).
Above, Dante’s special circle of hell for the perpetrators
of library book defacement.
The History of the South East Pole begins
The content of this book represents an attempted reconstruction following my grandfather’s fragmented and sometimes illegible notes. In reconstructing his system I have pieced together an instrument that deploys aspects of George Kelly’s repertory grid system, the I Ching, sir Francis Drake’s putative programming language Dra (later adapted by my grandfather to become the strongly situated language known as Dâr) and other processes that most closely approximate the schema my grandfather describes. The full extent of his method remains a mystery, what seems certain from the notes he did leave, is that a complete system was constructed and implemented, but in the intervening decades the full details of that implementation have somehow been lost or maliciously destroyed. We can only assume that this loss is irreversible. The system that I have salvaged from his legacy is, however, a powerfully interpolating assemblage of forces. Use them with discernment and the rewards will be numerous.
Like Aldous Huxley my grandfather embarked upon a mind-altering journey. I too have travelled that tenuous road in writing this text. The following algorithms expand upon the esoteric processes and transformations that entailed the writing of this book. These phenomena are in a state of flux, subject to erasure, scour, the pulling and pushing forces of the fluid and solid, the interplay of the exterior and the interior. Categorical descriptions of these processes are problematic. Perhaps, (and I suspect this more strongly as I experience the matrices of the South system), this ontological breakdown is what my grandfather had designed for his system all along. No doubt you will find your own answers and generate even more questions in engaging with it.

Algorithms Continued

You are here to provide a point of view. You are the most important character in this book, so let’s establish some important facts about you.

Lerqs:
Go to the twenty-one acres of the Southbank centre, walk along the Festival Terrace towards the National Theatre, regardless of the weather sit down outside the theatre complex and open this book at page 103
Criks: go to page 95

Ums:
Make your way to the Skylon Restaurant, it offers a range of cocktails and an extensive wine list, as well as a modern British menu in stylish surroundings. But you won’t be enjoying any of this today. You are on an important mission that involves carefully watching and writing a meticulous report on a Lerq. Carry on up the staircase until you reach the wide balcony that overlooks the Festival Terrace; try to get a good overview of the area before proceeding to the darkly concrete environs of The National Theatre. Go to the terrace that looks down on the pavement outside (if you can afford it you could go to one of the flashy restaurants they’ve got up there, as long as you have a view of the area below). You should be reasonably tired by now having climbed those two sets of stairs, possibly more if you got lost. Good. A degree of physical exhaustion can make surveillance work easier; your legs won’t be itching to move on. Remember that this silent, isolated and analytical process, though in many ways at odds with your outward-looking character, is actually good for you and, more importantly, it’s good for this book as a whole.
As an Um you probably enjoy being outside amongst the crowds and thinking outside of yourself. Your energy flows outward. In the first stage of this journey you spent time listening, this can be quite a challenge for an Um, but no doubt you rose to that challenge. In the West Ums are probably the most appreciated of all the types identified by the South System. Your brain is a little different from the others too; some research suggests that your posterior thalamus and posterior insula are more active, making you highly attuned to sensory and emotional inputs. In the past you might have been characterised as having a choleric or sanguine temperament. Stereotypically, you should be a risk taker. Tempered by your social intelligence and talent for happiness you will make an excellent team leader. But how will you handle difficulties and periods of isolation? Try to spot a Lerq in the crowd below. A Lerq might be chracterised as your diametrically opposite charcter. Lerqs are stimultaed by their own company and by their own thoughts, they do not need others in the same way that you do. You can learn a lot about yourself by studying Lerqs. Try to imagine what thoughts and feelings they are experiencing that enable them to remain so self-contained. How could this Lerq way of being help you? Do you envy or reject it? How, if at all does your Um nature impede you in life? Write your answers here:

Now go to page 137

Criks:
You Criks are enviably adaptable in social situations but we will not take advantage and subject you to an overly boisterous group of people. Instead you will visit the London Aquarium. There you will study the three-hearted genus Octopus. They too are adaptable, to the extent that they sometimes change colour to suit their surroundings.
http://www.londonaquarium.co.uk/

Where do fish keep their cash?

Please note the London Aquarium tests its fire alarm system every Thursday between 10 am and 11 am, so try to look a bit surprised, perhaps even panic-stricken when it goes off.

Like any Crik an octopus is a flexible and intelligent creature. An octopus can camouflage itself by deploying incredible mechanisms; these include specialized skin cells that transform
the colour of its skin, including its reflectivity and opacity. Octopus can also change colour in order to communicate with other octopuses; these communications may be friendly or hostile. A blue-ringed octopus can make itself bright yellow with blue rings if it gets angry.
Extraordinarily some octopus like the Mimic Octopus have an additional defence mechanism, they can transform their flexible bodies and the colour of their epidermis to imitate more deadly creatures such as eels and sea snakes. They can also change the texture of their mantle to make it spiky like seaweed, or scraggly and bumpy like a rock.

But how does the octopus remember who it is? There is no subjective security in these transformations. How do you know who you are between one setting and another? In this condition of near non-being you must anchor your own being in your present state. This consists of a journey within a journey. My grandfather characterised this state as an egg within an egg, and sometimes as an empty egg.
Look into the face of the fish here, but also look at the faces of the other human visitors, can you find anyone (fish or human) who looks like yourself, or in some way feels like home? Do you like the look of this person/fish? If not why not? Write what this feels like. Perhaps you have had to compromise because no one really looks like or reminds you of yourself, in that case writes what that feels like. Does it make you feel lonely or unique, do you begin to feel any sense of yourself as a location? It has been said that octopus, like other cold blooded creatures, including fish, do not dream, some people think this is because their cold hearts heal quicker from trauma.
Date:

Now go to page 148

Story 2

Degrees of freedom

If I am supposed to be writing an autobiography there is a fundamental flaw in the contract which my publishers have hitherto not noticed - there is no real ‘I’ to autobiographize. Although it is true I use this solitary symmetrical construction on a habitual basis. This ‘I’ of which there is no solid empirical evidence represents a vast number of un-useful habits – the continuous construction of un-resourceful representations, self destructive symbols, phobias and fear. Taking a small stroll through Borough Market will expose a cornucopia of such fears, the fear of not having material things and sensuous experiences, to name just two. You may retrace these steps yourself; beginning perhaps by the ship of avaricious cruelty we currently call the Golden Hind. A boat that represents every malignancy you can care to name. Start there, at this mendacious centre piece of Thames-side reverie.

Have I lost you yet? Who are you anyway? Those of you who are expecting to read a scientific treatise should already be dismayed by the subjective slant of my writing today. Others may be wondering what on earth I am doing using such resources – as the phobia, the displacement, the un-resourceful representation. Are these theoretical resources? Are you interested? Do they fit into a programming language as remotely valid entities?

My goal may once have been to make you all say a resounding communal ‘yes’ following a meticulous submission to the elegance of my logic. But there is no longer an ‘I’ to either persuade or be persuaded.

We are largely sets of unobservable relations, to even use that term implies an anthropocentrism I cannot support, nor yet can I support any form of essentialism. This is the world as I encounter it today. Tomorrow I plan to write a chapter on differential geometry and group theory that will clarify my slippery realism. I will present the case for manifolds, transformation groups and vector fields as fitting processes for a differential morphogenesis that works across both time and space, a philosophical terrain that consists of both the singular and the ordinary. In short a multiplicity, a set of relations and a rate of change.

INSTRUCTIONS:

Walk from the Golden Hind to Borough Market. You will surely become increasingly aware of gustatory representations. Can you resist them? What happens if you do? After 20 minutes suspend resistance, now what do you do? Write down exactly what happens. Describe before, after and during. Describe urges, flavours and regrets. Next time you come here do the same exercise. Note carefully any differences between each visit. In this way you will understand your own degrees of freedom.
Story 8

Cartographies of Constraint

My parents always criticised me for my fear of bridges, which I now know is called ‘gephyrophobia’. We lived so close to Waterloo Bridge my parents were exasperated by the limitations my phobia created, by what they characterised as my ‘scenes’ and ‘tantrums’ every time we crossed to the North. I didn’t want to be criticised for my fear of bridges. I wanted them to accommodate it, but this was not possible. My father would carry me across the bridge screaming. My mother would stride across it, leaving me to choose between the twin horrors of bridge crossing or maternal abandonment. At about the age of five I began to devise strategies that would nowadays be characterised as tantamount to a neurotic compulsion, but which at the time I found absorbing and satisfactorily distracting.

Tunnels have never disturbed me. I could cycle to Greenwich and cross under the Thames, or, if I had the money take the underground from Waterloo to Embankment. It fascinated me to learn that London has not always been resplendent with bridges, until relatively late in its history I would have been able to traverse north and South via myriad ferries, and thence drawn no attention to my phobia. But, as the London of my youth was, as far as I was concerned, over accommodated with bridges, I began necessarily to impose a range of restrictions and complex procedures upon myself, like an inverted version of the Bridges of Göttingen problem. I challenged myself to move through London with the maximum amount of riverine proximity without actually crossing any bridges. Though I have no liking for railway or motorway bridges, it is particularly bridges over bodies of water that terrify me. But my permutations and schedules of algorithms somehow mitigated my fear. In this way I gradually also eroded my desire for parental praise. My parents had no appreciation for my search algorithms so instead I sought praise from myself and lived in fear of my own disapprobation. I was like a rat who had built a maze for himself from which I desperately needed to escape, by exhausting all sets of combinations. A problem I am still trying to solve.

Lesson: What seems like a solution to one problem can cause even more inconvenience than the originating predicament.

Notes:

The New York Thruway Authority will lead gephyrophobiacs over the Tappan Zee Bridge. A driver can call the authority in advance and arrange for someone to drive the car over the bridge for them. The authority performs the service about six times a year.[
^ a b c Foderaro, Lisa W. (January 8, 2008). "To Gephyrophobiacs, Bridges Are a Terror.". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/nyregion/08bridge.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all. Retrieved 2008-01-08. "Mrs. Steers, 47, suffered from a little-known disorder called gephyrophobia, a fear of bridges. And she had the misfortune of living in a region with 26 major bridges, whose heights and spans could turn an afternoon car ride into a rolling trip through a haunted house."
^ "Gephyrophobia: A Fear Of Crossing Bridges. Even Before The Minnesota Collapse, Many Have Severe Phobia About Bridges.". CBS News. August 10, 2007. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/08/10/eveningnews/main3156354.shtml. Retrieved 2008-01-08. "The monster she fears is the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in Maryland. At four miles (6 km) long and 185 feet (56 m) high, Ayers says the thought of driving the bridge - with the way it rises straight in the air - raises a sense of panic in her."
^ "Reasonable fear or bridge phobia?". USA Today. August 8, 2007. http://www.mywire.com/pubs/USATODAY/2007/08/08/4184015?extID=10051. Retrieved 2008-01-08. "Jerilyn Ross, a psychotherapist and president of the Anxiety Disorder Association of America, notes that phobias are more than just being afraid of a certain object; they are marked by panic. Someone with gephyrophobia is afraid of panicking on a bridge, not necessarily the bridge itself, she says."

About your egg

The egg is a proto-novel, a book waiting to be hatched. We suggest you keep the egg close to you for the first few days. If you have spare folds of fat this is great, you can tuck the egg into them. Otherwise you might like to keep the egg in your pocket or under your jumper while watching television. When the egg has reached a temperature of about 67 degrees your book is ready to be hatched. Grab this book, head down to the Southbank, turn the egg on and take it for walk. By pressing the forward and backward buttons at the back of your egg you can experience the enhanced navigational range of this book. This will involve going up its stairs and through its secret tunnels, scampering over its many rooftops, clambering along ridges and down into its green valleys to find new and previously undiscovered pages. The book is designed to be smudged, thumbed, bumped, riffled through, used as a pillow, an occasional table and drawing book. It is also a form of compass. One way or another, (if you stay on Earth) this book will always point towards the South, just like your egg.

Story 7

Nagging Voices

The largest of Ivan’s notebooks was held together by green garden twine.
I begin to read it as the light of the longest day faded:

‘The memories of what I have witnessed act as a filter, but they are only a map of these events and not the actual terrain upon which they unfolded. In 1963 Dr Eee at the Callois Wing of ST Thomas’s hospital advised me to listen to my own language in deconstructing these memories, in order to expose my own filters, the deletions distortions and generalisations that I have unconsciously passed these memories though and made into a baseline habitual state.

My representational filters, explained Dr Eee, include the feelings both inside and outside of the body, but unfortunately I was not in a position to identify these apparently polarised locations. I heard a voice describing these disembodied kinaesthetic phrases: “there is somewhere solid, tickle, preserve pain in the neck warm”. Dr Eee told me that it was my own voice recorded under hypnosis, but I did not recognise it. I was advised by Dr Eee to use breaks and redirections such as Goto and delay – much like those used in my early computer programs, in fact I was constantly minded of these similarities which Dr Eee seemed oblivious too.

I wanted him to praise me for my superhuman efforts in deconstructing my habitual predicates or the language of my preferred representational system, but this desire was itself characterised by Dr Eee as an equally filtered preference for self-talk, which Eee called an auditory digital preference. This was revealed in my frequent use of words such as sense, learn, perceive conceive and process. I nagged at myself continually with these vocabularies, to the degree that they pulled me into a semi-hypnotic negative trance, in which I was profoundly entrenched in my own thinking and negative imaginings that took me deeper and deeper into consistent anchors or triggers. In a sense I was hypnotizing myself with my own language. But was Dr Eee right in his conviction that changing my language would change my life? Wasn’t the fact that I was so often lost in space evidence that my location in the world was dependent on more than language alone?’

Lerqs:

So here you are sitting outside the National Theatre on what is probably quite an unpleasant day. Perhaps you are trying not to concentrate on the negative aspects of this space. Your pain threshold in all probability is quite low, that’s not to imply you are a weakling or a whinger but to suggest that you often find things difficult (even intolerable). You are sensitive to your environment, sensitive to sound and smell. Other people may be intruding upon you right now with their noise and their annoying habits. Despite all these distractions you will probably be interested to know that someone is imagining your life. They are trying to imagine not only what you are doing right now but also why you are doing what you do. They may be observing you from the heavy concrete balconies above. You can try looking for them in the crowds but their number is legion (at least it should be if anyone actually buys this book). If things have been timed properly they will be writing detailed descriptions of you right now. Try not to feel self-conscious or bad about what they might be observing. You are being monitored all the time in this city so you should be used to it by now.
There are many different ways of feeling bad, no doubt during your trips to the Southbank you will experience several of them. That is so often the Lerq way. We highly recommend the following exercise as a counteracting measure to your multifarious bad states.
Practice not expressing unpleasant emotions, not 'identifying' with them but merely observing them. Practice not 'considering inwardly' the real or imagined opinions of others towards yourself, but merely observing them.
Now go to page Error! Bookmark not defined. (I don’t think the author has a clue)

Criks:

Non-Euclidean Observation.
Apparently authors should never allow their subjects to occupy more than one point of view at the same time. Let’s test this out right now here on the Southbank. Note the use of third person perspective in the opening sentence, this is a smoke screen designed to lull readers into a form of third person hypothermia. Now you are in this befuddled and even combative state watch out for further signs such as apathy, confusion and PARADOXICAL UNDRESSING.
This third person state can usually be managed with passive re-warming. This method relies on the victim's own production of specific subjectivity to re-warm the body. After wet perspectives have been removed and the skin dried, the victim should be wrapped in the infinite, warm regress of first person perspective, blankets, towels, or whatever else is available. We will now begin the non-Euclidean observation process. Return to one of the balconies along the Festival Terrace or a craggy overhang on the North face of the National Theatre complex. From there position yourself so that you have a good view of yourself in the area below. This is not hard to achieve with a little resourcefulness. You could try to imagine that one of the people sitting below you sipping a frothy cappuccino is you; if, for example, you had been born a few degrees further South or North, with one different parent or a dash of GM.
Describe that person in great detail. Where do they come from, what do they want, how do they hold themselves, what does their body language suggest to you?
Does this person look like they live to seek the thrill of a moment and yet although they are independent, outgoing and assertive they are also surprisingly trusting, often innocently walking into the lion's den at times? No matter what upheaval, challenge or triumph they confront – do they have a wonderful ability to bounce back?
Or does their life somehow fall short of their childhood dreams? Do their eyes often blaze with feelings that words never express?
Write everything you know about this person in the area below; when you have finished describing them turn your gaze upon yourself in the act of observing your self. Describe what you look like and feel like when you watch yourself:

Date:

South
HACKS

Lerqs >>>> Make up a more expressive word for ‘lost’

Criks >>>> Trip on an invisible wire.

Ums >>>>> Kiss your own elbow

(The above examples are entirely facetious)

Write something here
Photograph

1. spirituality
2. jealousy
3. nausea
4. hope
5. despair
6. ennui (look it up)
7. mendacity (ditto)
8. male
9. female
10. wise
11. ignorant
12. desirable
13. repulsive
14. calm
15. chaotic
16. safe
17. dangerous
18. soft
19. unkind
20. best

All types: answer the following questions about the River Thames >>>

Is it an extrovert or an introvert?
Is it lazy or energetic?
What kind of house would it like?
Is it happy or unhappy?
What job does it have?
What is its favourite colour?
How does it feel first thing in the morning?
If it was a film-star who would it be?
What does it smell of?
Who is its best friend?
What is its favourite song?
What gender is the Thames?

Recommended reading

Michel Foucault’s Technologies of the Self:
http://foucault.info/documents/foucault.technologiesOfSelf.en.html

Aspley Cherry-Garrards the Worst Journey in the World:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14363

© dare 2011

2011-01-23T11:16:00.000-08:00

Tensers and detensers; lost memories and embodied traces in the Marriage of Eliza Dagworthy 1915

2011-01-19T12:56:00.000-08:00

note to self: having re-read Barad on diffraction this afternoon realise I should add some stuff
about Agential Realism and the non-representational,

performative nature of my encounter with this photograph. Looking at Representation as a way of holding the world at arms length and assuming an a priori ontological separation.

Tensers and detensers; lost memories and embodied traces in the Marriage of Eliza Dagworthy 1915

Abstract

Like many people I have gaps in my memories, and thus in the symbolic narrative of my life. Before the age of nine my childhood memories are largely without detail. By and large those years may therefore be described (at least by convention) as ‘lost’. As a visual artist and artist-programmer the notion of such an aporia or cognitive deficit is particularly problematic. In the absence of representation what, if anything, can be retrieved, and what exactly can be communicated to others? In a wider philosophical sense such questions of representation and stable meaning have a high degree of cultural urgency. Marita Sturken (1999) urges us to examine the ‘cultural encoding of forgetting as a loss or negation of experience’ (1999: 252). Her question ‘what is an experience that is not remembered?’ (234) is one of the fundamental riddles of my own childhood. Sturken asks us to question the presumption that unmemorised experiences should be framed as a ‘loss of self’, and a ‘loss of subjectivity’ (243). These are critical questions in the context of my own research into amnesia.

Lost Memories and embodied traces is an idea for a computationally based project about the representation of my missing childhood memories. The focus of the project will be to explore the notion that memory is not an exact replica of events but is pieced together in a dynamic process that is strongly influenced not only by past experiences but by social contexts and sensory responses. In this colloquium I would like to present my ideas for the Lost Memories and embodied traces project, explaining how the project will attempt to establish a theoretical framework for embodied autobiography while also creating an installation that will communicate auto-biographical content via sensory technologies. I should emphasise that although my own memories (and one particular family photograph) are the focus for this work, it us not a discourse on individualism, exorcism or ahistoricsm.

A core conceptual focus of the project is the idea that memory is not located in individuals, objects, or social systems alone, but is spread across complex social, technological, cognitive and biological systems. The project therefore aims to develop a conceptually innovative methodological and practice based focus for the exploration of memory.

Introduction

The title of this paper might suggest that I am naive enough to be seeking what Italo Calvino described as a “true, total photograph” (1971). In this case, the photograph in question is of banal appearance, schematized into drab frontal poses and austere wedding outfits. But the photograph retains a dense impenetrability despite its many platitudes. One strategy in approaching the impenetrability of this image might be to deploy a Barthesian scheme of de-authentication, in this case by proving to myself and to you that it is not in fact a photograph or a representation but an event. I might dissolve this image by means of the opacity of my own projected desires. But in doing so would I also be dismantling Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, demolishing his bi-polar constructions of the punctum and the studium, (binary concepts of affect and intellect) and also destabilising the presumed codelessness of the photograph, by coding it back into my embodied memories?

My interest is not in forming a vituperative attack upon the putative agents (and agencies) that might have contributed to my childhood amnesia, or in dismantling the reputation of Roland Barthes, but, like W.G Sebald’s character Austerlitz, my concern is to investigate and articulate that which so stolidly resists a direct approach. As Proust wrote in relation to the past: ‘it is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect’ (Proust, 1913).

I have not accepted Proust’s assertion at face value but instead have used it as the catalyst for my core research questions, which are as follows:

• In light of Proust’s assertion what representative realm does the past (here taken to mean memories of the past) inhabit?

• If it is beyond symbolic/intellectual representation what other forms of articulation are available?

• Is there such a thing as somatisation of memory, or, less contentiously, embodied memory?

• Is memory itself an idealised notion – like that of the stable, originary subject?

•What is the relationship of time to memory, can we even be certain that a rigidly tensed time exists?

My attempts to address these questions have so far taken the form of generating two artist’s books and writing image manipulation software that uses EEG (Electroencephalography, the detection of the electrical signals emanating from the head) and GSR (Galvanic skin response, sometimes known as a ‘lie detector’) biosensors. The research has also drawn upon Philip Ausslander’s notion of ‘the performativity of performance documentation’ (the title of his 2006 paper), Peter Fritzsche’s paper ‘The Case for Modern Memory’ (2001), and, of course, Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (2000) among many other sources, including populist texts and Wikipedia articles about improving memory, losing memory and theories of forgetting.

This background research supports my plans for a complex installation/performance piece about lost memories. I would like to explain these practices and solicit critical feedback, relating to what, I am the first to admit, is a problematic and highly contested field, but it is also one that has both cultural and personal significance. As Peter Fritzsche writes, ‘the narrative of autobiography is both extremely durable and surprisingly weak, and it is this tension that gives life writing its dynamic and urgency’ (Fritzsche, 2001).

The first action I decided to take in attempting to examine my own amnesia was to create a book, arguably the reactive behaviour of a book-artist. But in the absence of coherent material what was I to put in such a book? Of course I am not the first person to try and represent absence in lexical form. Georges Perec’s novel, La Disparition (The Void, 1969), is a book without the letter e. These gaps represent, or so we might conjecture, the absence, and indeed, the murder in Auschwitz of his own mother. In a similar vein Austerlitz (2001) by W.G Sebald is a 428-page book without paragraph indentations. The book articulates absence through an embarrassment of riches or non-sequiturs – architectural and historical details as well as mystifying photographs that painfully magnify autobiographic lacunae. For my own book, Method of Loci (2011), the only content I have been able to draw upon is that which is publicly available, as I have no childhood photographs apart from one passport image dated 1971.

The child who looks out at me from that old blue passport is apparently lost to my adult self and to my adult memory structures. In the absence of other materials I have resorted to documenting web-based images of places, feelings and textures, symbols of fragments that have traveled with me into adulthood. These include low-resolution images of a church hall play group on One Tree Hill in South London which I attended in the mid 1960’s, the first road I lived in, swarming ants, black and white kitchen tiles, and Tom Thumb cigarillos, which my grandmother used to smoke while knitting, engulfed in a musky blue miasma. It was in documenting generalized memories into this book that I re-discovered online the old photograph that has become the loci of memory for this project.

The book, with that one exception, is therefore constructed from generalities, which might be characterised as ‘frames’ or ‘scripts’ in the language of artificial intelligence – declarative attempts to logically reconstruct human processes of remembering. These are contrived sets of structures amidst the chaos of missing data, not unlike the lexical structures assembled by Perec and Sebald.

Having constructed a book solely consisting of photographic images, some of which represent non-visual qualia such as postures, smells, sounds and felt textures, I then constructed a second book, Loci of Memory, which consists only of texts, though I have subsequently added a few drawings. These texts represent academic, populist and fictional accounts of memory loss and memory retrieval, as well as my written responses to them. Thus these books represent both reconstructed subjective memory fragments sourced from public data and collective accounts of memory also sourced from publicly available information.

I drew upon the data contained in Loci of Memory to try and construct a morphology of my own amnesia and would briefly like to outline my responses to the major theories of forgetting.Theories of forgettingMemory, like visual perception, while existing within discourse and ideology, is at the same time a physical entity, not just within the biological body but also within objects, such as memory foam, lazy battery effect, computers and, of course, as a biological mechanism in animals, including ourselves. Many difficulties arise when we relate conceptual scientific models of memory to the biological brain. Though there are apparently some physical structures that relate to the operation of proposed conceptual processes the operation of the brain bares very little resemblance to a computational model and indeed, is not modular in form.

