StephenBoydDavis

Nike, Hackney and Alec Davis

2010-08-31T07:05:00.000-07:00

The Hackney logo on sports and fashion items. From Hackney local government website.

A couple of years ago I was phoned by someone on behalf of Hackney council in North London, wanting to know the role of my father, Alec Davis, in the design of the borough’s logo in the mid-1960s.

It turned out that Nike had borrowed the logo for use on their Hackney Marshes brand worldwide without asking permission. In the end Nike did the decent thing and paid Hackney £300,000, to go towards the development of the borough sports facilities.

Hackney’s report: History of Hackney’s logo. It includes a short interview with me and a photo of Dad and me that I provided:

Alec Davis with Stephen in 1965 when Hackney’s logo was designed.

Guardian article: Nike scores own goal on Hackney Marshes.

BBC: Hackney wins logo row with Nike.

Richard Gregory (1923-2010)

2010-05-20T15:02:00.000-07:00

The café wall illusion is an optical illusion first described by Professor Richard Gregory. His colleague observed this effect in the tiles of the wall of a café at the bottom of St Michael’s Hill, Bristol. See Wikipedia article on the illusion.

Hard on the death of Jacques Bertin, Richard Gregory’s death on 17th May has just been announced. An esteemed scientist, he had a remarkable ability to make his knowledge accessible, most notably in Eye and Brain: the psychology of seeing, first published in 1966 and passing through five editions, and the Oxford Companion to the Mind, first published in 1987. I found both of these useful together with Illusion in Nature and Art with Ernst Gombrich in 1983 when developing my PhD. And Richard was kind enough to write to me when I questioned him about one of the ideas in his publications.

Obituary on Bristol University site.
Obituary in the Guardian.
Wikipedia article.
Richard Gregory site.

Millibands' weaknesses

2010-05-15T15:42:00.000-07:00

How Edward Miliband voted on key issues since 2001:

Voted very strongly for replacing Trident.
Voted very strongly for Labour's anti-terrorism laws.
Voted very strongly for allowing ministers to intervene in inquests.
Voted very strongly against an investigation into the Iraq war.
Voted very strongly for introducing ID cards.

How David Miliband voted on key issues since 2001:

Voted very strongly for replacing Trident.
Voted very strongly for the Iraq war.
Voted very strongly against an investigation into the Iraq war.
Voted strongly for allowing ministers to intervene in inquests.
Voted very strongly for Labour's anti-terrorism laws.
Voted strongly for introducing ID cards.
Voted very strongly for introducing foundation hospitals.

And they both have that patronising habit of dropping their Ts to try to make themselves sound like men of the people. How naive do they think we are?

All data from http://www.theyworkforyou.com/

Being and nothingness: Laurie Taylor has a go

2010-05-06T09:16:00.000-07:00

Laurie Taylor’s parodic column on the back of Times Higher Education this week highlights events at Middlesex.

Further coverage is at:

Philosophy petition exceeds 10000

2010-05-04T15:07:00.000-07:00

At 23:00 today, the petition against the closure of Philosophy at Middlesex was standing at 10437 and the map of signatories looked like this.

Middlesex University closes Philosophy

2010-05-04T04:08:00.000-07:00

Middlesex University has announced that it will close its Philosophy intake for students at all levels. This effectively means closing the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy which was the highest achieving subject group within the University in the UK government’s last census of research quality, RAE 2008. The government report said (emphasis added):

The majority of outputs are of at least internationally excellent quality; of these, a significant proportion are of world-leading quality. Of the remainder, most are of internationally recognised quality.

The cohesive and focussed character of the research strategy is outstanding, with the appointment of three new members of staff in the period confirming the distinctive profile. Research student provision and research income and its use are excellent. The three areas of specialisation are well thought out and provide genuine support for the commendably high levels of activity in the unit. The Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy and associated conferences makes an important contribution to the discipline.

Philosophy at Middlesex made a good showing among the UK’s top-ranked universities, as the University’s website points out.

Campaigners are trying to get the closure plan reversed:

I wish I had known this about drawing

2010-03-29T09:08:00.000-07:00

A recent conversation on the JISC Drawing Research list led me to write down what bothered me about the way I was taught drawing at Camberwell School of Art and Crafts (as it then was) in the 1970s.

One particular drawing tutor used to stand behind me and stare morosely at my work. After an interminable wait she would sigh and say, 'That's not very honest, is it?' I had no idea what she was trying to tell me. I now think I had totally misconceived drawing as being in some way concerned with matching the scene I was observing - and, worst of all, I did not even realise I had this preconception.

