Corinium Book Publishing

For anyone who is interested I have just put together a site to help promote my Dad's first book 'West Briton Story:'

www.coriniumbookpublishing.co.uk

You can read extracts etc and I'll probably add more content / functions to it as things develop.

Otherwise things are very pleasant in Msc land, an old friend of mine Carrie Duce is doing her final year of fine art here so we've been hanging out a fair bit and exploring the city. Also I've been thinking about my final project (already) and the techniques I will need to achieve it. I used to be interested in games, now I'm interested in simulation (web based) so I'm currently thinking about and reading around the notion of digital utopia / digital democracy / smart mobs and crowd sourcing. In effect (rather idealistically) I'm thinking about creating a simulated city (not like Vice City or anything, it'd be stylised perhaps in some way influenced by Tufte's 'Envisioning Information') which would grow and develop according to certain information which might be drawn from twitter feeds or anything I can harvest based on policy and opinion (so it would mutate according to the political climate to in some way represent the ideal vision of a combined morass of strangers through common criticism / opposition etc.) Also the funny thing about notions of Utopia is that one person's Utopia when imposed is another person's hell (Thomas More's Utopia for instance = a Christian Hell.) So it's too some extent about that as well.

This will probably change dramatically particularly as the moment you say digital Utopia you're liable to criticism about techno romanticism and techo determinism but it's that combination of high tech + a worthwhile idea that I am exploring. The tutors say it's hard and will require a lot of maths but they also say 'let's do it.' And what's the point unless I'm challenged.

Oh also I almost forgot, this is what made me want to post in the first place, to raise awareness of this:

www.processing.org

java without the palava (hehe)