Thus, the most dominant linear models of memory do not apply to our biological brains, which are fragmented and engaged in complex, distributed processes. Likewise, the dominant functional theories of forgetting are reductionist and cognitivist i.e. characterized as discrete linear processes such as encoding, storage and retrieval. These rely on information processing paradigms of cognition that have reified computational representations of human memory. The first major scientific and systematic theorist of forgetting was Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850 -1909), who proposed a logarithmic, exponential (gradually decreasing) theory of forgetting, which appears to hold up in relation to very specific situations, such as memorising nonsense syllables, but is apparently not scalable to memory in all its complex forms, including the loss of episodic or auto-biographical content (Foster, 2009:11).

More recently Daniel Schacter’s seven major categories of memory ‘sins’ (1996) involve sins of omission that involve forgetting, and sins of commission that involve distorted or unwanted recollection. The full seven so-called ‘sins’ are: transience, absent-mindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence. But, Like many theories that relate to memory, they are unprovable and also unfalsifiable or based upon the closed paradigms of evolutionary biology, however Shachter’s insight that ‘the act of remembering is a subjective experience, in which memories are records of how one has experienced events rather than replicas of the events themselves’ is significant and sometimes forgotten in the mass of literature relating to memory. However, as Sturken (1999) points out, there have been ‘only a small number of empirical studies that examine the question of memory repression’ (233), and yet she also asserts the inadequacy of empirical research to ‘address the status of memory’ (233). An aporia that is ripe for artistic inquiry, for the imaginative and independent forms of research practice that Graeme Sullivan[1](2005) advocates - an alternative practice that is ‘incisive, robust, and fearless…willing to explore all kinds of theories and practices of inquiry in all types of settings’ [2]

The cognitive neuroscientist Michel Gazzaniga has stated “Everything in life is memory, save for the thin edge of the present” (Foster, 2009:2). This is a challenging statement in light of my own claims to have very little memory of childhood. If memory is everything, then how have I survived thus far with such glaring gaps? Upon further investigation I have refined my self-characterization into the more specific statement that I have poor episodic memory, this in turn, relates to OGM or over generalized memory. OGM is characterised by a lack of spatio-temporal context. However, Gazzaniga’s assertion is not without ideological significance and should not be taken as an unassailable statement of fact. When he says everything is memory, this is perhaps an over generalised memory of memory. Likewise there are pressing theoretical arguments for tenselessness that refute Gazzaniga’s belief in a thinly edged present, let alone a past represented through memories.

Serious doubts about the absolute value of time were implicit in Einstein’s conception of simultaneity (1905), in which time is dependent on both observers and on space, thus undermining Newton’s absolute belief in its ontological independence. Hilary Putnam (1967) extended this theory into tenselessness, the counter intuitive refutation of our belief in a tensed temporality. Instead he proposes a transitive and relational coordinate system of unprivileged observers situated at different coordinate points in space and time.Putnam’s simultaneity model of tenseless time[1].

Memory, like visual perception and the passage of time[2] cannot be directly or absolutely observed, they are invisible processes (I shall address imaging technologies later on in this paper). The solipsistic and recursive proposal that we draw upon a ready made, a priori internal model of the world (constructed at some earlier point from memories) in order to navigate it is highly contested, and cuts to the core of the most pressing philosophical problems within the domain of computing and artificial intelligence – how we represent human knowledge and experience.

These issues have been critiqued by, among others, Lucy Suchman, (2007) Alva Noe (2004, 2009), Maturana, Varela, Rosch and Thompson (1991), Shaun Gallagher (2005), Antonio Damassio (1999), Karen Barad (2007) and Hubert Dreyfus (1972). However both Bergson and Proust complicate this issue with plausible notions that perception is a form of memory, indeed, with the idea that perception is not representation, but memory in the service of action.

I am not supporting the total abandonment of a priori structures but emphasising the dynamism and fluidity of our being in and of the world, which, to quote Maturana and Varela, ‘we bring forth in our coexistence with others, will always have precisely that mixture of regularity and mutability, that combination of solidity and shifting sand, so typical of human experience when we look at it up close’ (Maturana, Varela, 1992:241).

Psychological theories of memory and forgetting are no less controversial, particularly theories of repression and trauma-memory arguments, including explanations for amnesia relating to childhood sexual abuse, which raise the spectre of false memory syndrome, something I am of course not in a position to prove or dispute, I concur with Marita Sturken’s assertion that it is an issue that is ‘essentially irresolvable’ (1999), one that needs to be examined in a wider cultural framework.

Various feminisms, as Elizabeth Wilson states in Psychosomatic, Feminism and the Neurological Body, (2004) have largely dismissed biological accounts of embodied memory in their narratives of hysteria, somatisation or conversion, instead they have sought what Wilson describes as ’ideational’ explanations, relating to culture, signification or sociology (Wilson, 2004:5). Notable exceptions are feminist theorists of embodiment, such as Vicki Kirby (1997) Elizabeth Grosz (1994) and Elizabeth A. Wilson (2004) herself, who urges us to re-examine and to some extent theoretically reclaim the biological body and mind, thus eschewing the huge corpus of theory (if you’ll forgive the pun) which is predicated on a mind body split, from Descartes to Showalter’s writing on hysteria (1985).

However, I am not supporting a polarized stance on this subject, Elizabeth Grosz’s image of the Möebius strip is an apt metaphor for the complexity of mind-body integration and also I would suggest, the non-linear inter-relationship of materiality, culture, discourse and biology. The Möebius strip has also been used to illustrate the non-orientability of Spacetime in which the past and the future can be folded into each other.

My subjective, experiential response to these varied theories of forgetting is that there are entangled biological and social reasons for my own childhood amnesia. Episodic, or autobiographical memory loss is related to stress. My own childhood semantic and procedural memories are intact, but these are typically robust in the face of stress and ‘encoded’ differently from autobiographic content. Current theories propose that episodic memory is transferred from short-term memory to the hippocampus, which is especially vulnerable to adrenal (stress) hormones. The presence of such hormones can cause neural degeneration and thus a compromised episodic memory. Of course it is very difficult to quantify stress but my subjective assertion is that the experience of childhood maternal abandonment at some point between the age of three and five was both psychologically and biologically stressful and that this stress continued into early adolescence.

A bio-chemical account of my own amnesia is more compelling then the trauma-memory argument. In a study of 10,000 trauma survivors (Pope, Hudson, Bodkin & Olivia, 1998) found there were virtually none who suffered from trauma-amnesia. Indeed my own memory of the ‘private’ trauma of maternal abandonment is clearer than the events that surround it (though never conforming to full a blown narrative, but more akin to an unedited film without a script (Sturken, 1991: 235), in which I am always an external observer). This is in keeping with models of memory that posit (in certain circumstances) the negative and traumatic as more memorable then the neutral or pleasant [3].

The thin edge of the present: memory and the concept of now

Michel Gazzaniga’s statement “Everything in life is memory, save for the thin edge of the present” (Foster, 2009:2), is at odds with other neuro-scientific accounts of experience, in particular those of Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch (1993). It is also at odds with philosophies associated with Varela and Maturana’s enactivism, including Bergsonian Process philosophy, Buddhism and Nils Bohr’s principle of complementarity (1933-), the idea that items can have contradictory properties and subsequent conceptions of quantum level behaviour and the influence of observers on events. Between them these bodies of thought may be drawn upon to support a conception of human experience that is contingent, unfolding and for want of a better term, always occurring, or entangled within, the present. In Bergsonian terms time is a non-discrete, flowing duration (which is not, perhaps as radical as Putnam’s detensing).

My work with biosensors aims to explore a more process based conception of memory, and to test the distributions of agencies that relate to the way we remember what we call the ‘past’ through what we call the ‘present’ through the body. I propose that the body is always entangled with the past, and is in fact in both places at once – the past and the present.The Marriage of Eliza Dagworthy, 1915 has become the focus for my work with biosensors and image manipulation techniques. But of course an image is not a memory or a fixed reality and to treat is as such is to enter perilous theoretical territory, but as W.J.T Mitchell (Mirzoeff, 1998) warns in relation to the post-modern presumption of the non-naturalness of images,

the naturalistic fallacy should not become an:unexamined dogma, it threatens to become a fallacy just as disabling as the naturalistic fallacy it sought to overturn. To what extent is vision unlike language, working (as Roland Barthes, 1982, observed of photography) like a message without a code? In what ways does it transcends specific or local forms of social construction to function like a universal language that is relatively free of textual or interpretive elements? (We should recall that Bishop Berkeley, 1709, who first claimed that vision was like a language, also insisted that it was a universal language, not a local or national language.) To what extent is vision not a learned activity, but a genetically determined capacity, and a programmed set of automatisms that has to be activated at the right time, but that are not learned in anything like the way that human languages are learned?(W.J.T Mitchell in Mirzoeff, 1998: 91).

The photograph entitled The Wedding of Eliza Dagworthy is the Loci of memory for an investigation into the ontological integrity of both memory and photographic images, enabling me to test their distributions within both cultural and non-cultural dimensions. The image is particularly significant in light of Marianne Hirsch’s (1997) concept of post-memory, or ‘the experience of those who grew up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth’ (Hirsch, 1997:23). My paternal grandparents, and to a slightly lesser extent, my own parent’s lives were temporally and experientially anchored to the second world war, events were defined as having taken place before, during or after it. The war was their compass point, indeed, I think of my own birth date as ’20 years after the end of the war’, something my grandparents must have instilled in me by example.

The Wedding of Eliza Dagworthy 1915, was taken one year into another defining war, and arguably represents the entangled nature of the personal and the historical, family history and national history. Within my practice this photograph also relates to the performativity and dynamism of documenting events and to the embodied nature of both photography and memory. Peter Fritzsche writes that the:

capacity to picture oneself recapitulates the method of historicism in which the specificity of the case is associated with the strictures of periodicity. In other words, the remembering self should be regarded as a historical rather than a transcendental subject, if it is an entity formed by the practices of social life and does not stand ready-made on its outskirts’ (Fritzsche, 2001).

The Wedding of Eliza Dagworthy apparently presents a hackneyed trope of yokels in their best clothes standing outside their family farm in South Devon, it is superficially reminiscent of Lark Rise to Candleford (1945) or Cider with Rosie (1959). A quick troll through the world-wide-web will reveal many such images of wedding groups standing stiffly outside English farms. However on close examination only one or two members of the Dagworthy wedding party can bring themselves to present full smiles. Perhaps the subjects are bored or aching, having stayed in the same stiff postures for several minutes? Everyone has long sleeves and the flowers are restricted to white roses or carnations, an indication that it is early spring and that there is an uncomfortable chill in the air? Or perhaps there is a deeper reason for their half smiles. The clothes are not fashionable, the ugly outsized hats are from an earlier era and the women’s dresses are also unfashionably long, indicative of both the economic situation of the family and the fact that the war has been going on now for a year.

We can see then that the counter-narrative of this image is rapidly emerging, and is quite separate from the ostensible theme of a happy rural marriage. As Roland Barthes writes, it presents ‘an altogether different ‘script’ from the one of shots, sequences and syntagms’ (Barthes, 1988:57). But the punctum of this image (that which both wounds me and connects me to it, as opposed to the studium or intellectual content) is not the economic restraint of the situation or the stereotypically unfashionable dress of rural families. It is historical and personal, the knowledge that many of the young men in the villages of Woodbury and Woodbury Salterton are away at war. Those with the Devonshire regiment are stationed in India, Egypt, Iraq and Italy, undoubtedly their first trips abroad. Perhaps even their first time out of the county of Devon. An additional punctum or piercing element in this image is also represented by the absence of my great grandfather who I presume has just died in his late thirties or forties, and by the forlorn presence of my own three year old grandmother, Amelia Dagworthy, who will one day have to look after myself and my siblings after we are suddenly abandoned by our own mother. She is standing unsteadily at the front of the group, frowning at the photographer.

This impression of loss is at odds with the national image of its time, of necessary sacrifice and patriotic fervor. It is at odds with a telelogical picturing of history, as a path towards progress despite wars and premature, violent deaths. As Peter Fritzsche (2001) writes, ‘the power of national memory is indisputable and is manifest again and again in its ability to keep other pasts and other renditions from articulating themselves’ (Fritzsche, 2001). But are these false divisions –between the punctum and the studium, the pain of the punctum is informed by my socio-historical and cultural knowledge of what this image represents. I am not convinced the division is real, nor am I yet to be convinced that they meet in a via media such as Bergson’s conception of intuition. (But I’d really like to know what other people present here think about this.)

Aside from Barthes’s division of images, this image is also representative of gaps between local memory and national memory, and ‘it is precisely the instability of memory forms’ their fragmented, interiorized nature, that allows for renewal and redemption’ and resists official accounts’ according to Fritzsche (2001). In other words, localised memory might generate counter narratives that are at odds with idealised nationalistic histories. But to make greater truth claims for family histories and family photographs is also to deny the presence of constrained memories within those families, indeed ‘the subjective capacity ensures confusion because it makes human beings doubly historical. It engages them simultaneously in the socio-historical process and narrative constructions about that process’ (Michel-Rolph Trouillat, 1995). As Annette Kuhn writes of her own family images, they do not represent a transcendental reading, but a ‘timefull, contingent, and historically situated reading’ (Fritzsche citing Kuhn, 2001).

In relation to the conditions of my own childhood a deep-seated cultural suppression is at play. In spite of the shock and incomprehension that was customarily offered to us as a response to our own childhood abandonment, (this was in an era just before the liberalisation of Britain’s divorce laws) such abandonment is not historically rare, or biologically inconsistent. Indeed there have been what Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (2000) describes as ‘epidemics’ of both infant abandonment and infanticide:

The ethnographic record for numerous pre-technological societies shows that infanticide is considered the best option for a mother who knows that her child will not survive and who may jeopardise the mother's own survival. Nor is this suspension of the maternal instinct limited to supposed savages. For the past millennium, Europeans under legal and religious constraints preventing them from killing their children have still opted to abandon them whenever opportunities arose. By 1640, 20 per cent of baptised babies in France were being left at state orphanages. Anonymity in this and other depositaries was preserved by ringing a bell and placing the baby in a rotating barrel in the wall, to be received on the other side. In lean times, grills had to be placed across the opening to prevent older children being shoved in as well. Whenever philanthropists opened orphanages, they were immediately flooded. It seems that women's desire to abandon their children has always been underestimated.

(Thomas Sambrook, 2000).

Amnesia relating to children’s experiences is not limited to my own childhood memories; it has deep seated implications for our understanding of the historical realities of family life and the conditionality of parental attachment. The conditionality of that attachment is very well articulated by Thomas Sambrook:

In the 1960s and 1970s, John Bowlby revolutionised this field by putting mother-infant attachment in the context of evolutionary adaptiveness. He envisaged the child's attachment to the mother to be based on the perils of predators and the like. Hrdy's "modest addendum" is that what the Pleistocene infant really dreaded was not a hungry hyena, but a much more likely threat - the possibility of abandonment. Nor need this have been an all-or-nothing thing. Infanticide lies at one end of a continuum of maternal retrenchment, psychological withdrawal and denial of resources (2000).

The photograph of Eliza Dagworthy’s wedding seems similarly ambivalent, withdrawing and denying an umbilical nexus, in this case, with the past. However, despite its ambivalence and the generality of its composition, I still recognize myself in the image of my great aunt Eliza’s marriage, and also likenesses to my father, my uncles, my younger half brother, my sisters, and my grandmother. But should I ask myself as Barthes does, ‘who is like what?‘ (Barthes, 2000:100). Am I imagining an identity in these fragments of myself and my living relatives - scrying a ‘truth of lineage’ as Barthes calls it (103), a generalised ‘persistence of the species’(105), an identity that is at odds with reality of this image? For, in addition to my own memories the photograph, like all photographs, in its ‘seizing of a moment always, even in that very moment, assures loss’ (Kuhn, 2002).

As Fritzshe states ‘in this view photography is the very expression of Terdiman’s “memory crisis”, at once creating a documentary record of the past to fashion a sense of continuity and performing the anxiety about the durability and authenticity of the connections that have been established’ (2001).

Do I imagine the loss and anger of my infant grandmother? I am oddly shocked and repulsed by the presence of Reverend Chase in this image and his proximity to her, who despised religious figures. One of her most virulent dying wishes was that the family shouldn’t let priests get hold of her. During my research I came across accounts of war recruitment campaigns in rural Devon, supported by the local churchmen, and wondered if they had been the seed of her hatred for religious and other authorities. I wonder how unique her attitude was? I had always imagined it as a subjective trait, particular to my eccentrically rebellious grandmother, but my readings suggest a local stance of disdain for the war recruiters, I can hear her voice, her sarcasm in their responses:

Up to date, 26 names had been enrolled but, comments "The Western Morning News" representative who accompanied the march: "The apathy of the young men in the country districts is, in many cases, almost unbelievable. Beyond all doubt, much of the blame rests with the farmer's sons, who, if they choose, could set an excellent example to the labouring classes". At Buckland Brewer, for instance, half a dozen stalwart labourers were appealed to, but their reply was "We'll go when the farmers' sons go. Let them lead the way."When especially interrogated by Mr. Millman, one young farmer replied, "We'll stay at home and do the farming; let others do the fighting." Similar excuses were heard at Parkham. "Us farmers' sons be going to stay home and look after the grub and the money," was the answer actually given. "But look at this man, " said the questioner, bringing forward one of the soldiers. "He has been to the front and done his share. Won't you join and help the others?" "I never asked him to go," said the unwilling farmer. "I won't join, so there." "Then you ought to be kicked!" was the well-merited reply. Frequent excuses were: " I'll go when I'm compelled,"[4]

My grandmother despised those she was supposed to look up to and respect, including Winston Churchill, the Queen Mother, religious leaders. Her hatred for them went hand in hand with her hatred of all nationalism and sentimentality. I wonder if these traits were forming as this image was taken, whether she was even then harbouring resentment towards the sentimentality and mendacity of this photograph itself?

And yet my own reactions to this image fluctuate; I observe that they are in process. Do these fluctuations point to the contingency of memory itself or the subject who ‘holds’ these memories, if they are even seperable? I suspect the obvious answer is that it points to the contingency of them both. One day while looking at this image I felt a kick in my stomach, a moment of visceral shock. It was not a moment of logical analysis. I realised that we were both, in a sense, abandoned and betrayed by our parents at about the same age, the age my grandmother is in that photograph. So much made sense to me after I felt this, perhaps even my choice to work with this image out of all the many images I had amassed for this project.

What else might my body tell me? Was I remembering or reconstructing? Was this deductive logic, embodied knowledge, or Bergsonian intuition? More importantly, what might my body tell you about my memories and about the nature of memory itself? In other words, what is there beyond a textual reading of this image, beyond my previous exegesis? I wonder if there are other responses that might disrupt my own narratives of family history as reflected in this photograph from nearly a century ago? What is there now, or indeed, is there only the now in which to articulate memory?

Conclusion: Point-Instant, sensing and making memory traces

In keeping with Plato’s Pharmakon my work with images and memory supports the idea that symbolic representations of memory are at once both poison and remedy. At the same time, I would like to test the notion that memory has neither meaning nor autonomy outside of the present. Of course I am not alone in questioning the tensedness of time, belief in the totality of the present moment as Michael Eido Luetchford explains (2004) is a core tenet of Buddhist philosophy:

According to Buddhist thought, the past is not real, because it no longer exists, and the future is not real because it has not yet come into existence. Only the present moment is real existence. Early Buddhist philosophers developed a theory of existence as a point-instant

(Michael Eido Luetchford, 2004).

This is supported to some extent by Bergson’s resistance to the mathematical reducibility of time as an experience, but to instead a non-linear and flowing, mathematically unbounded experience of time or duration. However, Bergson clearly does believe in the past (as well as the future) but it is one that is activated as memory by action in the present. Memory in Bergsonian terms is a strange agent. Grosz writes of the Bergsonian assertion that ‘memory returns to objects the rich potential they have for functioning outside their familiar use; it returns to them the qualities, properties, contexts that perception must eliminate in order to act on the object. Perception can never be free of memory and is thus never completely embedded in the present, but always retains a reservoir of connections with the past as well as close anticipation of the imminent future. The present is extended through memory into the past and through anticipation into the near future’ (Grosz, 2004:173). Yet, at least since St Augustine wrote the Confessions in the 4th century AD, the idea of such temporal divisions as the past, present and future has been contested. St Augustine proposed that time only exists as a subjective quality, engendered within individuals by memory.[5]

Again this notion of memory accords it an agency, but can it really hold such power and if it does, is amnesia also agential? My use of biosensors, in the form of EEG and GSR sensors enables me to perform the dynamism of my relationship to my own memories and my embodied responses to the photograph of my Grandmother and her family. I propose that the photograph has the potential to be both symbolic and sub-symbolic, offering a complex complementarity, in this case, that they are both culturally and biologically received and conceived, signifying absence and presence, that like memory they are embodied and dynamic, indexical and generative. As my relationship to this image unfolds the image itself is transformed, when the GSR sensor detects a significant drop in resistance I am shocked, and at the same time the software generates a new image of Eliza Dagworthy’s wedding photo.

The shock to my body triggers a re-imaging and dissolution of Eliza’s wedding, one that is ontologically entangled with its own documentation. Phillip Ausslander highlights the paradox at play in two notable and even more extreme works of performance documentation, Chris Burden’s Shoot (1971), a ‘notorious’ work in which the artist enlisted a friend to shoot him (with a gun) in a gallery setting, and Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void (1960), in which the artist appears to be flinging himself out of a window. My work with Biosensors and photography aims to similarly destabilize the originary event while questioning and inverting the status of documentation and the conventional notion that an event precedes and authorizes its documentation. As Ausslander points out, our perception of these processes is taken for granted:

the presumption of an ontological relationship between performance and document in this first model is ideological. The idea of the documentary photograph as a means of accessing the reality of the performance derives from the general ideology of photography, as described by Helen Gilbert, glossing Roland Barthes and Don Slater: “Through its trivial realism, photography creates the illusion of such exact correspondence between the signifier and the signified that it appears to be the perfect instance of Barthes’s ‘message without a code.’ The sense of the photograph as not only representationally accurate but ontologically connected to the real world allows it to be treated as a piece of the real world, then as a substitute for it.’”

(Ausslander, 2006).

At the same time, the vulnerability of biosensor technology (even medical grade EEG sensors) to environmental noise and false readings adds another element of ontological doubt to the technologies of representation at play in this work and arguably blurs the boundaries between subjects and objects, originary and documenting events. Leading to, as Amelia Jones (1998) frames it:

an expansion of the phenomenological relation to a technophenomenological relation that intertwines intersubjectivity with interobjectivity: we are enworlded via the envelopment of our bodies in space, the touch of the keyboard, the stroke of our gaze on the video screen. Seemingly paradoxical, given the conventional association of technology with disembodiment and disengagement from the world, recent body-oriented practices have increasingly mobilized and highlighted this reversibility, using the artists’ own body/self as both subject and object, as multiplicitous, particular, and unfixable, and engaging with audiences in increasingly interactive ways (Jones, 1998).

This is in keeping with my conception of the Lost memories and embodied traces performance / installation (loosely diagramed below). The roboticist Rodney Brooks wrote ‘In AI, abstraction is usually used to factor out all aspects of perception and motor skills…When we examine very simple level intelligence we find that explicit representations and models of the world simply get in the way. It turns out to be better to use the world as its own model’ (Brooks, 1987). But what happens if you try to factor out abstraction and leave only perception and motor skills in an arts context? Not at the level of Brook’s very simple situated robots, but at the level of human interaction with such a performance/installation?

This is the core methodological framework for the project.To participate in this work subjects will be finely calibrated via their bodies to the corresponding state diagram of my own body at varied times of memory retrieval. Calibration will be facilitated via heart rate (using a treadmill), galvanic skin response and EEG readings. I am also considering the use of urine and hormone tests to establish both a biological and psychogenic calculus of my unfolding experience of memories. Participants will experience mild electric shocks when near exact states are matched. The shock will also trigger and impact on the documentation of our corporeal synchronization and a reconfiguration of Eliza’s wedding photograph.

In effect I would argue that this is a type of sub-symbolic time machine in keeping with a detensed and embodied theory of time and special relativity. Whether this type of spatiotemporal synchronisation and performativity is possible, or indeed, is in violation of physical or logical laws will become apparent at the time of its implementation. At the same time the project seeks to explore Maria Sturken’s question (1999) ‘what does the act of forgetting produce?’(243). The project acknowledges the possibility that forgetting is, to quote Sturken, a ‘primary means through which subjectivity is shaped and produced’ (243).

