inresidence

Fruit labelling

Rob has alerted me to this site: http://www.etichettando.com/uk/index.htm

Amazing how much human effort and ingenuity goes into something as silly and seemingly insignificant as fruit labelling. Fair play to the person who put this site together. In one strike, the world of identifiably fruity fonts & graphics - a fruity design aesthetic even - is open to us.

Lisbon phone pics

Had a fabulous couple of days in Lisbon to celebrate the passing of my 40th birthday. What a beautiful town - full of music and fish!

I went a bit crazy with the phonecam. I'm probably coming to it a bit late in the day, but I'm just so excited by the possibilities that this tech has to offer.

Despite my years, I'm guess I'm still just a boy with a toy...

Oldton update - with tables

With the help of Simon Mills at trAce, I've revamped the site so that it work on most browsers without any glitches. Still got to decide about which graphics resolutions I'm supporting.

The main technical difference is that I was using floating boxes in Adobe Go Live and it's clear I haven't been using them properly. So now it's a retreat back to good old tables. Terribly old fashioned I'm told (by Rob), but thanks to a template supplied by Simon, pretty straightforward for a dummy like me to implement.

The most important creative development is that that the 'Your Oldton' section is becoming a gallery of all the contributions I'm receiving from people out there.

It's all very well for me to bang on about my dad and my 'story', but it's equally important to be able to see how the town and my past is being constructed out of other people's stuff. And I do need to encourage more people to join in.

The only way to do that effectively is to show all that stuff in the raw in one discreet area, and then link to the parts of the narrative/map where each piece has been assimilated.

I have two postcards, several emails, a couple of sound files and a whole heap of photos to put into this section. I'm hoping to have it all in place before my talk at Hay.

Oh, and I've been making more left hand pages/playing cards in Photoshop. My new favourite is this one:

Oldton Playing Cards

I have a had a revelation about Oldton as a story being told through a a set of playing cards. The Photoshopped 'left hand pages' become the 52 face cards, and the map of the town can be assembled by matching up the back of cards, thus:

New phone for Norway Day

After much faffing about with Orange I have upgraded my phone. I now have a Nokia 7250i and it has a camera. I didn't think I'd be very excited by this, but combine the ability to snap low res images with the ability to email said images instantly via GPRS and the whole world of moblogging/instant digital writing has opened up to me.

Here is Frank, Rob and me with our Norwegian hats on to celebrate Norwegian independence day on 17th May. I mailed these to Nina in Oslo within seconds of snapping them in London. Amazing!

Improving the Oldton brand

Already I'm receiving spam through the oldton.com domain name. Or maybe it isn't spam and these people genuinely feel I need help. They could be right:

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We will provide your business with a unique and bright personal image. Seen only once, your catchy logo or corporate identity will gain customer attention and recognition. You will never have to introduce yourself twice, your visual identity will speak for you.

Our team of professional designers specializes in the creation of custom logos, business and corporate identities. Our top priorities are fast turn-around and 100% satisfaction guarantee. You will be able to choose from as many design ideas as you want, select as many colors as you wish, order any modifications you like, and request any formats you need. Our prices are affordable even for one-person businesses and what is important - we guarantee no hidden fees.

Follow the link below to browse our portfolio and hot offers. Make your business recognizable in just a few days!

LifeGame

Went to see Lifegame at the National Theatre. A guest is interviewed gently about his or her life on stage and key moments are dramatised on the fly by a group of actors: a gruesome family Xmas dinner from when the interviewee was 10, the first shag in a car, the last conversation with granny, a fantasy death scene.

It's experimental and improvisatory so some bits succeed more then others. The Guardian was pretty down on the whole. A review from the original run a few years back seems kinder and nearer the mark. I thought the second half soared, partly as a result of the necessary but less entertaining interviewing & information gathering of the first half.

Or is it simply that people get more interesting as they get older and all those childhood memories at the beginning are rather generic and ill-formed (we went through the guest's life in chronological order)?

We wondered (Rob & I) how technology could be brought to bear on this kind of theatre. Could the interviewing process be converted into a more surreptitious data gathering exercise? Could members of the audience be plucked out as guests? Could sound and 3D graphics and on-fly personalisation of screens be used alongside the actors to capture and project a slice of someone's life?

This leads back to the idea we kicked around with Izzy Mant some months back.

Eden myths

I recently listened to In Our Time on BBC Radio 4 about how the story of Adam & Eve has affected Western thought and culture over the centuries.

I'm interested in this because it's clear to me that my Oldton story is some kind of celebration of Eden. W.H. Auden in one of his Dyer's Hand essays neatly categorised all writers as either people who were endeavoring creatively to hark back to Eden or march on to the New Jerusalem. He explores this idea in Horae Canonicae too. I would definitely be in the former camp.

The most interesting aspect of the Radio 4 description was how much emphasis was placed on the Genesis myth taking hold at a time when our brains were getting much bigger. The whole story can be seen as an expression of our collective anxiety about the size of our brains, our growing interest in an inner life - our intellect, our growing self consciousness - and our subsequent 'divorce' from the natural world around us, especially in terms of our relationship with other smaller-brained animals.

One speaker on the programme even mentioned that the curse on Eve regarding the pain of child birth could be related to the fact that the bigger brained we become, the more painful and difficult it is for our mothers to give birth.

On a key page of Oldton, I had already picked out a quotation about how in the reading of new media works we need to use our 'noodle'. So perhaps this story is all about how our 'noodles' are changing as we move further way from nature and into the virtual world.

Hmm. Perhaps I've been hanging around academics too much lately ;-)

Funding for The Nuuk

Have recently received news that XPT has won EC development money to work up our ideas about The Nuuk. So come September when my trAce residency ends, I'll still have a job as digital writer. Huzzah!