Much of the teaching was brilliant, but I wish someone had made a few points clear to me then:

drawing is a form of representation, and no representation matches what it represents: instead it is a transformation.
how the marks on the page relate to what you see, or think you see, is entirely up to you.
many of the marks we make are not direct responses (whatever that means) to experience, but conventionalised and culturally determined; this is not a problem.
what matters is not the relation between the scene and the drawing, but that between the scene, the drawing and the viewer (who may only be the person doing the drawing).
drawing tries to construct something which produces a response in the viewer that is in some way analogous to looking at the scene; in what way it is analogous is again entirely up to the person drawing.

In short, I wish someone had drawn my attention to the 'dominance of making over matching' (Gombrich 1977 Art and Illusion: a study in the psychology of pictorial representation p248) and invited me to rethink what I thought I knew about drawing in light of that idea.

I pursued some of these questions of the relation between the scene, the depiction and the viewer in A Schema for Depiction (2007) In: Van der Waarde, K. and Westendorp, P. (eds.). Visible Language 41(3). Special issue on Visual Metaphors in User Support. 280-300.

Wild optimism about new technologies

2009-12-31T06:53:00.000-08:00

New technologies are often greeted by wild optimism which later seems misplaced. Here is an extract from Our Iron Roads of 1852, extolling the moral benefits of the railways:

The individual benefits conferred by the facilities of travel now enjoyed are most important. To make the tour of Europe was once regarded as essential to the completion of the education of a gentleman; and still very many will declare, with old Du Bartas :—

“O thrice, thrice happy he, who shuns the cares
Of city troubles.”

[...] The change already effected in our own land by the Railway System is most surprising. The country may now be traversed from the South coast to the Borders in a few hours. The extremities of the island are now, to all intents and purposes, as near the metropolis as Sussex or Buckinghamshire were two centuries ago. The Midland counties are a mere suburb. With the space and resources of an empire, we enjoy the compactness of a city. Our roads are contracted into streets, our hills and dales into parks, and our thousand leagues of coast into the brief circumference of a castle wall. Nineveh was a city of three days’ journey round, Great Britain can be traversed in one, in its longest dimensions, during the same time. For questions of distance, we are as mere a spot as Malta, St. Helena, or one of the Channel Isles, or as one of the little states of the ancient Ægean. One circumvallation includes all the cities of the island. “A hundred opposite ports are blended into one Piræus, and to every point of the compass diverge the oft-traversed long walls that unite them with our engirded acropolis.”

By the union of activity and sympathy thus promoted, the great social, commercial, and political interests of the nation are drawn nearer together. Local distinctions and district prejudices are disappearing for ever, and the unit of British enterprise, wealth, and wisdom, is becoming more compact, energetic, and potent, and more promising of prolonged health and permanent stability. Men who but a few years since scarcely crossed the precincts of the county in which they were born, and knew as little of the general features of the land of their birth as they did of the topography of the moon, now unhesitatingly avail themselves of the means of communication that are afforded to visit spots and explore regions; to which the solicitations of friends, the beauties of scenery, or the charms of historic association, may offer attractions. The spread of ideas, as well as the conveyance of persons and of merchandise, depends greatly on means of transit; men become better acquainted with the condition and habits of their fellow men, and ignorance is diminished before the onward and resistless march of knowledge and of truth. The same principle is applicable to the affairs of other lands. Long-cherished national animosities are lulled, and wither away as the intercommunion of people extends; the once oft-repeated axiom, that proximity of situation between empires necessarily makes them hereditary foes, is repudiated as a defunct absurdity—friendships are making sacred the intercourse of families, who, debarred of means of communication, would otherwise never have met-a selfish patriotism will at length be lost in an enlightened and generous philanthropy! In proportion as intercourse is diffused, the happy period will be hastened when countries will become but as counties,—when, united by the same feelings which now actuate different portions of the same nations, they will regard the practice of settling a disputed question by a mutual slaughter as absurd as it is inhuman,—and will see, that though they may be separated by a diversity of tongue, or by the barriers of an arbitrary geography, yet that they, the children of a common Father, brethren of one great family, are heirs of the same destiny, and that their own highest interests are best advanced by the promotion of each other's welfare, and by the assiduous diffusion over the earth of peace and good-will among men.

Williams, Frederick S. 1852. Our Iron Roads – their history, construction and social influences. Ingram, Cooke and Co, London. 284-285.

Related themes are taken up in these three excellent books:

Marvin, Carolyn. 1988. When Old Technologies Were New – thinking about communications in the late nineteenth century. Oxford University Press, Oxford

Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. 1986. The Railway Journey: the industrialisation of time and space in the nineteenth century. University of California Press, Berkeley, California.

