Unplugged: Hey Ada!
Last week, programmer, arts organizer, and mom Lisa Haskel helped us kick off our fortnightly Unplugged series at The Britannia. With a small friendly mix including curators, academics, artists, and writers, we gathered around a cozy candlelit corner to talk programming in the arts as well as international communication between artists in the early days of email. Having grown up on email, myspace, and YouTube (well, practically), it’s difficult to imagine a time before artists could display & discuss their work easily on public forums such as web sites and video hosting sites.
Lisa’s career has focused over the years on the intersection of arts practice and computing, and for that reason, we’re honoring her here as part of our pledge to Ada Lovelace Day. An organiser, adminstrator and commentator in the field of media art and new media practice, Lisa has worked for the Arts Council of England, created drupal sites for folks like National Strategies, studied interactive development at the Rick Center for persons with disabilities, and taught PHP and CMS to arts students at Ravensbourne College (to name a few).
At Unplugged, Lisa walked us through a few of her favorite former students’ projects—some fantastic explorations of more traditional media artists employing Web development tools in unpredictable ways:
Jee Hyun-oh's delicate, illuminated garden of a social network.
Jee Hyun-oh’s GORI.Node Garden: an installation piece of mechanical flowers that vibrate when stimulated by network activity.
Shanyin Hung's Farmer Brown's Journal
Shanyin Hung’s Farmer Brown’s Journal promotes the idea of knowing where your food is sourced from as a CMS-driven web site.
Dave Miller’s online comic strip generator invites internauts to be authors, collaborators, and characters in an online comic story, mashed up with dialogue generated by live news taken from web feeds.
Our forthcoming workshops and our Unplugged calendar are posted online for all you MzTEK internauts to check out and participate.
If you’re not in the know yet, tonight we’re learning to Bit Torrent to the max, and next week Ruth Catlow from Http Gallery / Furtherfield will present at Unplugged.