Getting to the very end of three years of hard work less than three weeks to go feeling a bit panicked because there is so much more that I wanted to fit in and get done and now it seems over the next three weeks that it will be a case of fairly severely trimming back and trying to concentrate on the essentials I feel that it is an ongoing project I really don't want it to end yet so hopefully the things that I have set up next year will continue and that's where I can be putting my energies now I'm not sure about my early morning blog walking and where that might go but I have found it very interesting and useful to do this as while you were walking up the hill the words and thoughts are coming from quite deep in improvised fashion and I can often make connections through the blog that I wouldn't make if I was attempting to sit down and think it through or even possibly in writing although these early morning sessions are very wordy and need a lot of cutting down I'm still hopeful that I'll be able to putting a search engine so that I could search to find what I wanted the Masters degree website that I have built acts as a sort of aide memoir to lots of the ideas that I have had a lot of examples so I can quickly go back and find things for future reference next I think I'll launch fairly strongly into digital drawing touch sensitivity still the collaboration the playing throwing images back and forth or perhaps moving on a little bit from the photography yesterday when I had Derrick Welsh with me he was doing a session with my students with mobile phones he had a large collection of devices and some of the ones I had as well and they spent the lesson drawing on phones that combination of drawing and animation worked best and most of the session they were pretty well engaged but it's not something that I feel I could do longer term I think the iPhone is too restricting their small size is too restricting I'm very much looking forward to the ipad and the possibilities of working on a large scale I'm quite sad at the moment and they don't have any sort possibility of a stylus because I think a stylus would be hugely improve the possibilities of drawing on devices but I guess there are a lot of technical reasons why they don't I'm guessing that its touch sensitivity that they are really working for and art sort of takes backseat of them that provides a constraint and its good to have constraints and learning to do spectacular drawings with fingers by zooming in and out is perhaps just as good as working with a paintbrush or a pencil it's just that from a drawing point of view we're much more used to drawing with a pencil or a thin brush rather than with our fingers working with fingers might give a more direct way of drawing more the sort of Monkton more hands-on more direct maybe it might just be that I'm not used to touch working with touch

Tags: blogwalking,iphone,MA,drawing

waking up from a dream, trying to hang on to it... but it is gone - I suspect what I was trying to retrieve was never there anyhow.

It was in Australia, a swimming pool complex, it was all about playful learning, and I had found a young woman enthusiast attendant who was introducing me to the most amazing and highly relevant concepts about play. I would need to add these to my writings, they were a new and very exiting angle. She introduced me to her guru, a man in his 60’s, looking a bit like an ageing Hollywood star. That was it, that was the point at which I woke - needing to get this concept, which I suspect was never there, down, before it went, but it wasn’t there.

