Today I received rapporteur feedback from the RF1 and have been slowly assimilating it. The most troubling thing is how straightforwardly it highlights the major unexplored area in my research: the method. The conference will help with this, but it still feels like an area of weakness that needs a lot of work.

The Gravity lecture was from Ian Kiaer, and was a dauntingly clear demonstration of how to connect practice with solid theoretical grounding. I feel like I don’t know enough already, but the research in Kiaer’s practice proves this.

Met with a colleague this morning to discuss some changes in our work pattern, and had a good long conversation about the way institutions operate and how the future might look. Then met with supervisor for lunch, and had a chat with two other researchers in the unit about what my research might entail. It was good to put some names to faces and to talk about possible assonances and connections between the currently fairly separate areas of research practice in the unit.

All time in between these events was spent finishing various people’s books for the book project. (I think we’re nearly there, finally.)

Today began with a meeting with Jon Kirby at the Design Futures unit about the visual identity for the Method conference. It was cut short because I had to run to the deadline meeting for the book project, and spent a fair proportion of the rest of the day helping people complete their books to the specifications laid down by Sharon. I managed to complete three people’s books before heading to the ADRC seminar shared with the creative writing group.

This was an interesting collaborative effor in which a couple of  PhD students from the art and creative writing areas did short presentations on the work they were doing. While a range of topics were discussed, the key areas of confluence were the use of voice and speech, and how this immediacy is understood in writing and through reflection. Structurally, the creative writing students seem to clearly divide their critical and creative output, giving a seemingly much less negotiable form to their thesis. There seems to be a more circumscribed relationship between the two. Art students seem to have a bit more of a job to justify their creative work as new knowledge – nobody would question that the production of a novel or body of poetry is the generation of new knowledge. Can art theses operate the same way? Should they?

The Transmission lecture – Grace Schwindt – was unfortunately a bit of a disappointment. Only one major body of work discussed, and largely referred to only in terms of the administrative and practical approaches rather than the motivations or intentions. Grace didn’t give much away, and this seemed to weaken the voice in her work rather than strengthen it.

The evening was spent managing more issues with the book project, with other PhD team members. The whole set were checked, errors spotted and info sent on to the authors.

A slow start to the week: most of the day’s effort was directed toward finalising the book project for the print deadline tomorrow. I’m glad I spotted and fixed a few errors before proofing. I also helped several other people with their books via email and in person at the S1 studio.

Had a productive morning of reflective writing, and through it realised a few connections in my thinking that I hadn’t previously spotted. First, that the thing I’m researching is embedded, embodied and everyday (as Christine Hine describes it in terms of ethnography), and as such, the work I make to inquire into it should be the same. Part of what’s been slowing me up is an implicit expectation that the work will be presented in a gallery context, and to consider it instead as something everyday, that might exist within and between the everyday social interactions that devices mediate, seems quite liberating.

I attended a C3RI seminar by Heath Reed from Design Futures, snappily titled Positioning creative, three dimensional design practice and understanding its role and value in university based social research and development projects. It was a good explanation of the sorts of things that the design for health people are working on, and in some ways the products and devices they are coming up with have such a positive impact on people’s lives that it puts the value of my own research activity into sobering perspective. The presentation sought to identify a theoretical perspective from which to understand university-hosted design projects of this nature, and outlined how the university is one of the only places where multidisciplinary teams can conduct “deep research” in addition to working on design concepts in a consultancy capacity. The outside design world sees this hybridisation as an unfair advantage, as external consultancies have mainly commercial concerns. The consensus in the room was that this sort of work is precisely what universities are supposed to be doing (as opposed to designing better hairdryers for example), and this raised an ethical question for me about how the work is valued; the value of contracts and bids was discussed in monetary terms, but little was said about how lives are qualitatively altered for the better, or how the neoliberalised model of research funding contributes to this assessment of the quality and value of the research.

I also spent some time following up a lead that my supervisor gave to an exhibition. I’d seen the article but skipped it, thinking it was about Timo Arnall, but it’s actually Jon Gerrard who is opening a show in London presently. I searched out some further shows and booked a gallery visit trip for near the end of the month.

The rest of the day was spent reading two papers that I’ll be discussing with my students tomorrow.

Today was mainly spent working on the visualisation for the method conference. I’ve been doing the coding in Processing and up to a point that was fine. Today I hit the wall though, when I realised that it just wasn’t able to read the data accurately enough to play back multiple events per second at tenth of a second accuracy. So, I started looking into oF in earnest.

I already have an old install which I never really got working, so I spent a while making that work and getting a bit more used to Xcode. I did a tutorial and read through a lot of example code. It’s totally different to java and it’s going to be very slow going to get up to speed with it.

Not sure whether to try and make the method conference thing work in oF or to stick with Processing. Both strategies run the risk of my having an unfinished project by the deadline. I also found a course running at the end of March, which might be a good way to get started on oF.

The visualisation doesn’t look like much at the moment. I feel the urge to see some visible progress so might park the method work tomorrow in favour of something a bit more visual.

After seeing a lot of celebration over the launch of the Raspberry Pi 2 today, I did a little research into the current state of play with creative coding environments on it. Turns out that Processing now runs adequately on the pi, and oF seems also to be viable. In particular there are lots of nice looking libraries available for oF, including a few projection mapping ones. Projection mapping was the reason I bought the pi in the first place, to design a standalone unit to run the piece S/N (2011). Finally, three years on, this might actually be possible.

The downside to all of this is that I’m likely going to have to learn C++ to progress with the video-based work. Processing is just too cranky with video, so if I’m going down this road then I need to do some serious technical reskilling.