I arrange things into artworks, including paint, wood, plastic, raspberry pi, people, words, dialogues, arduino, sensors, web tech, light and code.
I use words other people have written to help guide these projects, so I read as often as I can. Most of what I read is literature (fiction) or nonfiction on philosophy, art theory, ethics and technology.
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Referenced in the book H is for Hawk as a semi-autobiographical (or at lease self-referential) work by White set in Ireland, which piqued my curiosity so I got this out of the library.
The history and original design of the World Wide Web by its creator
While it's nice to read the story of the origins of the WWW, the voice of the ghostwriter is very strong here. Berners Lee is great at crediting his colleagues, and how it was not him, but a team that developed the protocols and technologies that led to the web, but there is a tension with the need to have a 'heroes journey' narrative here, which fills the book with contradiction. Each chapter tells a little bit of something interesting, but overall the book is a bit too Hollywood to enjoy.
This book analyses the values and processes that characterise DIY (do it yourself) digital infrastructure, …
This was included in the recent Institute of Network Cultures e-newsletter. All of their publications are free to download. I'm researching exactly this topic over the last two years, so it's timely and I'm looking forward to reading this.
The history and original design of the World Wide Web by its creator
Found this in a second hand furniture shop in Buncrana north Donegal. Owner wanted 50 cent so I decided to have a look.
Have had this one on the pile for a while. Need something with a different pace so here we go.
The authors of Bad Language were careful to condemn pedantry and deride disinformation about language and dialect when they wrote this enjoyable book in 1990. More than that, they were at pains to dismiss any notion of correctness in language, regularly pointing out classism and elitism in this. The book breaks down ideas considered "bad" in English, from swearing to malapropisms, and presents them as part of a living, loved language. And they had fun along the way.
And so did I.
The final work of the Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass—a witty and elegiac series of …
Günther Grass' last book is a fitting conclusion. It's a wittily funny, perfectly curmudgeonly, and surprisingly touching account of the end of his life, documented through short essays, poems and drawings. There is narrative here, and a deep love for humanity coupled with a mild hopelessness about a future that he will never see. And a final tooth that perhaps he cannot save.
The final work of the Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass—a witty and elegiac series of …
Picked up in a second-hand bookshop where it just asked to come home.
Gifted to me a few years ago by my partner and put on the long finger. Now I'm trying to get through that pile of books that other people felt I would love.
As the world around us increases in technological complexity, our understanding of it diminishes. Underlying …
James Bridle's writing and art about the complexity of network technologies is often so careful about saying everything succinctly and clinically that it's tempting to believe that he might be part machine. So if anything, this book has proven his humanity, if a little disappointingly.
In content, writing in 2017, Bridle is ahead of his time. His topics range from bias in image machine learning models to secrecy in corporate and government surveillance. However, the structure of the chapters often reads like a Wikipedia dive, leaping between stories and vaguely connected ideas with gleeful abandon. The result is a little chaotic and difficult to connect together. By no means a bad book, but there are better examples that deal with these topics more coherently.
The DisCO Manifesto is a deep dive into the world of Distributed Cooperative Organizations. Over …
This short book documents some models and ways of using Distributed Co-operative Organisations as a structural model. It's a useful reference and resource point for a relatively novel structure of organisation. The stronger chapters are those that cross theory with practical examples, best exemplified in Chapter 3: Last Night A Distributed Cooperative Organization Saved My Life. Overall, the book is playful, nicely designed, coherent, and a useful guide for trying our something with this organisational model.
![N. Scott Momaday: House Made of Dawn [50th Anniversary Ed] (Paperback, 2018, Harper Perennial Modern Classics)](https://solarpunk.sfo3.digitaloceanspaces.com/images/covers/a0bbbd4f-1457-4491-a4b9-a2b3aa96cd6d.jpeg)
In a moment of synchronicity, Cormac McCarthy died two days before I finished this book. It was strange to see him in the headlines because I had been talking about him since I opened N Scott Momaday's masterpiece House Made of Dawn. I don't like to give equivalences when describing books, but in this case it's an obvious one. This book was a clear influence on McCarthy, either directly or indirectly. And it is powerful.
The story is about Abel, a longhair indigenous American, set between 1945 and 1952. He has grown up on a reservation in New Mexico. He suffers the indignity of this experience, and many other slights and insults to tradition and life, like a thousand small cuts.
The story is of this experience of slow erasure, of violent intolerance. I is incredible to think that this book is over 50 years old. Each section has …
In a moment of synchronicity, Cormac McCarthy died two days before I finished this book. It was strange to see him in the headlines because I had been talking about him since I opened N Scott Momaday's masterpiece House Made of Dawn. I don't like to give equivalences when describing books, but in this case it's an obvious one. This book was a clear influence on McCarthy, either directly or indirectly. And it is powerful.
The story is about Abel, a longhair indigenous American, set between 1945 and 1952. He has grown up on a reservation in New Mexico. He suffers the indignity of this experience, and many other slights and insults to tradition and life, like a thousand small cuts.
The story is of this experience of slow erasure, of violent intolerance. I is incredible to think that this book is over 50 years old. Each section has a different voice but all are captivating. Each skips between memory and story, presenting a microcosm of an experience suffered by so many. And each is beautiful and devastating.
The DisCO Manifesto is a deep dive into the world of Distributed Cooperative Organizations. Over …
Recommended by the editor of COMPOST magazine as a good introduction to Distributed Cooperative Organisations, an area I'm very interested in right now.
My partner had some credit left on a gift card in a nice bookshop. We spotted this, and we had both enjoyed her book Three Strong Women so picked this up on a whim.
An exquisitely illustrated, one-of-a-kind celebration of the hidden beauty of nature and the ingenuity of …
Susan Ogilvy has lovingly painted the nests of common birds in a beautiful book. Each has a description of the origin of the nest, many given to her by friends and family. This is it — the book is perfect in its simplicity.
One small complaint is an unnecessary addition of somewhat spurious descriptive information about each bird species' habits. Despite seeing the uniqueness of each nest, these descriptions jar with the individuality she paints so beautifully. The book remains perfect if you ignore these parts.