Between the crystalline and the chaotic

This short feature documents elements of research in advance of a long-term work. Rather than a technical account or retrospective, the aim is to demonstrate by example how research itself is a primary process, illustrated by work carried out at the IOCT during the last few years. When creative output is appraised only from its visible results, something is lost in the telling; carefully selected public facets rarely convey the depths of the underlying lines of inquiry. The research covered is for a work that generates quantitative data, driving visualisations of human movement, proximity and orientation. The aim is to reveal how this literal data reflects our relationships to one another in social settings. To contextualise the current process, complex systems, dynamic pattern formation and other works are also mentioned. As a personal account, it seemed appropriate to supplement the usual academic passive voice with first-person narrative

Greenview : the gorilla in the library smart sensing and behaviour change

This paper provides a description and analysis of the Greenview project, an experiment in smart sensing leading to energy consumption behaviour change in building users. Greenview was an innovative app built on the back of the successful DUALL project (funded by JISC). Where DUALL created a simple web-based information-feedback tool that could report electrical consumption in specific university buildings back to users via a simple dashboard using Yahoo widgets; Greenview refined the ICT tool further into a sophisticated smart phone application which could connect staff and students in De Montfort University (DMU) to monitor the relative energy consumptions of their buildings. The developed iPhone ‘app’ visualised comparative energy use on the DMU campus through a narrative of improving or declining habitats for endangered species, represented by animated cartoon characters living as virtual mascots in each university building. Based on the emotive nature of the ‘Tamagochi’ concept, the app tested an engaging way to encourage care for the environment. When consumption levels exceeded those on the same day of the previous year, the visible well being of species would change. The app also provided real-time data through meter readings provided on a half-hourly basis, allowing the inclusion of graphical data options, appealing both to emotional identification with the building mascot and to the range of preferences individuals have for viewing and interpreting data.Funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union.peer-reviewe

Is creativity a ‘natural’ process?

We are a product of the natural world and cannot dissociate ourselves from it. This may be the reason human models of culture - like persistent dynamic patterns in nature - resist the two extremes of:     disorder-inertia;     order-crystallisation; These two extremes lead to either rigidity or dissolution - qualities that appear to attract equal degrees of avoidance, except for a few special (and sometimes innovative) cases, which act a 'seeds' that shift attention from - or even destroy - existing outmoded forms. The resulting balance between the polar urges towards order/control and freedom/chaos can be seen as the result of this dynamic equilibrium. We disparage creative works that are too rigid or formulaic as much as we do those that are too unstructured or undirected. Over and above the cultural at a lower and more fundamental level, do the various human aesthetics spring from the very natural processes of which we are a part? In other words, is creativity and the appreciation of its outcomes informed - or even driven - by the dynamic complex equilibrium of our human biology and chemistry, combined with the physics of the natural world? If this might be the case, even in part, we need to examine what it means for the notion of 'individual' expression. This paper explores the idea that the processes studied under the umbrella of complexity are related to those followed during the process of creativity. It also touches on other ideas that relate to this connection between the natural world and human creativity, for instance from those arising from fundamental properties of number, and the connection between collaboration and the emergence of creative structures

MEAA 3D scanning: interim report

An interim report covering the results to date of the use of photogrammetry to turn images of heritage artefacts from Museum of East Asian Art (MEAA) into models suitable for viewing on the web. This project tested whether the relatively inexpensive techniques used in a previous project with Leicester City Council Arts and Museums Service with Roman artefacts (see IOCT) could also be employed with finer more detailed ceramics from the MEAA, without significantly increasing workload or reducing the quality of the resulting 3D models. The aim was to produce 3D models of valuable and delicate heritage items that appear faithful enough to the originals for research and visitor viewing, yet lightweight enough in file size to be delivered via the web

The Gorilla in the Library: lessons in using ICT to engage building users in energy reduction

This paper is concerned with the role of the digital economy as an enabler of behaviour change in the built environment. The Greenview research project at De Montfort University (DMU), funded by JISC’s Greening ICT fund , has undertaken innovative work to explore novel and interesting ways to engage building users in energy reduction. Findings are presented around both the methodological challenges of capturing and presenting live electrical data for iPhone applications and the wider opportunities and barriers to ICT enabled behaviour change. From a technical perspective Greenview has shown the need to conduct detailed and thorough technical work to ensure the visualisations correlate to actual building performance and from the behaviour change perspective both Greenview and its predecessor (DUALL ) have explored moving beyond quantitative approaches to presenting information on energy and sustainability that is fun, creative and [hopefully] engaging. Finally, it is clear that without senior commitment and sincere staff engagement and collaboration mere information provision in the form of dashboards are impotent

Personal Space

An online artwork connecting individual experiences to live space weather data. For the initial stages of the containing exhibition TETTT, 22 daily “prompts” in the form of keywords and phrases encouraged participants to write regular accounts of their life experience. The text on the screen is continually refreshed from over 500 of these intimate accounts and recollections. The central panel shows two measures of live “space weather”: 1. intensity of geomagnetic activity: the Kp index; 2. extent of the solar wind in AU (Astronomical Units). These data are used to filter the text according to intensity of language and modify the display in real time. The eight surrounding panels of text are refreshed according to the numerical order of the Chinese mathematical “magic square” of three, known as the Lo-Shu, historically used to lend order to cultural activities. This provides a connection between the impersonality of space weather and the very personal narratives. The central panel—usually allocated to “Earth”—displays live space weather, the colour of the rotating sun reflecting its current intensity

Teaching Innovation Project: The case for Markdown

Web presentation: https://daveeveritt.github.io/markdown-overview/#/markdown Source code: https://github.com/DaveEveritt/markdown-overviewAn online presentation arguing the case for Markdown as a primary text-based source for generating learning materials. The Presentation itself is written as a single Markdown file. The purpose is to use a single non-proprietary text-based cross-platform format from which multiple outputs can be generated, including PDF, Word, HTML, e-books, etc. This presentation was one of the outputs from a Teaching Innovation Project

Left To Our Own Devices, track on Dervish House, musical album by Memory Wire

https://memorywire.bandcamp.com/track/left-to-our-own-devicesA musical sound recording using digital processing of acoustic musical instrument

Sketches for Esther Rollinson's "Splinter" artwork

For the first exhibited outcome of the work informed by these sketches, see: https://www.phoenix.org.uk/event/melt-splinter-and-thread/Detailed digital sketches using the Java programming language and the Processing environment, derived from initial work with Esther Rolinson's light sculptures "Splinter" and "Thread"

A Critique of Computer Creativity Evaluation

Using algorithms to generate creative work is a well- established transdisciplinary practice that spans several fields. Accessible and popular coding tools such as Processing and Open Frameworks, as well as the rise of hack spaces have significantly contributed to increased activity in this field. However, beyond art-technology curation and historical contextualisation, evalua- tion of the resulting artefacts is in its infancy, although several general models of creativity—and its evaluation—exist. There is a perceived distinction between human and computer creativity, whereas we argue that they are effectively the same thing. Computers are made and programmed by people, so it makes sense to measure the creativity of the human influence behind the machine, rather than viewing computers as truly autonomous entities. By concatenating and enhancing existing models of creativity, we propose a framework that takes these issues into account, with a view to evaluating creative work that uses the computer as a medium more effectively