AliaK's blog

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"Guerrilla knitting" has a couple of meanings in the knitting community - to some, it merely means knitting in public, while to others, it means creating public art by knitted means.

Rose White from yarnivore spoke at The History of Guerilla Knitting session at the 24th Chaos Communication Congress in 2007 in Berlin on day 3 - 29/12/2007. a torrent video can be downloaded of the session. (open the video in VLC if you don't have another video player that can play the .mkv video file). The Chaos Communication Congress is organised by the Chaos Computer Club, Europe's largest hacker group, founded in 1981.

Rose gave a brief history of knitting, and some of the myths held over the years about the foundations and age of knitting. She compares knitting with computer hacking referring to proprietary knowledge, pattern making, knitting guilds. Also about the commercialisation and control of patterns prior to 1960s and subsequently by Knitting pattern books and yarn companies who controlled the market

Elizabeth Zimmermann who in the 1960s generated generic pattern books which broke out of the usual mold of patterns requiring a yarn makers yarn to make the pattern correctly. Effectively she made knitting open source again! She had a TV show in the USA which brought her style of knitting to the public, and she ran knitting camps to teach others.

Rose also mentioned KnitML, the knitting XML code specification which is being introduced to standardise knitting patterns and terminology.

"The KnitML Project's main goal is to develop and promote adoption of a standard content model for knitting patterns. By developing a community-supported specification (KnitML) and providing basic rendering and transformation tools, the KnitML Project aims to make KnitML easy to use and valuable to the knitter."

Questions were raised also about knitting (patterns) and Creative Commons licencing. many patterns are not available to be used as they are still covered by US copyright so are still unavailable to the public.

Rose talks about giving back the creative power to the knitter - to allow them to modify the patterns, or not make the project exactly as per the pattern. even changing the colours used in an accompanying photo of a finished pattern is a stretch for some knitters!

Rose says, "over the past 30 years or so, there have been different individuals who have contributed to this geekier, more hands on approach to knitting - wresting it out of the control of commercial enterprises. this leads us to guerilla knitting in the end."

Barbara Walker - Rose referred to her as "a knitting engineer". "she wrote 4 books of stitch patterns, where she knitted swatches, and dissected them and included written instructions on how to knit them - stitch by stitch. and she also developed a charting system, so that next to the swatch there would be a grid showing you how to do it in pictures, so that, you didn't even have to speak her language to do it. so that many of these knitting patterns were available, not just to English speakers, but to anyone who could pick them up and look at them. so this enormous dissemination of knowledge occurred when she started doing that."

Debbie New - who creates "labyrinth knitting" and wrote a book called Unexpected Knitting, which includes experimental knitting patterns including her swirl, sculptural, free-form, swatchless, labyrinth, cellular automaton, virtual and ouroborus knitting techniques.

also featured was Dave Cole and his knitted lead teddy bears and giant outdoor knitting using cranes and telephone poles as knitting needles to knit the American Flag at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

the Simply Crafted website also lists some of these knitting pioneers as well as some freeform fibre (knitting & crocheting) artists such as Prudence Mapstone

also mentioned was the new Ravelry site - a social networking site for crafters, knitters and fibre artists, where they can "Organize projects, stash, needles, and more" & "Show off your work. Share your ideas and techniques." & "discover. Find new designs & yarns. Make friends. Try new things." the site is only open in beta stages at the moment. aso of today, they send out 500 - 800 invitations daily and there are currently 6,193 people waiting for their invites, so the site is in demand!

this weekend I went up to london to visit Tolli. we saw Tim's band Personal Space Invaders at the Hope and Anchor in Islington. I took a few photos and videos - am still uploading them. the bands were :

Mr Workaday
Not So Pretty - http://www.myspace.com/notsopretty22
Joseph Macwam
Personal Space Invaders - http://www.myspace.com/personalspaceinvaders

I'm trying out making music using live coding techniques, with 2 pre-requisites - that it's easy and fast to do & learn - probably not the right pre-requisites (might upset real musicians :), but it's where I'm at for the moment.

so, I'm trying chucK. this is the first chucK tutorial. I used the miniAudicle IDE instead of command line interface. it was very easy to load the songs into the IDE (miniAudicle) and play them. I had separate files for each module and adjusted some of the parameters to change the sounds, then clicked the 'replace shred' to 'take' the change and add this file's sounds to the output audio.

this it meets my criteria - easy and fast to use. now I just have to make it sound musical instead of a collection of random sounds & tones :) (the hard part)

chucK documentation
chucK community / mail lists
chucK miniAudicle documentation
chucK wiki
chucK projects - some people are hooking up chucK apps and Processing for java based visuals, plus there's many examples of laptop instruments, as well as a Max patch and more

listen to the audio :
chucK_tutorial01.mp3
loscha_com_tambura01.mp3 - from the loscha.comchucK tutorials ( Loscha is in the Australian band Toydeath - a circuit bending performance experience ) - this piece reminds me of the original samples of the bridges in the Jodie Rose Singing Bridges project and cd.