Tags: brain,play

It is Thursday, 6 May it is polling day and I found out that I have one month left as the deadline has been brought forward which means that I'll have to to cut down scale down what I planned to do concentrate on some of the basics I'm a little bit cross that my iPhone apps won't be finished because I'm not sure that after this I will have the same motivation to get them finished particularly if they start costing lots of money although doing the projects next year with UWE on the animation and flip books will perhaps provide the motivation over the summer to get them done so I will keep on working on that I just cross because it's a waste of a great deal of time and energy that I have put in this year without the outcome this morning thinking about what I've termed the milieu environment the grounds on which on working in relation to the art of the 20th century in relation to montage and collage again I will not be able to get through the collage book makes sense of that and add that to the section maybe it's not necessary maybe what I have done will be more than enough but the thinking when it becomes particularly difficult for me is that the tale end of this montage in putting two things together which might be visual or they might be conceptual might be that you put ideas together as much as you put images together and that this global network and the databases on the computer have made it easier and easier to collect vast amounts of things that you can put together temporarily or you can try many more things much more quickly iteration maybe I could say that the 21st century will be as a century of the iteration as we can try things out and try things out and try things out Mashable is another word a century of mash and collaboration as people come very quickly see what others are doing and build on it and the idea that this in some way perhaps mirrors the way in which the brain works with neural networks going off all over then making the connections and where originality comes out is by making new connections or unusual collections putting things together that weren't necessary put together before that's where innovation comes fromIt was an idea that I know it was to do with sailing ships the fact that the square leaders gave way to the schooners and the innovation was happening in America which was separate from the Admiralty in the tradition of the square rigged boats that was stopping the innovation because people couldn't cope with the concept of a sail that wasn't square onto the wind and another one yesterday where after years and years and years we discovered or we have discovered that ceramic plates are 100 times better for acrylic pallets that are the plastic ones that the companies sell us even a disposable plastic ones the ceramic plate is just so much nicer to use and so much more easy to clean so the other idea is to do with space and this is going to Manovich I guess the spatial montage as the way we used to look at images and make symbolic connections in our heads with the imagery that we saw so the element of conception was there through the symbolism and film often it references itself you get a film referencing a film referencing a film as we saw with that with the animation that I showed the yr 8's on Monday so you're getting visual references back but it's not just visual because they are conceptual references and somehow a conceptual reference is in a space which is a little bit like a virtual space and the brain which used to be our heads the idea of concept being our heads at the brain has also become the network and the people in the brain are the neurones and the concept is not just sparking at in our own heads when we see something but it's sparking off in this much bigger space which is not a two-dimensional space is a very three-dimensional space possibly a four dimensional space as it brings in time and maybe eventually a 5 dimensional space brining in something else which is the collaboration that is happening the way that it's all sparking at once maybe Jung's collective consciousness whatever it is a good leave the idea of the film is so flat is on a flat surface and in the new projectors are becoming visually three-dimensional but it's more than that because if you add in time that is not temporal but can happen anywhere at any time you're getting much more like this brain sparking off in all directions at once an overtime and over space and this is what the computer technology is enabling. Thinking about Muybridge in terms of creating a sequence of images and the concept of the plate, the still image the frame they were still putting frames of a light-sensitive material into the backs of cameras but led on to the cine film which has long strip of celluloid with consecutive images on which fed back into the film camera and created to 35mm camera and then thinking about in relation to the flip books and modern digital cameras which are able to take a sequence of images either as a movie or as a sequence of images so it's a good digital camera to an extent is breaking down that distinction am I just mention again that iteration is an idea of what the 20th century art is a combination of iteration and being able to take lots of frames consecutively very quickly one after another. The idea of the artists becoming collective rather than an individual even though it may be channelled and funnelled through an individual is very similar or has a simile in me as an art teacher or a games-master being the Channel or funnel for the creative happenings either on the web or within the classroom. Teaching arts and having ideas like the iPhone apps and things like that is a little bit like a farmer sowing seed you cast the seed you don't really know where its going to fall people might not e-mail me back kids might not be interested you don't know whether the seed will grow in a fertile mind you might not even be there if it does grow to see it flower we might be there and it may grow from a tiny seed into a vast redwood tree.

Tags: Montage,innovation,virtual,Muybridge,iteration

Right it is Wednesday 5th of May I am walking up the hill I don't feel this morning like I've got a great deal more to say on the work that I'm doing on the MA because so many other things crowd in this time of year and make it difficult for me to concentrate I want a month off now do it all wrapped up to my satisfaction which would be impossible because I'm impossible to satisfy although I can relate to feeling I had this weekend that to me finishing the MA now it is sort of irrelevant I'm already on to next year and thinking about next year and no matter what the outcome of this MA there is so much that I have gained from it way more than what I set out thinking I might achieve err that it has been an extremely useful experience for me there are lots of loose ends some of which make me quite cross the iPhone apps in particular because I still think that my iPhone app is a brilliant idea and I would very much like to develop it and maybe I can for next year but that thread of the MA has receded a bit as the photoshoppingpong has come to the fore and photoshoppingpong is really beginning to take off from my point of view again looking towards next year I will need to get more students involved to turn it back towards students and hope that it's not too much work for me to keep a pottering along but slowly getting lost in the play activity of creating photo shop files painting with digital paint really enjoying the ideas has been a fantastic experience just having that element of game gives a little bit of the incentive that is needed to get me creating to get me into that state and I have myself always needed that he's never been quite good enough that I'm just doing it for the sake of doing it I need that little bit more incentive whether it's working towards a degree or an A-level or GCSE or whatever her or whether it's doing it because there's something else or someone else on the horizon with the rather stupid amount of work that I put in over the weekend to the BAL library presentation that I created which in many ways was way way over the top a .doc document properly would work just as well but I spent very many hours producing the pressie presentation for the Olympic Museum and I will put it into the MA somewhere because it is definitely part of it from my point of view maybe not for marking point of view but it does encompass a lot of thoughts that have I been having with this thought in particular that I do something like that because there's a very slight outside motivation to produce the work I'm thinking of someone else or thinking of a target audience as I do it at the same time mostly doing it for its own sake because it's so way over the top so perfectionist and no one is ever going to really look at it that closely unless of course I make use of it myself for next year perhaps working with a history teaches the idea of the timeline dropping things into the timeline organising your brain space three dimensionally rather than two dimensionally I think that's the main thing that's perhaps the main thing the essence to get into the MA is this idea of three-dimensional space three-dimensional patterns as the brain is a three-dimensional object and we're still in a two-dimensional space often with our computers it's still print based or computer based on a two-dimensional model that comes from the written word and the book and then the screen and while film added linear time it was time that went from here to there a not time the you could jump about in and the beauty of the prezi is that you can jump from place to place and the prezi in relation to timeline as you can jump from place to place within that timeline from era to era and it zooms and out in this beautiful way

