SheepyWiki

[Alex Hough]

Dear All,

I thought I'd share this experiment : https://alexhough.github.io/SheepyWiki6.html

Alex

[@TiddlyTweeter]

Ciao Alex,

Excellent stuff.

What stands out is you art-think & show TW can be a visual art tool.

Rather than a neat animation with defined edges you thought to do "misty morning" -- very evocative. Different to take defined space to blur it.

Might be interesting to degrade the edges of tiddlers too????

Best wishes
Josiah

[Alex Hough]

Hi Josiah,

Thank you for the suggestions, I'll see what I can do next time I am in "visual art mode"

Below are some thoughts emerging just now. I want to get them out of my head then refactor and reuse in the [[Philosophy of Tiddlers]] kind of way....I am finding these exchanges very inspiring... what follows is first draft quality. The context of email reply is helping me. I don't want to go into an editing process just now... later

(I think there is another dimension the workflow emerging here. Different media (email, TW) have different qualities, they all interact in different ways with  creative (and other) processes

!! Avatars/ArtTutor

The ArtTutor avatar is based on my visual art tutor. I remember her saying "its just a sprawling hypertext Alex" and "its difficult to see your conceit". The work she was talking about was one where I photographed chewing gum on pavement during semi-random walks in cities. This was framed a pyscho geography and rereve. I wanted to appropriate the gum-splodgy on  the street as a sculpture, a readymade in the tradion of DuChamp. I wanted to then extend this into data and hypertext. Each "gum splodge" marks a node on a network. It has a unique geo-location and -- maybe -- we would be able to retrieve the DNA profile of the chewer from the gum.

Basically, to get an art degree by photographic chewing gum you have to justify it in terms of art history. I did this with my tutors very patient guidance. I was soon connecting everything I could think of to my ready-made/hypertext sculpture, and quite righly she pointed out that all things are connected in the sense that they exist as thoughts in your mind. She pointed me towards Kant. 

!! ArtTutor/NounProjectIcon

I found an icon of a teacher punishing a student and have used it as part of a [[conceit]]: i imagine the kind of things the tutor would be saying if I presented SheepyWiki to her in a seminar. I also want to locate the tutor "[[On the plain|The Cheshire Plain]]" to use it as a context to comment on knowledge production in that region. I am engaged with a number of organisations which could be said to be creating and sharing knowledge. The [[plain perspective]] offers a view of the region which is different from a map. The boundaries are formed from geographical elements and landmarks. The slightly wider perspective is that of the Mersey Basin [see ref]

!! Psychogeography of ideas as creativity tool

I want to make SheepyWiki into a useful too to help my thinking in a number of [[PROCESSES]]. Perhaps there is a hierachy (to be determined later) but the main ones are those which give rise to a sense of place. 

I am using the SheepyWiki development process to try and help me learn about POSD - Process Oriented Systems Design. Jane, one of my friends in the systems thinking community worked on this methodology when she worked at ICL, a state funded computer company which eventually got sold to Fujitu. POSD was developed by two people who lived in my hometown of Alsager.

In the spirit of the arts practices associated with psychogeography I want to use the intellectual legacy of the area to inform my thinking about the area. This contrived starting sitiuation will I give rise to some interesting learning outcomes. The whole idea of POSD -- as I see it --is to design for emergence. 

The POSD project was "ditched" (wow! --a landscape / water metaphor!) by ICL in favour of a hardware project, but some of the people involved in it are carrying on its development. The main two are getting quite old now, one is deaf and the other has developed parkinsons. So there is a kind of emotional motivation here to, especially for Jane who still sees them. I am less directly emotionally driven, but I see how important it is to Jane. And it turns out that -- in her role as my informal mentor / consultant -- I have been using the POSD stuff along with another methodology with strong connections to the region: Stafford Beer's Viable System Model. Basically Jane has fused POSD and VSM and I think its really important for me to support her work and to learn how to use it.

Looking down onto the Cheshire Plain you  an see Jodral Bank, a radio telescope. You can see Manchester and Alderly Edge, the places that Alan Turing lived and worked while at Manchester Universities computer science department. POSD also comes from that department: Manchester University and ICL worked in partnership.  The PlainView in SheepyWiki offers a context to think about all this. And if you want you can go to places like [[Tegs Nose]] or [[Lyme Park]] sit down (or fly a kite?) relax and let your mind wander. 

The intention is to think about the wandering mind on and off-line. The SheepyWiki conceit -- i hope -- is on which you can take for a walk, take for a wander. And when you see a sheep, it will evoke conceptual metaphors which could act as a tool to help with creativity.

I like the idea of extending (smashing together?)the method of loci -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci -- and POSD. The sheep in a landscape becomes an icon with an easy to remember but highly complex set of extended conceptual metaphors

------

CSS effects

Within the overall conceit, the sheep looking out over the Cheshire Plain offers various conceptual metaphors branching out from a parent metaphor: [[Knowledge is located in a landscape]] --  [[Larkoff and Johnson]]

Bluring the image can evoke, foggyness - how "clear" things are or appear

Changing opacity: - how far away things are, (especially back lit trees in winter)

Hue: - time of day, orientation to the sun.

From the hill, the sheep is looking west towards ireland. She can almost see liverpool, Snowdonia, Angelea. She definately sees the oil refinary at Stanlow on the river Dee. When she's looking into the sun the colour is muted. The moisture (and polution) in the air creates hazyness and interesting sun set effect.

