Confession. I’m going home to Australia for 3 weeks on Thursday. However, I will be participating online and continuing this blog.

It is my father’s 70th birthday and I have been making a film about his life from photographs. It will be screened (as a surprise) at his party in our local town hall. It’s going to be a big event with the back catalogue of our family life in attendence.

I am feeling very emotional about it. Trawling through old photographs, I have thinking about the trajectory of my father’s life and in turn the trajectories of my own. Cleaning up the scanned images where their life as treasured objects shows itself. Then deciding to leave the torn edges and stains in place.

In the computer I can zoom in on a facial detail on myself then do the same with my brother, father, mother and grandparents. I can compare and make connections, just as I can with the timelines of our lives.

On reading Victor and Colin’s comments about Product and Process for the MA Forum, it became clear to me why I’m am doing an MA. It is to explore research based practice, which is new and challenging for me.

Meeting with Maria to discuss my project was very daunting and I didn’t feel very articulate on the day. I’ve never felt very articulate about my own work, and in the past, have just produced work, then thought about it afterwards. The process of researching and writing about an idea before I explore the practice is entirely new for me.

However, after speaking with Maria, it helped to focus my thoughts (and make me realise that they are VERY broad) and enable me to write a little. I am much more of a talker than a writer. Her comments in response were helpful, especially with language and structure.

It’s been a week of Japanese pleasures for me. Watched the film “Howl’s Moving Castle”, fantastically ridiculous hand drawn anime feature. Then researched origami techniques to construct my mo-sette (a rosette in honour of Mo the dog who was recently savaged by an german sheppard).

And finally, saw Ryuichi Sakamoto performing with Alva Noto at the Barbican. This was a superb expression of analogue meets digital. RS played a grand piano while AN processed the piano sounds. He also made digital sounds then fed both sources into some software that triggered visuals. The visuals must have been pre-designed with a colour palette and patterns but were then generated by the attack and possibly frequency/pitch of the audio. The screen was about 11 meters wide by 1 meter tall. A shape I have never seen before. The first piece had a few soft white blobs growing then fading away on a black background. It was so minimal and dramatic. When a very bass note happened the entire screen turned solid red. The whole aesthetic seemed rather Japanese. It made me think about our discussion in class about whether digital culture reflects the specific culture it is created in. I think it does.

Last night a robot spammed my blog

Well, it seems the disadvantage of using blogger.com is that the huge commercial monolith is a target for spam. I now have a collection of comments that advertise software and services. Disappointing.
However, this has set me off on a few projects:

I’m reworking the song ‘last night a DJ saved my life’ into ‘last night a robot spammed my blog’.

I’m going to try a few experiments to coax the robots to me. I’m going to start a new blog and throw out keywords to see what best summons the robots.
http://botbait.blogspot.com/