Tags: MA,apps,bal,prezi,pingpong,Flow,brain

It is Sunday 25th of April I'm heading up the hill in glorious sunshine and wondering about all the recordings that I've been making recently that I haven't yet turned into type and about how much time it takes and how useful the recording is well I guess how accurate it needs to be as well I don't guess it needs to be too accurate main thing has been going on over the last couple of days is a game of drawing ping-pong mobile drawing with a tutor of art drawing at Wimbledon art college which opens up lots of exciting possibilities of developing a project there over the coming year not that this would be hugely useful to the MA but there are so many parts of this project which are now set to continue into the coming year the task than I do today or one of the tasks is to set out some of my ideas that these ongoing projects for school in order for them to give me the time to do it time is an interesting point because I find that I am rapidly running out of time time and energy are both limited my energy is very definitely limited at the moment and over the last week I've been trying to get lots more sleep recharge my batteries after the fairly titanic efforts of the Easter break when I was really pushing myself quite hard and in terms of the work that I'm doing for the masters it seems that I might need to rein myself back in a bit simply because there won't be time to do all the things that I wish to do to any degree of finish although I am a bit sad that the iPhone app in particular isn't further because I still think that that is a very good idea and it will also be very useful for the flipbook stuff that I'm planning to do next year so I would very much like to get the iPhone app working and the other app on the iphone which is consequences I've not heard back on that at all so I would like to move that one forward maybe get that finished but the photoshoppingpong has been working beautifully I am thoroughly enjoying it and I'm keen to get more people involved are and that it is I guess going to be another ongoing project one bit of work that has to be done this term for that there will be the preparation of the presentation that I will give in San Francisco this summer and I'm thinking that that presentation or at least my part of it could be the bulk of the evaluation that I do for this master's project to combine those two bits of work and to try and get them finished in the half term in the summer what else I would much like to move photoshoppingpong towards freehand drawing as well as photomontage and to mix up the elements of drawing and montage and get computer drawing much more established at school it's something that we don't do a lot of at all and it may be simply that we haven't had the devices with which to do it the graphics tablet helps but I am very much looking forward to the possibility of the ipad with drawing applications on that one of the things that was coming out yesterday with the iPhone drawing that I was doing was the ability to mix many of the apps use the appropriate app rather than one program that does it all to use the program thats most suitable to the idea and mix and match them

Tags: apps,pingpong,Montage

Okay so Tuesday first week of my holiday already I don't know what the date is I've spent yesterday and will be spending today teaching some teachers about digital media but getting some ideas as I go the ideas that came up yesterday were particularly to do with rotoscoping because these teachers had done some very successful rotoscoping particularly a cartwheel which fitted in very well to things I've been doing and they entered these rotoscopings for a competition and they involved Julian Opie who is obviously an artist who has used rotoscoping quite extensively in his art so there is the link there to Julian Opie as an artist but also I was introducing them to the idea of a fixed rotation like the cartwheel cycle that remains in the middle of the screen while the background goes past behind like a panorama and I was looking into that a bit and discovered that the diorama a sort of endless landscape not endless but a landscape that went past operated by a couple of cranks and with another crank performer music hall Muybridge sort of character doing a talk err possibly puppets and that sort of thing in front of the diorama possibly with a proscenium so that it really is a precursor of Cinema and it was very popular in fact at one point it says in Victorian times it was the most popular form of entertainment and the people who ran these dioramas would go from town to town giving their shows a bit like the Punch and Judy man I guess so there's a link with and earlier even earlier generation of showmen so it all sort of fits together in retrospective and then there was the programme on television and Paul Merton presented on very early Cinema err and some ideas have people to look at but a particular idea picked up from there was to visit the current exhibition of early cinema in the museum at Hove and that led me then to think about adding exhibitions and meetings to the website that I'm creating and to get in contact with Antony Penrose again to arrange a meeting with him it's going to be a very busy Easter I think but good news today in that my iPhone app has been created as a draft so I need to download and look at that and possibly I can get in contact with the person who programmed the zoetrope app just to get some more ideas from him some connections or maybe suggest things to him err what else has been going on this as a bit of a chatty and newsy recording this morning rather than a meaty one I desperately need to get on with the writing and that my early-morning rambles are making connections but I did have a thought yesterday while I was demonstrating Photoshop to these teachers that a lot of my use of Photoshop is trial and error iteration rather than really a solid knowledge so my demonstrations particularly when I'm trying to demonstrate in talk at the same time are not brilliant but I can do it if I'm not talking so it's definitely that right brain left brain stuff if you believe in that

Tags: animation,Muybridge,blogging,apps,zoetrope

I have long been keen on the surreal, the quirky, the fun, bringing this into my art and into my teaching of art. Where does this it comes from? There is without doubt an element of humour, it is entwined with my sense of humour. I think that it goes back into my childhood. I would play with the butter, make patterns, run a stick along a fence, read cartoons. I was bred on the zany humour of Schultz, which became more zany as he and I grew up and older.

