Show and Tell at Monash

On 10th and 11th December the Fine Art Department at Monash University organised a postgraduate colloquium, a sort of big show-and-tell. It wasn't a public exhibition, but each student had some space to set up work and we each got a slot to talk about what we had done, and answer questions in a discussion led by a staff member. About 50 students were involved, so there were typically three or four parallel sessions.

We also had two lectures by Professor Andrew Benjamin, who has the title of Professor of Critical Theory and Philosophical Aesthetics at Monash. Professor Benjamin then attended quite a few of the student presentations, including mine, and asked probing questions.

The whole event was a great success, and an excellent way both to get feedback on one's own work and to find out what other students were up to over a wide range of practices: painting, drawing, sculpture, digital imagery, video and various types of installation. This is the first time the colloquium has been held; I hope it becomes a regular event.

Picture of Exiguous Cube

Here is a picture of my Exiguous Cube in the Monash Uni Faculty Gallery.

Exhibition: 30x30x30

I have a piece called Exiguous Cube in the 30x30x30 Exhibition
at the Faculty Gallery, Monash University, Caulfield, Melbourne.

When: Opening Fri 21st November, 5-7pm.
                 Exhibition 21st Nov - 5th Dec
Where: Faculty Gallery, ground floor Building G, Monash University Caulfield Campus (opposite Caulfield Station)
What: The exhibition is for works that are no bigger than 30x30 cm or 30x30x30 cm, from staff and students in the Faculty of Art and Design, Monash University.

My piece is made out of Lego bricks.

To make an Exiguous Cube in two steps:

Step 1: Add bricks. Place 2 x 4 Lego bricks at random in a 29cm x 29cm x 29cm cube, until no more will fit.

Step 2: Remove bricks. Choose a brick at random. Apply a test: the brick passes the test if it can be removed while leaving the eight corner blocks connected to one another. If the brick passes the test, remove it. Continue choosing bricks at random and applying the test until no more bricks can be removed.

The result is an Exiguous Cube: all the eight corner bricks are connected to one another, but if any brick is removed, the corner blocks won’t all be connected to one another by continuous chains of Lego bricks.

I wrote a computer program to carry out steps 1 and 2, and then built the structure produced by my program.

A censored Internet

The Australian Federal Government is planning to censor the whole of the Internet. This is not just about providing a "child-safe" version of the Internet; that is only part of the plan.

The other, and really objectionable, part is to censor the Internet for everyone, by requiring all Australian Internet Service Providers to block sites on a secret Government blacklist. The Government is also trialling "dynamic" filtering, which attempts to block sites on-the-fly on the basis of content.

As has been pointed out, this will do nothing to block pornographers, who have plenty of ways of evading filters. What it will do is:

• Slow down the Internet and make it more expensive for everyone. (Of course it is already slow and expensive compared to what is available in other advanced countries.)
  
• Block at least 1% of sites that have nothing objectionable, because the filtering software got it wrong. (1% is the lowest figure in the trial referred to below.)
  
• Give the Government extraordinary power to control what we can view.
• Give the Government the ability to read our bank information and the like, as the https protocol can be read by filtering software.
  
• Possibly give the Government power to censor email as well as websites, as one of the filters trialled by the Government has this ability.

Despite Government denials, this looks like the Great Firewall of Australia to me, and to a lot of other people.

For more information:

• http://nocleanfeed.com/ - lots of links to further information, and suggestions on action to take.
  

• http://www.acma.gov.au/webwr/_assets/main/lib310554/isp-level_internet_content_filtering_trial-report.pdf - the Government report on the filtering trial in Tasmania.
  

A sonic history of computing

I have been reading the book The Language of New Media by Lev Manovich (MIT Press, 2001). In the early part of the book, Manovich has some scattered comments about the history of computing, and he tries very hard to find connections with visual media.

Of course Manovich refers to the punched cards used to control the Jacquard loom, which is certainly a connection with visual media. But he goes on to discuss Turing's abstract machines, and to say: "[a Turing machine's] diagram looks suspiciously like a film projector. Is this a coincidence?" Manovich then discusses Conrad Zuse's use of old cinema film to make punched tape to control his machine. Manovich's two examples of computing machines in these comments are Babbage's Analytical Engine, which was never built, and Zuse's machines, which as far as I know had minimal influence on subsequent developments. Von Neumann misses out completely.

(And, by the way, I don't think Turing's original paper had a diagram. The paper is "On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem", Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, Ser. 2, Vol. 42, 1937. There is what I believe to be a photographic reproduction of it in the book The Undecidable, ed. Martin Davis, Raven Press, Hewlett, NY, 1965. There is no diagram in this reproduction.)

Let me make a case along Manovich’s lines for the importance of sound culture in the history of computing.

In functionality the tape part of Turing’s abstract machine is like an audio tape recorder; is this a coincidence? The BBC began using audio recorders in 1932; they used a steel tape. Turing submitted his paper in 1936.

The modern stored-program digital computer originated from several lines of investigation in the period 1937–1950. The first design that fully implemented the features of modern machines was EDVAC (initial design 1945, came into operation in 1951); this machine was far more important for subsequent developments than any of the examples Manovich refers to. The design used magnetic wire for input and output, a system based on audio magnetic wire recorders. For memory it used a mercury acoustic delay line, where data was stored in the form of sound pulses circulating in a tube of mercury.

Thus sound culture could be said to play an important part in the history of computing. Of course this has no more validity than Manovich’s statements about visual culture and computing.