nonsite

I’ve been working out of a beautiful studio at the Banff Centre for the past four weeks and for the first time in about a year I’ve been able to start to feel like I’m getting caught up on some of the many strands I’ve had floating around in my head for the past few months and certain themes, issues and ideas are starting to float to the top. Recently mapping, locative media, geo-tagging have been strong, but not as strong as my more recent interest in Claude Shannon, lossy data compression, image fidelity and encryption. I wish I was clearer where this research might end up, but I’m following my research instincts and I will worry about outcomes later.

The best thing I did this week was download Markus Gebhard’s JavE 5 ascii generator. This ascii editor has a very elegant interface that can draw and convert images into ascii. It seems very robust. It saves images as .txt files so you can open them as quite large files even though they are very low resolution- an interesting contradiction.

I haven’t really taking much time to reflect on the contextualization exercise two weeks ago. I have to admit to being a little disappointed at the level of engagement- again I think it must be hard for my colleagues if they don’t have the background or the interest in what I’ve been thinking about. I think Jonathan did the best he could, but I don’t know that I learned much new. I’m also not sure how helpful my comments have been for my colleagues- other than Ayhan, as I happen to have some older knowledge that relates to his project.

It feels pretty anticlimactic at the moment, hopefully tomorrow will be useful.