From college days - the happening - performance art - drawing arrows on the sand to stop the tide rising.

In early teaching, taking students for random van rides, tossing a coin for right or left.

Feelie boxes, blindfold walks, dream game drawings.

Tags: surrealism

I just recorded all that and none of it recorded so I shall have to do it again.
It was beginning with the idea of making an iphone app out of a filemaker pro database, I had an email advertising this as a possible service and I immediately thought of the possibility of the game of consequences as an iphone app I shall have to have a search when I get back to see if one already exists, but otherwise it seems like a good idea, I could at least do the interface if I don't actually build the app because of the expense. I went on to do some talking about Hare Brain Tortoise Mind' and - this is really difficult now because not only am I talking, but i am trying to remember what it is that I was saying, it was to do with the radio 4 programme where there was a propensity for people to believe in wrathful gods as a way of control in large societies where in small societies people are more inclined to worship spirits of natural things. And it was about teaching as a gut feeling working with the gut feeling with an artistic sensibility and wether people are genetically wired with certain brains so that if you have a brain that is more spatially aware and makes looser connections does that mean that you are going to be inclined to be an artist. And if you decide that your are going to be an artists, do you become an artist, or is it the way brain works that turns you into an artist. Are you an artist if you decide that you are going to be an artist - can you be an artist if you are not mad? VG, Picasso? I think that is basically what I was trying to say.

Take three

I had an email this morning from a company suggesting that I could make an iphone app from a filmmaker database and my immediate thought was that I could turn my title game of consequences into an iphone app and gradually build up stories over time. I may design it anyway even though I am thinking that it would be a little bit expensive to actually put it into practice just for that. But if it is designed and the idea is there then that will be a part of the work done. And then I went on to talk about 'Hare Brain Tortoise Mind' and specifically talking about the way our brains are built would give us a propensity to be an artist or a mathematician perhaps but if we have somehow a loose more right brain approach then we are more likely to be artists and have that artistic sentimentality. I think that came from thinking that you can teach proportion, golden section, balance and composition, perspective, but mostly this just comes by feel, you get students that just seem to have an innate ability with putting colours together and making comfortable and easy compositions. Where does that design sense, the balance, the composition, come from? Is it somehow in the way that the brain is working is it trained? I definitely think that I have students who seem to have a natural ability with it, is it therefore programmed somehow into the genetics, into the brain, do certain brains have a propensity towards being artistic and if they do does that predetermine what you might become if you have a brain that is somehow looser, are you more likely to become an artist. And how much is the teaching in education involved in that and how much is the identity - if you decide that your identity is that of an artist, If you identify with artists is that what makes you want to become one and therefore you find the tools. So is it that identity that is vital, and are there experiences in life which give you that trigger to be choosing your identity in that direction. That reminds me of north american indians and the fact that if you are born with green eyes you are destined to be the medicine woman and then the programme on radio 4 about the basis of god and religion talking about the fact that is small tribal societies where everyone could know every one the sprits are more likely to be in and of the earth and in the animals they wouldn't be overriding creatures spiritual deities that have control, they would be more benign perhaps but big societies like Egyptian and Greek Roman and then Christianity, the other big religions, have powerful god or set of gods in control maybe big societies need to have the control in order not to fall apart. A sort of spiritual police force. Maybe that is programmed into the brain collectively as we are social beings.

It is an extraordinary experience in itself that the first recording that I made flowed pretty well - the thoughts just tumbled out - and then the second third and fourth recordings when I was trying to reproduce what I had said, I couldn't do it. The thoughts did not tumble out in the same way as I was trying to think about what I had said as well as saying it.

Tags: brain,artist,apps

When do people doodle, and why - on the phone, in meetings - when it is not the primary focus of attention, otherwise it would be drawing not doodling, like whistling a tune. It is the situation that makes it a doodle. It is throwaway. Many of the little games that I have been finding on the web are like doodles.

