Very excited to be in Wellington for this 6th ADA symposium, it looks as though they have managed to keep this thing alive due to keeping it contained and keeping the program focused.
There were two workshops this morning running concurrently (one was on Quartz Composer and the other on Copyright – so the crossover was minimal (one being practical and the other being more academic). This afternoon there were three workshops one on Leonardo, one on Arduino and one on open source software.
I went to the Quartz workshop in the morning which was great – it is a developer package which is attached to the Mac OSX operating system. It reminded me a lot of Isadora in the way it is put together – patch/noodle based.
Morgan Barnard, who is part of ada and also connected to the Victoria University Design school which is hosting ADA this time, showed us how he had used to connect a twitter feed or rss feeds directly into a live environment meaning that in real time things were constantly changing and shifting. This appeals to me as it keeps alive the installation/screen beyond a static timeline based piece of work.
Using twitter #hashtags we were able to bring in an rss feed of the symposium and utilise this within other graphics – like text, moving imagery etc. There is also a video capability which I did not get into due to lack of time.
One fascinating thing that happened during the workshop was that Michael Jackson died. This is fascinating in in of itself, but as tweets began to appear “confirming” both his death and his good health, then apparently reporting on Jeff Goldblum’s death in New Zealand on set and even Harrison Fords death at sea, I began to question what is it that is more important – the scoop? or the validity of the report?.
The second workshop allowed me to get into ubuntu which is the linux OS. by running virtual box I am now able to run Ubuntu as a virtual machine inside my Mac OSX. This is great as I have always avoided learning image manipulation due to the prohibitive cost of Photoshop. Now running GIMP maybe I can finally add that string to my bow.
Beyond the symposium, Wellington is a great city – really connected – everything is very close – it has a real character and feeling about, and the Victoria University Design school is so well resourced – one of the best labs I have seen.
