art and technology

. .one step forward 3 back ! learning all these bits of code is a bit like trying to learn chinese and russian with a blindfold on ! juggling new stuff in Processing, arduino and pure data – thay have some similatires but are specific in what they are good at – yesterday managed to get a video into processing – hurray ! but this morning when I checked it out again, it wouldn’t work . . . then after about half an hour of faffing around dicovered that when I saved it, it had made itself into an arduino file ! what’s that about then ! guess I should have noticed but the sketch was blue rather than grey – but none of the files work in the arduino state, in that they got error messages but in theory does it mean they could work through the arduino ? anyway some sort of progress is being made though not really interactive – yet !

. . .beyond the screen is proving rather painful – not that interested in interactivity – well interactivity that goes beyond looking listening thinking and moving around ! however not to be defeated, have spent the afternoon getting 3 LEDs to light up in different sequences – albeit in a rather weedy way !

but am soooooo uninspired and bewildered by the idea that millions of people (well, mostly blokes) spend their time making ‘weekend projects’ of little gizmos that measure their lives in various ways via a bit of arduino work and acres of code – it’s all very well Lacan saying that women are forever outcast as “other” – don’t think he realised how much “other” we might be ! I almost feel like another species when I looks at all this stuff !