Category Archives: Uncategorized

You’d think after all this time (I first studied Media in 1982 and have been teaching in the Media field since 1985) that I’d have a clear idea about the notion of media. But no, I find myself regularly rethinking … Continue reading →

Take a tape of the sound of the snow falling. This should be done in the evening. Do not listen to the tape. Cut it and use it as strings to tie gifts with. (Yoko Ono, Snow Piece (Tape Piece … Continue reading →

Is there any value in describing what I remember of a philosophical argument from a long distant time of reading? I believe there is value, because, however abbreviated, simplified, even distorted the memory of the argument, it is nonetheless the … Continue reading →

Labour is apparently human, but it is bound by a paradox. In its disregard for immediate compensation, it represents a turn away from immediate ‘animal’ needs and inclinations. This suspension of immediate existence is the manifestation of the human rationality … Continue reading →

For men of experience know the fact but not the why of it; but men of art know the why of it or the cause. It is because of this that we regard also the master-artists of a given craft … Continue reading →

My Loom blog entries consider the relation between the labour of programming and the labour of program execution. While it would seem natural that the conceptual space of programming utterly determines the mechanical space of execution, my aim has been … Continue reading →

I can’t help returning to this question: what sense does it make to refer to mechanical labour? The problem is this, human labour involves pursuing activities with no immediate reward in order to obtain delayed advantage. It combines alienation from … Continue reading →

How can algorithmic, iterative human labour be related to mechanical labour? Can, for instance, the process of in-fill dotting in Central Australian Indigenous painting be meaningfully related to the process of intricate drawing in algorithmic computational art? They may share … Continue reading →

The relation between LeWitt and his draftsperson is often compared to the relation between a composer and performer , but I think it’s also valid to look at the comparison between a programmer and the entity of execution.1 In an … Continue reading →

Exhibition opening talk – Last Exile, Agnieszka Golda and Martin Johnson, Friday June 17th 2011, Wollongong City Gallery Thanks to Martin and Agnieszka for asking me to open this show, which I know has taken so much work. We shared … Continue reading →

A walk can follow a trail, but it can also determine one. It can shape a trail from a network of real and latent paths. The trail may shift from the uncertainty of an animal track to the clarity of … Continue reading →

Why bother describing the creek when I have photographed it, when I include the five photographs here? Is it to provide a context for the images, to explain that they depict a flooded Byarong creek – a creek that runs … Continue reading →

A work on walking and the everyday. Not the walks of a flaneur or a psychogeographer. No effort to reshape space via the practice of walking. Instead to reflect upon a set of walks that I regularly do. Begin with … Continue reading →

[Sorry, there are going to be a number of these. I know they are repetitive. They are my effort to find ways of describing media art, not that the genre is especially important or requires closely policed limits, just that … Continue reading →

[These are notes for a possible introductory text.] What is media art? Forgive me, I know this is a dumb, dumb question… Vere simply, media art is not a clear category. It is not as though you can simply clarify … Continue reading →

Media art is typically associated with technologically based systems of representation and communication. However the notion of media can also be thought more generally – as middle, as milieu (Serres), as paradoxical ontological condition. The strangely inert and active space … Continue reading →

– Communication and Media Studies – amorphous and interdisciplinary – my background – Derrida, Ponge, Bazin, Barthes, Blanchot, Kracaeur on the thing (the other). Serres combines a concern with the complexities of mediation with a concern with the real. All … Continue reading →

A medium is alive as long as it is being used for pornographic ends In his Tue, 20 Dec 2011 15:51:41 +0100 post, Florian Cramer argues that McLuhan’s famous “the medium is the message” is less an effective model for … Continue reading →

I began studying a Bachelor of Communication and Media Production at the Canberra College of Advanced Education (now the University of Canberra) in 1982. It was the first year that the program ran. I can remember meeting with the convenor, … Continue reading →

Related to Media 5 post, it is funny that Shannon and Weaver’s transmission model of communication (1949) was always presented as a vital and yet ludicrous point of disciplinary origin. What enabled this apparently very crude model of senders, messages, … Continue reading →

By default WordPress displays posts in reverse chronological order – the first come last and the last come first. This system accords at the level of the user interface with a fundamental computational data structure, the stack. Like a stack … Continue reading →

Have recently become interested in the question of the ‘everyday’. Very developed body of literature on this topic, including authors such as Lefebvre, Blanchot, de Certeau, Perec, Sheringham, Highmore, etc. Lefebvre describes the everyday as a level of social being … Continue reading →

Finally have returned to the Loom graphics engine. Big job of implementing bezier curve subdivision. So far have just worked on quad subdivision. Two examples, playing around with the fly-wire theme. Of course these are very tiny versions of much … Continue reading →

At one level academic referencing is a matter of honesty and etiquette. It acknowledges that your work has developed from other work and enables your readers to follow up on specific sources should they be interested. Hardly objectionable in these … Continue reading →

My mode of practice… So I determine the set of parameters relevant to the work of subdividing a spline polygon. A new center, for instance, can be calculated at the actual center of the current polygon or the center can … Continue reading →