[1]Available at http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/putnam/Accessed 20/01/11.[2] J.E. McTaggart (1908), among many other physicists and philosophers, questioned the existence of time, although he recognized the value of tenses, he also asserted the logical incompatibility of the past, present and future. The biggest challenge to Newton’s conception of a stable, independent and absolute time was Einstein’s emphasis on relativity or simultaneity, in which the order of events is dependent on an observer’s reference frame.[3] An anecdotal experience of vivid trauma memory was the witnessing of a multiple high-speed car crash a few years ago. I was with several friends who all reported afterwards that, like me, their view of the event had unfolded in slow motion. As we witnessed one car somersaulting over another it felt as if we could have made phones calls, drank coffees or chatted about the weather before it finally landed and smashed into the other cars. An experience that illustrates the strangeness of both memory and time, and, perhaps, their non-linear co-dependence and arguably the way they are both entangled with our biochemistry.[4] ‘Recruiting for the Devonshire Regiment in 1915’Available at http://www.devonheritage.org/Nonplace/DevonReg/RecruitingfortheDevonshireRegimentin1915.htmAccessed 11/01/11[5] Before relativity the main theoretical approaches to time included absolutists (such as Newton) who believed that time exists independent of material objects or anything external and on the other hand, relationists, who believed time was dependent on physical movement. Conventionalists such as Poincaré, did not believe in an absolute time as Newton did, but were committed to the convenience of a general agreement upon time.
[1] Sullivan, G. (2005) Art Practice as Research, Sage).
[2] Available at http://artpracticeasresearch.com/ accessed 28/01/11

2011-01-13T05:07:00.000-08:00

Here Machinka enters into Bruce Nauman's disturbing green tunnel on the last day of the Move exhibition (Choreographing You) at the Hayward

2011-01-13T05:06:00.000-08:00

2011-01-11T05:13:00.001-08:00

2011-01-09T02:01:00.000-08:00

Lee Weinberg and I have had our paper 'Algorithms for social curation' accepted for publication in Bodies Space and Technology' - whooopeee!
http://people.brunel.ac.uk/bst/home3.html
The paper is about the VAINS project for online curation.

2011-01-01T11:17:00.001-08:00

This is the hacked toy EEG machine and output when looking at an old family photograph

Hacked into a toy EEG machine

2010-12-26T12:39:00.000-08:00

This is good news! I've followed a fantastic hack from frontiernerds.com

and made the MindFlex toy I purchased in the Argos sale this morning, into a serviceable machine for providing a data flow of my brain's electrical activity (with all the limitations that this sentence implies, naturally!). I do notice non-random responses to my concentration etc, so this is going to be incredibly useful for the memory project, as I'm going to see how certain objects, tastes, smells etc, effect brain activity.

Christmas house, for Jonas and Julia

2010-12-16T10:34:00.000-08:00

HAPPY CHRISTMAS!
When you text or phone the house it lights up with an LED fading on a timer between RGB. (of course, not putting the number here LOL). This Christmas house is for Jonas and Julia and it's made from the Box containing the lovely Swiss chocolates they sent me!

2010-12-15T11:38:00.000-08:00

Continuing to investigate template matching for the Chiromancer and feel some hope as the last couple of algorithms I've written are pretty good at finding significant features on the palm images, now I'm looking at establishing a significant difference between images, and this looks pretty useful, infact what I am going to use it in the next iteration:

minSAD = VALUE_MAX;



// loop through the search image

for ( int x = 0; x <= S_rows - T_rows; x++ ) {

for ( int y = 0; y <= S_cols - T_cols; y++ ) {

SAD = 0.0;



	// loop through the template image

	for ( int i = 0; i < T_rows; i++ )

	    for ( int j = 0; j < T_cols; j++ ) {



        pixel p_SearchIMG = S[x+i][y+j];



        pixel p_TemplateIMG = T[i][j];



        SAD += abs( p_SearchIMG.Grey - p_TemplateIMG.Grey );

    }

	}



// save the best found position 

	if ( minSAD > SAD ) {

	    minSAD = SAD;

    // give me VALUE_MAX

	    position.bestRow = x;

	    position.bestCol = y;

	    position.bestSAD = SAD;

}

}

The last bit enables a rectangle to be drawn around the best matched region.

2010-12-12T10:59:00.000-08:00

Weird how the power dips when I press the button so the LCD fades, but the logic works, atleast on the old NG, not sure it likes sharing with the speakJet Shield...
// adapted from SIMON MONKS Project 17 - LCD message board

#include

// LiquidCrystal display with:
// rs on pin 12
// rw on pin 11
// enable on pin 10
// d4-7 on pins 5-2
LiquidCrystal lcd(12, 11, 5, 4, 3, 2);

const int buttonPin = 7; // the number of the pushbutton pin
const int ledPin = 13; // the number of the LED pin

// variables will change:
int buttonState = 0;
void setup()
{
pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT);
// initialize the pushbutton pin as an input:
pinMode(buttonPin, INPUT);
Serial.begin(9600);
lcd.begin(2, 20);
lcd.clear();
lcd.setCursor(0,0);
lcd.print("Evil Genius");
lcd.setCursor(0,1);
lcd.print("Rules");
}

void loop()
{
buttonState = digitalRead(buttonPin);

// check if the pushbutton is pressed.
// if it is, the buttonState is HIGH:
if (buttonState == HIGH) {
// turn LED on:
digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH);
lcd.clear();
lcd.setCursor(0,1);
lcd.print("HI!/
/
/");
}
else {
// turn LED off:
digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW);
}

if (Serial.available())
{
char ch = Serial.read();
if (ch == '#')
{
lcd.clear();
}
else if (ch == '/')
{
lcd.clear();
lcd.setCursor(0,1);
lcd.print("Rules");
}
else
{
lcd.write(ch);
}
}
}

Getting there with the Buddha Box

2010-12-10T05:21:00.001-08:00

Getting there with the Buddha Box, now there are buttons that let you talk back to the Buddha box..

2010-12-08T08:23:00.000-08:00

/hmm the clicker method doesnt work as it speaks both sentences wqhen the box opens...not sure why
// set up a new serial port
//rxPin: the pin on which to receive serial data
//txPin: the pin on which to transmit serial data
#include
const int buttonPin = 5; // the number of the pushbutton pin
const int ledPin = 13;
int clicker =0;
#define txPin 2
#define rxPin 3
#define busyPin 4
int buttonState = 0;
// set up SoftwareSerial port
SoftwareSerial speakJet = SoftwareSerial(rxPin, txPin);
char helloMiki[] = {
20, 96, 21, 114, 22, 88, 23, 5, 183, 7, 159, 146, 164, 6,6, 6, 140, 129, 194, 129};
char sounds[] = {
200, 201, 202, 203, 220, 221, 222};
char message[] = {
20, 96, 21, 114, 22, 88, 23, 5, 8, 135, 8, 146, 5, 128, 153, 5, 170, 154, 8, 188, 5, 152, 5, 170, 8,128,146,8,135,8,144,5,8,191,162,5,8,134,187};
char one[] = {
147, 142, 6};//'one'
char two[] ={
191, 162, 6};
char hbrock[] ={
159, 146, 164, 6, 171,148,135, 194};

void setup()
{
// initialize the serial communications with PC:
Serial.begin(9600);
// define pin modes for tx, rx pins:
//pinMode(rxPin, INPUT);
pinMode(txPin, OUTPUT);
speakJet.begin(9600);
}

void SJBusy(){
delay(20); // wait 12ms minimum before checking SpeakJet busy pin
while(digitalRead(busyPin)){
delay(250); // wait here while SpeakJet is busy (pin 4 is true)
}
delay(250); // a bit more delay is needed for some reason
}

void loop() {
buttonState = digitalRead(buttonPin);

// if it is, the buttonState is LOW:
if (buttonState == LOW) {
// turn LED on:
clicker++;
Serial.println(clicker);
// speakJet.print(sounds);
// speakJet.print(message);
// speakJet.print(helloMiki);

digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH);

}
else {
// turn LED off:
digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW);
}

// buttonRead2(clicker);
SJBusy();
buttonRead(clicker);
buttonRead2(clicker);
}

void buttonRead(int c){
if((buttonState ==LOW)&&(clicker<=4)){

// your hand is on the sensor
speakJet.print(hbrock);
}
}

void buttonRead2(int c){

if((c>4)&& (buttonState ==LOW)){
speakJet.print(sounds);
}
}

2010-12-05T12:08:00.002-08:00

Streatham High Road is still a really important research location for me, and its recently given me an idea for a palm-reading device that will use computer vision to generate texts based on the pixel data in images of hands. The end device should be installed in a Streatham style shop - a particular aesthetic that is non-centralised, and more or less DIY - the opposite of what chain stores represent.

2010-12-05T12:08:00.001-08:00

The Chiromancer

2010-12-05T11:59:00.000-08:00

Palm reading, otherwise known as palmistry or chiromancy, is practiced all over the world, with roots in Indian astrology and Romani fortune telling.The objective is to evaluate a person's character or future by studying the palm of their hand. London has recently seen an explosion in high street palm readers and astrologers, which may be symptomatic of economic and existential uncertainty, or indeed the failure of our highly mediated urban environment to provide coherent answers to our most deep-seated questions.

The Chiromancer installation will represent a digital implementation of these ancient and culturally diverse divinatory practices, one that is rooted in the embodied and diverse nature of human experience.

Work description

The Chiromancer will be an installation for embodied readings of heart, head, life and fate. The portable hardware unit will use computer vision to generate an interactive experience of ancient predictive technologies. By analyzing hands the system will be able to make a series of readings, including information about physical activities that are best suited to each visitor. The Chiromancer will first invite visitors to place their palms on a smooth service, this will be scanned by an internal camera enabling the system to identify the four major lines on the human hand, which are:

(1) The heart line.

(2) The head line.

(3) The life line.

(4) The fate line (though not everybody has this).

2010-12-03T05:00:00.001-08:00

In order to use the voice synthesiser I have to write with a new set of contsraints, which we might think of as a robot voice aesthetic, generating text from parts of speech - phonemes and allaphones etc, and, if I use the SpeakJet chip dictionary, a very limited vocabulary, such as

20, 96, 21, 114, 22, 88, 23, 5, 152, 8, 160, 136, 7, 146, 140, 14, 137, 188, 191, 128, 153, 187, 131, 145, 186

or:

ARE YOU ALMOST YOURSELF

The PhraseALocutor generates codes which include data for speed and emphasis.

this is the dictionary I am working with to generate robotic spiritual advice:

