Went to my first stock car race at Buxton Raceway. It reminded me of Mad Max, The Warriors and maybe Brassed Off all rolled into one. It was exciting and fascinating to peek into a subculture with it’s own niche references, in-jokes and tight range of styes.
Morris Dancing in Stockport
I went to the Joint Morris Organisation Day of Dance in Stockport the other weekend. Such a joyful, colourful, visually rich event. I couldn’t stop smiling at folk just having fun. A beautiful combination of tradition, community, pride, performance and silliness.
10/10 would look out for more morris dancing again.
Vibe coding software for one
What’s so great about vibe coding? I’ve been trying out tools like v0 and lovable, here’s my thoughts and some experiments I've made.
TL;DR Vibe coding encourages faster making and will facilitate a more creative (and weird!) digital landscape
Lowering barriers to making
These tools help reduce the gap between having an idea and making something. Without the need for extensive documentation to communicate an idea, the pure thought (minimum viable design?) can be inputted. The tool will fill in the blanks, join things up and the making process will help guide what comes next. Instead of being in a theoretical planning mode, it’s satisfying to be working in editing mode on a real thing.
Spirograph drawing app
Getting weird
I agree with something that Kevin Roose said on the hard fork podcast:
“What I think is so fun and interesting about this genre of coding project is you can really just build what I call software for one”
Vibe coding tools are making it easy to create esoteric and quirky digital experiences that can be as niche as your imagination can make them. It might be time for digital products to get weird again.
Personalised music recommender
Building experiences using the real world
These tools don’t sit in isolation on your desktop – they’re ‘alive’ in your browser and have access to all the things you think an AI should be able to see and know about. You can prototype with a wider spectrum of real inputs, APIs and devices. Do you want a website that only works on Fridays; an app that can look at you through your webcam; a tool built around open source weather data? Just ask the AI to plug it into your project and you’re prototyping with real data immediately.
Webcam waving tool
Having fun
As design has matured in recent years and found itself closer to the board room, it’s had to get more serious and naturally lost some of its silliness. Vibe coding encourages making things straight away and iterating; a side effect of that speed is that there’s a flippancy to these tools which can allow space for more fun, jokes and Easter eggs.
Design brief generator with limerick
🙏 Shout out to Mark Hale for pushing me to write things down!
Plinth Stones
I started this project a number of years ago, trying to find a purpose for stones that were unearthing themselves on the allotment. Trying to turn the annoyance of snagging my spade into something delightful. I started collecting them – of course.
Then started putting holes in them to see if I could stack them. Then made these small plinths for them to sit on. I was thinking of combining Barbara Hepworth with a bit of Tom Sachs. But considering they were languishing in a box for years I’m most pleased just to have scratched that itch and finished something (and felt the urge to blog about them).
Folk Videos —
Three great videos that seem to hang together.
Alice Anderson at the Wellcome Collection —
Things wrapped in copper thread. It’s a deceptively simple artistic process but the result is stunning. Helped along by the fantastic lighting design the ideas of concealment, repetition, abstraction, scale, and familiarity changed as you walked through the space and the pieces caught the light differently – interactivity at it’s simplest and effective. The images here show the range of scales the work takes, ‘Geometries 64 Shapes’, a collection of small objects on a wall, and ‘Ropes’, a 250m long installation that you could get inside and walk around.
I really liked how the thread brought the objects back to a collection of simple shapes, with what looked like dull planes and then as you moved they shimmered with texture. The original objects were physically there but, like a palimpsest, were ghosted and built on top of when given their copper lustre. My favourite piece wasn’t on a postcard: ‘Jars’ from Anderson’s site is below. Wellcome Collection link here.
Feral: Shifting Baseline Syndrome & Trophic Cascades —
After writing this post I found a Ted video of Monbiot explaining what I wanted to in a much better way. So you could watch that instead.
I’ve just finished reading Feral by George Monbiot. It’s an articulate, intoxicating and inspirational read even if points are, at times, a little simplistically or evangelically argued. He advocates for rewilding as a method of more holistic conservation than simply maintaining what already exists. He argues passionately for how this could create a more imaginative, thrilling, economically and ecologically advantageous environment.
There were two particular ideas which I’d not come across before that seemed so logical and exciting that I wanted to write them here to remember:
The first is Shifting Baseline Syndrome. This is what happens when conservationists (or policy makers or whoever), seek to effect a change to put something back to the way it was, believing that this ‘before state’, is not just an acceptable scenario, but that it’s the best it could be. Monbiot uses fishing as an example of how people’s reference points move. Current fish stocks are being measured against their 1970s population, this however, is already a substantially reduced position and doesn’t provide a good reference point for the best case scenario, (which for fish populations was sometime before modern commercial fishing technology got involved).
The second is the idea of Trophic Cascade. When deer graze they eat and kill lots of saplings and would-be trees that don’t get a chance to grow. You end up with treeless grasslands, or similar monocultures that don’t provide the kinds of habitats that encourage a diverse flora and fauna. This is not good as trees are brilliant for everything it seems – from creating better soil conditions, to providing dead wood habitats for thousands of creatures, and helping to prevent flooding by helping with soil erosion and rain run-off. This situation has arisen over decades of human influence that’s squeezed out top of the food chain predators. What happens when you reintroduce these predators (think wolves, lynx etc.) is that the browsing animals begin to get eaten and so are reduced in number, limiting their effect. But the more interesting thing is that it alters their behaviour and how they eat. Rather than being allowed free reign the deer are more cautious, and so don’t hang around the river where they are in the open and are easy prey. This allows plants that would have previously been eaten to grow up around the river, leaves fall into it, which increases the ecology of the river and also provides shade. All these factors encourage shrimpy creatures and subsequently the eels etc. that prey on them. So everything is connected and can be altered by relatively smallish tweeks at the top of the ecological cascade.
This reintroduction of predators is currently being played out in Wales where they’re looking for people to let Lynx on their land.
And if that’s not far enough the Long Now project: Revive and Restore is looking to take extinct species (so completely gone, dead and not here anymore), and using Jurassic Park style technology genetically modify and selectively breed back a range of animals. Their key specimen being a Woolly Mammoth! Brilliant talk by Stewart Brand about this here.
Bombs —
These three links caught my attention as a group and I thought I’d share them here.
Bomb Sight uses archival data and modern mapping software to display where all the recorded bombs fell on London during WW2. The delivery mechanism means people immediately search for the places and areas that they live, work and inhabit everyday. Being able to relate archival data to your life now is such a powerful way to connect with history and to understand the blitz’s impact.
Starfish sites where created away real bombing targets in the UK to try and draw attention and bombs from German raids.
Wartime factories on the west coast of America created elaborate set designs on top of their factories to disguise them as fields and suburban streets.