[postdoctoral research fellowships at the ioct]

Two fantastic opportunities to work at the IOCT:

Postdoctoral Research Fellow (two posts)

Institute of Creative Technologies (IOCT)

Three years fixed term

£29,138 - £31, 840 pa

You will work on ‘DMU Creative', a project which aims to provide a commercial showcase for the best creative work in the East Midlands by establishing a quality threshold and an advanced content management system. This project is funded by the HEIF (Higher Education Innovation Fund), which is an HEFCE funding stream designed to encourage and facilitate knowledge transfer, collaboration and outreach, in support of the development of innovative goods, services and policies. The undertaking or possession of a PhD is essential.

The two Research Fellows will work closely together to ensure a co-ordinated project. Responsibilities will include literature research, experimental work, software development, field trials, project documentation, seminar/workshop, technical/academic papers and laboratory support. The work will involve travelling within the UK.

Post 1 (ref. 5062): You will, in the first instance, establish a record label and associated internet radio station to connect with a large number of SMEs and micro-businesses working in music production across the region. This will be followed by similar endeavours in other fields of creative production. You will be based in the Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre, which is a partner of the IOCT.

Post 2 (ref. 5063): You will undertake the creation of an advanced content management system that utilises broadband to bring the creative resources of the region together, to create a portal which promotes the regional creative works nationally and internationally, to establish by making them commercially available over a variety of connected devices, including TVs. You will be based in the Mechatronics Research Centre, which is also a partner of the IOCT.

Please quote relevant reference number.

Closing date: 7 October 2008.

Application forms and further details are available from our website: www.jobs-dmu.co.uk.

Alternatively telephone 0116 250 6433 (24 hour answerphone).

Or write to:
The Human Resources Team, De Montfort University, The Gateway, Leicester LE1 9BH.

[ TIR-W Volume 9 no. 2 Instruments and Playable Text ]

From the guest editor Stuart Moulthrop:

"Our work is animated by the desire to evoke from simple rules a plausibly infinite set of expressions. We come at this problem from various perspectives, techniques, and points of the aesthetic compass, and we arrive at happily different results, but a certain resemblance remains.

For Judy Malloy, who was a master composer when I was still learning canon and fugue, the key to invention lies in the artful crossing of pattern and chance, of musical and cybernetic form, in her "Concerto for Narrative Data."

John Cayley, who would be our Che or Tristan Tzara if this were an actual movement, gives us a newly re-engineered version of "riverIsland," an exploration of poetry-as-simulation that continues to define the possibilities of its form.

Next come some younger though no less accomplished talents, beginning with Shawn Rider, a writer, digital designer, and meta-gamer who is represented here with two pieces, "PiTp," a work laid open deliberately to digital intervention, and "So Random," a story that tells itself each time, specially, just for you.

Elizabeth Knipe, another relatively new player, offers "activeReader," an interactive media piece that brings its own interpretation of reader engagement and emergent, open form.

Nick Montfort, equally at ease with aesthetic programming and the long-form palindrome, offers what we might call a minimum instrument, "The Purpling," a maze of recirculating expression built from humble Web pages.

Last in train is my own "Under Language," a sort of talkative poem with consequences, far less credible in its claim to infinity than most of its companions, but still a kind of game, for those who will play."

Read the new issue here.

[delayed canadian copyright reform]

A few weeks ago I wrote about the Canadian government's highly contentious plan to introduce copyright reforms...looks like the Canadian public has spoken out and managed to delay the bill:

"A controversial bill that seeks to reform Canadian copyright laws, expected to be introduced early this week, may be quashed after a groundswell of opposition erupted over the past week.

The government last week filed a notice indicating the bill would be introduced this week, leading industry experts to expect it to happen on Tuesday. But a spokesperson for Industry Minister Jim Prentice, who was to introduce the bill, said it would not happen on Tuesday and could not say if it would happen this week."

This delay seems to be in a large part thanks to Michael Geist's debate of the issue (on his blog, YouTube and through the Facebook group he started):

"Michael Geist, the Canada research chair of internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa, has led the charge against the bill and has accused Prentice of caving in to lobbying from U.S. entertainment companies, who are seeking to curtail digital copying in all its forms. He has also accused the minister of ignoring the wishes of regular Canadians and for not including the public in his consultations.

Geist started a Facebook group to protest the bill a week ago, which more than 12,000 people have so far joined. On his blog Monday, Geist wrote that the group has resulted in hundreds of letters and phone calls to Prentice and other MPs from every political party.

"Something exceptional happened this past week. Fair copyright in Canada found its voice," Geist wrote. "It will be silent no more."

Here is an interesting comment from one of Geist's readers (Written by Dale Bolton on 2007-12-11 11:30:46):

"[...] The copyright cartels will not stop until we have to pay for every instance of anything that is used. EG, I am at work right now and we are listening to a radio. The RIAA would love to charge us for every instance of us singing along with the songs, and labeling it as an unauthorized performance/duplication.