The backlit conceit also links in with the idea that computer screens are back lit. colours look different when they are backlit (need to do some more thinking on this)

!! Some Links

 POSD

Static: http://www.prattens.co.uk/webposd/posd.htm

Dynamic: http://www.prattens.co.uk/dynamics/introduction.html

GEOGRAPHY

Cheshire Plain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheshire_Plain

Mersey Basin: http://www.merseybasin.org.uk/

---

ALex

On 31 October 2017 at 12:59, @TiddlyTweeter <tiddly...@assays.tv> wrote:

Ciao Alex,

Excellent stuff.
Ciao Alex,

What stands out is you art-think & show TW can be a visiual art tool.

Rather than a neat animation with defined edges you thought to do "misty morning" -- very evocative. Different to take defined space to blur it.

Might be interesting to degrade the edges of tiddlers too????

Best wishes
Josiah

AlexHough wrote:

I thought I'd share this experiment : https://alexhough.github.io/SheepyWiki6.html

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[@TiddlyTweeter]

Ciao Alex

A few comments -- since this is public on TW group I'll try confine my comments to (broadly) TW related comments. Its slightly askance of your post, but I hope relevant enough. I stuck to what I know. Ask if you need more detail on any points.

1 - ART VEHICLE

The history in art of juxtaposition of elements that create new meanings dates back way before the internet ...

ASSEMBLAGES occur most obviously in Trompe-L'oeil

Very relevant also is the "Assemblage Of Persons" found, for instance, in complex Elizabethan Tableau Portraiture:

TW is very interesting for its flexibility for assemblage, re-combination etc. (The French term "Bricolage" capturing well the richness of transformation whilst simultaneously indicating the role of the "Bricoleur". This differs from UK/USA D.I.Y. where the stems differ: i.e., we say "D.I.Y. and handy/wo/men", not "D.I.Y. and D.I.Y.ers.")

"Bricolage" is a huge semantic field in French with deep history.

Levi-Strauss used it effectively to differentiate "The Savage Mind" from explicit "Moderns."

Another useful French approximation to art assemblage is GLEANING, most used in France, though known elsewhere. There is a whole film about it by Agnes Varda: THE GLEANERS AND I

And of course CUT-UPS of Burroughs (wordy version) and Brian Gyson (art visual version, not so well known).

All of these an extension of general process of MONTAGE--now central to all forms of edited composition. Originally found only in the visual arts now applied to all art-forms.
 
WHY do I emphasise this: TW is an instance where the potential for the Bricoleur is VERY high. In that sense its quite akin to the originating force behind the WWW. Originally the WWW was meant to be an AUTEUR'S medium, not a publisher's. Which leads me to Sheepy ...

2 - THE C.E.R.N. SHEEP

Regarding you interest in the socio-psycho-geography of Sheep Appearances.

CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) has a flock of 70 sheep that have grazed between its laboratories for over 45 years. It has a full-time Shepherd.

It was in CERN that Tim Berners Lee came up with the idea of working hypertext that became the WWW.

Was the creator of the WWW influenced by sheep?

I will comment in another thread about Butchery.

Very best wishes
Josiah

[@TiddlyTweeter]

Ciao Alex

Footnote to last ... on ancient MEMORY SYSTEMS ... the loci method ...

First off probably the best modern work on this is Frances Yates' THE ART OF MEMORY.

I like the idea of extending (smashing together?)the method of loci -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci -- and POSD. The sheep in a landscape becomes an icon with an easy to remember but highly complex set of extended conceptual metaphors

Absolutely right as far as WWW stuff goes. All the thinkers prior to the creation of the net envisaging it imagined it as an EXTERNAL MEMORY MACHINE. For instance Vannevar Bush:

"wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified"

The idea the net would be an encyclopedia with infinite cross-referencing was very insightful.

As far as the ART OF LOCI goes, the ancient method of using associative VISUAL thought to remember anything goes ...

... well I think we have largely lost it (though Derren Brown & other magicians can use it still to do magic). The WWW substitutes it. Rather than engage your memory you engage with the Internet.

In that sense the externalisation of memory to computers may indicate broad cultural changes like ...

1 - the (final??) social-psycho adaptation from ORAL cultures to WRITING cultures. Or perhaps, better, change from personal internalising cultures to public externalising cultures. (Recommend Walter J. Ong if you interested in this theme.)

2 - an ambivalent triumph of what Karl Popper called WORLD THREE. Meaning the "knowledge bases" far extend beyond one human ever being able to ever grasp them. In short the accelerated accumulation of information and analysis that exists and persists "is if" it existed without US. The problem is that the Internet just as easily preserves total rubbish. The optimising rationalists of the past completely overlooked that :-)

Coming back to Sheepy TW...

Interesting is WHAT DOLLY KNOWS. Dolly knows & sees a lot. But there is always the problem of articulation. Mastering the means of communication and the means of relevance for hearers is not as simple as it perhaps once was.

The problem with tech on the net is its quite a stubborn instrument. Whilst its easy to AUTEUR into populist SLOTS (controlled by mega-servers) its not at all easy to find flexi-tools that let you change the MODE of saying/showing. TW is VERY good at that. Probably at the limits of flex possible? Even so there is a LOT you have to learn to find its FLEX-BUTTON. Once you do it very good. However there is also the problem left (one many artists get stuck on) ... the solution, though working well, is obscure, undisseminated and no one sees it.

Getting TW (Sheep & all) better noticed is something that interests me.

Best wishes
Josiah