Aghillo

Collaboration is a coat of many colours – it exists in many forms and for many ends. It can be fun, it can be exciting, it can be extremely hard work and it can take you outside of your comfort zone. In its very best form it gives everyone involved a chance to learn something, to produce something meaningful and not just merely contribute from their own single perspective. HighWire’s strap line ‘creating innovative people for radical change’ doesn’t quite capture the collaborative nature of much of our work and of our thinking. But it’s there, it’s definitely there. (more…)

There’s some really nice experimental work going at Nihilogic integrating audio, HTML5 <canvas> and <audio> tags along  with a javascript api which drives the graphics in real-time. The really interesting thing here is doing it in real-time, no pre-processing of the sound track is used. This is nice – it gives all sorts of possibilities to drive visualisations using live performance. However, it gets really interesting when we start thinking about using this to drive physical media as well as digital media. Dancing toys? Enhanced theatre performance? Adaptive architecture?

In the spirit of playfulness, DIY culture and ‘Making do’ I wondered last night what I could do with Eric Morecambe and his statue on Morecambe’s sea front. The joy that this statue brings to people is a wonder to see by the way – there’s always smiles and laughter around him. What to do though? Well, he’s sat out on the sea front 24 hours a day / 365 days a year so he clearly sees a lot of weather. So the obvious thing to do is let him have his say about it – find a suitable weather API (after playing with wunderground and google, I finally settled on yahoo), parse the weather data into a string, use the weather condition codes to generate comments, then send Eric’s thoughts on their way to the world via an automated tweet twice a day. Quite a fun thing to do with just an API, some PHP and a cron job. Feel free to follow Eric’s weather at www.twitter.com/ericsstatue