Partly inspired by the way that Tom Armitage made Tower Bridge come alive, I’ve been playing around with various ways of exploiting Twitter. Some things work better in 140 characters than others, but it’s fun experimenting. These are a few of the things I’ve been messing about with:
| Shippingcast | As a kid brought up on Radio 4, the Shipping Forecast has a special place in my heart – it’s almost poetry. @shippingcast was an attempt to push the daily forecasts out onto Twitter – it’s been partially successful, but suffers from having a lot of detailed information compressed into 140 characters. You can read more about how it was done here. |
| @riverthames | I walk along the River Thames on my way to work, so it was a natural candidate to experiment with. @riverthames takes the tidal predictions and twitters when high and low tides are expected at London Bridge – there’s more about it here. |
| Stock markets | This is about as sensible as my twitter experiements gets – tweeting various international stock market indexes on an hourly basis throughout the day. Just like @riverthames, I made a conscious decision to use the first person to announce the changes – I’m intrigued by the concept of applying personalities to inanimate objects and how that changes our perceptions of them. |
| jocoukshares | Something I knocked up for Laura Oliver at Journalism.co.uk – again tweeting stock market prices, but this time for a basket of media shares. There’s some future developments to come with this that will allow you to choose the shares you want to “follow”, using an XMPP client to handle direct messages to and from the bot. |
| The Pips | This is firmly in the category of “fun, but useless” – a parody of the BBC’s Greenwich time signal that “pips” every hour, on the hour. |
Arduino hacks
Once upon a time I was a (prototype) electronic engineer, back in the days when programming was hard and Real Engineers built analogue circuits. Fast forward the best part of 20 years, and Arduino has made programming microcontrollers easy and enjoyable. There’s a few projects I’ve been tinkering with over the last few months which play around with taking online activity and making it physical. The first one that’s made it beyond the breadboard stage is an evil plot to stuff an Arduino into the guts of an innocent teddy bear for nefarious purposes.
Photography
I’ve been taking photographs for as long as I can remember. Up until about three years ago, I was exclusively digital – then I realised that because the rest of the world (and especially professionals) were going digital, there was a glut of second-hand analogue equipment on the market. Thanks to the wonders of online retail and eBay, I’ve been able to acquire a collection of kit that I could previously only dream of.
My main gear is Hasselblad medium format cameras – they shoot 6×6cm negatives onto roll film, and are some of the most beautifully-designed objects I’ve ever had the pleasure of handling. Even if I wasn’t into photography, I’d want a Hasselblad camera just to *look at* – they are gorgeous pieces of industrial design. They’ve also got some of the finest Zeiss lenses ever made, and take stunningly clear pictures.
I shoot mainly black-and-white, which means I can process the films myself. Once that’s done, they get scanned on a flat-bed scanner and manipulated in Photoshop, then printed (occasionally) with a Fuji Lightjet.
The beauty of film is that it forces you to slow down and LOOK. The cameras are completely manual, so it’s a much more contemplative process than filling up a data card with JPGs. And there’s a tactile quality about the resulting images that makes digital seem very sterile. I find it very difficult to articulate, but there’s an analogue blurriness about an image composed of silver crystals which makes them feel as if they’re only tangentially connected to the real world. Digital’s fantastically convenient and easy, but it’s just a bit too real for my liking.
All my pictures get posted onto my Flickr stream.
