Another week really leaping between lots of different things, each very interesting. Between London and Brighton, helping Pupak with her photography projects and other family stuff.

So, importantly the Lighthouse studio project has been properly announced. I am working on the idea of ‘Emotional Infrastructure‘ and working up a couple of small proposals for ideas in developing the ideas around the diaries and other tools to gather an emotional response to the infrastructure around us.

In thinking about this today I was reminded of a quote that I stumbled across whilst on the train to Brighton a couple of weeks ago.

‘In most sci-fi movies it’s usually the elite who are on the cutting edge of whatever’s going on, but I think it’s going to be quite the contrary. It’s going to be a grassroots- type movement. Those are the ones who are not fighting it, not analyzing it, not organizing it. They’re just experiencing it.’

This is David Cronenberg, in the introduction to the published screenplay of Crash. I found the reference to it in an article ‘From Videodrome to Virtual Light: David Cronenberg and William Gibson’ by Dominick M. Grace.

It is that last sentence that in fact encapsulates what I am trying to explore with the idea of ‘Emotional Infrastructure’ to look at, most people do not get the opportunity to chose the infrastructure that surrounds them, that allows them to operate in the social construct of a city for example but they experience it every day, some elements of it every minute. What we can learn from examining these experiences I do not yet know, that is my goal for this residency at Lighthouse, to develop this idea into the start of a decent conversation about this.

In other news though, I have been trying to throw myself deeper into the world of MediaWiki as a tool and noting how I need to improve my own digital toolkit/chain so that I can get from idea and notes on paper to prototype a bit quicker. In fact that is my goal for the coming weekend, to sort out such a toolkit so I can quickly start a project with a framework which has a lot of the common elements I want in place from the get go.

I have also been identifying possible places to think about submitting papers and conferences from my work over at CSM. Plus doing a bit more background on Open Access Journals and how to set one up, something on Critical Infrastructure Studies is in a pipeline, somewhere near the Tehran/Belfast border.

Next week I hope to have more realised in code and hardware for Heresay as well as Emotional Infrastructure.

A first stab at keeping week notes.

It was half term this week, so it was filled with a lot of running about with the children as well as work. This meant that I didn’t get into Central Saint Martins this week, though phone calls and shared emails with colleagues meant that some projects were progressed.

Monday was a day of experimenting with Little Printer quite a bit, and discovering a lot of components for possible future projects which I hope to blog about more next week. I was trying to get a useful Heresay feed running for the printer, which worked eventually, but needs a lot more work to be robust.

Tuesday I met up with Nathan, who was over from Boston and with Lily, Kate and Richard from impossible. A meeting of minds which is always a pleasure and one where I leave with notes on lots of ideas to follow up on.

Wednesday was a day of running workshops at DACS.

Thursday and Friday was down to Brighton, to work at the Lighthouse Studio. It has been so far a lot of bits and pieces, chatting about lots of ideas and scribbling down notes to follow up on as well as getting small things done to make everything else work.

I did go visit a big CCTV camera though

and people at the Lighthouse have been doing Surveillance Diaries.

I have finished reading ‘Ground Control’ by Anna Minton

and have been flicking through this small book on Critical Spatial Practice.

Both of which are feeding into my thoughts and ideas around ‘Emotional Infrastructure‘ and Critical Infrastructural Thinking. The latter is leading to a discussion about creating an open journal on the subject, so I started off a landscape review on the existing publications that either cover or fringe the topic.

I have been setting up and using a number of wikis and trying to get a single install that will deliver all the requirements from myself and various clients. I have used a number of commercial wiki solutions before but really want to get my head around MediaWiki properly and find a set of extensions that make it a rich experience for the audiences that I am presenting it to as a solution.

That said, there are lots of problems, hoops and work arounds to get things working how I would imagine it. It can be slightly confusing to a client when you describe the software as that which runs Wikipedia but the ‘out of box’ experience is not quite the same. Still I’m getting there and hope to have something useful in a number of cases.