tag: Constant

On 7th February I’ll be back in Brussels for a performance at Public Domain Day

The Public Domain Day is celebrating works of art which enter into the public domain because their copyrights have expired. These works can be freely enjoyed, used, changed, republished by everybody. Worldwide, this The Public Domain Day is celebrated on the first of January, and this year we celebrate, with a slight delay, the works of authors and artists who died in 1944. In Brussels, the Public Domain Day is celebrated by a yearly event that is organised by Constant, CRIDS (Centre de Recherche Informatique et Droit, FUNDP Namur), Cinema Nova and the Royal Library of Belgium.

For OSP’s Print Party on October 18th I made a bunch of new software and modified some old software that did sonification of text, bitmap, and vector images. I saw it as a way to differently engage with the usually static images featured throughout the festival. Here’s some of the visual output from a Processing sketch that, when combined with Pure Data, would redraw an SVG and convert it to sound:

Last month I attended the Co-Position meeting in Brussels of the Libre Graphics Research Unit. I’ve already talked about one of the work sessions in a bit of depth. Today I was alerted that an article I wrote for Furtherfield that gives an overview of the meeting went live!

How can designers and programmers work more harmoniously? How can the tools being created better meet the needs of users? There is a need for designers to have a greater role in the production of the tools that they use, aside from just reporting bugs, requesting features or designing logos for open source projects.

I’ll be in Brussels from 22nd - 25th February for the Libre Graphics Research Unit Co-Position meeting.

The Co-position research meeting focuses on digital tools for arranging texts and other graphic elements: How can we re-imagine lay-out from scratch? What tools do we need to support decentralized collaboration? How can we understand what workflows, distributions of work and media are coded into our tools? Can we bring canvas editing, dynamic lay-outs, web-to-print and Print On Demand together in more interesting ways? What kind of messages do we propagate and how does this change the tools we need?