character sets: a tale of kanji and praseodymium
Last week I spent some time with a friend helping to get her website working more smoothly.
She hadn’t been aware there was any problems: sat in Tokyo, using a machine set with Japanese defaults, all the text on her site looked fine. Both the text in Japanese and the text in English:
Unfortunately, to me (sat in Birmingham with my machine set to rule-Britannia-there-couldn’t-possibly-be-anyone-speaking-any-other-language defaults, the pages looked like this:
A mixture of English and absolute garbage.
We tracked it down to a missing character set declaration and, with the addition of a simple line of code, I can see both types of text correctly now.
Great!
Ami’s website is here: www006.upp.so-net.ne.jp/AMIKO/. Most of the important pages have been fixed now. If you can’t see the Japanese script properly, at least now you know why!
Meanwhile…
I’d been asking around the Department for any posters that people could let me have.
I managed to get my hands on a couple of rejects. A few of the mistakes were fairly obvious, for example where the printer had jammed, however some were much more subtle.
Presumably the printing computer lacked the correct character set information to be able to display greek letters correctly. Thus, what we normally consider to be a fairly infallible discipline instead confessed its ignorance…
posters
Meanwhile, fate seems to be drawing me towards delving into the world of the research poster.
The walls of the department are covered with these things – they’re everywhere. So ubiquitous that they become almost like wallpaper. Even when I was an undergraduate in the department I can’t say as I ever really took much notice of them. That said, I’ve never taken part in a proper poster session. I’ve never actually seen these things in use…
Atoms to Art inaugural conference
Prof. Robert Freer, of the University of Manchester, and Alex McErlain of Manchester Metropolitan University have been awarded a grant from the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) to establish a research network in ceramics and glass over a period of two years. They will endeavor to bring together as many people as possible who are potentially interested in this venture at a conference ‘Atoms to Art’, to be held in September 2005.
From the Atoms to Art website.
As part of this conference, artists and scientists presented their research interests by way of posters displayed outside of the main room. There were pseudo poster sessions, but nothing structured: so although we had designated times to look at the displays, the relevant people were not formally on hand to discuss their work.
At some point a comment was made about how different the artists’ and scientists’ approaches to poster design were.
Suggestion
In between presentations at the ISP launch event, my engineering collaborator mentioned about how he’d be interested in investigating the whole communication difficulty thing. Posters came up again as part of this converstation.
Proposal
As a follow-up to the follow-up of the Atoms to Art conference mentioned above, we are planning to host an event at the Universirty of Birmingham. Various emails have gone back and forth as we home in on a format for the day, but for some reason this line from one of them
This and perhaps posters at lunch time to cover topics from the attendees (contributed papers)?
provoked quite a strong negative response from me.
I’m still not entirely sure why. Again, please note that I’ve never been to a proper poster session…
Anyway, there’s this whole format style convention thing going on with the posters I’ve seen in the department so I reckon there’s some mileage in delving deeper…
mugs and vases
As part of The Residency I’ve spent some time being introduced to different aspects of the research group’s work and some of the other stuff happening in the building. There’s a plethora of high-tech gadgetry stuff here.
It all looks quite alluring, but I’m cautious of using the gadgetry for gadgetry’s sake. There needs to be a solid reason for using it.
…on the other hand it would be a shame not to use it whilst I have the opportunity…
The rapid prototyping machines (and processes) look like they may have some potential for going somewhere. The ideas I’ve had so far will take a lot of experimenting as far as trying out new combinations of materials. Just what the ISP is about, but not so hot for getting stuff done before graduation.
Never mind, I should really just get stuck in and see what happens.
In thinking about how I might do something that addresses the idea of manufacturing an object from computer-generated instructions; something that gets produced in this sort of hermetically sealed chamber; something that is magiced into being by lasers; something that is produced to near-perfect final shape, I decided to take a low-tech approach to seeking out an idea.
Last week I ‘borrowed’ students from one of the foundation classes at uni and gave them all the same prompt:
Hi, I’m just trying to generate some really loose, sketchy-type drawings. I’ve got two examples here: one of an object made from metal and one of an object made from plastic. What I’d like you to do is to draw something made from ceramic/clay. Don’t be too precious about it, just a 5-second job or somehing.
At this point most people’s minds went blank.
I tried to give them a free choice in what they drew, although I may have influenced them in giving two vessels with the metal and plastic examples.
I was looking for imperfection: thus asking them to draw quickly and then, after that, asking them to draw the same object again, but using their other hand.
Here are the results:
I’m wondering if I can use the precise rapid prototyping technology to generate imprecise objects.
meanwhile…
It was interesting watching the students complete the with-the-left-hand part of the request. (Out of 17 volunteers only one was left-handed). Initial reaction were usually along the lines of “I can’t do that” and “It will be rubbish!”. I tried to emphasise that it was more an excercise in mark-making rather than in producing an accurate drawing.
A lot of people didn’t actually draw using their hand. Or their wrist. Or their arm. A lot of people drew by moving their torsos. So wooden! It looked really uncomfortable.
now available with logos on
So, here we are on VIVID’s Interdisciplinary Support Scheme. A chance to formalise a relationship that was starting to develop with people within the IRC at Birmingham Uni.
In many ways it is the dream set up: I get a bursary towards the R&D of a project, with a not too specific deadline for when that all has to happen by. The exact nature of the project hasn’t been specified either so I essentially have a free rein. How often do you get an opportunity like that?
All beautifully timed to coincide with an identity crisis of monstrous proportions…
The last 9 months or so have mostly been occupied with me asking some fairly fundamental questions of myself and of my work. Actually, most of that time has probably been spent figuring out that I needed to ask some questions and then identifying which questions needed to be asked.
Whilst the “am I art or am I science” issue seems to have been resolved some time ago (I decided it’s a stupid question – not something to waste my time on) this was replaced by the “am I craft or am I fine art” chestnut. Whilst this may ultimately also turn out to be a futile question, the upshot is that I’ve been looking very critically at the work I’ve done over the last few years and have been trying to identify what my strongest projects have been.
I touched on this in an earlier post and I think I now have a general strategy for tackling future work. Which is good, because I really need to be making some work now!
It’s all been a bit fraught: whilst the ISP residency itself is fairly open, I am also coming to the end of a BA degree and that definitely does have deadlines!
So, here we are on VIVID’s Interdisciplinary Support Scheme. At first I really struggled to justify my place on the scheme, but now I have gone a long way towards laying some solid foundations.
The idea of using this website as a sort of online sketchbook seems to be working really well for me. Better than I had expected. Exposing one’s workings to the world in general seems to be fairly narcissistic, but it is forcing me to sit down and marshal some disparate trains of thought. It will be interesting for me to look back later and see how different threads have come together.
But for now, time to do some work.
And stick some logos on the bottom.