a = \EYIY \IYable=\FAST \EYIY \BO \UH \LE about=\UX \OB \AYWW \TT across= \AX \EK \FAST \RR \OH \SE \SEact= \AY \EK \TTacting = \AY \EK \TT \STRESS \IH \NGEactivated= \AY \KE \TT \FAST \IH \VV \FAST \EYIY \TT \IH \EDadd= \AY \AY \EDaddress= \SLOW \AY \ED \FAST \RR \EH \SLOW \SEadorn = \SLOW \AX \DO \FAST \OWRR \NEafraid= \AX \FF \FAST \RR \EYIY \EDafter= \AY \FF \TT \FAST \AXRRafternoon= \AY \FF \FAST \TT \FAST \AXRR \FAST \NE \UW \SLOW \NEagain= \AX \GE \SLOW \EY \NEagainst= \AX \GE \EY \NE \SE \SLOW \TTair= \EYRRairplane= \EYRR \PO \FAST \LE \EYIY \NEalarm = \SLOW \UX \LE \AWRR \MMalert= \AX \LE \AXRR \TT alien=\Fast \EY \Fast \EYIY \LE \IY \Slow \Fast \AX \NE alive= \UX \LE \FAST \OH \FAST \OHIY \VVall= \SLOW \AW \SLOW \LOalligator= \AY \LE \FAST \IH \GE \RELAX \EYIY \TT \FAST \AXRRalmost= \OH \FAST \LO \MM \STRESS \OW \SO \TTalone= \UX \LO \OW \OW \SLOW \NEalong= \UX \LO \OH \OH \SLOW \NGOalpha= \AY \LE \FAST \FF \UXalphabet= \AY \LO \FAST \FF \FAST \AX \STRESS \SOFT \BE \EY \SLOW \TTalready= \AW \LE \FAST \RR \EY \DE \IYalso= \SLOW \AW \SLOW \LO \SLOW \SO \OWWWalthough= \FAST \OH \SLOW \LO \DH \SLOW \OWWWalways= \SLOW \AW \LE \WW \EYIY \SLOW \SEam = \AY \AY \MMamong= \RELAX \UX \MM \UX \NGOample = \SLOW \AY \FAST \MM \PO \UX \LOan= \AY \AY \NEanchor =\FAST \EYIY \NGE \KE \RR and = \SLOW \AY \SLOW \NE \ODanger = \FAST \EYIY \FAST \IY \FAST \NE \GE \AX \RRangle = \EYIY \NGE \LEanimal= \SLOW \AY \NE \FAST \IH \MM \SLOW \LEanother= \UX \NE \UX \DH \AXRRanswer= \AY \NE \SLOW \SE \AXRRant = \SLOW \AY \NE \TTany= \STRESS \EY \NE \IY \IYapart= \UX \STRESS \PO \AWRR \TTapartment= \UX \STRESS \PO \FAST \AWRR \TT \MM \EY \NE \TTape= \EYIY \POappear= \UX \SLOW \PE \IYRRapple= \AY \PO \SLOW \UH \LEapril = \EYIY \PE \RR \LEare= \AWRRarm= \AWRR \MMarmy= \FAST \AW \RR \MM \IYaround= \UX \FAST \RR \AYWW \NE \ODarrow= \EYRR \OWWWart= \AWRR \TTas= \AY \SLOW \ZZask= \SLOW \AY \SLOW \SE \EKasleep= \AX \SLOW \SE \LE \IY \FAST \PEass= \AY \AY \SLOW \SEastronaut= \AY \SE \P4 \TT \FAST \RR \FAST \OW \FAST \NO \OH \TTat= \AY \SLOW \TTate = \EYIY \TTaught = \SLOW \AW \SLOW \TTaugust = \SLOW \AW \GO \AX \SE \TTaunt= \OH \NE \TTautomobile= \SLOW \AW \TT \FAST \OWWW \FAST \MM \FAST \OWWW \SOFT \BE \IY \LEautumn= \OH \TT \AX \MM \MMavenue= \AY \VV \EY \NE \IYUWawake= \UX \WW \EYIY \KEaway= \AX \WW \EYIYax = \AY \AY \EK \SEazure = \SLOW \AX \ZH \FAST \IHWW \RRb = \BE \IY \IYbabblebot=\BE \AY \OB \Slow \LO \BO \AW \TT baby= \BE \EYIY \EB \IYback= \BE \SLOW \AY \P4 \EKbad = \BE \AY \AY \EDbag= \BE \AY \AY \EGbake= \BE \EYIY \KEball= \BO \SLOW \OH \LOballoon= \BO \FAST \UX \LE \UW \UW \NEbanana= \BO \FAST \UX \NE \AY \NE \AXband= \BE \SLOW \AY \NE \ODbasic= \BE \EYIY \SE \IH \FAST \P4 \OKbathe = \BE \EYIY \DHbather = \BE \EYIY \DH \FAST \AXRRbathing = \BE \EYIY \DH \IH \NGEbeast = \BE \IY \SE \TTbeauty = \BE \IYUW \TT \IYbeer = \BE \IYRRbeige = \BE \EY \EYIY \JHbelow = \BE \IY \LE \OWWWbeta= \BE \EYIY \TT \UXbib = \BE \IH \IH \EBbird =\FAST \SOFT \BE \AXRR \ED blast = \BO \LE \AY \SE \TTbleed = \BO \LE \IY \DEblue = \BO \FAST \LO \IHWWbong= \BO \OH \SLOW \NGObook = \BO \SLOW \UH \OKbot = \BO \SLOW \OH \TTboy = \BO \OWIYbrain = \BO \FAST \RR \EYIY \NEbread = \FAST \SOFT \BE \RR \SLOW \EH \EDbright = \BO \FAST \RR \OHIY \TTbrightly = \BO \FAST \RR \OHIY \TT \LE \IYbroom = \BO \FAST \RR \SLOW \UW \MMbrooms = \BO \FAST \RR \SLOW \UW \MM \SEbrown = \BO \FAST \RR \AXUW \NEbrush = \BO \FAST \RR \SLOW \AX \SH \SHburn = \BE \AXRR \NEbusiness = \BE \IH \ZZ \NE \IH \SEby = \BO \OHIHc = \SE \SE \IY \IYcab = \KE \AY \AY \EBcake= \KE \EYIY \RELAX \EKcalendar = \KE \FAST \AY \LE \EH \NE \DO \FAST \AXRRcall= \KO \SLOW \OH \LOcamel= \KE \AY \MM \UX \LEcamp= \KE \AY \MM \POcan't = \KE \AY \NE \P4 \TTcan= \KE \SLOW \AY \NEcandle= \KE \SLOW \AY \NE \DE \EHLEcandy= \KE \AY \NE \DE \SLOW \IYcap= \KE \SLOW \AY \POcar = \KO \SLOW \AW \RRcare= \EK \EY \EYRRcarpet = \KO \FAST \AWRR \PE \IH \TTcarriage= \EK \FAST \EYRR \SLOW \IH \JHcarrot= \EK \FAST \EYRR \AX \TTcasual = \KE \AY \ZH \FAST \IHWW \AX \LEcat= \KE \AY \TTcatch= \KE \SLOW \AY \P4 \CHcent= \SE \EY \NE \P4 \TTcenter= \SE \EY \NE \TT \FAST \AXRRcertain = \SLOW \SE \FAST \AXRR \TT \EH \NEchair= \CH \EYRRchalk= \SLOW \CH \OH \FAST \LO \OKchange = \CH \EYIY \NE \JHchangeable = \CH \FAST \EYIY \FAST \NE \FAST \JH \AX \EB \UX \SLOW \LEcheck = \CH \EH \EH \EKchecked = \CH \EH \EH \EK \TTchecker = \CH \EH \EH \KE \AX \RRcheckers = \CH \EH \EH \KE \AX \RR \ZZchecking = \CH \EH \EH \KE \IH \NGEchecks = \CH \EH \EH \KE \SEcheek= \CH \SLOW \IY \KEcherry= \SLOW \CH \FAST \EYRR \IYchest= \CH \EH \EH \SE \TTchests = \CH \EH \EH \SE \TSchi= \KO \OHIYchicken= \CH \IH \KE \EH \NEchip = \CH \IH \IH \PEchips = \CH \IH \IH \PE \SEchurch = \CH \AX \RR \CHcircle= \SLOW \SO \FAST \AXRR \KO \UH \LOcircus= \SLOW \SO \FAST \AXRR \KE \AX \SLOW \SOcity= \SLOW \SE \SLOW \IH \TT \IYclap= \KO \FAST \LE \AY \POclass= \SLOW \KO \FAST \LE \SLOW \AY \SLOW \SEclean= \SLOW \KO \FAST \LE \SLOW \IY \NEclear = \SLOW \KO \FAST \LE \IYRRclimb= \SLOW \KO \FAST \LE \OHIH \SLOW \MMclock = \SLOW \KO \FAST \LO \SLOW \OH \OKclose = \SLOW \KO \FAST \LE \OWWW \FAST \ZZcloset= \SLOW \KO \FAST \LO \SLOW \OH \FAST \ZZ \EH \TTcloth= \SLOW \KO \FAST \LE \SLOW \OH \TH \THclothes= \SLOW \KO \FAST \LE \OWWW \FAST \ZZcloud= \SLOW \KO \FAST \LE \AYWW \ODclown = \SLOW \KO \FAST \LE \AYWW \NOcoat= \KO \OWWW \TTcob =\KO \SLOW \OH \Fast \P4 \OB cognitive = \KO \OH \GO \FAST \NE \FAST \IH \TT \IH \VVcoin= \OK \OWIY \NEcold= \OK \OWWW \LO \FAST \DOcollide = \KO \UX \LE \OHIH \EDcolor= \KO \SLOW \UX \LO \FAST \AXRRcom = \KO \OH \OH \MMcomb = \KO \OW \MMcome = \KE \SLOW \UX \MMcomputer = \KE \UX \MM \FAST \PE \FAST \IYUW \TT \AX \RRcomputers=\KE \UX \MM \FAST \PE \FAST \IYUW \TT \AX \RR \SE contain= \KE \AX \NE \TT \EYIY \NEcontainer= \KE \AX \NE \TT \FAST \EYIY \NE \FAST \AXRRcook= \KO \SLOW \UH \KOcookie = \KO \SLOW \UH \KE \IYcool= \KO \SLOW \UW \LEcoop = \KE \UW \UW \POcopy = \KO \SLOW \OH \PE \FAST \IYcore = \KO \SLOW \OWRRcork = \KO \OWRR \EKcorn = \KO \OWRR \NOcorner = \KO \FAST \OWRR \NE \FAST \AXRRcorona = \KO \OW \RR \OW \NO \AXcorrect = \KO \OWRR \EH \EK \TTcorrected = \KO \OWRR \EH \EK \TT \IH \EDcorrecting = \KO \OWRR \EH \EK \TT \IH \NGEcorrects = \KO \OWRR \EH \EK \TScost= \KO \SLOW \AW \SE \TTcosts = \KO \SLOW \AW \SE \TScotton = \KO \SLOW \OH \TT \AX \NEcould = \KO \UH \UH \ODcount= \KE \FAST \AYWW \NE \TTcountry= \KO \UX \NE \TT \RR \IYcover= \KO \UX \VV \AXRRcow = \KO \AYWWcracker= \EK \FAST \RR \AY \KE \AXRRcrain = \KE \RR \EYIY \NEcrayon= \EK \RR \FAST \EYIY \OH \NEcreated= \KO \Fast \RR \IY \EYIY \TT \IH \ED crib = \KO \RR \SLOW \IH \EBcross= \OK \FAST \RR \OH \SLOW \SEcrowd= \KO \FAST \RR \AYWW \ODcrown = \KE \FAST \RR \AYWW \NEcry= \KO \FAST \RR \OHIYcub =\KO \SLOW \UX \EB cup= \KO \SLOW \UX \P4 \POcurb = \KO \AXRR \EBcut= \KE \UX \P4 \TTcute = \KE \IYUW \P4 \TTd = \DE \IY \IYdaisy= \DE \EYIY \ZZ \FAST \IYdance= \DE \SLOW \AY \NE \SLOW \SEdanger = \DE \EYIY \FAST \NE \FAST \JH \FAST \AXRRdark= \DO \AWRR \P4 \EKdate = \DE \FAST \EYIY \IY \P4 \TTdaughter = \DE \SLOW \AW \TT \FAST \AXRRday = \DE \EYIYdeactivated= \DE \IY \P4 \AY \KE \TT \IH \VV \FAST \EYIY \TT \IH \EDdear= \DE \IY \FAST \IYRRdecember = \DE \FAST \IY \SE \EH \MM \EB \FAST \RRdeclare = \DE \FAST \IY \P4 \EK \FAST \LE \EYRRdeep= \DE \SLOW \IY \P4 \PEdeer= \DE \IYRRdelta= \DE \EHLE \TT \FAST \UXdentist= \DE \FAST \EY \NE \TT \IH \SE \TTdesert= \DE \STRESS \EH \ZZ \FAST \AXRR \TTdesk= \DE \EH \SE \KEdessert= \DE \EH \FAST \ZZ \FAST \AXRR \TTdictionary= \FAST \DE \FAST \STRESS \IH \KE \CH \AX \NE \FAST \EYRR \IYdifferent= \DE \FAST \IH \FF \RR \FAST \EH \NE \TTdifficult= \DE \FAST \IH \FF \IH \KO \FAST \UH \LE \TTdime= \DO \OHIY \MMdinner= \DE \IH \NE \FAST \AXRRdirection= \DE \FAST \AXRR \EH \KE \SH \AX \NEdirt= \DE \FAST \AX \FAST \AXRR \P4 \TTdirty= \DE \FAST \AXRR \TT \SLOW \IYdiscover= \DE \FAST \IH \SE \KE \UX \VV \AXRRdish= \DE \SLOW \IH \SLOW \SHdistance= \DE \FAST \IH \SE \TT \AX \NE \SLOW \SEdivide = \DE \FAST \IH \VV \OHIH \DEdivided = \DE \FAST \IH \VV \OHIH \DE \SLOW \IH \EDdo = \DE \IHWWdoctor= \DO \OH \KE \TT \FAST \AXRRdodge = \DO \OH \OH \OD \JHdoe = \DO \OWWWdog = \DO \OH \OH \OGdoing = \DE \FAST \IHWW \SLOW \IH \NGEdoll= \DO \OH \OH \LOdollar= \DO \FAST \OH \SLOW \LE \AXRRdolphin= \DO \OH \LO \FF \IH \NEdong= \DO \SLOW \OH \SLOW \NGOdoor= \DO \OWRRdot = \DO \SLOW \OH \TTdouble =\DO \UX \OB \UH \LE down = \DO \AYWW \NEdozen= \DE \UX \FAST \ZZ \EY \NEdragon= \DO \FAST \RR \AY \FAST \GE \AX \NEdrain = \DE \FAST \RR \EYIY \NEdraw= \DO \FAST \RR \OH \OHdress= \DE \FAST \RR \SLOW \EY \SEdrill= \DE \FAST \RR \SLOW \IH \LEdrink= \DE \FAST \RR \RELAX \IY \NGE \EKdrive= \DO \FAST \RR \OHIH \VVdrop= \DO \FAST \RR \SLOW \OH \FAST \POdrum= \DE \FAST \RR \SLOW \UX \MMdry= \DO \FAST \RR \OHIYduck= \DO \SLOW \UX \KEduring= \DO \FAST \AXRR \SLOW \IH \NGEdusts = \DO \AX \SE \P4 \TSdwarfs = \DO \FAST \WW \OWRR \FF \SEe = \IY \IYeach= \IY \IY \P4 \CHeagle= \IY \GE \AX \LEear = \IYRR \RRearly= \FAST \AXRR \LE \FAST \IYearn = \AX \RR \NEearring = \IYRR \FAST \RR \IY \NGEearth= \AXRR \TH \THeasy= \SLOW \IY \ZZ \FAST \IYeat= \SLOW \IY \TTeffort = \SLOW \EH \FF \FAST \OWRR \TTegg= \SLOW \EY \GEeight = \EYIY \P4 \TTeighteen =\EYIY \P4 \TT \IY \NE eighty = \EYIY \P4 \TT \IYeither= \SLOW \IY \FAST \DH \AXRRelbow= \EH \LE \SOFT \BO \OWWWelephant= \EHLE \FAST \UX \FF \SLOW \AX \NE \TTeleven =\FAST \IH \LE \EH \VV \Fast \EH \NE emotional = \IY \MM \OW \SH \FAST \AX \NE \FAST \UX \LEempty= \EY \MM \PE \TT \IYend = \SLOW \EH \SLOW \NE \ODengage = \SLOW \IH \NE \P4 \GE \EYIY \JHengagement = \SLOW \IH \NE \FAST \GE \EYIY \JH \FAST \MM \FAST \EY \NE \TTengages = \SLOW \IH \NE \FAST \GE \EYIY \JH \IH \FAST \ZZengaging = \SLOW \IH \NE \FAST \GE \EYIY \JH \IH \NGEengine= \EY \NE \FAST \JH \SLOW \IH \NEenjoy= \EY \NE \FAST \JH \OWIYenough= \RELAX \SLOW \IY \NE \SLOW \AX \FFenrage = \SLOW \IH \NE \FAST \RR \EYIY \JHenraged = \SLOW \IH \NE \FAST \RR \EYIY \JH \EDenrages = \SLOW \IH \NE \FAST \RR \EYIY \JH \IH \FAST \ZZenraging = \SLOW \IH \NE \FAST \RR \EYIY \JH \IH \NGEenter= \SLOW \EY \NE \TT \FAST \AXRRentire= \SLOW \EY \NE \P4 \TT \OHIH \FAST \RRepsillon= \EH \PO \SE \SLOW \IH \FAST \LO \FAST \OH \NOequal = \IY \KO \FAST \WW \UX \LEequals = \IY \KO \FAST \WW \UX \LE \FAST \ZZerection= \SLOW \IY \FAST \RR \EH \KE \SH \AX \NEerror = \FAST \EYRR \OWRRescape = \EH \SE \KE \FAST \EYIY \P4 \PEescaped = \EH \SE \KE \FAST \EYIY \PE \TTescapes = \EH \SE \KE \FAST \EYIY \PE \SEescaping = \EH \SE \KE \FAST \EYIY \PE \IH \NGEeta= \EYIY \TT \FAST \UXeven = \SLOW \IY \VV \EY \NEever= \EY \VV \FAST \AXRRevery= \EY \VV \RR \IYextend = \IH \KE \SE \TT \FAST \EY \SLOW \NE \ODextent = \EH \KE \SE \TT \FAST \EH \NE \TTextra= \EY \KE \SE \TT \FAST \RR \FAST \AXextract = \EH \KE \SE \TT \FAST \RR \FAST \AY \EK \TTeye= \OHIYf = \SLOW \EH \FFface= \FF \EYIY \SEfah = \FF \OH \OHfall = \FF \SLOW \OH \LOfallen = \FF \SLOW \OH \LE \FAST \EH \NEfalls = \FF \OH \OH \LO \SEfamily= \FF \AY \MM \FAST \AX \LE \IYfamous = \FF \EYIY \MM \AX \SEfan = \FF \AY \AY \NEfar = \FF \AWRRfarm = \FF \AWRR \MMfart= \FF \AWRR \TTfast = \FF \AY \SE \TTfaster = \FF \AY \SE \TT \RRfastest = \FF \AY \SE \TT \EH \SE \TTfather = \FF \SLOW \AW \DH \AX \RRfaucet = \FF \AW \SLOW \SE \EY \TTfaucets = \FF \AW \SLOW \SE \EY \TSfault = \FF \OH \OH \LO \TTfaults = \FF \OH \OH \LO \TSfavorite= \FF \FAST \EYIY \VV \FAST \RR \IH \TTfear = \FF \IYRRfears = \FF \IYRR \SEfeature = \FF \IY \CH \AX \RRfebruary = \FF \EH \EB \RR \UW \EYRR \IYfed = \FF \EH \EH \EDfeed = \FF \IY \IY \EDfeeding = \FF \IY \IY \DE \IH \NGEfeeds = \FF \IY \IY \DE \ZZfeel= \SLOW \FF \SLOW \IY \LOfeet = \FF \IY \TTfence= \FF \EY \NE \SO \SOfern = \FF \AXRR \NEfew = \FF \IYUWfibber =\Slow \FF \IH \Soft \BO \Slow \RR fiction = \FF \IH \KE \SH \AX \NEfield = \FF \SLOW \IY \LE \DEfifteen =\FF \IH \FF \TT \IY \NE fifty = \FF \IH \FF \TT \IYfight = \SLOW \FF \FAST \OHIY \P4 \TTfighter = \FF \OHIY \TT \RRfighting = \FF \OHIY \TT \IH \NGEfights = \FF \OHIY \TSfill= \FF \SLOW \RELAX \IH \LEfinally= \FF \FAST \OHIY \NO \FAST \LE \IYfind= \FF \OHIY \NE \ODfinger= \FF \IH \FAST \NGE \GE \AXRRfir = \FF \AXRRfire= \FF \OHIY \RRfirst= \FF \AXRR \SE \TTfish= \FF \IH \IH \SH \SHfist= \FF \IH \IH \SE \TTfit= \FF \IH \TTfive = \FF \OHIH \VVfix = \FF \IH \KE \SEfixed = \FF \IH \KE \SE \TTflag = \FF \LE \AY \AY \EGflat= \FF \LE \AY \TTflight = \FF \LE \OHIY \TTflights = \FF \LE \OHIY \TSfloat= \FF \LE \OWWW \TTfloor= \FF \LO \OWRRflour= \FF \LO \AYWW \RRflower= \FF \LO \AYWW \RRfly= \FF \LO \OHIYfollow= \FF \AW \LO \OWWWfood = \FF \UW \UW \DEfool = \FF \UW \UW \LOfoot= \FF \SLOW \UH \TTfootball= \FF \SLOW \UH \TT \FAST \P4 \SOFT \BO \OH \SLOW \LOfor = \FF \OWRRfore = \FF \OWRRforeign = \FF \OWRR \FAST \IH \NEforest= \FF \OWRR \FAST \EH \SE \TTforget= \FF \FAST \OWRR \GE \STRESS \EH \TTfork = \FF \OWRR \KEforks = \FF \OWRR \KE \SEform = \FF \OWRR \MMfort = \FF \OWRR \TTforth = \FF \OWRR \THforties = \FF \OWRR \TT \IY \FAST \ZZforts = \FF \OWRR \TSfortune = \FF \OWRR \CH \AX \NEforty =\FF \Fast \OWRR \TT \IY forward= \FF \FAST \OWRR \FAST \WW \AXRR \EDfour =\FF \Fast \OW \OWRR fourteen =\FF \FAST \OWRR \Fast \TT \IY \NE fox = \FF \SLOW \OH \KO \SEfree = \SLOW \FF \RR \SLOW \IYfreeze = \FF \RR \IY \ZZfreezer = \FF \RR \IY \ZZ \FAST \AXRRfreezers = \FF \RR \IY \ZZ \FAST \AXRR \ZZfreezing = \FF \RR \IY \ZZ \IH \NGEfriday = \FF \RR \OHIY \DE \EYIYfriend= \FF \RR \EH \NE \DOfright= \FF \RR \OHIY \TTfrog= \FF \RR \OH \SLOW \OGfrom= \FF \RR \UX \SLOW \MMfront= \FF \RR \UX \NE \TTfrozen = \FF \RR \OW \ZZ \EH \NEfruit= \FF \RR \UW \TTfull = \FF \RELAX \UH \RELAX \UH \LOfun= \FF \SLOW \UX \NEfunny= \FF \SLOW \UX \FAST \NE \IYfur= \FF \AXRRfurniture = \FF \FAST \AXRR \NE \FAST \IH \CH \FAST \AXRRfxalarm= \RESET \REPEAT \3 \A7 \REPEAT \3 \A6 \REPEAT \3 \A4 \REPEAT \3 \A3 \A1 \REPEAT \3 \A0 \RESETfxalpha= a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y zfxberzerkchickenfightlikearobot=\SPEED \120 \BEND \4 \NTA1 chicken,, fight like a robot \Reset fxberzerkgotthehumaniod=\SPEED \120 \BEND \3 \NTG2 got thu humaniod,, \SPEED \120 \BEND \10 \NTA2 got thu intruder \RESET fxberzerkthehumaniodmustnotescape=\SPEED \120 \BEND \10 \NTA1 thu humaniod must not escape \RESET fxburningfusewithbang= \RESET \SPEED \114 \CH \P1 \CH \P1 \CH \SPEED \0 \REPEAT \6 \SH \SE \M1 \RESETfxburp=\Reset \SPEED \74 \BEND \0 \NTC1 \AXRR \SPEED \0 \P0 fxcountdown=\RESET ten \P3 nine \P3 eight \P3 seven \P3 six \P3 five \P3 four \P3 three \P3 two \P3 onefxcrickets=\RESET \C3 \P4 \C3 \P3 \NTC2 \C3 \P6 \C3 \P2 \C3 \P6 \C3 \P2 \BEND \14 \NTD3 \SPEED \90 \C3 \P2 \C3 \P4 \RESET fxdanger=\RESET \NTA#2 \BEND \1 \A5 \P5 danger \P5 \A5 \P5 danger \P5 \A5 \P5 danger \RESET fxdemowords=\RESET \NTC2 activated, \NTD2 basic, \NTE2 correct, \NTF2 discover, \NTD2 engage, \NTC2 favorite, \P1 guaging,, \NTB2 humaniod, \NTA2 innovations, \NTG2 january, \NTF2 keep, \NTE2 learn, music, \NTC2 new, \NTD2 often,, \NTC2 plenty, \NTE2 quick, \NTD2 ready, \NTC2 sincerity,, \NTC3 teacher, \NTB2 uncle, \NTA2 vacation, \NTG2 welcome, \NTF2 xray, \NTE2 yes,, \SPEED \120 and \NTD2 finally,, \SPEED \100 \NTC2 zebra \SPEED \0 \P0 \RESET fxfrogs=\RESET \NTC1 \SPEED \20 \BEND \0 \BO \FAST \UX \ED \P2 \BEND \10 \NTD2 \FAST \WW \FAST \OHIY \Fast \ZZ \SLOW \P1 \NTA1 \SPEED \60 \BEND \3 \FAST \AXRR \P2 \NTC1 \SPEED \20 \BEND \0 \BO \FAST \UX \ED \BEND \10 \NTD2 \FAST \WW \FAST \OHIY \Fast \ZZ \SLOW \P4 \NTA1 \SPEED \60 \BEND \3 \FAST \AXRR \Reset fxmonths=\RESET january, february, march, april, may, june, july, august, september, october, november, decemberfxnumbers=\RESET one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety, hundred, thousand, million fxping= \RESET \SPEED \50 \BEND \0 \M0 \M0 \M0 \RESETfxrobotbede=\RESET \SPEED \127 \BE \IY \DE \IY \BE \IY \DE \IY \BE \IY \DE \IY \BE \IY \DE \IY \BE \IY \DE \IY \RESET fxrobotbeeps=\R2 \A4 \C6 \C1 \D5 \R3 \B4 \B2 fxrobotdroid= \RESET \B3 \P4 \B2 \P5 \R7 \R0 \R7 \R2 \R7 \R4 \R7 \R6 \R8 \R3 \R3 \R3 \P4 \B6 \P4 \B6 \P4 \C8 \P4 \C9fxrobotsad=\Reset \BEND \0 \SPEED \61 \B8 \P1 \B3 \B0 \P1 \C9 \P1 \Reset fxsongironman=\RESET \BEND \2 \SPEED \72 \NTA1 \OHIH \IH \DELAY \23 \SPEED \68 \NTC2 \AY \FAST \AY \MM \DELAY \25 \FAST \OHIH \IH \FAST \NTD2 \AX \SPEED \90 \RR \FAST \NO \FAST \STRESS \MM \AY \FAST \AY \SLOW \NE \RESET fxsongscales=\RESET \NTC2 doe \NTD2 ray \NTE2 me \NTF2 fah \NTG2 so \NTA2 la \NTB2 tee \NTC3 doe \RESET fxsongstar=\RESET \NTG2 \DE \REPEAT \6 \IY \NTE2 \DO \REPEAT \2 \UX \NTC2 \DO \REPEAT \8 \UW \NTE2 \DO \REPEAT \8 \UX \NTG2 \DO \REPEAT \8 \IY \NTC3 \DO \REPEAT \8 \UX \MM \MM \P0 \RESET fxstatus1= \RESET \B6 \P3 \B6 \P3 \B6 \P3 \B7 \B0 \RESETfxstatus2=\Reset \B0 \P2 \B0 \P2 \B0 \P2 \B6 \P2 \B0 \P2 \B6 fxtest=\Reset testing,, testing,, one two three fxufo= \RESET \REPEAT \5 \A5fxwomwom=\SPEED \120 \BEND \0 \C0 \BEND \ 1 \C0 \BEND \2 \C0 \BEND \3 \C0 \BEND \4 \C0 \BEND \5 \C0 \BEND \6 \C0 \BEND \7 \C0 \BEND \8 \C0 \BEND \9 \C0 \BEND \10 \C0 \BEND \11 \C0 \BEND \12 \C0 \BEND \13 \C0 \BEND \14 \C0 \BEND \15 \C0 \BEND \0 \C2 \BEND \ 1 \C2 \BEND \2 \C2 \BEND \3 \C2 \BEND \4 \C2 \BEND \5 \C2 \BEND \6 \C2 \BEND \7 \C2 \BEND \8 \C2 \BEND \9 \C2 \BEND \10 \C2 \BEND \11 \C2 \BEND \12 \C2 \BEND \13 \C2 \BEND \14 \C2 \BEND \15 \C2 g = \JH \IY \IYgame =\Slow \GE \EYIY \MM gamma=\Slow \GE \AY \MM \UX garden= \GO \AW \FAST \RR \FAST \DE \EH \NEgarment = \GO \FAST \AWRR \MM \EH \NE \TTgate =\Slow \GE \EYIY \TT gates =\Slow \GE \EYIY \SLOW \TS gauge =\Slow \GE \EYIY \JH gentlemen = \JH \FAST \EH \NE \TT \LE \MM \EH \SLOW \NEget =\Slow \GE \SLOW \EH \TT giant= \JH \OHIY \FAST \EY \NE \TTgift=\Slow \GE \IH \FF \TT giraffe= \JH \FAST \AXRR \SLOW \AY \FFgirl=\Slow \GE \Fast \AXRR \Fast \RR \SLOW \LO give=\Slow \GE \SLOW \IH \FAST \VV glad=\Slow \GO \FAST \LE \SLOW \AY \ED glass=\Slow \GO \FAST \LE \SLOW \AY \SE glasses=\Slow \GO \FAST \LE \SLOW \AY \SE \FAST \SOFT \EH \FAST \ZZ glove=\Slow \GO \FAST \LO \UX \SLOW \VV glue =\Slow \GO \FAST \LO \IHWW go =\Slow \GO \SLOW \OWWW goat=\Slow \GO \OWWW \TT gong=\Slow \GO \SLOW \OH \NGO good =\Slow \GO \UH \UH \OD goodbye=\Slow \GO \UW \OD \FAST \P4 \SOFT \BO \OHIH goose=\Slow \GO \SLOW \UW \SE got =\Slow \GO \OH \OH \TT grand=\Slow \GE \FAST \RR \AY \NE \OD grandfather=\Slow \GE \FAST \RR \AY \NE \DO \FF \SLOW \AW \DH \AX \RR grandmother=\Slow \GE \FAST \RR \AY \NE \ED \MM \UX \TH \AXRR grape=\Slow \GE \FAST \RR \EYIY \PO grapefruit=\Slow \GE \FAST \RR \EYIY \PO \FF \FAST \RR \UW \TT grass=\Slow \GO \FAST \RR \SLOW \AY \SE \SE grasshopper=\Slow \GO \FAST \RR \AY \SE \HO \OH \PO \FAST \AXRR gray=\Slow \GO \FAST \RR \SLOW \EYIY grease =\Slow \GO \FAST \RR \SLOW \IY \SE great =\Slow \GO \FAST \RR \EYIY \TT green =\Slow \GO \FAST \RR \SLOW \IY \NE grey=\Slow \GO \FAST \RR \EYIY ground=\Slow \GO \FAST \RR \AY \FAST \AYWW \FAST \NE \OD group=\Slow \GO \FAST \RR \UW \UW \PO grow=\Slow \GO \FAST \RR \OW \OWWW guaged =\Slow \GE \EYIY \JH \SOFT \DE guages =\Slow \GE \EYIY \JH \IH \ZZ guaging =\Slow \GE \EYIY \JH \IH \NGE guest =\Slow \GE \EH \EH \SE \TT h = \EYIY \CHhair = \HE \EY \EYRRhalf= \HO \SLOW \AY \FFhammer= \HE \AY \MM \AXRRhand = \HE \AY \SLOW \NE \ODhandle= \HE \SLOW \AY \NE \FAST \DE \FAST \AX \SLOW \LEhandstands = \HE \AY \NE \DE \SE \TT \AY \NE \ED \SEhappen= \HE \AY \PO \EH \NEhappy= \HE \AY \PE \IYhard= \HO \AWRR \ODhat = \HE \SLOW \AY \TThave= \HE \SLOW \AY \VVhe = \HE \IYhead= \HE \SLOW \EH \DEhealth= \HE \SLOW \EH \LE \SLOW \THhear = \HE \IYRRheart= \HE \AWRR \TTheat= \HE \SLOW \IY \TTheavy= \HE \EH \VV \IYhell = \HE \EH \LE \LEhello = \HE \FAST \EHLE \LO \OWWWhelp= \HE \EHLE \POher= \HE \AXRRhere= \HE \IYRRhers= \HE \FAST \AXRR \ZZherself= \HE \FAST \AXRR \SE \EH \LO \FFhex = \HE \SLOW \EH \KE \SEhexagon = \HE \EH \KE \SE \FAST \AX \GO \OH \NOhi= \HO \OHIYhide= \HO \OHIY \P4 \SLOW \EDhigh= \HO \OHIYhim= \HE \SLOW \IH \MMhimself= \HE \IH \MM \SE \EH \LO \FFhis= \HE \IH \ZZhit= \HE \IH \TThobbies= \HO \OH \Fast \BE \Slow \IY \Fast \SE hobby= \HO \OH \Fast \BE \Slow \IY hoe = \HE \OW \OWWWhold= \HO \OW \SLOW \LO \ODhole= \HO \OWWW \SLOW \LOholiday= \HO \OH \LE \IH \DE \EYIYhollow= \HO \OH \LO \FAST \OW \FAST \OWWWhome= \HO \OW \OW \SLOW \MMhonest= \OH \NE \EH \SE \TThoney= \HO \UX \NE \IYhook= \HO \UH \OKhop= \HO \OH \POhorn= \HO \OWRR \NEhorse= \HO \OWRR \SEhot = \HE \OH \TThour = \AYWW \RRhouse= \HO \AYWW \SEhow= \HO \SLOW \AYWWhug= \HO \SLOW \UX \SLOW \OGhuman= \HE \FAST \IYUW \MM \EH \NEhumaniod= \HO \FAST \IYUW \MM \UX \FAST \NO \FAST \OW \FAST \OWIY \EDhundred = \HO \UX \NE \ED \FAST \RR \EH \EDhung = \HE \SLOW \UX \SLOW \NGOhunger = \HO \UX \FAST \NGE \GE \RRhungry= \HO \UX \NGE \GE \FAST \RR \IYhurry= \HO \AXRR \IYhurt= \HO \AXRR \TTi = \OHIHice= \OHIY \SE \SEicecream= \FAST \OHIY \FAST \IY \SLOW \SE \FAST \P4 \KE \RR \IY \MMif= \IH \FF \FFill= \IH \LOin= \SLOW \IH \SLOW \NEinfinitive = \SLOW \IH \FAST \NE \SLOW \FF \IH \NE \IH \TT \IH \VVinjure = \SLOW \IH \NE \JH \FAST \AXRRinnovate = \SLOW \IH \NE \FAST \OW \VV \EYIY \TTinnovations = \SLOW \IH \NE \FAST \OW \VV \FAST \EYIY \SH \AX \NO \SEinsect= \IH \NE \SE \EH \KE \TTinside= \IH \NE \SLOW \SE \OHIY \EDinstead= \IH \NE \SE \TT \SLOW \STRESS \EH \EDinstruct = \IH \NE \SE \TT \FAST \RR \FAST \AX \OK \TTinterrupt = \IH \NE \TT \AX \FAST \RR \UX \PE \TTinto= \IH \NE \TT \IHWWintrigue = \IH \NE \TT \FAST \RR \IY \EGintrigued = \IH \NE \TT \FAST \RR \IY \GE \EDintrigues = \IH \NE \TT \FAST \RR \IY \GE \ZZintriguing = \IH \NE \TT \FAST \RR \IY \GE \IH \NGEintruder= \IH \NE \TT \RR \UW \FAST \DE \FAST \AX \FAST \AXRRinvestigate = \FAST \IH \NE \VV \EH \SE \TT \IH \GE \FAST \EY \FAST \EYIY \TTinvestigated = \FAST \IH \NE \VV \EH \SE \TT \IH \GE \FAST \EY \FAST \EYIY \TT \IH \EDinvestigates = \FAST \IH \NE \VV \EH \SE \TT \IH \GE \FAST \EY \FAST \EYIY \TT \SEinvestigating = \FAST \IH \NE \VV \EH \SE \TT \IH \GE \FAST \EY \FAST \EYIY \TT \IH \NGEinvestigator = \FAST \IH \NE \VV \EH \SE \TT \IH \GE \FAST \EY \FAST \EYIY \TT \FAST \AXRRinvestigators = \FAST \IH \NE \VV \EH \SE \TT \IH \GE \FAST \EY \FAST \EYIY \TT \FAST \AXRR \FAST \ZZinvite= \FAST \IH \NE \VV \OHIY \TTiota= \OHIY \OW \TT \UXiron= \FAST \OH \FAST \OHIH \FAST \AX \RR \NOis = \SLOW \IH \ZZisland= \FAST \OHIH \FAST \IH \LE \EH \NE \DOit = \SLOW \IH \SLOW \TTj = \JH \EYIYjacket= \JH \AY \KE \IH \TTjam= \JH \SLOW \AY \SLOW \MMjanuary = \JH \AY \NE \FAST \IYUW \FAST \EYRR \IYjar= \JH \AWRRjelly= \JH \EH \LE \IYjet = \JH \EH \EH \TTjob =\JH \AW \AW \P4 \OB joke= \FAST \JH \SLOW \OW \OKjoy= \JH \OWIYjudge = \JH \AX \AX \ED \JHjuice= \JH \IYUW \SE \SEjuly = \JH \FAST \IHWW \LE \OHIHjump= \JH \UX \MM \POjumped = \JH \AX \MM \PE \TTjune = \JH \IYUW \NOjust= \JH \AX \SE \TTk = \KE \EYIYkangaroo= \KE \AY \FAST \IY \NGE \FAST \AX \RR \UH \UHkappa= \KE \AY \PO \UXkeep=\KE \Slow \IY \PE key = \KE \IY \IYkick= \KE \IH \KEkitchen= \KE \IH \CH \EH \NEkite = \KE \OHIH \TTknee= \NE \IY \IYknife= \NE \OHIY \FFknob = \NO \OH \OH \OBknock= \NE \OH \KOknot= \NE \SLOW \OH \TTknow = \NO \OW \OWWWl = \EH \EHLEla = \LO \OH \OHladder= \LE \AY \DE \AXRRlake = \LE \EYIY \EKlambda= \LE \AY \MM \DO \UXlamp= \LE \AY \MM \POland= \LE \AY \NE \DOlapel = \LE \UX \PE \EH \EHLElarge= \LE \AWRR \JHlast= \LE \SLOW \AY \SE \TTlate= \LE \EYIY \TTlaugh= \LE \AY \AY \FFlay= \LE \EYIY \FAST \IYlazy = \LE \EYIY \FAST \ZZ \IYlead = \LE \EH \EH \EDleaf= \LE \IY \FFlean= \LE \IY \NEleap= \LE \IY \PElearn= \LE \AXRR \NEleash = \LE \IY \IY \SH \SHleave= \LE \IY \VVleft= \LE \EH \FF \TTleg= \LE \EH \EGlegislate = \LE \EH \JH \EH \SE \LE \FAST \EYIY \TTlegislated = \LE \EH \JH \EH \SE \LE \FAST \EYIY \TT \IH \EDlegislates = \LE \EH \JH \EH \SE \LE \FAST \EYIY \TT \SElegislating = \LE \EH \JH \EH \SE \LE \FAST \EYIY \TT \IH \NGElegislature = \LE \EH \JH \EH \SE \LE \FAST \EYIY \CH \AXRRlei= \LE \EYIYlemon= \LE \EH \MM \AX \NElength= \LE \EH \NGE \THless= \LE \EH \SE \SElet= \LE \EH \TTletter = \LE \EH \TT \AX \RRlettuce= \LE \EH \TT \AX \SE \SElibrary= \LE \OHIY \EB \RR \FAST \EYRR \IYlid= \LE \SLOW \IH \EDlie= \LE \OHIY \FAST \IYlift= \LE \IH \FF \TTlight= \LE \OHIY \TTlike = \LE \FAST \OH \FAST \OHIY \EKline= \LE \OHIY \NElinguist = \LE \IH \NGE \FAST \WW \IH \SE \TTlion= \LE \OHIY \AX \NEliquid= \LE \IH \KE \FAST \WW \IH \EDlisten= \LE \IH \SE \EH \NElists = \LE \IH \SE \TSlitter =\LE \IH \TT \AXRR little = \LE \IH \TT \EHLElock= \LO \OH \OKlong= \LO \OH \SLOW \NGOlook= \LO \SLOW \STRESS \UH \OKloose= \LE \UW \UW \SElose= \LO \SLOW \UW \FAST \ZZloud= \LO \AYWW \DOlove= \LO \SLOW \UX \SLOW \VVlow= \SLOW \LO \OWWWluke = \LE \IHWW \OKlunch= \LO \UX \SLOW \NE \CHlynxmotion= \LE \FAST \IH \NGE \KO \FAST \SO \FAST \MM \OW \SH \AX \NEm = \EH \EH \MMmachine= \MM \FAST \UX \SLOW \SH \IY \NEmagnevation=\Fast \MM \AY \GE \Fast \NE \IH \VV \FAST \EYIY \SH \AX \NO mail= \MM \EYIY \LOmake= \MM \EYIY \EKmale= \MM \EYIY \LOmama = \MM \OH \OH \MM \OHman= \MM \SLOW \AY \SLOW \NEmany= \MM \EH \NE \IYmarch = \MM \AWRR \CHmarry= \MM \EYRR \IYmatch= \MM \AY \SLOW \CHmay = \MM \EYIYmaybe= \MM \EYIY \EB \IYme = \MM \IY \IYmean= \MM \SLOW \IY \NEmeasure = \MM \EH \ZH \FAST \AXRRmeasures = \MM \EH \ZH \FAST \AXRR \FAST \ZZmelt= \MM \EH \LE \TTmemories = \MM \EH \MM \FAST \AXRR \IY \FAST \ZZmemory = \MM \EH \MM \FAST \AXRR \IYmen = \MM \EH \EH \NEmend= \MM \EH \NE \ODmerry= \MM \EH \FAST \EYRR \IYmetal= \MM \EH \TT \EHLEmice = \MM \FAST \OH \FAST \OHIY \SE \SEmiddle= \MM \IH \DO \LOmight = \MM \FAST \OH \FAST \OHIY \TTmilk = \MM \IH \FAST \LE \EKmillion =\MM \IH \FAST \LE \FAST \IYEH \Slow \NE mind= \MM \FAST \OHIH \FAST \IH \NE \ODmine = \MM \OHIY \NEminus= \MM \FAST \OHIH \FAST \IH \FAST \NO \SLOW \UX \SEminute = \MM \FAST \IH \NE \IH \TTmirror= \MM \IYRR \OWRRmistake= \MM \FAST \IH \SE \TT \EYIY \EKmitten= \MM \IH \SLOW \TT \FAST \EY \NEmix= \MM \IH \KE \SEmonday = \MM \UX \NE \DE \EYIYmoney= \MM \UX \NE \IYmonkey= \MM \UX \NE \KE \IYmonth = \MM \UX \NE \THmoon= \MM \UW \NEmore= \MM \FAST \OW \OWRRmorning= \MM \FAST \OW \FAST \OWRR \NE \IH \NGEmost= \MM \SLOW \OW \SE \TTmother= \MM \UX \TH \FAST \AXRRmotor= \MM \OW \TT \FAST \AXRRmountain= \MM \FAST \AYWW \NE \TT \EY \NEmouse = \MM \AYWW \SEmouth= \MM \AYWW \SLOW \THmove= \MM \SLOW \UW \VVmu= \MM \IYUWmuch= \MM \UX \CHmud= \MM \SLOW \UX \DOmuseum= \MM \IYUW \FAST \ZZ \IY \FAST \UX \MMmusic= \MM \IYUW \ZZ \IH \EKmust= \MM \UX \SE \TT my = \MM \OHIYmyself= \MM \OHIY \SE \EH \LE \FFn = \EH \EH \NEnail= \NE \EYIY \LOname = \NE \EYIY \MMnarrow= \NE \EYRR \OWWWnation = \NE \EYIY \SH \AX \NEnear= \NE \IYRRnearly= \NE \FAST \IYRR \LE \IYneck= \NE \EH \EKneed = \NE \SLOW \IY \EDneedle= \NE \IY \DO \LOneighbor= \NE \EYIY \EB \AXRRneither= \NE \IY \TH \FAST \AXRRnet= \NE \EH \TT network=\NE \EH \TT \Fast \WW \Fast \AXRR \EK never= \NE \EH \FAST \VV \AXRRnew= \NE \IYUWnext= \NE \EH \KE \SE \TTnickel= \NE \IH \KE \EHLEnight= \NE \OHIY \TTnine =\NE \Stress \OHIH \NE nineteen =\NE \Fast \Relax \OHIY \NE \TT \IY \SLOW \NE ninety =\NE \Fast \Relax \OHIY \NE \TT \IY nip = \NE \IH \PEnipped = \NE \IH \PE \P4 \TTnipping = \NE \IH \PE \IH \NGEnips = \NE \IH \PE \SEno = \NO \OWWWnobody= \NO \OW \FAST \P4 \SOFT \BO \OH \DE \IYnoise = \NO \OWIY \FAST \IY \SEnone= \NO \SLOW \UX \NEnoon= \NO \SLOW \UW \NEnose= \NO \OWWW \ZZnot= \NE \OH \TTnotice= \NO \OW \TT \IH \SEnovember = \NO \OW \VV \FAST \EH \MM \EB \FAST \AXRRnow= \NO \AYWWnu= \NO \IHWWnumber= \NE \UX \MM \SOFT \BO \RRnurse= \NO \AXRR \SEnut= \NO \UX \TTo = \OW \OWWWo'clock= \OW \P4 \KO \LO \OH \OKoar= \OWRR \FAST \RRobey= \SLOW \OW \SOFT \BO \EYIYobject= \OH \OB \JH \EH \EK \TTocean= \OW \SH \AX \NEoctober = \OH \OK \TT \OW \SOFT \BO \FAST \AXRRoctopus= \FAST \OH \KO \TT \FAST \AX \PO \FAST \UH \SEof = \SLOW \UX \VVoff = \OH \OH \FF \FFoften= \OH \FF \TT \EH \NEold= \OW \LO \DOomega= \OW \MM \EYIY \GE \UXomicron= \OW \MM \IH \KO \RR \OH \NOon = \OH \OH \NOonce= \WW \UX \NE \SEone =\WW \Stress \OH \SLOW \NE only= \OW \NO \LE \IYoopic= \SLOW \UW \PO \SLOW \IH \EKopen= \OW \PO \EH \NOor= \OWRRorange= \OWRR \NE \JHother= \UX \TH \AXRRouch = \AYWW \CHought= \AW \AW \TTour = \AYWW \RRout = \AYWW \TToutdoors= \AYWW \TT \SLOW \DO \OWRR \SEover = \SLOW \OW \FAST \VV \AXRRowl = \AYWW \LOown= \OW \SLOW \NEoz = \OH \OH \ZZp = \PE \IY \IYpackage= \PE \SLOW \AY \KE \EH \JHpaint= \PE \FAST \EY \FAST \EYIY \NE \TTpaintbrush= \PE \FAST \EYIY \NE \TT \SOFT \BO \FAST \RR \UX \SHpan= \PO \SLOW \AY \NOpants= \PO \AY \NO \TT \SEpaper= \PE \FAST \EYIY \PE \AXRRparakeet= \PE \FAST \EYRR \UX \KE \IY \TTparent= \PO \AY \FAST \RR \FAST \EH \NE \TTpark= \PO \FAST \AWRR \FAST \RR \EKparrot= \PE \EYRR \UX \TTpart= \PO \AWRR \TTparts = \PO \AWRR \TSpass= \PO \AY \SEpast= \PO \AY \SLOW \SE \TTpaste= \PE \EYIY \SE \TTpath= \PO \AY \SLOW \THpaw= \PO \SLOW \OH \OHpea= \PE \IY \IYpeace= \PE \SLOW \IY \SEpeach= \PE \SLOW \IY \CHpeanut= \PE \FAST \IY \NO \UX \TTpear= \PO \EYRRpeck = \PE \EH \EH \EKpeg = \PE \EH \EH \SLOW \EGpen= \PE \EH \NEpencil= \PE \FAST \EH \NE \SE \AX \LOpenguin= \PE \EY \FAST \NGE \FAST \WW \IH \NEpenny= \PE \EH \NE \IYpeople = \PE \FAST \IY \PE \SLOW \LEpeppers = \PE \EH \PO \FAST \AXRR \FAST \ZZperhaps= \PO \FAST \AXRR \HO \AY \PE \SEpet= \PO \EH \TTpeter = \PE \FAST \IY \TT \AX \RRphase = \FF \EYIY \ZZphi= \FF \OHIYphysical = \FF \IH \ZZ \IH \KE \EHLEpi= \PO \OHIYpiano= \PE \IY \AY \NO \OWpick = \PE \IH \KOpicked = \PE \IH \KO \TTpickled = \PE \IH \KE \LE \LE \EDpicnic= \PE \IH \KE \NE \IH \EKpie= \PO \OHIYpiece= \PE \IY \SEpig= \PO \IH \EGpillow= \PO \SLOW \IH \LO \FAST \OWWWpilot= \PO \FAST \OHIH \LO \AX \TTpin = \PE \IH \NEping = \PE \IH \IH \SLOW \NGEpink= \PE \FAST \IY \NGE \EKpinned = \PE \SLOW \IH \SLOW \NE \ODpinning = \PE \SLOW \IH \NE \IH \NGEpins = \PE \IH \IH \NE \FAST \ZZpiper = \PO \FAST \OHIH \FAST \IH \PE \AX \FAST \AXRRplant= \PO \FAST \LO \AY \NE \TTplate= \PO \FAST \LE \EYIY \TTplay = \PO \FAST \LE \EH \EYIYplayed = \PE \FAST \LE \EH \FAST \EYIY \EDplayground= \PO \FAST \LE \EH \FAST \EYIY \GE \FAST \RR \FAST \AYWW \NO \ODplaything= \PO \FAST \LE \EH \FAST \EYIY \TH \IH \SLOW \NGEplease= \PO \FAST \LE \IY \ZZpleasure = \PE \FAST \LE \EH \ZH \AX \RRpledge = \PE \FAST \LE \SLOW \EH \JHpledged = \PE \FAST \LE \SLOW \EH \JH \ODpledges = \PE \FAST \LE \SLOW \EH \JH \IH \ZZpledging = \PE \FAST \LE \SLOW \EH \JH \IH \NGEplenty= \PO \FAST \LE \EH \NE \TT \IYplus = \PO \FAST \LO \UX \SEpocket= \PO \OH \KE \EH \TTpolice= \PO \FAST \UX \LE \IY \SEpolite= \PO \FAST \OW \LE \OHIY \TTpond= \PO \SLOW \OH \NE \ODpong= \PO \OH \SLOW \NGOpony= \PO \FAST \OW \FAST \OWWW \NE \FAST \IYpoor= \PO \FAST \OW \OWRRpop = \PO \SLOW \OH \POpopcorn= \PO \OH \PO \KO \OWRR \NEpossible=\PO \OH \SE \IH \OB \LO post= \PO \FAST \OW \FAST \OWWW \SE \TTpot= \PO \SLOW \OH \TTpotato= \PO \OW \TT \FAST \EYIY \TT \OWpottery = \PO \FAST \OH \TT \FAST \AXRR \FAST \RR \IYpour= \PO \FAST \OW \OWRRprepare= \PO \FAST \RR \FAST \IY \PE \EYRRpretend= \PO \FAST \RR \IY \TT \EH \NE \DOpretty= \PO \FAST \RR \IH \TT \IYprice= \PO \FAST \RR \OHIY \SEprize= \PO \FAST \RR \OHIY \FAST \ZZpromise= \PO \FAST \RR \OH \MM \IH \SEprove = \PE \FAST \RR \SLOW \UW \SLOW \VVpsi= \SO \OHIYpudding= \PO \FAST \UH \DE \IH \NGE \GEpuddle= \PO \UX \DO \LEpull= \PO \UH \SLOW \LOpumpkin= \PO \UX \FAST \MM \P4 \KE \FAST \SOFT \IY \FAST \IH \NOpuppet= \PO \UX \PO \EH \TTpurple= \PO \FAST \AXRR \PO \SLOW \LOpush= \PO \SLOW \UH \SLOW \SHput= \PO \SLOW \UX \TTpuzzle= \PO \SLOW \UX \FAST \ZZ \LEq = \KE \IYUWquack = \KO \FAST \WW \AY \EKquantity= \KE \FAST \WW \OH \NE \TT \FAST \IH \TT \IYquart= \KO \FAST \OW \OWRR \TTquarter= \KO \FAST \OW \FAST \OWRR \TT \FAST \AXRRquestion= \KO \FAST \WW \EH \SE \TT \FAST \IH \UX \NOquick = \KO \FAST \WW \SLOW \IH \P4 \EKquickly = \KO \FAST \WW \SLOW \IH \EK \LE \IYquiet= \KO \FAST \WW \OHIY \EH \TTquilt = \KO \FAST \WW \IH \LE \TTquit= \KO \FAST \WW \SLOW \IH \TTr = \AWRRrabbit=\SLOW \RR \AY \BE \RELAX \IH \TT race= \RR \EYIY \SEradio= \RR \EYIY \DE \FAST \IY \SLOW \OWrailroad= \RR \FAST \EYIY \FAST \IY \LE \FAST \RR \FAST \OW \FAST \OWWW \ODrain= \RR \EYIY \NErainbow= \RR \FAST \EYIY \NE \SOFT \BO \FAST \OW \FAST \OWWWraise= \RR \FAST \EY \FAST \EYIY \ZZrather= \RR \AY \TH \AXRRray = \RR \RR \EYIYrays = \SLOW \RR \EY \FAST \EYIY \ZZreach= \RR \SLOW \IY \CHread = \FAST \RR \SLOW \IY \EDready = \SLOW \RR \EY \DE \IYreceive= \RR \FAST \IY \SE \SLOW \IY \VVred = \RR \SLOW \EH \EDremember= \RR \IY \FAST \MM \EH \MM \EB \FAST \AXRRrepair = \RR \FAST \IY \PE \SLOW \EYRRrepeat= \RR \FAST \IY \PO \IY \TTreply= \RR \IY \PO \LO \FAST \FAST \OH \OHIYrest= \RR \EH \SE \TTreturn= \RR \IY \TT \AXRR \NErho= \RR \OWrib = \RR \SLOW \IH \EBribbon= \RR \IH \FAST \SOFT \BO \UX \NEride= \RR \OHIY \DEright= \RR \FAST \OHIY \FAST \IY \TTring= \RR \IY \SLOW \NGEriver= \RR \IH \VV \FAST \AX \FAST \AXRRroad= \RR \FAST \OW \FAST \OWWW \ODrob= \RR \SLOW \OH \OBrobot = \RR \FAST \OW \FAST \OWWW \SOFT \BO \OH \TTrobotics = \RR \FAST \OW \FAST \OWWW \SOFT \BO \OH \TT \FAST \IH \FAST \P4 \KE \FAST \SErobots = \RR \FAST \OW \FAST \OWWW \SOFT \BO \OH \TSrock= \RR \OH \OKroll= \RR \SLOW \OW \SLOW \LOroller= \FAST \RR \SLOW \OW \LO \AXRRroof= \FAST \RR \SLOW \UW \FFroom= \RR \SLOW \UW \MMrope= \RR \FAST \OW \FAST \OWWW \POrose= \RR \FAST \OW \FAST \OWWW \ZZrough= \RR \UX \FFround= \RR \AYWW \NO \ODrow= \RR \FAST \OW \FAST \OWWWrug= \RR \UX \OGruler= \RR \FAST \UW \LE \AXRRrun= \RR \UX \NErural = \RR \FAST \AX \RR \SLOW \EHLErush= \RR \UX \SLOW \SHs = \EH \SE \SEsad= \SE \SLOW \AY \EDsaddle = \SLOW \SE \AY \DE \EHLE \LEsail= \SE \EYIY \LOsame= \SE \EYIY \MMsand= \SE \SLOW \AY \NE \ODsandwich= \SE \FAST \AY \NE \ED \FAST \WW \IH \CHsap =\SLOW \SE \SLOW \AY \PO sat = \SLOW \SE \SLOW \AY \TTsaturday = \SLOW \SE \FAST \AY \TT \FAST \AXRR \DE \EYIYsaucer= \SO \OH \SE \AXRRsavage = \SLOW \SE \AY \VV \FAST \IH \SLOW \JHsave= \SE \FAST \EYIY \FAST \IY \SLOW \VVsaw = \SE \SE \AW \AWsay= \SE \FAST \EY \EYIYscarf= \SE \KO \AWRR \FFschool= \SE \KO \SLOW \UW \LOscissors= \SE \FAST \IH \FAST \ZZ \FAST \AX \FAST \AXRR \SOscore = \SE \KO \OW \FAST \OWRRscott = \SLOW \SE \KO \SLOW \OH \TTsea= \SE \SE \IY \IYseat= \SLOW \SE \SLOW \IY \TTsecond = \SLOW \SE \EH \KO \AX \NE \ODsecret= \SE \IY \KO \FAST \RR \FAST \EH \TTsee = \SE \SE \IY \IYseed= \SE \IY \IY \EDseem= \SE \IY \IY \MMseesaw= \SE \IY \SE \SLOW \OHsend= \SE \EH \NE \ODsensitive = \SLOW \SE \FAST \EH \NE \SE \IH \TT \FAST \IH \SLOW \VVsensitivity = \SLOW \SE \FAST \EH \NE \SE \IH \TT \IH \VV \IH \TT \IYsent=\SE \SLOW \EH \NE \TT september =\SLOW \SE \FAST \EH \PE \Fast \TT \EH \FAST \MM \EB \FAST \AX \FAST \AXRR seven = \SLOW \SE \FAST \EH \VV \EH \NEseventeen =\SLOW \SE \FAST \EH \Fast \VV \Fast \EH \NE \Fast \TT \IY \NE seventy =\SLOW \SE \FAST \EH \Fast \VV \EH \Fast \NE \TT \IY several= \SLOW \SE \FAST \EH \VV \FAST \RR \FAST \EHLE \FAST \LEsew= \SE \SLOW \OW \FAST \OWWWshade= \SLOW \SH \EYIY \EDshadow= \SH \AY \DO \FAST \OW \FAST \OWWWshall= \SH \SLOW \AY \SLOW \LOshallowest = \SH \AY \LO \OW \EH \SE \TTshare= \SH \SLOW \EY \FAST \EYRRsharp= \SH \AWRR \POshe= \SLOW \SH \SLOW \IYsheep=\Slow \SH \SLOW \IY \PE sheet = \SLOW \SH \SLOW \IY \TTshell=\Slow \SH \SLOW \EY \LE shift = \SLOW \SH \SLOW \IH \FF \TTshine= \SLOW \SH \FAST \OHIH \FAST \IH \NEship = \SLOW \SH \SLOW \IH \POshirt = \SLOW \SH \AX \FAST \AXRR \TTshoe= \SLOW \SH \UW \UWshort = \SLOW \SH \FAST \OW \FAST \OWRR \TTshortest = \SH \FAST \OW \FAST \OWRR \TT \FAST \AX \FAST \SE \TTshould = \SLOW \SH \SLOW \UW \ODshouldn't = \SH \SLOW \UW \SLOW \DO \NO \TTshout= \SLOW \SH \FAST \AYWW \FAST \WW \TTshovel= \SLOW \SH \FAST \UX \SLOW \VV \EHLEshow= \SLOW \SH \OW \FAST \OWWWshut= \SLOW \SH \SLOW \UX \TTsick= \SLOW \SE \SLOW \IH \EKside= \SLOW \SE \OHIY \EDsidewalk= \SLOW \SE \OHIY \ED \FAST \WW \OH \OKsight = \SLOW \SE \FAST \OHIY \FAST \IY \TTsigma= \SLOW \SE \IH \GE \MM \FAST \UXsign= \SLOW \SE \OHIY \NEsilent= \SLOW \SE \FAST \OHIY \LE \FAST \EH \NE \TTsince= \SLOW \SE \IH \NE \SEsincere = \SLOW \SE \IH \NE \SE \IYRRsincerely = \SLOW \SE \IH \NE \SE \FAST \IYRR \LE \IYsincerity = \SE \IH \NE \SE \EH \RR \IH \TT \IYsine= \SLOW \SE \OHIY \NEsing= \SLOW \SE \IY \SLOW \NGEsink= \SLOW \SE \RELAX \IY \FAST \NE \EKsister = \SLOW \SE \IH \SE \TT \FAST \AXRR \FAST \RRsit = \SLOW \SE \IH \IH \TTsix =\SLOW \SE \IH \Stress \KE \Fast \SE sixteen =\SLOW \SE \Fast \IH \Stress \KE \SE \Fast \TT \IY \NE sixty =\SLOW \SE \IH \Stress \KE \SE \TT \IY size= \SLOW \SE \OHIY \ZZskin= \SLOW \SE \KE \SLOW \IH \NEskirt= \SE \KE \FAST \AX \FAST \AXRR \TTsky = \SE \KE \OHIH \FAST \IHsleep= \SE \FAST \LE \SLOW \IY \POsleeve= \SE \FAST \LE \SLOW \IY \VVslice= \SE \FAST \LO \OHIY \SLOW \SEslide= \SE \FAST \LO \OHIY \EDslipper= \SO \FAST \LO \IH \PO \FAST \AXRR \FAST \RRslow= \SE \FAST \LO \SLOW \OWWWsmell= \SE \FAST \MM \SLOW \EH \SLOW \LOsmile= \SE \FAST \MM \FAST \OH \FAST \OHIY \SLOW \LOsmooth= \SE \FAST \MM \UW \UW \SLOW \THsnail= \SE \FAST \NE \FAST \EY \FAST \EYIY \LOsnake= \SE \FAST \NE \FAST \EY \FAST \EYIY \KEsnow = \SO \FAST \NO \OW \FAST \OWWWso = \SLOW \SO \FAST \OWWW \FAST \WWsock= \SLOW \SE \SLOW \OH \OKsoft= \SLOW \SO \OH \FF \TTsoil= \SLOW \SO \FAST \OW \FAST \OWIY \LEsome = \SLOW \SE \UX \MMson= \SLOW \SO \UX \NEsong = \SO \OH \SLOW \NGOsoon= \SLOW \SO \UW \UW \NOsorry= \SLOW \SO \AW \RR \FAST \IYsound = \SE \AYWW \NO \ODsoup= \SLOW \SE \UW \UW \POspeak = \SE \PE \SLOW \IY \EKspeakjet= \SE \PE \SLOW \IY \EK \JH \EH \TTspecial= \SE \PE \EH \SH \SLOW \LEspeech = \SE \PE \IY \IY \CHspell = \SE \PE \EH \EHLEspelled = \SE \PE \EH \EHLE \EDspeller = \SE \PE \FAST \EH \EHLE \AX \RRspellers = \SE \PE \FAST \EH \EHLE \FAST \AXRR \FAST \ZZspelling = \SE \PE \FAST \EH \EHLE \IH \NGEspells = \SE \PE \FAST \EH \EHLE \FAST \ZZspend= \SE \PE \SLOW \EH \NE \ODspider= \SE \PO \FAST \OH \FAST \OHIY \DE \FAST \AXRR \FAST \RRspit= \SE \PE \SLOW \IH \TTspoon= \SO \PO \SLOW \UW \NOspread= \SO \PO \FAST \RR \SLOW \EH \EDspring= \SE \PO \FAST \RR \IY \SLOW \NGEsquare= \SE \KO \WW \EYRRsqueeze= \SE \KO \WW \IY \ZZsquirrel= \SE \KO \FAST \WW \AX \FAST \AXRR \LEstair = \SE \TT \EY \EYRRstamp= \SE \FAST \TT \SLOW \AY \FAST \MM \PEstand= \SE \TT \SLOW \AY \NE \ODstar= \SE \TT \AWRRstare = \SE \TT \EY \EYRRstart = \SE \TT \AWRR \TTstarted = \SE \TT \AW \RR \TT \IH \EDstarter = \SE \TT \AW \RR \TT \AX \FAST \RRstarting = \SE \TT \AW \RR \TT \FAST \IH \NGEstarts = \SE \TT \AW \RR \TSstatement = \SE \TT \EYIY \TT \MM \EH \NE \TTstay= \SE \TT \EYIY \FAST \IYsteal= \SE \TT \IY \SLOW \LOsteel = \SE \TT \IY \SLOW \LOstep= \SE \TT \SLOW \EH \POstick= \SE \TT \SLOW \IH \EKstill= \SE \TT \IH \SLOW \LOstir= \SE \TT \AXRRstomach= \SE \TT \UX \MM \EH \EKstone= \SE \TT \OWWW \NOstop = \SE \TT \SLOW \OH \POstopped = \SE \TT \SLOW \OH \PO \TTstopper = \SE \TT \OH \PO \FAST \AX \FAST \AXRRstopping = \SE \TT \OH \PO \IH \NGEstops = \SE \TT \SLOW \OH \PO \SEstore = \SE \TT \OWRRstory= \SE \TT \OWRR \FAST \IYstraight= \SE \TT \RR \FAST \EYIY \TTstranded = \SE \TT \FAST \RR \AY \NE \DE \FAST \IH \EDstranger= \SE \TT \RR \FAST \EYIY \NE \JH \FAST \AXRRstrawberry= \SE \TT \FAST \RR \OH \SOFT \BE \FAST \EYRR \IYstreet = \SE \TT \RR \IY \TTstretch= \SE \TT \RR \EH \CHstrike= \SE \TT \FAST \RR \OHIY \EKstring = \SE \TT \RR \RELAX \IY \SLOW \NGEstripe= \SE \TT \FAST \RR \OHIY \POstrong= \SE \TT \FAST \RR \OH \SLOW \NGEsub = \SLOW \SE \SLOW \UX \OBsubject = \SLOW \SE \UX \EB \JH \EH \EK \TTsubtract= \SLOW \SO \FAST \UX \OB \TT \RR \AY \KE \TTsucceed = \SLOW \SE \FAST \RELAX \UX \KE \SE \SLOW \IY \EDsuck = \SLOW \SE \SLOW \UX \EKsugar = \SH \UH \FAST \GO \FAST \AXRR \FAST \RRsuit= \SLOW \SO \SLOW \UW \TTsummer= \SLOW \SO \UX \MM \FAST \AX \FAST \AXRRsun= \SLOW \SO \UX \SLOW \NEsunday = \SLOW \SE \UX \NE \DE \EYIYsupper= \SLOW \SO \UX \PO \FAST \AX \FAST \AXRRsuppose= \SLOW \SO \UX \PO \OW \FAST \ZZsure= \SLOW \SH \UW \SLOW \RRsurprise= \SLOW \SO \FAST \UX \PO \RR \OHIY \FAST \ZZswallow= \SLOW \SO \WW \OH \LO \OWWWswan= \SLOW \SE \WW \OH \NOsweat = \SLOW \SO \FAST \WW \EH \TTsweated = \SLOW \SO \FAST \WW \EH \TT \IH \EDsweater = \SLOW \SO \FAST \WW \EH \TT \FAST \AXRR \FAST \RRsweaters = \SLOW \SO \FAST \WW \EH \TT \AX \RR \FAST \ZZsweating = \SLOW \SO \FAST \WW \EH \TT \IH \NGEsweats = \SLOW \SO \FAST \WW \SLOW \EH \TSswim= \SLOW \SE \FAST \WW \IH \MMswing= \SLOW \SE \FAST \WW \IY \SLOW \NGEswitch = \SLOW \SO \FAST \WW \IH \CHswitched = \SLOW \SO \FAST \WW \IH \CH \TTswitches = \SLOW \SO \FAST \WW \IH \CH \IH \FAST \ZZswitching = \SLOW \SO \FAST \WW \IH \CH \IH \NGEsystem = \SLOW \SE \IH \SE \TT \FAST \EH \MMsystems = \SLOW \SE \IH \SE \TT \FAST \EH \MM \SEt = \TU \IY \IYtable= \TT \FAST \EY \FAST \EYIY \SOFT \BE \FAST \UX \LOtail= \TU \EYIY \LOtake= \TU \EYIY \EKtale= \TU \EYIY \LOtalk = \TT \SLOW \OH \SLOW \OKtalked = \TT \SLOW \OH \SLOW \OK \TTtalker = \TT \OH \KE \AXRRtalkers = \TT \OH \KE \AXRR \FAST \ZZtalking = \TT \OH \KE \IH \NGEtalks = \TT \SLOW \OH \KO \SOtall= \TT \OH \SLOW \LOtask = \TT \SLOW \AY \SE \SLOW \EKtaste= \TU \EYIY \SE \SLOW \TTtau= \TT \AYWWte = \TU \IY \IYtea=\TU \IY \IY teach= \TT \SLOW \IY \CHteacher= \TT \SLOW \IY \CH \FAST \AXRR \FAST \RRteam= \TT \SLOW \IY \MMtee=\TU \IY \IY telephone= \TT \FAST \EH \LE \FAST \EH \FF \SLOW \OW \NOtelevision= \TT \FAST \EH \LE \FAST \EH \VV \IH \ZH \UX \NOtell= \TT \SLOW \EH \SLOW \LOten = \TT \EH \EH \NEtennessee= \TT \EH \NE \FAST \EH \SE \IY \IYtent= \TT \EH \SLOW \NO \TTtest = \TT \EH \SLOW \SE \TTtesting = \TT \EH \SLOW \SE \TT \IH \NGEtests = \TT \EH \SLOW \SE \TSthan= \DH \SLOW \AY \SLOW \NOthat's = \DH \SLOW \AY \SLOW \TSthat= \DH \SLOW \AY \SLOW \TTthe = \SLOW \DH \SLOW \IYtheater = \SLOW \TH \IY \EYIY \TT \AX \RRtheaters = \SLOW \TH \IY \EYIY \TT \AX \RR \FAST \ZZtheir= \SLOW \DH \EYRRthem= \SLOW \DH \EH \SLOW \MMthen = \SLOW \DH \EH \SLOW \NOthere= \SLOW \DH \EYRRthese= \SLOW \DH \SLOW \IY \FAST \ZZtheta= \TH \EYIY \TT \UXthey = \SLOW \DH \EYIYthey're= \SLOW \DH \EYRRthick= \SLOW \TH \SLOW \IH \EKthin = \SLOW \TH \SLOW \IH \SLOW \NOthing= \SLOW \TH \SLOW \IH \SLOW \NGEthink = \SLOW \TH \SLOW \IH \NGE \EKthinks = \SLOW \TH \SLOW \IH \NGE \EK \FAST \SEthirsty= \SLOW \TH \FAST \AXRR \SE \TT \FAST \IYthirteen =\SLOW \TH \FAST \AXRR \TT \IY \NE thirty = \SLOW \TH \FAST \AXRR \TT \IYthis = \SLOW \DH \SLOW \IH \SEthose= \SLOW \DH \SLOW \OW \ZZthough= \SLOW \DH \OWWWthousand =\SLOW \TH \FAST \AYWW \ZZ \FAST \AX \SLOW \NE thread = \SLOW \TH \RR \SLOW \EH \EDthreaded = \SLOW \TH \RR \EH \DE \IH \EDthreader = \SLOW \TH \RR \EH \DE \AX \RRthreading = \SLOW \TH \RR \EH \DE \IH \NGEthreads = \SLOW \TH \RR \EH \DE \ZZthree = \SLOW \TH \RR \SLOW \IYthrew= \SLOW \TH \RR \SLOW \UWthrough = \SLOW \TH \RR \SLOW \UWthrow= \SLOW \TH \RR \OWWWthu=\SLOW \DH \SLOW \UX thumb= \SLOW \TH \SLOW \UX \MMthursday = \SLOW \TH \AXRR \ZZ \DE \EYIYtickle= \SLOW \TT \IH \KE \EHLEtie= \SLOW \TT \OHIYtiger= \SLOW \TT \OHIY \GE \AX \RRtight = \SLOW \TT \OHIY \TTtill= \SLOW \TT \SLOW \IH \SLOW \LEtime = \SLOW \TT \OHIH \SLOW \MMtimes = \SLOW \TT \OHIH \SLOW \MM \FAST \ZZtiny= \SLOW \TT \OHIY \SLOW \NE \FAST \IYtip= \SLOW \TT \SLOW \IH \POtiptoe= \SLOW \TT \SLOW \IH \PO \SLOW \TT \OWtire= \SLOW \TT \OHIY \RRtired= \SLOW \TT \OHIY \RR \ODtitans= \SLOW \TT \OHIY \TT \FAST \AY \NE \FAST \ZZto = \SLOW \TT \IHWWtoast= \TT \SLOW \OW \SE \TTtoday= \SLOW \TT \UW \DE \EYIYtoe= \SLOW \TT \OWWWtogether= \SLOW \TT \UW \GE \EH \DH \AXRRtomato= \SLOW \TT \OW \MM \EYIY \TT \OWWWtomorrow= \SLOW \TT \UW \MM \AWRR \OWWWtong= \SLOW \TT \OH \NGO \OGtongue= \SLOW \TT \UX \SLOW \NGEtonight= \SLOW \TT \UW \NO \OHIY \TTtoo = \SLOW \TT \IHWWtook = \SLOW \TT \UH \UH \OKtool= \SLOW \TT \SLOW \UW \LEtooth= \SLOW \TT \SLOW \UW \SLOW \THtoothbrush= \SLOW \TT \SLOW \UW \TH \SOFT \BO \FAST \RR \UX \SHtop= \SLOW \TT \OH \POtouch= \SLOW \TT \SLOW \UX \CHtoward= \SLOW \TT \FAST \OWWW \OWRR \ODtowel= \SLOW \TT \AYWW \SLOW \LEtown= \SLOW \TT \AYWW \NOtoy = \SLOW \TT \OWIYtractor= \SLOW \TT \RR \AY \KE \TT \AXRRtraffic= \SLOW \TT \RR \AY \FF \IH \EKtrain= \SLOW \TT \FAST \RR \EYIY \NOtravel= \SLOW \TT \FAST \RR \AY \VV \SLOW \LEtray = \SLOW \TT \FAST \RR \EYIYtreasures = \SLOW \TT \FAST \RR \EH \ZH \AX \RR \FAST \ZZtreat = \SLOW \TT \FAST \RR \SLOW \IY \TTtree= \SLOW \TT \FAST \RR \SLOW \IYtriangle= \SLOW \TT \FAST \RR \OHIY \EYIY \NGE \LEtrip = \SLOW \TT \FAST \RR \SLOW \IH \PEtriple = \SLOW \TT \FAST \RR \IH \PO \SLOW \LEtrousers= \SLOW \TT \FAST \RR \AYWW \ZZ \FAST \AXRR \FAST \ZZtruck= \SLOW \TT \FAST \RR \UX \OKtrusts = \SLOW \TT \FAST \RR \UX \SE \TStruth= \SLOW \TT \FAST \RR \SLOW \UW \SLOW \THtry= \SLOW \TT \FAST \RR \OHIYtub = \SLOW \TT \UX \UX \OBtube= \SLOW \TT \SLOW \UW \OBtuesday = \SLOW \TT \UW \ZZ \DE \EYIYtulip= \SLOW \TT \UW \LO \IH \PEtunnel= \SLOW \TT \UX \NO \SLOW \LEturkey= \SLOW \TT \AXRR \KE \IYturn = \SLOW \TT \AXRR \NEturned = \SLOW \TT \AXRR \NE \ODturning = \SLOW \TT \AX \FAST \RR \NE \IH \NGEturns = \SLOW \TT \AX \RR \NE \SEturtle= \SLOW \TT \AXRR \TT \SLOW \LEtwelve = \SLOW \TT \FAST \WW \EH \LE \VVtwenty =\SLOW \FAST \TT \Fast \WW \EH \NE \Fast \TT \IY twice= \SLOW \TT \FAST \WW \OHIY \SEtwin= \SLOW \TT \FAST \WW \IH \NOtwo = \SLOW \TT \IHWWtypewriter= \SLOW \TT \FAST \OHIY \PO \FAST \WW \FAST \RR \FAST \OHIY \FAST \TT \AXRRu = \SLOW \IYUWumbrella= \UX \FAST \MM \OB \RR \EH \LO \UXuncle = \SLOW \UX \FAST \NGO \KO \UH \SLOW \LOunder= \UX \NE \DO \AXRRunderstand= \UX \FAST \NE \DO \FAST \AXRR \SE \FAST \TT \AY \NO \ODunicorn= \IYUW \NE \IH \KO \OWRR \NEunless= \UX \NO \LE \EH \SEuntil= \UX \NE \TT \IH \LOunusual = \UX \NE \IY \FAST \UW \ZH \UW \EHLEup= \SLOW \UX \POupon= \UX \PO \OH \SLOW \NOupsilon= \UW \PE \SE \IH \LO \OH \NOus= \SLOW \UX \SEuse= \IYUW \ZZusually= \IYUW \ZH \UW \EHLE \IYv = \SLOW \VV \SLOW \IYvacation= \VV \FAST \EYIY \KE \EYIY \SH \UX \NOvalentine= \VV \FAST \AY \LE \EH \NO \TT \OHIY \NOvase= \VV \EYIY \SEvegetable= \VV \EH \JH \TT \UX \FAST \SOFT \BO \UX \LOversion = \VV \SLOW \RR \ZH \AX \NEvery= \VV \EYRR \FAST \IYvest = \VV \SLOW \EH \SE \TTvillage= \VV \IH \SLOW \LE \EH \JHvine= \VV \OHIY \NOviolet= \VV \OHIY \FAST \OW \LE \FAST \EH \TTviolin= \VV \OHIY \FAST \OW \LE \IH \NEvisit= \VV \IH \ZZ \IH \TTvoice = \VV \OWIY \SE \SEvoices = \VV \OWIY \SE \IH \FAST \ZZvoyage= \VV \OWIY \EH \JHw = \DO \FAST \UX \SOFT \BO \EHLE \IYUW \UWwagon= \WW \AY \GO \UX \SLOW \NOwait= \WW \EYIY \TTwalk= \WW \SLOW \OH \SLOW \OKwant = \WW \SLOW \OH \NO \TTwar = \WW \FAST \OW \OWRRwarm= \WW \OWRR \SLOW \MMwarning=\WW \Fast \OW \Fast \RR \NE \IH \NGE warrant = \WW \OWRR \AX \NE \TTwas= \WW \UX \ZZ wash= \WW \SLOW \OH \SHwatch= \WW \OH \SLOW \CHwater= \WW \OH \TT \FAST \AXRRwatermelon= \WW \OH \TT \FAST \AXRR \MM \EH \LO \UX \NOwave= \WW \EYIY \VVwe = \WW \SLOW \IYweak= \WW \SLOW \IY \EKwear= \WW \EYRRweather= \WW \EH \DH \AXRRwednesday = \WW \EH \NE \ZZ \DE \EYIYweek= \WW \IY \EKweight= \WW \EYIY \TTwelcome = \WW \EHLE \KE \UX \MMwell= \WW \EHLEwent= \WW \EH \NE \TTwet= \WW \EH \TTwhale = \WH \EYIY \LEwhaler = \WH \EYIY \LE \AX \FAST \RRwhalers = \WH \EYIY \LE \AX \FAST \RR \FAST \ZZwhales = \WH \EYIY \EHLE \ZZwhaling = \WH \EYIY \LE \IH \NGEwhat= \WH \SLOW \OH \TTwheel= \WH \IY \SLOW \LEwhen= \WH \SLOW \EH \SLOW \NEwhere= \WW \EYRRwhether= \WW \EH \DH \AXRRwhich= \WH \IH \SLOW \CHwhig = \WH \IH \IH \EGwhile= \WH \OHIY \SLOW \LEwhim = \WH \IH \IH \MMwhisker= \WH \IH \SE \KE \AXRRwhisper= \WH \IH \SE \PO \AXRRwhistle= \WH \IH \SE \P4 \SLOW \LEwhite = \WH \OHIY \TTwhole= \HO \OWWW \SLOW \LOwhy = \WH \OHIHwide= \WW \FAST \OHIY \FAST \IY \EDwig = \WW \IH \IH \EGwill= \WW \IH \SLOW \LEwin= \WW \IH \SLOW \NOwind= \WW \IH \NE \ODwinter= \WW \IH \NO \TT \AXRRwipe= \WW \OHIY \POwire= \WW \OHIY \RRwish= \WW \IH \SLOW \SHwith= \WW \IH \SLOW \SLOW \THwoman= \WW \FAST \OW \STRESS \MM \UX \NOwon =\WW \Stress \OH \SLOW \NE wood= \WW \SLOW \UH \ODwool = \WW \SLOW \UH \SLOW \LOword = \WW \AXRR \FAST \RR \ODwords = \WW \AXRR \ED \FAST \ZZwork= \WW \AXRR \SLOW \EKworld= \WW \AXRR \LE \EDworm= \WW \AXRR \SLOW \MMworse= \WW \AXRR \SLOW \SEworst= \WW \AXRR \SE \TTwould= \WW \SLOW \UH \ODwrist= \RR \SLOW \IH \SE \TTwristwatch= \RR \IH \SE \TT \WW \OH \CHwrite = \RR \OHIY \TTwrong= \RR \OH \SLOW \NGOx = \EH \EH \KO \SEx-ray = \EH \EH \KO \SE \RR \EYIYxi= \KO \SE \OHIYxray=\EH \EH \KO \SE \RR \EYIY xylophone= \ZZ \OHIY \LO \OW \FF \OW \NOy = \WW \OHIHyarn = \IY \AWRR \NEyear = \NGE \IYRRyell= \IY \EH \LOyellow= \IY \EH \LO \OWyes = \IYEH \SE \SEyesterday= \IYEH \SE \TT \FAST \AXRR \DE \EYIYyet= \IYEH \TTyo-yo = \IY \OWWW \IY \OWWWyou = \SLOW \IYUWyoung= \IY \UX \SLOW \NGEyour = \IY \OWRRyourself= \IY \OWRR \SE \EH \LE \FFz = \SLOW \ZZ \IY \IYzap= \ZZ \SLOW \AY \POzapped= \ZZ \SLOW \AY \PO \TTzebra=\ZZ \FAST \IY \Soft \BE \FAST \RR \UX zero = \ZZ \FAST \IY \FAST \IYRR \OWWWzeta= \ZZ \EYIY \TT \UXzipper= \ZZ \IH \PE \AXRRzone = \SLOW \ZZ \OWWW \SLOW \NEzoo = \SLOW \ZZ \IHWW

