Read the latest posts from Brendan Dawes
I've been a long time user and fan of version control systems, from the early days of SVN to being a daily user of Git for all my code based work, my website and also even my TouchDesigner projects. TouchDesigner is of course a binary format, not a format Git can parse and make sense of, so you can't see code changes over time. Yet much of my work like many others using TouchDesigner makes use of…
When I'm creating systems in TouchDesigner I'll often make use of the Custom Parameters feature in a Comp , allowing me to create a settings style interface for that Comp. What I also will want to do is save out those settings and have them load in automatically. There's a few ways to this including TDJSON.addParametersFromJSONOp but sometimes you just want a simple system so here's the code I use…
I never know what I'm going to find when I dig into the crates at a record store. Sometimes it's not even about the music but a cover jumps out at me. And so it was when looking through the crate marked "£2" I chanced on this classic cover by Josef Albers created in 1959. Worth two-quid for sure. To quote this article from Cabinet Magazine : From 1959 to 1961, the artist Josef Albers designed…
“Can you come to the care home?” “What’s wrong?” “We’d rather not say on the phone” With these words on Tuesday afternoon I knew my Mum had died. The day before we had been out together, laughing so hard people were looking at us as we ate our scones and cream which my Mum, as usual, said were “gorgeous.” After my Dad died in 2007 my Mum had lived with my Sister, doing an amazing job looking after…
It is not the ideas we do not have that block our thinking but the ideas we already have. — Edward de Bono This week — after finishing Catch-22 by Joseph Heller — I started reading Edward do Bono's How to Have a Beautiful Mind . I was first introduced to de Bono by my friend Adam Todd many years ago via The Six Thinking Hats which we used in many meetings to great effect back when I was Creative…
There's a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it? — Mr. McQuire, The Graduate. In order to further explore the 3D printing of the Descendants series , I added a new 3D printer to the studio in the form of an Elegoo Saturn Ultra 16K. Having owned a PLA printer since 2010 with the original Makerbot and then the Replicator 2 , an SLA based printer was a new excursion for…
If This Isn't Nice, What Is? — Kurt Vonnegut Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut is my first experience of reading the famed author of Slaughterhouse Five and this almost biographical work was an absolute blast. It kind of centers around the premise that the universe has glitched and everyone has to repeat the last ten years, exactly as it was before, without any free will. It's completely bonkers, full of…
It's good to revisit things to find hidden treasures — Laurie Anderson This sentence from Laurie Anderson, said whilst taking part in In Between Days really stuck with me. I've often said look again at the scraps on the cutting room floor which has the same sentiment — how we can sometimes be too quick to disregard things because we think they are mistakes or errors. And so this week I found…
Charles taught me that the beauty of being hands-on is that you get to make all the choices and move at your own pace — Llisa Demetrios talking about Charles Eames This weekend saw the inaugural edition of In Between Days , a two-day online symposium about creativity, technology and change presented by Anamorph and Chance Operations and sponsored by Field Notes . It was only a few weeks ago that…
One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that's a chair, that's a table, and yet at the same time, It's a miracle, it's an ecstasy. — Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse I've always been struck by the incredible way Woolf talks about the seemingly ordinary everyday, almost at a subatomic Quantum level. Reading To the…