In the states, those that have the money make the laws...I thought things were different here in Canada. Apparently the Conservatives are starting to show just how American they are by accepting all these bribes..er lobbying dollars and passing whatever legislation their American Masters tell them to.

Write your MP, let them know how you feel about this. SPELL IT OUT! Tell them that copy songs to their ipods, converting videos, making copies for your car, using your PVR/VCR to record tv shows, will ALL become illegal with the new legislation they are trying to push on us. The average person breaks copyright law 90+ times a day..think about it.

Canadian laws for Canadians..no American influence needed."

"The only people who like this bill are American companies who basically see this as an opportunity to overrule Parliament,” Cory Doctorow, former director of the San Francisco-based Electronic Freedom Foundation group and co-editor of tech blog Boing Boing, said. “If Parliament passes a law that says you’re allowed to copy a video to watch it later, that law goes away the minute there’s some technology that prevents you from doing it. So, it’s not surprising that American companies would support something that allows them to have this business model without all that pesky intervention from Canada’s government."

[creativity conversation]

Following my presentation on "Reader 2.0" for the Creative Writing and New Media Masters run by Sue Thomas and Kate Pullinger, the creativity Conversation held it's 8th session.


Speakers: Andrew Hugill (Composer, writer, and Director of the Institute of Creative Technologies)
Mohammad Ibrahim (Technology fusion, artificial life, and design methodologies)

Some notes (live-blogged)

"Why do we abandon or switch ideas, methods and views whilst being creative?"

Mohammad Ibrahim:




Strategies for Switching (intuitive or naturalistic)
Naturalistic/Action based
Intuitive
Process Oriented
Evolving Design Space


Current Research:
There is some work on switching between strategies
Lots of work and debate on identifying and switching between stages/phases
Very relevant for rational approach
Personal view - waste of time for the intuitive approach


Conclusion:
Apart from "initial scan brief" no real pattern
Hence naturalistic approach in the dominant one
No clear clusters of activities into phases/stages - the second scale
Clustered activities into phases - but no real agreement on order of activities in each phase (here are some activities, can you give us the order in which you do these activities? - they couldn't)
SO: Different intuitive approaches to evaluating a design space (trying to understand what the project is about rather than figuring out what they have to do)

Question on strategy: need to teach both strategies to students but the "experts" will develop their own strategies

Can we make a safe place where students can be creative, where engineering students can work with art and design students?




Andrew Hugill



Sees creativity as a process
Can you not change your mind in the process of creation? Why do we change our minds or rather, why don't we.
Rimbaud wrote the best poetry and then radically changed his views and became a banker - interesting exacmple of someone rejecting creativity

Three key words:
clinamen - from Epicurus, every so often an atom makes a slight swerve in its course and collides with another atom thus creating matter so clinamen is that swerve or bias
syzygy - from astronomy, when suddenly you get three bodies (unexpectedly) in alignment - things fall into place (eclipse)
anomaly - when something appears that doesn't fit

"The Act of Creation", A ha, Ah, and the Ha-ha (Arthur Koestler - adjusted, thanks Andy)

Andrew's own experiment into creativity with a musical composition, created a process and followed it through rigorously (though this process is not audible in the final musical product). However, when copying some music he made an error but this ended up adding to the creative aspect of this piece.

[los de abajo]

Los de Abajo were great live! Lots of enthusiasm and excitement and really got the crowd going. The venue, The Borderline in London was perfect. A well-hidden basement/cantina that seemed to add to the reverberation of the bass-heavy merengue and mamba beats. Their name, loosely translated as "those from below" encapsulates their theory that there are no underdogs: "That's all, that's all, we're all just human. We're all just human."

From the Los de Abajo manifesto:

Identity - is knowing who you are. And that's what this is all about - our Mexican identity. We are indefinable as a people. Our blood is restless, because we are the bastard children of a forced marriage between Jesús and Coyolxauqui. We have a demented uncle named Sam, and our brother is Emiliano. On one side of the Rio Grande we are ilegales and on the other we aliens. Aliens in our own country.Equality - is something the West likes to talk about a lot but there are just four words to describe it - We Are All Equal.

[music at sharon temple]

Ok, I admit. When I heard the word "temple" I thought "oh no..." this is going to be some kind of *religious* thingey...but in fact I was pleasantly relieved and the acoustics were amazing (the temple topped last year's Toronto Star list of Canadian essential architecture) . The choir was moving and the first song, Gloria, written by choir member Timothy Corlis was my favourite - it seemed to suit the surroundings the best.

Here is a blurb from the site:

"June 10: Noel Edison will conduct the Elora Festival Singers in a varied programme highlighted by notable Canadian commemorations including John Beckwith's Three Motets on Swan's "China", which was performed at the first Music at Sharon concert in 1981. Glenn Gould’s witty So You Want to Write a Fugue? will honour the 75th anniversary of the late- musician’s birth, and movements from Glenn Buhr’s Richot Mass will mark the 10th anniversary of Manitoba’s 1997 Red River flood."