2010-12-02T09:40:00.000-08:00

My Sparkfun SpeakJet Voice Box Shield is now working! Thanks to major help from Brock Craft and a very kind and swift response from Sukkin Pang at SK Pang Electronics, (http://www.skpang.co.uk/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=140_142&products_id=670) who supplied it. THIS IS REALLY EXCITING, as I can make things really speak now, and use this in my Buddha Box to magically make the box talk to you when you open it and speak words of wisdom....
This is helpful:
http://letsmakerobots.com/node/13210

The Buddha Box

2010-11-28T10:39:00.000-08:00

lcd.print("The greatest medicine is the emptiness of everything.");
slowly working on what I am now calling 'the Buddha Box', when you open it the LCD displays an apposite Buddhist saying, I've just ordered a voice synth shield so it should talk next....

2010-11-25T07:53:00.000-08:00

I just handed my thesis in, and what a giant anti-climax that was! I felt ike Aspley Cherry-Garrard delivering penguin eggs to the Royal Geographic Society (or whatever it was) after he had collected them from Antarctica, with much loss of digits, life and sanity etc. Read The Worst Journey in the World and you'll know exactly what I mean..
anyway, it is done, the point of no return has been reached. This should be a landmark point in my PhD journey, and this blog, the moment it was all heading for (before the final exam of course), but this is possibly imposing too teleological an interpretation upon the doctoral experience, which is processual....

2010-11-19T10:33:00.000-08:00

My paper has been accepted for publication in the International Journal of The Book!
:-)

Thinking about manipulating pixel arrays in Open Frameworks, some notes:

2010-11-12T13:40:00.000-08:00

Thinking about manipulating pixel arrays in Open Frameworks, some notes:
http://vormplus.be/blog/article/mirroring-video-with-openframeworks">http://vormplus.be/blog/article/mirroring-video-with-openframeworks

http://www.designdrop.net/blog/?tag=openframeworks
this is great too, I like the catch phrase:Analog Pixel Digital to Analog is the new Analog to Digital
Remnds me of the de-mediating video I saw the other day, seems to be a growing trend

MAC VERSION of South software now available here:

2010-11-12T11:22:00.000-08:00

MAC VERSION of South software now available here:

http://www.doc.gold.ac.uk/~ma501ed/south/south_Download.html

and final edition of the book before my final exam:
http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/south/13520786?showPreview

2010-11-09T08:20:00.000-08:00

Yup - works pretty well with Ess:

//based on Graph // by David A. Mellis
import processing.serial.*;import krister.Ess.*; //import this sound library//declare 3 channels for 3 sound files:AudioChannel myChannel, myChannel2, myChannel3;
Serial port;String buff = "";String buff1 = "";String buff2 = "";//String buff3 = ""; //meint index = 0;int NEWLINE = 10;
// Store the last 256 values received so we can graph them.int[] valuesx = new int[256];int[] valuesy = new int[256];//int[] button_value = new int[256];//mevoid setup(){ size(512, 512); Ess.start(this);
port = new Serial(this, "COM7", 9600); //selection of drumb sounds: //myChannel=new AudioChannel("bass.wav"); myChannel=new AudioChannel("tamb.wav"); // myChannel=new AudioChannel("bass2.wav"); // myChannel=new AudioChannel("bass3.wav"); // myChannel=new AudioChannel("bass4.wav"); // myChannel=new AudioChannel("bass5.wav"); // myChannel=new AudioChannel("bass6.wav");
myChannel2=new AudioChannel("bass6.wav"); myChannel3=new AudioChannel("bass2.wav");
// If you know the name of the port used by the Arduino board, you // can specify it directly like this. //port = new Serial(this, "COM1", 9600);
}
void draw(){ background(250);
stroke(0);
// Graph the stored values by drawing a lines between them. for (int i = 0; i <> 0){ serialEvent(port.read()); } // image(etch,0, 0, width, height);}
void serialEvent(int serial){ if (serial != NEWLINE) { // Store all the characters on the line. buff += char(serial); } else { // The end of each line is marked by two characters, a carriage // return and a newline. We're here because we've gotten a newline, // but we still need to strip off the carriage return. buff = buff.substring(0, buff.length()-1); index = buff.indexOf(","); buff1 = buff.substring(0, index); buff2 = buff.substring(index+1, buff.length());
// Parse the String into an integer. We divide by 4 because // analog inputs go from 0 to 1023 while colors in Processing // only go from 0 to 255. int x = Integer.parseInt(buff1)/2; int y = Integer.parseInt(buff2)/2;
// Clear the value of "buff" buff = "";
// Shift over the existing values to make room for the new one. for (int i = 0; i < 255; i++) { valuesx[i] = valuesx[i + 1]; valuesy[i] = valuesy[i + 1]; }
// Add the received value to the array. valuesx[255] = x; valuesy[255] = y; if(x >= 10){ myChannel.play(); println(" "+x + "x "); }
else if(y >=60){
myChannel2.play(); println(" "+y + "y "); } }

}
public void stop() { Ess.stop(); super.stop();}

2010-11-09T07:30:00.000-08:00

Two Piezos used as knock sensors.

