Projects

AMBIENT PRIVACY (a term coined by Maciej Cegłowski) is a physical index of my voice search history over the ~4 years I’ve been using the technology. When displayed, it consists of 689 index cards, stationery suitable for annotating these cards, and headphones playing the entire audio archive. It is intended to ask the viewer/listener to consider two perspectives. The first is the view of a life heard only through these 689 audio clips, recorded as queries to a corporation through its devices. These queries are to either an always-on microphone purchased and placed in my home, or to my phone, a similarly-attentive device. It reveals an off-kilter portrait of a person through only snippets of a life. From these, they will form their own incomplete narrative of a person’s life. ...

what I’ve been exploring openRNDR, a creative development framework. So far, I’ve written up some boids and some very simple pred/prey behaviour. so what I really enjoy creative coding and have had a fascination with simulating biological processes and simulating emergent behaviour for a while. This is a continuation of that interest, with the added advantage of allowing me to learn Kotlin, a language whose idioms and design I am interested in exploring as a way to understand new programming paradigms. ...

what Since early 2018 I’ve been learning R, a programming language for statistical analysis and data science. I initially learnt it as a way to dissect and understand my financial history, having painstakingly extracted all of my financial records from my bank. I later used it in experiments to track my spending locations, understanding my Twitter use, and dive into some data science at work. I then took on a number of data science courses on Coursera and have been slowly working my way through them. I wrote an R package for interacting with my newer challenge bank, Monzo, called Monzor. ...

what Over the years I’ve built a number of hardware projects. Most are relatively simple Arduino / Raspberry projects. Most recently, I built a smart lantern running Android things which I’m using to project my creative coding explorations. In the past I built (with a friend) a quadcopter drone (back before commercial/personal drones being available), a sun-seeker trike, and various small sensor experiments. This site is being served off a small Raspberry Pi at home, which also handles some dynamic DNS stuff, runs Steam Link, and hosts a few Twitter bot experiments. ...

what I enjoy hiking and have been doing it since I was a kid. I like to use my holidays to go walking whenever possible. I’ve hiked the Arctic trail in Greeland, the Arctic Circle trail in Norway, the Fish River Canyon in Namibia, the larger hikes in New Zealand, around parts of Ireland, and others. I don’t get to go hiking as often as I would like. ...

what From around 2007 to 2012 I played around with Processing, a creative coding framework in Java. I originally started experimenting with it after reading a paper on how fireflies use localised synchronisation to enhance their ability to attract other fireflies and wanted to see if I could recreate it. To the best of my knowledge, this was the first time this had been done digitally (though it’s very simple coding and has since been done numerous times.) After I’d iterated on that a few times, playing with OpenGL concepts and hardware interaction, I played around with visualising how genetic algorithms solve problems as a way to help understand how they work (which ended up on Wired’s security blog and a few other places), augmented reality (back in 2009 when it was still in its earliest phases), and trying to prototype weird Twitter interfaces which more accurately reflected the network nature of it. ...