dave's blog of art and programming

  • Futurecrafting in Cornwall with FoAM Earth

    The future is in short supply at the moment, particularly in a country with so many things changing – it is a constant surprise that there are so few ideas about where we could be headed. At the smaller scales too, at FoAM Kernow, in common with many organisations there is a feeling we tend…

  • How to design a tangible programming language – Pattern Matrix at Algomech (part 2)

    Once we acknowledge that weaving and programming are part of the same technological timeline, we can begin to look at the history of weaving as a eight thousand year long tale of human relationship with digital technologies – and use this long view to research new approaches to software engineering, a field with a much…

  • Pattern Matrix at Algomech (part 1)

    I’m writing this on the train with a slightly sleep deprived brain fizzing and popping from thoughts, ideas and conversations from this year’s Algomech festival in Sheffield. The Penelope project took a significant role in the festival, with the group’s participation in the Unmaking Symposium, the exhibition and also testing our latest weavecoding technology at…

  • Adventures with FM sound and the YM2612

    So I’ve been getting a into FM synthesis lately, and after giving the TX7 a spin I’ve been really wanting to try evolving sounds for the later synth chips Yamaha made for games consoles and soundcards. At that point in history FM was one of the only realistic ways you could synthesise complex sound as…

  • Creative Design Informatics for Horticultural Awareness at the End of the World Garden

    Thanks to Paul Chaney who runs The End of the World Garden, we had an opportunity to trial a short workshop based on our Farm Crap App and prototype Allotment Lab on his two-acre forest garden site in Cornwall. This was our contribution to the Bank Holiday Weekend Haymaking Extravaganza (along with a bit of…

  • Viruscraft: Genetic model connected to a tree visualisation

    The genetic model we were working on previously has now been ported into a browser compatible form and connected to a new tree visualisation that displays the species that emerge as the host population adapts to a virus infection. It’s still a prototype with rough edges, but have a play with it here, some example…

  • Technology after Collapse

    The philosophy underlying contemporary ‘seamless’ technology production seems to be one of endless energy, bountiful resources and waste being someone else’s problem. Naive working assumptions of some form are a requirement when designing for the future, but do we believe in these enough now to make them useful? Flashy ‘aspirational’ tech videos of ever thinning…

  • Pattern Matrix PCBs arrived & first tests

    After triple checking the schematics and design files and ordering 80 PCBs (50 sensors and 30 i2c boards) there was an anxious wait for them to arrive and do some initial tests to find out if there were any mistakes. We now have enough boards to make two new pattern matrix devices, one 4X4 and…

  • Viruscraft: building a ‘reasonably accurate’ genetic game world simulation

    The concept for the viruscraft game is to have a realtime genetic model or simulation of the host evolution which is adapting to the properties of a virus you are building (either on screen or via a tangible interface as part of an exhibit). This model needs to be realistic, but only up to a…

  • PCB design for pattern matrix 2

    This is the pattern matrix 2 tangible sensor schematic, which is fairly simple – just 4 hall effect sensors and a capacitor to smooth out any noise on the power supply. We need to make hundreds of these for the Penelope Project, and we can save some costs by using the built in pull up…