Arduno code:
#include
const int buttonPin = 2; //DIGITAL 2const int ledPin = 13;int buttonState = 0; ///above = button stuff
int xCoord;int yCoord;char coords[10];
void setup(){ // initialize the LED pin as an output: pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT); // initialize the pushbutton pin as an input: pinMode(buttonPin, INPUT); Serial.begin(9600);}
void loop(){ buttonState = digitalRead(buttonPin);

xCoord = analogRead(0); yCoord = analogRead(1); sprintf(coords, "%d,%d", xCoord, yCoord); Serial.println(coords); delay(50); }

Processing code
// based on Graph // by David A. Mellis
import processing.serial.*;
Serial port;String buff = "";String buff1 = "";String buff2 = "";//String buff3 = ""; //meint index = 0;int NEWLINE = 10;
// Store the last 256 values received so we can graph them.int[] valuesx = new int[256];int[] valuesy = new int[256];//int[] button_value = new int[256];//mevoid setup(){ size(512, 512);
port = new Serial(this, "COM7", 9600); // If you know the name of the port used by the Arduino board, you // can specify it directly like this. //port = new Serial(this, "COM1", 9600);
}
void draw(){ background(250);
stroke(0); // Graph the stored values by drawing a lines between them. for (int i = 0; i <> 0){ serialEvent(port.read()); } // image(etch,0, 0, width, height);}
void serialEvent(int serial){ if (serial != NEWLINE) { // Store all the characters on the line. buff += char(serial); } else { // The end of each line is marked by two characters, a carriage // return and a newline. We're here because we've gotten a newline, // but we still need to strip off the carriage return. buff = buff.substring(0, buff.length()-1); index = buff.indexOf(","); buff1 = buff.substring(0, index); buff2 = buff.substring(index+1, buff.length()); // Parse the String into an integer. We divide by 4 because // analog inputs go from 0 to 1023 while colors in Processing // only go from 0 to 255. int x = Integer.parseInt(buff1)/2; int y = Integer.parseInt(buff2)/2;
// Clear the value of "buff" buff = ""; // Shift over the existing values to make room for the new one. for (int i = 0; i < font =" loadFont(" mychannel="new" mychannel="new" mychannel="new" mychannel="new" mychannel="new" mychannel="new" mychannel="new" mychannel2="new" mychannel3="new" rando =" (int)random(1," rando ="=" rando ="=" rando ="=" mousepressed ="=">

Lie Detector

2010-11-07T11:36:00.000-08:00

The box at the end is a mock up for an idea but the circuit above is working as of this afternoon.

I've been trying to build my own lie detector - perhaps as an interface to a narrative building system. Anyway it works! At least it is measuring the amount of resistance my fingers supply to the circuit, enough to decide whether to flash a red light or a green light. Of course it isn't really a lie detector, but it is reading fluctuations in my body. I've just ordered '30 Arduino Projects for The Evil Genius' because its got a much more interesting circuit..

This is my ultra simple Arduino Code, a variation on Tom Igoe's Analog Input example:

http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/AnalogInput */int liePin = 8; int sensorPin = 0; // select the input pin for the potentiometerint ledPin = 13; // select the pin for the LEDint sensorValue = 0; // variable to store the value coming from the sensor
void setup() { Serial.begin(9600); // declare the ledPin as an OUTPUT: pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT); pinMode(liePin, OUTPUT); }
void loop() { // read the value from the sensor: sensorValue = analogRead(sensorPin); // turn the ledPin on //digitalWrite(ledPin, sensorValue); // stop the program for milliseconds:
// turn the ledPin off: digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW); // stop the program for for milliseconds: Serial.println(sensorValue); if(sensorValue >800){ digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH); digitalWrite(liePin, LOW); } if(sensorValue <500){>

2010-11-06T13:03:00.000-07:00

I went to see Christan Marclay's The Clock today at the White Cube, and can dazedly report an unfathomably beguiling experience - given that there is no narrative and the film is made from thousands of fragments, in which time is accurately sampled from myriad of film clips (a process my collegue Mick Grierson was involved in). I experienced it as an intensified 'now', with the overwhelming theme of time somehow relieving me from its normal constraints. The film generates a meta-time, a series of disjunctions that are punctuated by sounds running ahead of or behind the clips. when I came out of the White Cube I started noticing clocks everywhere...began to wonder if time has any meaning -beyond the subjective, ofcourse this is the provocation..Fantastic.

'The Clock' is constructed out of moments in cinema when time is expressed or when a character interacts with a clock, watch or just a particular time of day. Marclay has excerpted thousands of these fragments and edited them so that they flow in real time. While 'The Clock' examines how time, plot and duration are depicted in cinema, the video is also a working timepiece that is synchronised to the local time zone. At any moment, the viewer can look at the work and use it to tell the time. Yet the audience watching 'The Clock' experiences a vast range of narratives, settings and moods within the space of a few minutes, making time unravel in countless directions at once. Even while 'The Clock' tells the time, it ruptures any sense of chronological coherence.'The Clock' plays with how audiences experience narrative in cinema, examining the conventions and devices through which filmmakers create a persuasive illusion of duration. When watching a film, an audience is removed from normal time and swept up in a new register that corresponds to the narrative at hand. 'The Clock' transforms this condition of cinema: time, in this case, corresponds precisely to the actual time beyond the work. The audience will have the peculiar awareness of experiencing a fictional event, or countless events, at what appears to be the same time as when they watch it in the gallery'

http://www.whitecube.com/exhibitions/cm/

2010-11-05T11:36:00.000-07:00

When I think of Nam June Paik's TV Buddha of 1974 an infinite loop unspools, in which, as Rupert Spira says, Presence Only Knows Itself.
'In reality the Self is only identical with itself, only one with itself. There is nothing else present with which it could be identical. There are not 'two things.'
..However, the personal 'I' is nothing other than the thought that thinks it.'
http://non-duality.rupertspira.com/page.aspx?n=3ab20a74-0b4a-4f29-b712-7cc38ab47fd2

The other day in the Creative Coding workshops we were working with two cameras facing each other and feeding an inifinite loop of self-observation, only both images were disturbingly offset and assymetric, it was hard to understand what we were observing, as if we were watching time-lapsed mirrors in which our own presence was occluded.

2010-11-05T02:39:00.000-07:00

check out the Toaster Project - fantastic!
http://www.thetoasterproject.org/
check out Hunch, fun recommendation engine
http://hunch.com/
It suggested some programming languages for me!
such as Lua and Clojure - 'a modern dialect of the Lisp programming language'
check out literary minimilasm at accelerated texts:
http://twitter.com/acceleratedtext

2010-11-04T04:12:00.001-07:00

Cuckoo clock twitter interface idea - use solonoid? Or link up to RSPB information about bird migration, or Gatwick airport flights. Or let me know when birds are using my bird table! So I can then look at cctv of them....tilt switch in bird feeder..

2010-11-02T12:05:00.000-07:00

Olga Massanet's talk about the Deep Media Research project today was very inspiring and helpful for my ongoing thoughts about post-doctoral research, provoking good ideas for a way of melding my interests in embodied hardware and memory studies. Olga's project is concerned with non-symbolic modes of transmission between bodies - such as sweat, electrical signals,

'non-verbal, unconscious, infra-empircal communication processes', (her site below also has a very useful link to making a galvanic skin response machine the dmoo1 -

http://www.deepmediaresearch.org/how-to/how-to-build-dm001/!)

'Simply speaking DM001 is a device that takes measurements of the Galvanic Skin Response of two people. These different streams of data are then mapped onto two different motors. Each person is able to feel the fluctuations in skin conductivity of the other.' In exploring lost memories I have been considering ways in which embodied traces of events might be re-enacted without actually representing the events themselves, so devices that can communicate micro-gestures, or 'infra-verbal bodily comunications' would be one such way.

Mick Grierson mentioned Naim June Paik's TV Buddha (1974) today, this is also really interesting - raising questions of cause and effect, techno-mysticism - which Olga also mentioned.

2010-10-29T06:58:00.000-07:00

Logic to cycle up and down a row of LEDS,could add a delay that reflects the number of the button counter, or flas them on and off that many times, i.e delay() and digitalWrite(HIGH) or LOW how ever many tmes..same circuit as image below

int brightness = 0; // how bright the LED isint fadeAmount = 5; // how many points to fade the LED byconst int buttonPin = 7;int buttonState = 0; const int ledPin = 8; int counter =0;
//turns one after the other LED on and off in sequencevoid setup() { // declare pin 9 to be an output: pinMode(9, OUTPUT); pinMode(buttonPin, INPUT); pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT); //last led}
void loop() {
// set the brightness of pin 9:pwm /* analogWrite(9, brightness); analogWrite(10, brightness); analogWrite(11, brightness); */ buttonState = digitalRead(buttonPin); if (buttonState == HIGH) { counter ++;
}
if(counter ==1){ digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH); delay(1000); }
if(counter ==2){ digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW); analogWrite(9, brightness); delay(1000); } if(counter ==3){ digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW); analogWrite(9, 0); analogWrite(10, brightness); delay(1000); } if(counter ==4){ digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW); analogWrite(9, 0); analogWrite(10, 0); analogWrite(11, brightness); delay(1000); }
if(counter==5){ analogWrite(11, 0); analogWrite(10, brightness); delay(1000); }
if(counter==6){ analogWrite(10, 0); analogWrite(9, brightness);
delay(1000); }
if(counter==7){ analogWrite(10, 0); analogWrite(9, 0); analogWrite(8, brightness); delay(1000); counter=0; }
// change the brightness for next time through the loop: brightness = brightness + fadeAmount;
// reverse the direction of the fading at the ends of the fade: if (brightness == 0 brightness == 255) { fadeAmount = -fadeAmount ; } else { // turn LED off: digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW); } // wait for 30 milliseconds to see the dimming effect delay(30);

}

2010-10-29T06:15:00.000-07:00

control 4 leds, 3 are fading on PWM pins and one is turned on and off from a button, all connections have small resistors:

int brightness = 0; // how bright the LED isint fadeAmount = 5; // how many points to fade the LED byconst int buttonPin = 7;int buttonState = 0; const int ledPin = 8; void setup() { // declare pin 9 to be an output: pinMode(9, OUTPUT); pinMode(buttonPin, INPUT); pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT); }
void loop() {
// set the brightness of pin 9:pwm
analogWrite(9, brightness); analogWrite(10, brightness); analogWrite(11, brightness); buttonState = digitalRead(buttonPin); if (buttonState == HIGH) { digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH); delay(1000); } // change the brightness for next time through the loop: brightness = brightness + fadeAmount;
// reverse the direction of the fading at the ends of the fade: if (brightness == 0 brightness == 255) { fadeAmount = -fadeAmount ; } else { // turn LED off: digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW); } // wait for 30 milliseconds to see the dimming effect delay(30); }

2010-10-28T08:01:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ge0p2LtCJCo

2010-10-24T12:51:00.000-07:00

So it works like a psychedelic vision mixer, with the two potentiometers
controlling x and y rotations and the button causing the image to be inverted. Works really well!

crazyKalope - Arduino to Processing using the same circuit and same way of getting data into Processing as the Etch-a-Sketch

import processing.serial.*;
Serial myPort; // Create object from Serial classint potX; // Data received from the serial portint potY;int button;////////
PImage bob, bob2, bob3, bob4;float rot;int ax;int ay;void setup(){
background(255); size(600, 600, P3D);
//////// String portName = Serial.list()[2]; //choose from [0] [1] [2] myPort = new Serial(this, portName, 9600); myPort.bufferUntil('\n');

//////////////
bob = loadImage("input2.jpg");
bob2 = loadImage("input.jpg");
bob3 = loadImage("input3.jpg");
bob4 = loadImage("input4.jpg"); //random load image? ax = width/2; ay = height/2; rot =random(360);
}
void draw(){
// frameRate(14); // background(255); translate(300, 300); rot +=15; rotate(rot); //tint(0, 243); rotateY(radians(potY)); // strokeWeight(3); pushMatrix(); translate(130, height/2, 0); rotateY(radians(potY)); rotateX(radians(potX)); triangle(30, 75, 58, 20, 86, 75); popMatrix(); noFill(); stroke(255); pushMatrix(); translate(500, height*0.35, -200); fill((int)random(123, 255),(int)random(123, 255),(int)random(123, 255)); triangle(30, 75, 58, 20, 86, 75); popMatrix(); noStroke(); fill((int)random(123, 255),(int)random(123, 255),(int)random(123, 255)); ellipse(0, 0, 15, 15); // fill((int)random(123, 255),(int)random(123, 255),(int)random(123, 255)); //fill(255, 0, 0); noStroke();

println(" " +frameCount + " "); // tint(255, 230); noStroke(); fill((int)random(123, 255),(int)random(123, 255),(int)random(123, 255)); ellipse(width/3, height/3, 23, 23); tint(255, 123); //? // image(bob, 0,0,width/3,height/3); tint(255, 123); //? // noTint(); tint(255, 223); stroke(13); strokeWeight(3); // tint(255, 230);
stroke((int)random(123, 255),(int)random(123, 255),(int)random(123, 255)); line(0, 123, 0, 234); tint(255, 234);

if(button == 1){ pushMatrix(); translate(130, height/2, 0); rotateY(frameCount); rotateX(-0.4); // image(bob2, -50, -30, 123, 224); popMatrix(); save("data/ima.jpg"); print(" " + "PRESSED" + " ");
tint((int)random(100, 255),(int)random(100, 255),(int)random(100, 255)); filter(INVERT); rot +=45; PImage nee2 = loadImage("data/ima.jpg"); tint((int)random(100, 255),(int)random(100, 255),(int)random(100, 255)); // image(nee2, 100, 100, 123, 124); }
if(mousePressed){
// PImage nee2 = loadImage("data/ima.jpg");
// rot +=45;

} /* rotateY(mouseX); rotateX(mouseY); */ rotateY(radians(potX)); // rotateX(potY); rotateY(radians(potY));
//filter(BLUR, 4); // save("data/ima.jpg"); // PImage nee = loadImage("data/ima.jpg"); //image(nee, -100, -100, width, height); // tint(255, 203); // image(nee, 100, 100, 123, 124); // image(nee, 100, 100, 123, 124); // noTint(); fill((int)random(123, 255),(int)random(123, 255),(int)random(123, 255)); ellipse(width/3, height/3, 23, 23); // noTint(); fill((int)random(123, 255),(int)random(123, 255),(int)random(123, 255)); ellipse(width/3, height/3, 23, 23); tint(255, 123); if(frameCount >20 ){ // image(bob3, 0, 0, 123, 123); tint(255, 123); }
if(frameCount >30){ image(bob4, 20, 20, 423, 123); noTint(); scale(-0.75);
}
if(frameCount %30==0){
rot -=15; } if((frameCount >=40) &&(frameCount<=70)){ // image(bob3,-20, -20, 223, 223); tint(155, 33); filter(DILATE); } if((frameCount >=80) &&(frameCount<=170)){ // image(bob3, 45, 45, frameCount%4, frameCount%4 ); // } // filter(ERODE); scale( frameCount%4);} void serialEvent(Serial myPort){ String inString = myPort.readStringUntil('\n'); //get the data in and divide it with each new line if(inString != null){ //check there is a full string inString = trim(inString); //remove any gaps String[] list = split(inString, ','); //split where there are commas potX = Integer.parseInt(list[1]); //make the Sting into an int potY = Integer.parseInt(list[2]); //ditto button = Integer.parseInt(list[0]); //print them out so I can see what's happening if I want /* println(" " + Integer.parseInt(list[1]) + " "); //pot right hand println(" " + list[2] + " "); //pot left hand println(" " + list[0] + " "); //button */ stroke(0); strokeWeight(5); //dont allow values to go outside of screen int xVal = constrain(potX, 0, 360); int yVal = constrain(potY, 0, 360); println(" " + xVal + " " ); println(" " + yVal + " " ); // float m = map(xVal, 1024, 0, 360); point(xVal, potY); } }

2010-10-23T05:12:00.000-07:00

It works, but I'll check it with Brock and John before recommending anyone else to use it! I used Fritzing to generate the images, very useful.

http://fritzing.org/ and fun, if you are a hopeless geek that is.

Simple Arduino code:

/*Read and print data from 2 pots and one button i.e 2 analogue, 1 digital input */
void setup(){ Serial.begin(9600);}
void loop(){
//send this data through the serial port:

Serial.print(digitalRead(7)); //button

Serial.print(","); // separate with comma

Serial.print(analogRead(0)); //pot 1

Serial.print(","); // separate with comma

Serial.print(analogRead(1)); // pot2

Serial.print(","); // separate with comma

Serial.println("");
delay(20);}

2010-10-22T13:32:00.000-07:00

Got the shake button going - great, just threw away the code lifted from the web and started from scratch - much easier in the end!

/** * Read data from the serial port
*/
import processing.serial.*;
Serial myPort; // Create object from Serial classint potX; // Data received from the serial portint potY;int button;
int val;void setup() { //size(1024, 1024); size(512, 512); background(255); String portName = Serial.list()[2]; //choose from [0] [1] [2] myPort = new Serial(this, portName, 9600); myPort.bufferUntil('\n');}
void draw(){ // background(255); shake(); if(button == 1){ fill(255); rect(0, 0, width, height); shake(); }}
void shake(){ //mechanism to start again fill(255, 0, 0); // ellipse(potX, potY, 12, 12);
}void serialEvent(Serial myPort){
String inString = myPort.readStringUntil('\n'); //get the data in and divide it with each new line if(inString != null){ //check there is a full string inString = trim(inString); //remove any gaps String[] list = split(inString, ','); //split where there are commas potX = Integer.parseInt(list[1]); //make the Sting into an int potY = Integer.parseInt(list[2]); //ditto button = Integer.parseInt(list[0]);
//print them out so I can see what's happening println(" " + Integer.parseInt(list[1]) + " "); //pot right hand println(" " + list[2] + " "); //pot left hand println(" " + list[0] + " "); //button fill(255, 0, 0); //ellipse(Integer.parseInt(list[1]), Integer.parseInt(list[2])/2, 10, 10); // ellipse(potX, potY, 12, 12); stroke(0); // line(512 - valuesx[i], 512 - valuesy[i], 512-valuesx[i + 1], 512 - valuesy[i + 1]);
// line(512 - potX, 512 - potY, 512-potX + 1, 512 - potY + 1); strokeWeight(5); //dont allow values to go outside of screen int xVal = constrain(potX, 0, width); int yVal = constrain(potY, 0, width); point(xVal, potY); }
}

2010-10-21T15:15:00.000-07:00

First efforts at a potentiometer controlled physical computing etch-a-sketch, most of the code is ripped off from the web, but the challenge at this point is making a 'shake' button, so you can clear the screen. Would be fun to use a tilt switch, and embed the hardware in a nice olde case of some sort, maybe a cigar box or chocolate box...any excuse to eat a whole box of chocolates..

I've had a paper accepted for the 14th Great Writing International Creative Writing Conference, June 18-19, 2011
at Imperial College London. Seems like a very long time to wait until summer. There was frost on the ground this morning..anyway, it's really good news...

memory mechanisms

2010-10-20T12:45:00.001-07:00

http://memorymechanisms.webs.com/
A place to build up my memory research

2010-10-20T09:44:00.000-07:00

Hello Vendela - I think you are refering to the Roger Callois quote:
Space pursues them, encircles them, digests them in a gigantic phagocytosis. It ends by replacing them. Then the body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. He tries to look at himself from any point whatever in space. He feels himself becoming space, dark space where things cannot be put. He is similar, not similar to something, but just similar. And he invents spaces of which he is "the convulsive possession." All these expressions shed light on a single process: depersonalization by assimilation to space, i.e., what mimicry achieves morphologically in certain animal species (Caillois, 1935).link to it here:http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpcaillois.htm
Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia*
Roger Caillois originally published in Minatoure, 7, 1935.

Elizabeth Grosz, in Grosz, E. (1994) Volatile Bodies Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
also talks about the condition, Legendary Psychasthenia which I referenced.
Hope that helps!
Good luck with your research

Future Books

2010-10-20T09:39:00.001-07:00

http://elanordare.webs.com/
Trying to start a future books website, the truth is I just like playing with templates...

2010-10-16T06:34:00.000-07:00

Post-desktop publishing: future books in an era of ubiquitous digitality. The Implications of intelligent and pervasive book forms.

Abstract

If digital literature is going to emerge as anything other than a facsimile of traditional texts it must deploy the significant strengths that contemporary computation has to offer. This paper will outline my reasons for stating this while also outlining and contextualising the software and book I have developed for my doctoral practice. This software generates bespoke literary content that works in collaboration with an analogue book called South:a psychometric text adventure. I shall explain how philosophies of Real World Interaction and situated programming have informed the development of this work, and why it represents a critique of previous digital forms and the underlying logic of traditional Artificial Intelligence, which I shall argue, has failed to deliver any significant digitally mediated literature.

Author Key words: Digital Technology, The Future of Books, Artificial Intelligence, Computing, Dissemination, Programming, Materiality, Pervasive Computing, Post-Desktop
Stream: Information Society, and Print and Electronic Texts

Introduction

This paper will describe the innovative practice based research I have taken over the last three years as a doctoral researcher and writer at Goldsmiths, Department of Computing, University of London. My research has centred upon the development of interactive software and a book entitled South: a Psychometric Text Adventure (available here in both electronic and paper forms http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/south/12924476).

The project re-conceptualises the book form, drawing formally upon elements of self-help and text adventures while technically deploying real world interaction, embodiment and situated computing. I will explain what this means and the implications of using technology in alternative paradigms for developing relevant new book forms.

I will evidence the outcomes of my practice and explain how this work has involved deepening conceptions of the relationship between book design, literary content and the complex capabilities of digital-technology. The paper will discuss insights into computational structures, and the materiality of programming practices. I will argue that my status as a writer-programmer, working within a supportive interdisciplinary academy has been conducive to enhancing the development of skills, knowledge and operational effectiveness that can preserve the centrality of the book form while accommodating the meaningful benefits of digital technologies. These benefits are not restricted to dissemination alone, but also have important implications for the structure, form and content of future books

Context and core questions

The South project asks three central questions:

Have digital book forms been successful or have they failed to make the impact initially heralded by for example, Landow (1992) and Bolter (1991)?
If so what are the causes of this failure?
What alternative technological structures and systems might be investigated?

These questions need to be framed in light of the polarised views of digital text that emerged from the 1990s onwards. Writers such as Birkerts (1994) and Updike (2006) characterised hypertext fiction as a threat to traditional reading while Landow (1992) and Bolter (1991) viewed it as representative of a positive shift towards empowering readers, a position that was supported by drawing heavily upon the theories of Roland Barthes (1970), upon notions of ‘writerly’ and ‘readerly’ texts (so called writerly texts require readers to actively construct or produce meaning, whereas readerly texts, according to Barthes, require static, pre-determined, forms of ‘passive’ reading), and upon Michel Foucault’s ideas about the decentring of authorial agency. But despite these two views there is little evidence to support the idea that traditional reading forms are dead or, on the other hand, that hypertext and other digital fictions have engendered a radical shift in traditional modes of reading and writing (though there are other valid debates about changes in attention span, or ‘deep focus reading’ which I will not enter into here). In 1992 Landow wrote;

Electronic text processing marks the next major shift in information technology after the development of the printed book. It promises (or threatens) to produce effects on our culture, particularly on our literature, education, criticism and scholarship, just as radical as those produced by Gutenberg's movable type.
(Landow, 18: 1992).

But has electronic text really had a significant effect upon our reading and writing of fiction, and is the much heralded ‘non-linearity’ of digital text a reality? Espen Aarseth (1997) challenges the notion that digital texts are non-linear while analogue texts are linear, he points out that a book can be randomly accessed as easily as a hypertext, indeed, it is possible to code hypertext in such a way as to control the order of reading above and beyond that of analogue texts. This is also true of other forms of computational text. In 1994 Sven Birkerts wrote of hypertext that it is:

delivering a mighty blow to the long-static writer-reader relationship. It changes the entire system of power upon which the literary experience has been predicated; it rewrites the contract from start to finish.
(Birkerts, 1994: 163).

