Posted on 1 Comment

Nightwalks

In lieu of a working writing arm, I’m taking to a few different strategies to make sure I can keep working, one of which has been recording my voice. I’ve been using this as a way to keep more fluid notes than I can with dictation, and the same has gone for my creative as well as academic thinking. In some new experimenting with a creative piece that (just today) found a name – Nightwalks – I’ve been taking my normal note-taking-before-forming-full-creative-ideas onto audioboo. At first I was a little frustrated with the fact that I couldn’t shape and edit before the words flew out into the big wide world (as I can on a piece of paper), until I allowed myself to see the meanderings, ums, and corrections as just like papered crossings outs, footnotes and refinement. It feels refreshingly bare to lay out my thinking in such an open way, and very in fitting with how I think tech and art can work together – opening up processes, hopefully in a vaguely interesting ‘DVD extras’ kind of way.

You can catch all of my recorded meanderings on audioboo under the tag ‘nightwalks‘ or play them on the boobase map, below – you can zoom and drag to move as you normally would on googlemaps, and click on the flags to open the option to play the audio. The thoughts and feelings therein will soon be morphing into an idea for recording… so, as they so anachronistically say: stay tuned.

Posted on 2 Comments

This is Why I’m Not Blogging at the Moment

Xray Twitpic... on Twitpic

It’s my right arm, I’m right-handed and despite having some speech-to-text software that works pretty well, I had no idea how much my thinking relied on handwriting and that small amount of time between thought and keyboard. Turns out trying to develop lines of argument at the same time as saying them out loud is kind of distracting.

Who’d have thunk it.

In the meantime, if you’re desperate to hear me rant, I’m going to be speaking at the (massive, gulp) Shift Happens Alt/Shift arts/learning and tech conference in York on the 5th of July. I do believe the tickets are sold out, but just in case I don’t pass out/throw up I’ll ask someone to film it, and youtube it after.