Standage, Tom. 1998. The Victorian Internet. Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London

Open play

2009-09-24T04:17:00.000-07:00

Computers are systematic machines – though the question of whether they are inherently limiting has been debated since the protocomputing of Babbage and Lovelace.

Since programmes are so easily conceived as sets of rules and mechanisms for applying them, there seems a particular tendency when play is offered though digital systems to opt for those forms of play which are already most systematised. They favour what Callois termed ludus, the goal-oriented, structured game, over paidia - freeform, exuberant play (Caillois 1958). This tendency appears as staged objectives, such as the levels typical of so many videogames, or as the imitation in digital media of games which are already highly systematised in their real world forms.

Ere be Dragons, a project at the Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts, funded by the Wellcome Trust 2005/06.

I discussed this briefly in an article for Digital Creativity on our project Ere be Dragons. Dragons is an open work, in the sense Eco uses the term (1979, p.50) to refer to both openness of interpretation and the more literal openness made possible by interactivity.

The Open Work is also a theme of the ongoing Lansdown Centre project Scambi, centred on the work of Henri Pousseur. See http://www.scambi.mdx.ac.uk/.

References
Caillois, R. (1958) Man, play and games. Translated by M. Barash. University of Illinois Press. See on AbeBooks.
Eco, U. (1979) The role of the reader: explorations in the semiotics of texts. Hutchinson, London. See on AbeBooks.

Chronographics blog begins today

2009-08-31T16:11:00.000-07:00

I have started a blog devoted to thoughts, research and links on chronographics.

It is at http://chronographics.blogspot.com/

The first two posts introduce the subject and provide links to material about the timeline of Jacques Barbeu Du Bourg.

Princeton and Basingstoke?!

2009-08-31T08:21:00.000-07:00

Princeton is architecturally stunning, principally for its 19th century gothic buildings on an almost industrial scale. There are innumerable walkways between the buildings and I spent an hour just wandering about and gazing.

John Witherspoon (1723-1794) was the only college principal to sign the Declaration of Independence.

Newton, Locke and Hume, key Enlightenment figures, depicted as inspiration for Witherspoon. What is the unnamed volume? It's impossible to see its name from the other side either.

Rather improbably, the statue of Witherspoon was cast in 2001 in Basingstoke, one of the ugliest towns in England.

iARTA at University of North Texas

2009-08-31T07:19:00.000-07:00

iARTA, the Initiative for Advanced Research in Technology and the Arts, is a project by University of North Texas in Denton TX to bring art, design and music together with computing science and engineering in a university research cluster. Five visitors discussed with an internal team from the university how this could best be brought about.

The other participants were:

Chris Csikszentmihályi, Director of the MIT Media Lab's Computing Culture group, which works to create unique media technologies for cultural applications. He also directs the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, which develops new technologies and techniques to strengthen geographic communities.

Dick Rijken, Stephen Boyd Davis, Alain Depocas, Chris Csikszentmihályi, Mark Tribe

Alain Depocas, Head of Research and Documentation Centre, The Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology, Montreal, Quebec. Alain’s work at the Langlois Foundation focuses on the documentation and preservation of technology-based artworks and practices and on Web dissemination.

Dick Rijken, Director of STEIM in Amsterdam. In addition, he is the chair of an official EU workgroup on the creative and cultural industries, which focuses on national and European policies, and he is a professor at The Hague University of Applied Sciences, where he researches innovation in the traditional culture sector.

Mark Tribe at the Center for Culture and Media, Brown University, is a founder of Rhizome.org and serves as a Board Member for ISEA.

David Bithell, one of the leaders of the iARTA initiative

iARTA site

Chronographics at Princeton

2009-08-30T14:51:00.000-07:00

I was lucky enough to be in the States last week with enough time to go to the Rare Books collection at the library of Princeton. They have a very rare example of an early timeline - in fact it may be unique. It was created in 1753 by a Frenchman, Jacques Barbeu Du Bourg. I'm very grateful to Stephen Ferguson, curator of Rare Books, and other staff who helped me at the Library.

Outside the Firestone Library at Princeton, August 2009

The timeline is special for two reasons. It may be the first to use a constant numerical scale for an entire historical period - and that's a lot, because it starts with the beginning of time (God, Adam etc.) and extends right through to Barbeu Du Bourg's own day. And it is interactive - slightly. Du Bourg's timeline is built into a very simple wooden machine with two crank handles so that you can move time back and forth.

I hope to organise material about this and related topics in a Chronographics blog, but for now here is a link to my translation of Diderot's article* from the Enyclopedie which describes the machine.

* Diderot, Denis. "Chronological (machine)." The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. Ann Arbor: Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library, 2009. Trans. of "Chronologique (machine.)," Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 3. Paris, 1753. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0001.081 (accessed 14 August 2009).