Vlog Europe is on this weekend, but they've just posted a link to the site where they'll be streaming some of it live - video of course! and a chat channel. the schedule looks good. they're going to talk about software, personal media, videoblogging and it's effects on big media, videoblogging and making content not money

online video editing sites

Andrew Garton's posted a question asking for recommendations for online video editing systems. I did a quick google search & asked on the videoblogging list. making a list below (& replied to his post) for reference :

(read more)

the empyre list is discussing Second Life this month, and different Australian and international digital media artists are showing their work. Blakkbyrd sent through some SL articles and links

there was a discussion about why would somebody pay you to videoblog if you're not getting huge amounts of traffic (amongst other questions / points). the thread started talking about online advertising. I didn't read all the replies, but here's what I'm thinking..

read the original thread

my reply # 1 and # 2 (below)

I think one day people will be shooting / making video / media as stringers and sell that to people who need video / media, likely businesses who can afford to pay. another layer to news program's stringers/freelancers but on any topic, not just news. ala Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. so people will be taking videos for themselves and to upload and be paid if someone uses/downloads it. when archive.org started I was reminded of this also - "The Library" - a collection of clips from creative minds & people uploading as they will. so the utubes and googles et al will become clip libraries. most will be noise, but some will be useful for others. it happens in a small way now, how many of you have had people see a clip or video and ask if they can use it? similar with photos. eg I've had people see a photo and remember a place or a personal memory and ask if they can use it. after a while of people posting videos / photos / media - patterns will develop and certain topics / styles / genres will be sought after. anything is possible - the niches, the popularist content, the everyday life, the world around us. in the future when the world is different people will want to see how it was. I wonder also if it'll affect our memories & the way our brains connect thoughts & images as the ease of storing photos/videos to trigger memories is different now to even say 30 years ago, but that's probably another thread. I wonder then if it'll lead to obsession ala until the end of the world when Claire became obsessed with watching her recorded dreams on her portable video player. I think the two ideas (book/movie) will merge & expand.

I think this has all been mentioned here before - a while ago.. so a refresher. but, I think it's getting closer. especially with google etc & their searching capabilities and tagging / metadata so common place these days. if I were a big business this is the way I'd be going anyway.

oh, also, which is why I think ads on videos is an old media way of thinking. like ads on tv. (which will phase into product placements soon enough). people will still use them now whilst they make money from them but I don't think they'll be necessary or used in future as they'll be regarded as spam. similar to what was mentioned earlier, people ignore spam on the net now, so in the future when the generations change, they'll lose their power. the information / message will be the currency. & hopefully the creative mind! :)

--

extract from Snow Crash (by Neal Stephenson) about the library..

"The business is a simple one. Hiro gets information. It may be gossip, videotape, audiotape, a fragment of a computer disk, a xerox of a document. It can even be a joke based on the latest highly publicized disaster."

"He uploads it to the CIC database -- the Library, formerly the Library of Congress, but no one calls it that anymore. Most people are not entirely clear on what the word "congress" means."

"And even the word "library" is getting hazy. It used to be a place full of books, mostly old ones. Then they began to include videotapes, records, and magazines. Then all of the information got converted into machine-readable form, which is to say, ones and zeroes. And as the number of media grew, the material became more up to date, and the methods for searching the Library became more and more sophisticated, it approached the point where there was no substantive difference between the Library of Congress and the Central Intelligence Agency. Fortuitously, this happened just as the government was falling apart anyway. So they merged and kicked out a big fat stock offering."

"Millions of other CIC stringers are uploading millions of other fragments at the same time. CIC's clients, mostly large corporations and Sovereigns, rifle through the Library looking for useful information, and if they find a use for something that Hiro put into it, Hiro gets paid."

"A year ago, he uploaded an entire first-draft film script that he stole from an agent's wastebasket in Burbank. Half a dozen studios wanted to see it. He ate and vacationed off of that one for six months."

"Since then, times have been leaner. He has been learning the hard way that 99 percent of the information in the Library never gets used at all."

---

just out of interest, there's also some interesting papers about this book.. google 'neal stephenson video library' and there's even some interesting discussions

http://www.utpjournals.com/simile/issue16/blackmorefulltext.html

http://library20.ning.com/forum/topic/show?id=515108%3ATopic%3A5678

yesterday I bought a dvd on Arabic Percussion - it's a how - to / instructional dvd by Yinon Muallem, "Master of Percussion". I don't think I'd be able to carry a traditional drum around with me on my travels, and I thought they were made from wood & animal skin so wouldn't be allowed back into Australia by Customs anyway. I spoke to the guy from the shop and he had modern versions not made of wood or animal skin which sounded great when he played them but I said I'd think about it.. instead I found a couple of pairs of finger cymbals / zills - like the ones bellydancers use. the larger ones are the more professional versions and sound the best. the smaller ones are the cheaper ones found in most of the stores at the markets. but these fit my hands better so I thought I'd start with them. you wear them on the thumb and middle finger and can do a couple of strokes - hit together then open again for the higher 'ting' and hit together and stay together for the 'clap' sound. the store had a dvd also for bellydancing, hopefully it's got some English. their website lists the classes but it's in Hebrew so I can't read it yet..

http://www.arabesque.co.il/ - the arabic bellydancing & musicians site
http://www.yinon-muallem.com - the arabic percussion dvd site