My research has lead me to question both premises, to ask if it has really been the case that hypertext literature has either ‘revolutionised’ or ‘destroyed’ traditional forms of fiction. Between these two logically and philosophically opposed, but mutually reinforcing positions, there is a third view, that despite the rise of ubiquitous digitality, hypertext and wider forms of digital fiction have, by and large, failed to extend analogue book forms, let alone challenge or threaten them. Far from offering a radical break from traditional books, digital forms of literature are almost invariably blank re-mediations of them, and in the case of e-books, facsimiles of analogue books. Mc Neil (2008) takes the view that the legacy of hypertext has been less than impressive:

ten years later most people don’t even know what Hypertext fiction is. As computer graphics advanced and modems were replaced with Ethernet hookups, users looked for connectivity, not the locked in world of CD-ROM entertainment. Plus, that interactive “Choose Your Own Adventure” spirit already exists in literature like Julio Cortazar’s “Hopscotch” and Mark Z. Danielewski’s “House of Leaves” — and you can take those with you on a plane.
(Mac Neil, 2008 available at http://tomorrowmuseum.com/tag/fiction/page/3/ accessed 10/09/10)

The failure of digital fiction and Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence

It is therefore my primary argument in approaching this research that digital literature has failed to make a significant impact on literary fiction. The second motivating foundation for my research has stemmed from correlating the failure of digital fiction to the wider failure of Artificial Intelligence, specifically the form of Artificial Intelligence known as GOFAI – or good old fashioned artificial intelligence.

GOFAI represents one particular view of human intelligence that has been comprehensively critiqued by, among others, Hubert Dreyfuss (1972) and Alison Adam (1998). Dreyfuss and Adam note the limitations of propositional logic (a form of logic also known as sentential logic, based on combinations of statements, such as dogs have four legs, Elizabeth Windsor is the Queen of England, which are often abstracted into truth tables). Writers such as Lucy Suchman (1987, 2007) offer viable alternatives to GOFAI and therefore to purely propositional, a priori structures, in the form of situated programming. Situated programming has played a significant role in the development of the South book and software. Situated programming relates to the notion of software agents (modules of code that can make things happen in a program) existing in a dynamic environment. Situatedness is also related to the notion of embodiment, as, in order to understand their relationship to an environment, software agents rely on sensors which emulate human senses, such as touch, sight and sonic awareness. Situated programs therefore have a deep and dynamic relationship to the environments in which they operate. They are based on the more contemporary notion that intelligent behaviour emerges from the dynamic interplay between brains, bodies and situations (tantamount to changeable environments). More recently writers and practitioners such as Justine Cassell (2007), Cassell and Vilhjalmsson (2001) and Dourish (2001) have provided further insights into paradigms of digital interactivity that draw upon the body and the real world as opposed to hard coded a priori models of a disembodied and static world.

Real World Interaction

According to Jacob et al, practitioners of Real World Interaction:

employ themes of reality such as users’ understanding of naive physics, their own bodies, the surrounding environment and other people. They thereby attempt to make computer interaction more like interacting with the real, non-digital world
(Jacob et al, 2008).

It is important to acknowledge as Jacob et al do, the difficulty of terms such as ‘real world’, which I would qualify here as meaning social awareness, including inter-subjective interactions, environmental situatedness, (the sense of being in an environment and being able to navigate and manipulate it), and embodiment, particularly proprioceptive awareness of ourselves as bodies within an environment bound by gravity. As I have stated, earlier a priori models have been the legacy of first generation computing which have deployed command line arguments as opposed to direct manipulation, many narrative systems have been built on complex knowledge bases which, as Dreyfus (1972) Adams (1998), and Suchman (1987, 2007) argue necessitate an infinite regress of rules. As a counter argument practitioners (programmer story tellers) such as Chris Crawford have argued that they can see no reason why a computer program should not be able to generate its own complete literary works that are ‘equal’ to those of writers

There can be no doubt that C++ has the expressive potential to write a program capable of, say, writing profound novels
(Crawford in Sengers, Mateas, 2003: 195).

But there is little evidence for the accuracy of this statement, and also, tellingly, no ‘feel’ for the materiality of computing and the fundamental asymmetries of understanding that exist between embodied human beings and disembodied computers. Jacob et al have predicted instead that RWI will become the next major paradigm of Human Computer Interaction. Their analysis highlights a growing move towards embodied interfaces that is only supported by the mass market of iPhones, Androids and iPads that now use cameras and motion to control programs. RWI itself has arguably evolved from a complex interdisciplinary backdrop in which embodied and situated computing has become more prominent, especially in light of the failure of good old fashioned artificial intelligence to deliver the type of insights and understandings it had once promised us.

Another significant critique of abstract cognitive models has come from the philosophers Elizabeth Grosz (1994) and Judith Butler (1990) who have argued for a re-conceptualisation of the body in all systems of human knowledge production. It is in the context of these re-conceptualisations of Human Computer Interaction and the urgent case for methodologies and processes that can preserve the centrality of the book form while embracing the meaningful benefits of digital technologies, that I have developed the South project.

South: a psychometric text adventure

Above, the South book and egg. The egg is a via media between digital and analogue book forms.

Every good book needs a protagonist and luckily you’ve come along just in time to fulfil that role. According to How to Write a Blockbuster ‘characters provide readers with the emotional key, the route into your story’. This principle seems equally applicable to any decent guidebook or gazetteer, but the authors of this book also warn: ‘if your characters are flat and lifeless, no one will want to read it’.
Are you feeling flat and lifeless? You’re in for a pretty boring read if you are. Your job is ‘come alive’ so that I can just sit back and type. You should expertly discover who you ‘really’ are and help the rest of us to get to know you.

Above, an excerpt from South: a psychometric text adventure, Dare, 2010:8.

The South project consists of a book, a software interface and an ‘egg’ which uploads tailor-made content for individual readers. The project exists within the context of my ongoing practice as a writer and fine artist concerned with investigating the meaningful strengths and characteristics that computation can bring to the experience of reading and writing. The software works dynamically with the book in order to provide readers with a tailor made experience of the book, which is in part a travel guide, self-help manual and novel, centred upon the South Bank area of South London.

The book features fictional narratives about and ‘by’ a reclusive computer scientist called Ivan Dâr, the fictional creator of the South software. In order to tell the story of Ivan Dâr the book places location, sensation and tactile response at the forefront of the site-oriented experience it offers to readers. Readers are invited to construct their own narrative interpretations through touch, sound and movement, to locate themselves within and through the environment in which the book is set.

The non-linear South book and its readers, like the volatile content of the Thames itself are inherently unstable and localised, at least in my conception of them. The interdependency of each algorithm, and its direct relationship to the subjective state of readers, enables the book to also at times deliberately limit the mobility of users, emphasising the idealisations as much as the realities at play in this work.
In conjunction with the South software and egg, the book takes on an even greater degree of contingency, issuing instructions that have been generated in response to economic and meteorological events as well as my own subjective changes. It is significant that in this largely mutable configuration it is the overtly fictional content, the stories I have written about Ivan Dâr and his subjective dis-integration that retain the greatest degree of stability. Ambiguity, tension and mystery, if they exist at all, emanate from the experiences readers generate for themselves in the materiality of their research into the site and their own subjectivity and embodiment.

The South project assumes therefore that its readers are intricate, intelligent and often inconsistent. The current form of the South book assumes a broad readership, ranging from people who are interested in London, walking and psycho-geography to those who are curious about what a location can tell them about themselves. Other readers may come to the book through their interest in game forms such as ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books and text adventures. All readers will find themselves required to engage in a series of psychometric (or psychologically evaluative) processes woven in and around the South Bank. Depending on specific interactions and situations the egg will also tell readers to look for hidden content in the book, and to navigate new pathways through both the paper-based text and the physical location. Interaction with the South project is divided into three distinct processes:

1. When a reader opens the software it automatically scans the web for news and other situating information, including the local weather and financial data.
2. The South software evaluates readers via psychometric testing and generates appropriate and challenging content for them that complements the book.
3. The reader uploads the freshly bespoke content into the egg and goes to the South Bank with the book and egg. The egg will guide them through both the book and the location in ways that are unique to each occurrence of interaction.

evaluation of
readers and
computer based
narrative generation
[using a range of
processes including
language and image analysis]
egg content
generation

Data gathering and
Analysis
(Pre-processing)
Three distinct processes:

Above, the software generates bespoke content and tasks to help users explore the South Bank in a way that is personally meaningful to them. The content is held inside the interactive egg device. The central character of the book, Ivan Dâr, is an avian embryologist

.
Bespoke content and types of knowledge
Many of the evaluative procedures deployed by the South software and book involve the senses, and indeed the progression of the evaluations through the five senses is part of the underlying narrative of the assessment process. The emphasis upon sensory and embodied interaction in both the South book and software also enforces the central notion that the technology we use does not exist in isolation from the cultural or physical spaces in which we live and work. The question of what constitutes knowledge or intelligence in these tests is also challenged (it is also an important question in the context of claims about intelligence and computing), what, the book asks, do we mean by intelligence? Are there other types of intelligence or knowledge that computers and conventional research processes can deploy, such as:

• Embodied knowledge

• Tacit knowledge[1]

• Situated knowledge

The processes presented in the South book and software are designed to facilitate an exploration of these questions within and through the South Bank location. Ivan Dâr, the central character of South is framed as a man literally in search of himself, struggling with ‘breaking the boundary of his own skin’ (as Roger Callois puts it). Ivan Dâr endures a psycho-physical breakdown in which he cannot find himself because he appears to have no location in space. At times the book deliberately aims to bewilder or undermine its own readers, hinting at the possibility of space as an annihilating agency working against them, generating a hostile space by means of its aesthetic strategies and by asking readers to undertake paradoxical or impossible tasks, lying to them, issuing contradictory instructions or leaving exasperating lose ends. Ivan Dâr’s fictions return to the theme of his so-called sickness and the strategies he devises to operate within the city despite his phobias and disintegrating boundaries.
In this way the South project uses situated Artificial Intelligence techniques such as language and image analysis as well as pattern matching, psychometric and embodied evaluations to gain insights into individual readers and to individual situations as well as to more widely felt experiences, such as breaking news, world temperatures, and financial data. Real World Interaction allows us to explore modes of interaction with books that can draw upon the situatedness and embodiment of human readers, likewise, by deploying digital technology and evaluative procedures bespoke content can be combined with stable analogue content.

About Your Egg

The egg is a proto-novel, a book waiting to be hatched. We suggest you keep the egg close to you for the first few days. If you have spare folds of fat this is great, you can tuck the egg into them. Otherwise you might like to keep the egg in your pocket or under your jumper while watching television. When the egg has reached a temperature of about 67 degrees your book is ready to be hatched. Grab this book, head down to the Southbank, turn the egg on and take it for walk. By pressing the forward and backward buttons at the back of your egg you can experience the enhanced navigational range of this book. This will involve going up its stairs and through its secret tunnels, scampering over its many rooftops, clambering along ridges and down into its green valleys to find new and previously undiscovered pages. The book is designed to be smudged, thumbed, bumped, riffled through, used as a pillow, an occasional table and drawing book. It is also a form of compass. One way or another, (if you stay on Earth) this book will always point towards the South, just like your egg.

Above, an excerpt from South: a psychometric text adventure, Dare, 2010: 254. Below, tailor made content for readers. The egg guides people through the book in unique paths. The text is not designed to be read linearly, but structured in collaboration with individual readers and the South software.

Above and below, computer generated
content for a digital book, Eleanor Dare 2010

Conclusion

In order for computation to bring significant and worthwhile mediations to literary texts it is necessary to use digital technologies, not as passive vessels alone, but as medium specific tools. Devices such as Kindle and iPhones are a case in point. The computational abilities of these devices could be used to meaningful effect rather than as blank re-mediations of traditional book forms, mere holders of analogue facsimiles. The South project has been an effective proof of concept, evidencing that it is possible to create bespoke literary content while preserving those aspects of book form that so many people cherish, such as the materiality of books and the tactile intimacy of reading. My own methodology has involved paying attention to the particularity of programming structures and paradigms. I would contend that such an analysis has not been extensively engaged upon by previous generations of digital fiction authors., At the same time the structures and orthodoxies of programming have been submissively accepted and rarely evolved by such authors, hence perhaps the stagnation of such forms as IF (interactive fiction) and hypertext fiction.
It is perhaps a challenging but exciting prospect that writers of digitally mediated literature need to develop computational skills and, likewise, programmers involved in this field need to know how to write. Interdisciplinary initiatives such as those at Goldsmiths where I undertook my doctoral and masters research will enable programmers, technologists and writers to gain insights into each other’s domains, and in my case to become both programmers and writers. Where this is not directly possible it behoves researchers such as myself to facilitate and disseminate insights into computational structures and the literary possibilities of emerging technologies. The South book contains detailed information about how to hack the code I have written, enabling those who are interested to experiment with programming new kinds of writing and thus to encourage a future that will tolerantly investigate and benefit from diverse book forms.

______________________________________________________________

The South book is available here in electronic and paper forms:
http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/south/12924476
The South software can be downloaded from here:
http://www.doc.gold.ac.uk/~ma501ed/south/south_Download.html

Bibliography

Aarseth, E. J. Cybertext: Perspectives on ergotic literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Adam, A, (1998) Artificial Knowing, Gender and the Thinking Machine, London and New York: First Routledge.

Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway, Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Barthes, R. (1970) S/Z, Mass Market Paperback, Editions du Seuil.

Birkerts, S. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in the Elecronic Age. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1994.

Bolter, D. J. Writing space: The computer, hypertext, and the history of writing. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 1991.

Butler, J. (1999) Gender Trouble, Routledge.

Cassell, Justine, Kopp, Stefan, Tepper, Paul, Ferriman, Kim & Striegnitz, K . (2007) "Trading Spaces: How Humans and Humanoids use Speech and Gesture to Give Directions." In T. Nishida (ed.) Conversational Informatics. New York: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 133-160
Cassell, J., Bickmore, T., Vilhjalmsson, H., Yan, H. (2001). "More Than Just a Pretty Face: Conversational Protocols and the Affordances of Embodiment." Knowledge-Based Systems 14: 55-64.
Dourish, P. 2001. Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Dreyfus, H. L. (1972) What Computers Still Can’t Do, A Critique of Artificial Reason,

Gallagher, S. (2005) How the Body Shapes the Mind, Oxford University Press.

Grosz, E. (1994) Volatile Bodies Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Jacob, R. J., Girouard, A., Hirshfield, L. M., Horn, M. S., Shaer, O., Solovey, E. T., and Zigelbaum, J. (2008). Reality-based interaction: a framework for post-WIMP interfaces. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. CHI '08. ACM Press, New York, pp. 201-210.

Kelly, Kevin (2006) Scan This Book! Available here:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/magazine/14publishing.html?pagewanted=1 accessed 03/10/10
Landow, G. P. Hypertext 2.0: The convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Landow, G. P. Hypertext: The convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

Mateas, M. and Sengers, P. (eds) (2003) Narrative Intelligence, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.

Suchman, L. (1987) Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-machine Communication, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Suchman, L. (2007) Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Updike, J. (2006) The End of Authorship available here:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/books/review/25updike.html?_r=1&scp=1 &sq=updike%20+%20snippets&st=cse accessed 04/10/10

[1] Tacit knowledge is summed up by the scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi in his statement "We know more than we can tell." (Polyani, 2009: 4)Tacit knowledge implies a multi-layered background of subjective and unformalised skills and knowledge, including cultural and embodied forms of knowing.

The Visceral Narratives colloquium

2010-10-15T11:36:00.000-07:00

The Visceral Narratives colloquium was a very good experience, what I came to Goldsmiths for - true interdisciplinary dialogue. I really enjoyed hearing about the work of the two other artist researchers, Katya Oicherman and Claudine Leroux, whose work has so many overlaps with my own, but is also completely different. I’d like to present with them again –
these are our blurbs:

Claudine Leroux, “Drawing the lines of Memory”. Claudine will deal with the creative process involved when verbalizing images of events experienced in early childhood, and which can only be accessed through a sensory memory. She will focus on the shift of perspective in perception of the self through time, its spatial dimension and its emotional charge, when writing for a reader.

Katya Oicherman, “Binding Auto/Biographies”. In her work, Katya recreates traditional Jewish ceremonial textiles, using her own family history as a basis for the embroidered text in the work. Hi/stories of Jewisness are staged and told as a mixed-media autobiography, interplaying text and stitch. Telling / writing / embroidering are related in terms of the notions of uniqueness and narration and contextualized within feminine writing and contemporary craft theory.

Eleanor Dare, “Figure and ground: the body as a locus of narrative and knowing”. Eleanor will investigate the ways bodies and language are intertwined and examine how illness or trauma require us to speak from the body in different terms from those of orthodox academic research or Cartesian epistemologies. In particular, she will look at embodiment as a basis for the re-conceptualisation of digitally mediated life-writing.

It was very generous of Lucia Boldrini to organise and chair this colloquium for us and not even talk about her own work! I heard Lucia read her paper on Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang in Copenhagen (June 2010) and was hoping to hear more, but I guess three talkers is a good number for one afternoon. The discussion was valuable as well. I’m always amazed when people can be bothered to ask good qurestions, so that is always a bonus…I want to do this again and see how Katya and Claudine’s work develops – their work is brilliant, I feel very lucky to have presensted with them today.

2010-10-11T03:50:00.000-07:00

Visceral Narratives colloquium Friday 15th

2010-10-08T05:54:00.000-07:00

Hadn't quite grasped that the Visceral Narratives colloquium is next Friday, which means it's unfortunately clashing with the Waterman's seminar. Anyway, this is the poster I made this morning, Katya provided the stork images, which now look like little babies that are somehow racing or jockeying the poor old birds, interesting to see what kind of people turn up for this - stork racing enthusaists of South London....
Colloquium - what a weird word, I spell it differently each time I write it, then go back and try to cover up my shameful mistakes. Hmm.pity there is no spell-check for Blogspot.

2010-10-08T05:25:00.001-07:00

2010-10-02T11:55:00.000-07:00

I've had that paper accepted for the 8th International Conference on the Book, at St Galen University, Switzerland, so that's encouraging! It's a virtual presentation so I have to work
out what form that should take, as there are options, such as YouTube and Sonic Power Points (no Skype allowed). Anyway, the more exciting part of having it being accepted is being able to submit the paper to the International Journal of The Book, which is my main goal in relation to this paper, as it sums up my doctoral research, a useful practice in readyness for doctoral defense.....

2010-09-25T15:52:00.000-07:00

Ahrc what I've written so far:

Gestural codes: A psychophysical framework for the investigation of missing memories.

A proposal for a computational system that will deploy embodied processes in the absence of fixed representations.

This research project explores a computational and philosophical apparatus for the investigation of missing memories. This interdisciplinary work will incorporate aspects of life-writing and digital narrativity as well as computer science and philosophies of mind.

Like many people I have gaps in my memories, and thus in the symbolic narrative of my life. Before the age of nine my childhood memories are largely without detail. By and large those years may therefore be described as ‘lost’. As a visual artist and artist-programmer the notion of such an aporia or cognitive deficit is particularly problematic. In the absence of representation what, if anything, can be retrieved, and what exactly can be communicated to others? In a wider philosophical sense such questions of representation and meaning have a high degree of cultural urgency. At this point in human-computer-interaction (or hci) we are on the verge of developing radical alternatives to fixed representation. (cite?) Two of those alternatives are present in the concepts of enactvism and Real World Interaction (or RWI), in which embodiment and environmental context become the principal loci of essentially processual meaning making. In these alternative paradigms tangible and social approaches to interaction become deeply embedded.

The system I propose to develop will bring very new technological innovations to the domain of digital narrative. Using a 12 camera motion capture system and GPS technology embedded in iPhones and iPads, will develop a performative narrative system that will enact the feelings and processes involved in experiencing partial or missing memories. The system will use real-world objects, sounds and images as well as actual and virtual spatialisations. The system may therefore be described as psychophysical (more) .

2. The need for this research

My background investigation suggests that although there has been some research into using gesture capturing systems for interactive narrative, these systems have not focused upon the important philosophical and pragmatic question of representation (and, more importantly, its absence) in either computation or narrative. This is a considerable gap given the increasing relevance of embodiment to both the arts and computation (support). The phenomenological tradition emphasises the primacy of actions and embodied practices over abstract cognition in everyday activity, and yet few artists and producers of interactive narrative have been able to comprehensively articulate these resurgent ideas within a digital context.

(prove its important Add relevant quotes)

WHY THE RESEARCH IS IMPORTANT

* may resolve theoretical questions in the areas of HCI, digital narrative and life writing* may develop better theoretical models in this area* may influence teaching of interactivity
Such a system may have implications for people who experience serious loss of memory. Are there ways in which computers can help to retrieve, not memories themselves (as fixed representations) but embodied and performative layers or laminations that can communicate experiences to others in the absence of fixed representations?
Similarly, does such a system may have value in the absence of common spoken languages. Emotion and affect may be communicated computationally across distances of time, space and culture.
Does this also have an implication for other types of performance – such as theatre or dance? Research based at Goldsmiths provides easy access to performers across a range of disciplines and also to diverse cultural and linguistic populations.
May hidden layers of meaning and memory be revealed via gesture, in other words, to quote Michael Polanyi, do we ‘know more than we can tell’? (Polanyi, 1968)

AHRC Early Career development fellowship

2010-09-25T01:25:00.000-07:00

I’m starting to try and put together coherent ideas for an AHRC
Early Career Development Fellowship. I've been moaning to all and sundry about the difficulties of understanding the application process, so now have got some useful feedback about it and feel less overwhelmed - because everyone else seems to be beleaguered by the bureaucracy and confusion, its not just me! Which is always good to know.

This is the AHRC blurb:
The Fellowships scheme provides salary and associated costs for periods of three to nine months, to enable an individual researcher to work on a specified research project or programme. The Fellowship can be used to support a wide range of research activities provided that these lead to significant specified research and other outputs by the end of the Fellowship, including the preparation of publications and other outputs from research conducted prior to the start of the Fellowship. Proposals for full economic costs up to a maximum of £120,000 may be submitted.
The early career route aims to enable the AHRC to work in partnership with institutions to support the career development of researchers at the start of their careers and to provide them with focused research time and appropriate support and mentoring so that they can broaden their research experience and enhance their research outputs profile. In order to apply to this route, applicants must meet additional eligibility criteria as outlined in the AHRC Funding Guide
http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/FundingOpportunities/Pages/Fellowshipserc.aspx

2010-09-23T13:12:00.000-07:00

Position paper proposal for the Eighth International Conference on the Book. In 2010, the Conference is to be held at the University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland from 6-8 November 2010
link here:http://B10.cgpublisher.com/proposals/143
my paper will have this title
Post-desktop publishing: future books in an era of ubiquitous digitality. The Implications of intelligent and pervasive book forms.
fingers crossed...

The Book Conference will provide a forum for participants in the book publishing industry, librarians, researchers and teachers from around the world to discuss the past, present and future of the book, and with it, other key aspects of the information society, including publishing, libraries, information systems, literacy and education.

in fact it's worth quoting from last years conference as the themes are so relevant, although I'm coming at it from the point of view of writing and reading more than selling, obviously:

Digital technologies are not mere tools applied to stable phenomena. Instead, they are essential factors in the creation of a new space — the digital sphere. Although the digital sphere shares many characteristics with traditional productive and social realms, it also introduces mechanisms and possibilities that make it profoundly distinct.
The digital sphere provides novel opportunities and challenges to the publishing industry, raising key questions about the ways in which publishing and related sectors might be accommodated. This panel will serve as a forum for the examination of these possibilities through a consideration of key questions, such as:
Is the book publishing industry in better shape than the music industry, and therefore better equipped to cope with digital downloading?
What does social media mean for book publishing?
Is the ‘long tail’ approach to sales and distribution just fashionable hype, or can it lead to increased profits? If yes, for whom?
Is downloading of greater interest to publishers than Print on Demand?
How big of a problem is piracy? Is it an inevitable fact of life or a profound threat?
And, more generally, what is the publisher’s role in the digital sphere? What is the key to success in this realm?

http://booksandpublishing.com/conference-2010/program/#scp

The description of conference talking circles is a useful model as well

2010-09-16T11:10:00.000-07:00

link to open Frameworks pdf >>>

2010-09-07T04:30:00.000-07:00

It feels like our presentation went well at the Brunel conference yesterday, despite running out of time. We need to distill even further the essence of the VAINS project, and as Janis suggested, maybe make a demo of the interface and software to show, rather than embedding this in our power point presentation.

The image was created by Lee to demonstrate the structure of VAINS