Tags: drawing,brain,doodles

Thursday, 24 March thinking this morning about doodles about getting scraps of paper envelopes in meetings Biro scribbling mindlessly letting things grow why do we do it what's the compulsion and what relation is there between doodling and the sort of little flash games that I am playing with on the Internet and where you can get little games on the Internet umm to be more compulsive but I don't think you can ever get them as compulsive as doodles because doodles is not just about the doodling well it's not about the doodling really it is more about the situation of being in a meeting or on the phone it's not something you sit down to do you don't sit down to doodle it happens because you're doing something else it is the situation and that is maybe what destroys just about anything err that you're trying to do with the phone or computer because you're not in the situation except perhaps things on the iPhone apps on the iPhone like ipint where you are sharing little bit of silliness with friends in a pub or in a class it strikes me that the iPhone in a classroom situation is very similar in some ways to the notes used to go around in classes that's similar also to the Facebook social networking and into the iPhone apps I've got dozens of them on my phone and I hardly ever look at them they just sit there I have collected them they're fun individually they are great fun possibly but I don't make time to play with them I don't have time to make time to play with them so they just sit there so how do you make a game that is compulsive but not too time consuming something that people want to do I was looking at a website err this morning and Juan Opie and he has been producing art using Flash particularly one where a camera on the Internet is taking stop frame animations and then the animations are added to the website and other digital artist Ross something or other also I think working for Fabrica err the Benetton establishment producing video cameras that point out of shop windows so all this thing isn't stuff is not very original sadly but I suppose you have to do it and then you become original but the ideas are very clever I'd love to make a camera that is showing what's happening in television downstairs in the art room and I could talk a little bit in my essay about the other networks that I have going the CCTV in the art department and something that I could do with that the flashing on the CCTV and I could possibly also talk about the network whereby I can control people's Facebook and start writing comments into their Facebook as I sit in the art department and the control that gives me a one-way sort of game but it's a similar sort of thing I guess quite harmless from me in this situation but potentially very far from being harmless quite an extraordinary level of control and then finally there's the serendipity of finding Juan firstly online when I was looking for flip-flops because of his flipbook application made for Benetton finding the Benetton site and then in the book that I had ordered from the library at Bower Ashton a book about animation there is a case study on him as well so he comes up twice in a very short amount of time and in fact I had already seen his flip book a couple of years ago when it first came out and I knew it was him but all that serendipity it seems to happen regularly you see what you are looking for our experience is far from objective we know the world as we think we know it there was a little programme on radio four last night which I must re listen to it was actually about religion but it was talking about needing to be in a group so you are needing to know what you think you know I'll have to listen to iplayer and see if I can get hold of it

Tags: drawing,web,apps,iphone,facebook,flipbook,doodles

Monday, 23 March I was downloading a program iTunes last night which is a digital zoetrope beautifully done and there it got into the Apple editor's pick so I was a bit cross about that at the time because I feel that this is what I had in mind but on looking at it a little bit further what I am doing is more of a display of images this zoetrope on iTunes on the iPhone is much more of a toy and I'm hoping that what I can produce is more of a tool more of the game so that got me thinking about the nature of game and toy the balance between something that is just a curiosity a pub game something that makes you smile for a second or two that is really are quite boring after that or something that you want to come back to again and again because it interests you and captures your imagination and that is the tool that I would be looking for one that I could really use with students in school and a tool that would capture their imagination and it is after all the capturing of the imagination which is what I am after as a teacher that's what I'm doing in my classroom I don't think I'm teaching skills they learn those I am out to capture their imagination get them fired up so what is it about the nature of games and gaming not that it goes to far to take up too much time it needs to be simple and easy beautiful and fun amusing titillating somewhere between game and toy toy and game it is the do with visual illusions so it is in the realm of the wonder err a must stop doing errs because my voice recognition software isn't too good with err though maybe this time I would have trained it enough that that is all beside the nature of games and gaming and how much time people are prepared to spend I found with photoshoppingpong earlier in the year that it took me a while to get into it took me a while to get going and then I was addicted and I was always looking forward to the next volley but I have had a lot of difficulty getting students involved to this extent it is much easier to get them involved within the structure of a lesson and much much more difficult to get them involved and working outside of lesson time until I have got them going far enough that they are doing it for themselves rather than for me I have not ever been particularly interested in games playing as games playing has developed over the last 30 years I'm of a generation that missed out on this but there are things that interest me about media it is much easier just to sit down passively in front of the television and watch whatever is in front of the eyes without having to even bother with making a choice as to what to view I have a library of interesting programs interesting films that would be much more edifying than the slush that is normally broadcast and yet it is an effort to to set them up to watch I have to watch them where as in front of the television with my laptop on my lap idly surfing the Internet while half watching a crass quiz I can successfully waste a lot of time the second gate

