The proofs for the book project were returned today, so a large proportion of the first half of the day was spent responding to this and making necessary changes. There was a meeting before the lecture during which I helped bring several people’s books to completion.
The lecture was by Andrew Conio, and was quite a frustrating experience. His delivery was very quiet and measured, but there were a few points in his argument that irked me. Involved in the Occupy movement, he offered no explanation or critique of why it ended, remaining upbeat and rose-tinted about its successes. Was it an artwork?, he asked, seemingly unconcerned about how the instrumentalisation that this would imply might change the art or the activism. The crux of his argument seemed uncritically utopian, and his analysis of the problems that Occupy was demonstrating against seemed unfocused. “Because capitalism, okay?” seems fine until you begin to question it in more detail. I’m still not quite able to pin down what it was that vexed me so much about this lecture.
The evening was spent working on the data visualisation piece for the method conference. I managed to program a thread to accurately read the data and now it plays back accurately in time rather than at the fastest possible frame rate. This clears the way to move forward with this piece of work in Processing rather than having to fight it out with oF.