• Prayer 2.0 fixes and development. I’ve somehow created some bugs in the Prayer 2.0 website that need fixing urgently, also I’m planning to launch some similar websites with different purposes.
• Photobombing development. I’m applying for travel bursary from University, to enable me to do country-wide photobombing hence development of the site has a new urgency.
• Second Life / David Bowie Project. I’m taking on various parts of this collaborative project; setting up/ maintaining a project blog, various writing tasks, floor plans for “Bowie World” and development of graphic themes for some of the pods.
• Feedback. My friend Zimmy is working with visual feedback and we’re looking at collaborating to create a fully interactive audio/visual/feedback experience. I’m researching using Ableton Live, GlovePIE and Wii controllers to enable digital input to control the A/V aspects of this.
• Phase Loops. Using techniques pioneered (as far as I know) my Steve Reich many years ago, I’m creating a sound piece using a single voice loop of Branka’s voice.
• MMU Wiki. Setting up a Wiki software to be used by the Interactive Arts department at MMU, research the various software options.

… and “god” knows what else!

Its been two months since my last plan, which was broadly to research two areas for potential to work with for creative means:

• Spam
• Blogs

On the spam front, I went full circle with spArt. Looking back it was brilliant because of its subversiveness and despite it being a common criticism of the work I really like the fact it was “formless”. However it doesn’t matter how I look at it, spam is illegal, so I can’t do it….. unless I get even more subversive and start using distributed machines to do the emailing for me (rather than my own ISP). I think I will avoid that one. Pandora and all that. On the plus side, this background led me on to Prayer 2.0, which is now up and running.

I came up with two ideas for utilising blog technology:

1. Loves & Hates
2. BlogCrossing

Loves & Hates, I haven’t made this into a tangible piece of work, but the idea works great. I wondered how often people writing blogs wrote that they loved something, and likewise hate something. Using blog alerts, I had emailed to me all the references to the words “I love my” and “I hate my” from all the blogs that Google indexes (many millions). I will use this as the dataset for a piece of work.

BlogCrossing, referencing the website BookCrossing, BlogCrossings are individual USB memory sticks. Each one contains a fully working blog and the bearer is asked to make a contribution and then pass it on to someone else. The only difference is that a BlogCrossing can only be accessed by the person who has the USB memory stick. Blogging is traditionally a one writer to many reader type of relationship, this forces a one reader to many writer relationship.

Looking Forward

• Music! I’ve been recording an album since the summer. I need to get it done for my agreement with Creaked Records.
• Push Prayer 2.0, I need to go on a “recruitment drive” for Prayer 2.0 users. This will involve web promotion and producing fliers and so on. Potentially “installing” Prayer 2.0 on computers at University to encourage students to use it.
• Purchase and release BlogCrossings – I need to purchase and prepare several USB memory sticks for BlogCrossing.
• Photobombing development, dedicate time to improving and developing my Photobombing website so that it can be relaunched next year.

• Using Spam for creative purposes
• Utilising the “blogosphere”

I’m really interested in the spam “problem”. There’s a distinct irony that by far the largest distributed computer networks in the world are controlled by hackers of disrepute for (primarily) spam activities and spam is something that anyone who uses email regularly will be aware of. I’m not certain exactly what I want to say, or how I want to do it; but I’m going to do something with spam.

The blogosphere (as its called) interests me differently. Although blogs – as they’re known now, the word derives from web logs – have been around for at least 10 years now. It is an amazing resource, whatever subject you choose you can rest assured that someone, somewhere will be writing about it on a blog. Again, I’m not certain how I can create some work that is relevant and interesting, but I’m going to do some research into it.

Run! Caiti in Alexandra Park, we went to play on the bikes and look at squirrels.