Tags: zoetrope,games,pingpong,television,addiction,play

OK Friday, March 19 and lower gate I'm going to try and talk much more clearly and more slowly one of the problems I seem to have had with the transcription is not recognising some of my faster words he doesn't like me saying err either doesn't like that at all so here is a slower dictate. Talking to my year eight yesterday about sight and perception how we see everything with the brain with our understanding and our memory not objectively with our eye so the sight is all subjective it fitted in quite neatly with the program I was watching on television about high-speed cameras and how the eye and can only process information at a certain speed so it doesn't see things the fast which is of course the basis of flipbook movement animation and move the Cinema the persistence of sight that the image on the retina and all the visual tricks behind the zoetrope and the praxinascope etc and I was also thinking about how the flipbook in your hand is still so magic the kinaesthetic actually holding it and I found some flip books online yesterday that are designed for the iPhone that work with the inclinometer so that as you tip the iPhone runs through the flipbook backwards and forwards so I'm very keen to build that into my iPhone application. I also had a brilliant meeting on Wednesday with the centre for fine print research they are very keen to get these training sessions going so to an extent that does hone what I am doing for my masters degree to look very closely at the flip books to collaboration bit with photoshoppingpong is going while I think that will just tick over I've got my year nine started now on the Photoshop ping-pong site and I can speak quite a lot about the game that Peter and I played and how much fun that was how we got into the flow what else might I talk about this morning and I think leaving the education bit behind and being much more to towards on the idea of games of playing games of collaborative games of games where you raise the energy and maybe this has something to do with expectation and with boundaries when you go and play rugby you expect to get muddy you expect to get involved in the rough-and-tumble which wouldn't be appropriate in other settings so partly the game is about appropriate in this in different settings and I was also talking about this to my year eight yesterday in relation to Facebook and blogging that you have too be even more careful about the appropriateness of the comments you're making because of the contexts in which they are made particularly if anyone can be reading them your mother perhaps or a stranger whoo second gate

Tags: flipbook,pingpong,blogging,brain,iphone,pingpong,facebook

OK Wednesday, 17 March walking up the hill again found the disadvantage today with my plan of doing this every day over Easter it's not much good in the rain thinking about games playing today I've spent the morning trying to key out the background err of the girls cheerleading err sequence and regretting that we didn't do it on a green screen because I'm losing part of the face our which would mean doing it all in photo shop frame by frame massive be time-consuming Iv'e done about a 3rd which took me the best part of a day question is how much time I waste on this if waste it is and so what background I put in that fits or adds meaning and I'm not sure I'm still totally taken unhooked by the process of moving the mouse and moving a figure that direct manipulation and it excites me in a visual way the fact that it's the person that I manipulating there must be an element to that in the same way that there is an element in life drawing I'm not saying that it's sexual because it's not except that it must have a similar sort of energy base in that it is a communication with another being and its manipulation of another being very similar to life drawing err but time is the big issue err trying to automate the process when it hasn't been done a green screen so maybe with my current yr eight after Easter I do one more set of sequences with a green screen based on what we've been doing by getting plywood and painting it green and then laying that down on the floor and still doing the death-defying acrobatic sort of stuff but the more exciting one this time was the one that came from the boys where he went bit wild to begin with again it's the wild creative wild thing like in the bottle top sequence where creativity came out of the accidental in that from their first bit of wild film it looked to me a little bit like a pinball machine so they then set up the next sequence as a pinball machine putting tape down on the floor with the idea that I would put a pinball machine background in behind the images are which I shall do again it's hugely time-consuming without a green screen but the idea is brilliant and possibly the Idea moves on one more step if you created a few sequences of pinball umm and built them into a Flash game with a lever so that you actually create a pinball machine that has an interactive element are different interactive element for the player and rather than just moving the figures with a slider they press the button to flip the flippers and you actually turn turn it into a game not that I would have time to do that although I am sure it would be perfectly possible but it would certainly be an idea to plan and to write up umm and I think probably to put a few of the Flash game examples in that I found over the years as examples like the feather one err and the singing one err so we shall put those into the website but also talking to Michaela about oakdragon and thinking back to my original game of only human and 10 pin bowling umm human skittles where the children were the skittles or the adults whoever was playing and we rolled a great big soft ball down the field at and whoever the ball hit had to gently fall over and if they touched someone else as they fell then those people had to fall over as well and it was just hilarious very very simple concept but absolutely hilarious and it doesn't the same sort of stuff that doesn't have a point to it human skittles it is just a game and the joy is in the playing and the joy is being playing as a group and is again it just is totally zany like the surrealist stuff like exquisite corpse err we have another fantastic session on Monday with exquisite corpse with consequences with my year sevens so that's definitely got to be corrected and go in as a part of this and is the surrealism thing about talking about surrealism I probably need to do a bit of work more work over this Easter umm on a Roland Penrose and talking umm doing my interview if I can set it up so that will be something to set up for this week and the digital flip books which are being will which show that the talk is today right I've reached the second gate so I'm going to stop more tomorrow turn the machine off and hope this works

