dave's blog of art and programming

  • More procedurally rendered eggs in HTML5 canvas

    The first Project Nightjar game was a big success, with 6 thousand players in the first few days – so we’ll have lots of visual perception data to get through! Today I’ve been doing a bit more work on the egg generator for the next citizen science camouflage game: I’ve made 24 new, more naturalistic…

  • Fascinate Falmouth

    It’s not often that you get to go to the first edition of a festival or conference, but last week was the first ever Fascinate Conference, in Falmouth – a varied collection of artists, performers, musicians and experimenters with technology, some from far away on their first visit to Cornwall, others were local – both…

  • Where is that nightjar?

    The first Project Nightjar game is online! It’s a perception test to see how good you are at spotting the camouflaged birds – a great use of the photos the researchers are collecting in the field, and we can also use the data as an experiment by comparing our timing when searching for birds with…

  • Sonic Bike Hacklab Part 3: The anti-cloud – towards bike to bike mesh networking

    [Continued from part 2] One of the philosophies that pre-dates my involvement with the sonic bikes project is a refusal of cloud technologies – to avoid the use of a central server and to provide everything required (map, sounds and computation) on board the bikes. As the problems with cloud technology become more well known,…

  • Algorave in Wired UK Magazine

    Great to see algorave featured in Wired, a review of our last Stubnitz gig, (lots of shots of Al Jazari and Scheme Bricks) and an interview with Alexandra Cardenas. Read the full page article here.

  • Sonic Bike Hacklab Part 2: FM accelerometer transmissions

    [Continued from part 1] On day one, after we introduced the project and the themes we wanted to explore, Ryan Jordan had a great idea of how to prototype the bike-bike communication using FM radio transmissions. He quickly freeform built a short range FM transmitter powered by a 9v battery. The next thing we needed…

  • Sonic Bike Hacklab: Part 1

    Time to report on the sonic bike hacklab Kaffe Matthews and I put on in AudRey HQ in Hackney. We had a sunny and stormy week of investigation into sonic bike technology. After producing three installations with sonic bikes, the purpose of the lab was to open the project up to more people with fresh…

  • Slub at the Deershed festival

    Deershed is a music festival designed to accommodate families with lots of activities for children. Part of this year’s festival was a Machines Tent, including Lego robot building, Mechano constructions, 3D printing and computer games. Slub’s daily routine in the Machines Tent started by setting up the Al Jazari gamepad livecoding installation, a couple of…

  • Deershed Festival, Sonic Bike Lab, Fascinate Festival

    Preparations for a busy summer, new Al Jazari installation gamepads on the production line: This weekend Alex and I are off to the Deershed Festival in Yorkshire to bring slub technology to the younger generation. We’ll be livecoding algorave, teaching scratch programming on Raspberry Pis and running an Al Jazari installation in between. Then onwards…

  • Genetic programming egg patterns in HTML5 canvas

    Part of the ‘Project Nightjar’ camouflage work I’m doing for the Sensory Ecology group at Exeter University is to design citizen science games we can build to do some research. One plan is to create lots of patterns in the browser that we can run perceptual models on for different predator animals, and use an…