There are no words to describe the opposite sensations of being at-our-job and being not-at-our-job even if we know the feeling of crossing that threshold by heart. But the most essential quality that makes a job a job is that when we are at work, we surrender the power to decide the worth of what we do. At-job is where our labour is appraised by an external meter: the market. At-job, our labour is never a means to itself but a means to money; its value can be expressed only as a number—relative, fluctuating, out of our control. At-job, because an outside eye measures us, the workplace is a place of surveillance. It’s painful to have your sense of worth extracted. For Marx, the poet of economics, when a person’s innate value is replaced with exchange value, it is as if we’ve been reduced to “a mere jelly.”

It has been a minute since I wrote anything new, but thankfully I have found time for another side project and, by extension, another blog post. This one is going to be a little different though. Like everything on this blog it is in fact a data science post. I’m going to talk about art, object-oriented programming in R, and the grid graphics system. It being the time of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras – or “Gay Christmas” as it is affectionately known – I’ll do it with a rainbow palette. Nevertheless, pretty palettes notwithstanding this won’t be a particularly upbeat pride-flag-waving kind of post. There will be art, and there will be code. But there will also be little slivers of darker stories, and in a moment I’ll explain why I’ve made the decision to include them. But let’s start with the art.

Computer-generated artwork has been around for quite a while. The idea of using R for this purpose, however, is a little more recent. Designed originally as a programming language for academic statistical computing, R is now a mainstream language for data science and analytics. Can it also work as an artistic medium? Is there an overlap between our familiar data science workflows and the artistic process? Perhaps we can become better data scientists through art, and vice versa.

Code poetry is built on a simple premise: it is a single text that reads as poetry and executes as code.

The history of art is also a history of rejection. I’ve written that somewhere before. Once the patterns that recur throughout art history become apparent, you might expect there to be a learning curve. But there isn’t one. Why is that? I’m also not sure why there is so little understanding of the fact that the very things that are so feverishly, vehemently and vocally rejected—be it photography, video, the internet, Instagram or, more recently, NFTs and artificial intelligence—ultimately win out in the end. Herbert W. Franke (1927–2022), Germany’s best-known science fiction author, metaverse visionary and computer artist, devoted decades of his life to writing books and texts that remain as relevant as if they were written yesterday. He wrote tirelessly to demonstrate that art can indeed be created using technology, and that such art deserves serious consideration.

Syllabus here. Readings should be generally available on the web, unless otherwise indicated. If you’re having trouble accessing a resource, try the NYU Library Proxy (it’s very easy to set up). Please contact me ASAP if you have trouble accessing any of the readings.

This passage occurs as part of an argument that it’s possible to port videogames between platforms without changing the underlying game design (an argument that I ultimately agree with). However, I think that Emily Dickinson is—for reasons I’ll get into shortly—an inopportune choice as an example of a poet whose work “can survive a transcription.” In fact, I think Emily Dickinson’s work is an example of how, in fact, nothing survives transcription, and that’s the statement that I set out to prove in this talk. But along the way, it occurred to me that the converse is also true: nothing doesn’t survive transcription, and that the tension between these two seemingly opposite claims actually informs and explains them both.

Wiki for Arts and Studies

Sometimes I enjoy programming as play. The only goal is that I make something fun and whimsical that serves no real purpose except maybe that I can share it with friends.

The pixels that power our nostalgia were never meant to be viewed on modern, high-definition displays. What’s the right way to update history?