Tags: Flash,flipbook,exquisite corpse,surrealism,play

March 16 marching up the hill experimenting again with my walking blog thinking that over that three weeks of the Easter holiday I might do this every morning just the recap on the idea that I should to a recording every morning on a walk up the hill near my house with the dog between two gates one at the bottom of the hill one of the top of the hill and a walk I guess about err 8 minutes maybe the idea is that while I'm walking I should attempt to empty my conscious mind of thoughts and let the flow of speaking bring the ideas up from under the surface from the subconscious so that I can examine them in the light of day I was doing this last year and the year before last year recording my thoughts on life and and then transcribing them later when I got back home which was really quite a time-consuming process now with new software I'm hoping that when I get home I can simply plug the iPhone in and the entire mornings and thoughts will be transcribed for me either software and I don't know how it will cope with my breathlessness as I walk up the hill or with pauses for that matter and I found last Jeff has now I guess an awful lot of what I was saying as I walked up the hill is irrelevant padding and now really the ideas that come out are very few and far between are very small but sometimes quite remarkable I was thinking this yesterday talking to parents about the work I'm doing in school an aside talk the idea seemed to flow in the way that they don't when I'm just trying to think with a conscious mind lots more constant surface when I'm talking to someone I'm not sure what difference it makes if I'm talking to a machine that is not responding that we shall see anyway nearly April nearly 3 weeks when I am planning to work like crazy on this master's degree get the bulk of the writing down and I've been looking a lot at the ideas of flow and aren't what is art yesterday talking to parents err I was talking about working possibly on the edges of acceptability in relation to school working with blogging social networking and to me personally though I didn't say this with the images of young people that I am manipulating and although I don't find it I umm a problem for me at all I do see that it's a bit of a problem for me in relation to school and my job as an art teacher it's not safe but what I said to this parent is along the lines of if it isn't pushing the limit if it isn't on the edge of acceptability and it probably isn't art hand or certainly aren't as we've known it in the last century so much of which is pushing boundaries and pushing barriers as far as I'm concerned although Roy would take issue with this he says the students at each company artists or maybe I'm not an artist but in school if I'm not pushing the boundaries then is it art and if it isn't not what is it is it just skills is it the groundwork of the basics how can I do that thinking about the book the zen of seeing and the quotes there if you are just learning the technique from someone else what are you learning you have to learn that too do and I think maybe you learn it through doing art anyway second gate so I've got to stop here and get myself back home and to the dentist

Tags: blogwalking,school,zen

Okay this is an experimental recording climbing up the hill the plan is to have another go at doing my walking blog maybe a couple of times a week for the rest of the course of three months or so I've got a goodly collection of these recordings the difference this time is that the are recording that I make hopefully can be transcribed directly onto the machine using the new transcription software so I won't have to have a spend a lot of time we were according depending entirely course on how accurate this recording is and the fact that it's being done from my iPhone also hopefully will mean that I can use it in school to do reporting to record my ideas and thoughts on students at the end of lessons it all depends on the speed and ease of the transcription and how much time it takes to do this because if it's longer than typing then there's no point in doing it at all and the one of the difficulties I have I half thoroughly enjoyed inventing new stuff but I'm not very good at keeping it up on a regular basis I'm also thinking at the moment that my degree a lot of what I'm doing with the jury a lot of what new media is to do with is about tagging and little things in little increments rather than big things no longer a big book but lots of little books lots of snippets twitter the quote the sound bites about the ease of finding and collating all these bits and pieces and this lot of information is what it's about maybe one of the problems with this recording is going to be the quality of the sound of the wind particularly if I am on my bicycle I don't think I would work at all maybe that I have to get myself a much better lapel mic and use the Marantz rather than the iPhone so that I get the quality of the recording that I need to make the transcription It will be of interesting and also to see how well this works with me being breathless as I walk up the hill and whether I might need to make a new profile that incorporate the breathlessness okay enough of this switching the machine off recording it

Tags: blogwalking,iphone,tagging

Thinking that teachers at school have only just started using email - the metaphors being used, the letter, posting, one to one - is all very much based on the victorian post model - as is the desktop metaphor, based, obviously, on a desktop, and documents. In a similar way the IWB in school is just a posh version of a chalkboard - and in many cases the chalkboard might be just as good.

While the students are using the technology in a totally different way - with social networking and mobile devices, text speak and instant messaging.

Tags: school,Metaphor

idea for an application like wordle - that picks the colour palette from a painting - colours and how much of each colour is used in an image

Tags: ideas

Here is another plea - just for a bit of comfort...

I downloaded the voiceband app, and was in the staffroom attempting to show it to our director of music - who didn't seem interested, even though she has an iphone, but she was rushing off somewhere... but another teacher was looking on, and said words to the effect - how much time do you waste on that? I was stung, as she said it in quite a vicious and righteous tone, not at all pleasant. And this teacher is our head of ICT.

I was also a little surprised by one of my art teachers - I gave her a macbook several years ago, and she still has not got the hang. Yesterday, after days of frustration, she said that she was going back to her PC. I had no idea that she was feeling this way, otherwise I would have helped her much sooner. She had spent hours and hours making collections of downloaded images in iphoto - firstly using cut and past to copy images from google onto her desktop - so the were not jpeg files for a start - but then, after creating albums - including many of precious family albums - she was deleting what she thought of as the original photos from the library. And wondering why they then disappeared from her albums.

She was literally in tears of frustration and rage.

In the meantime I have my year 7 logging on to the Voki site, and sending me their comments on their photoshop creations via a speaking avatar.

Just to illustrate two huge gulfs - that between the digital native speaker, and the struggling foreigner, and between the pc left brain spreadsheet mentality, and the wonderfully creative, exciting and extraordinary potential of the iphone for learning.

Here's to the ipad...?!

Tags: computers,iphone,apps,school

This is an as yet unsubstantiated thought that our schooling is a direct decedent of our puritanical past. Schools, the army, the class system: control, categorise, regiment. Children to be seen (if that) and not heard. A Cromwellian nightmare of grey work pray serve. Anything colourful, fun, dancing, playful, banned as frivolous, not serious. At times I curse my puritanical upbringing, with it's work ethic. Artists are often seen as subversive, bohemian, selfish, reclusive, perhaps even not useful. Why are the head of sciences and maths at the school where I teach paid more than the heads of the arts and the humanities? The school will say that all students have to do these subjects, this is why they are paid more. Why do all students have to do maths and science, but not art, especially as we live in a society where the arts employ so many? Art is playful, often not serious, and therefore less important. There is also the thought that our education system, mechanised and industrial, is a result to an extent of the generation lost in WW1 - all the teachers that died, so classes were taught by specialists, in much greater numbers, on a conveyer belt of learning.

Tags: play,pedagogy,school

The best ideas seem to rise from the subconscious like bubbles bursting on the surface of a glass of champaign. Often when I cycle or walk, I am not thinking or much, I am conscious of the real world, the passage of time, the effort of the hill. Then time expands, disappears, my consciousness alters, and often at this point ideas will pop into my consciousness. Sometimes these thoughts may have been forming deep for ages. Sometimes they are ideas that make lots of connections between other ideas that I am working with. Sometimes I don't know where these ideas have come from, out of the blue.

Tags: blogwalking,brain

The black stone on the moon in 2001, omnipresent, menacing, powerful. I am struck by the similarity between the polished granite stone in 2001, and the current digital gadgets, the phones and MP3 players; the iPhone and iPod especially, and some of the more expensive, perhaps more desirable mobile phones and pda's.

Tags: iphone,touch,objects

I am addicted to gadgets, new gadgets, the next gadget. I am addicted to collecting - and the internet provides ample possibilities. I am addicted to games - sudko, but also problem solving, spreadsheets and desk top publishing.

Tags: gadgets,addiction

a perfect shape for the job that it does, and such a beautiful object to hold - brown or white, no difference - why would we go for the brown?

Tags: objects,touch

A word that I have just coined, to denote a presentation that is neither still image nor moving image, but somewhere between the two. The philm is a sequence of still images, but not an animation. An animation is a sequence of still images that recreate the actuality of a live movie, by re-creating the movement in a real movie. Still images are a movie that re-create the still image perhaps. At any point one can move through the sequence, or stop and look at an individual image. The experience of a philm is tactile - it is the scrubbing through with the finger or mouse. The philm might be the child of the zoetrope or flip book, phlipbook... a pook, as in photobook.

Tags: kinesthetic,touch,animation,zoetrope,flipbook

list v picture, mac v pc logic and language v feeling, space writing v drawing, conscious and subconscious time and space.

Tags: L v R,drawing,brain

pebbles - collecting - people have collected pebbles for years, tokens, memories, museums, patina, the holding of a pebble in the hand, lucky charm, a stone to play with, to hang about the neck - rosary.

I was on an archeological gig around standing stones in Pembroke, talking to an archeologist who had found a pebble that, due to it’s geology, must have come from Cornwall. Something or someone must have picked this pebble up at some point, and carried it from Cornwall to Pembroke. As this was an ancient site, we mused on the possibility of it being an ancient person who had treasured this stone.

Like magpies, we have collections of precious stones, picked up from beaches on holidays.

For a while, when my child daughter found sleeping difficult, a wise one gave her a sleeping stone to put under her pillow at night, to ‘worry’ in her pocket during the day.

We give objects an energy and a meaning.

Tags: pebbles,objects

Thoughts from this mornings walk around touch - the jumping up and down of the brushes on the site. Clicking buttons - that button thing, the magic of going from one place to another, being in control. How does this fit with play - with desirable objects - my penknife - the Pitt Rivers.

Objects in the Pitt rivers - ornamentation, treasure, collect, pebble - the pebble from pre history story.

the scrubbing - touch in that - the fact that Apple call their ipod the touch.

Tags: touch,play,scrub,objects,pebbles