Nokia Cocks Twitter Bot

NokiaCocks is an automated Twitter bot that periodically tweets lewd text-based penises, reminiscent of the glory days of the Nokia 3210.

0-0 ////////// Ð

— Nokia Cocks (@nokiacocks) January 1, 2018

Two things influenced this project: to rejuvenate a previous attempt to recreate this era, and my ambition to create an absurdist Twitter bot.

My first attempt at this was back in May 2017, where I had a little fun making the tweets up by myself. I lost interest after a few weeks, assuming that it had run its course. More recently,  after experiencing some hostile bots on Twitter, I planned to create something of a counter-bot which sole purpose was simple, puerile humour. I felt like this would be a perfect opportunity to develop my NokiaCocks into something autonomous.

By randomly choosing different parts of the penis, the bot is able to make up to 5million different variations. At a rate of two cocks per day, the twitter bot will, theoretically, be able to produce enough cocks for 6,978 years worth of tweets before repeating itself. Starting to sound a lot like Silicon Valley here.

ΘΘ ]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]] Փ . . . .

— Nokia Cocks (@nokiacocks) December 27, 2017

∞ // 0

— Nokia Cocks (@nokiacocks) December 25, 2017

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— Nokia Cocks (@nokiacocks) December 24, 2017

I see this Twitter bot and my School Days Over self-playing mining game to be very similar. Both have been born out of a response to the very recent globally detrimental use of computer automation and also as an attempt to capture something fun and perhaps culturally significant.

I look forward to what this bot will produce over the next few years.

SCHOOL DAYS OVER: MINING GAME

via GIPHY

I thought I’d write up a little work in progress report on a new game I’ve been developing.

The concept for this game came about perhaps two or three years ago, where I was getting annoyed with the surplus of mining and crafting games. After the exponential success of Minecraft, it seemed like every new game incorporated some facet of its game mechanic. I grew immediately tiresome and felt like making an anti-Minecraft game that used these same mechanics to draw attention to the social and historical issues of mining. My initial thoughts were to produce a game that featured politically motivated songs about mining, inspired by a moving performance of The Mountain by Steve Earle in St. David’s Hall in Cardiff, Wales. Earle remarked that this was his only song to have been translated into Welsh, poignantly highlighting the relational nature of the working-class struggle.

I parked my first attempts until relatively recently until two things again inspired me:

The desire to make a self-playing game following this keynote, and, the evolution of Bitcoin as a mainstream currency.

When simplified, it is possible to see Bitcoin as something of a self-playing game; hugely powerful computers run programmes that slowly ‘mine’ cryptocurrency. The recent popularity of Bitcoin can be seen to be mostly in part to media coverage, but the typical user has grown from early-adopter pizza purchasers to money laundering, gangsters, and other illegal activities. I wanted to make my game along the same lines as Bitcoin, but instead of mining for something considered morally dubious, I aimed to produce a game that mined for something culturally beneficial. In this case, song lyrics.

What I’ve arrived at (so far) is a 2D self-playing game referencing the 16-bit era. A solitary protagonist slowly mines out a pit, uncovering lyrics of the Ewan MacColl song School Days Over with each block. The miner gradually gets slower, a-la Bitcoin. Some of the design decisions have been taken from The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, a game from my childhood. I've included below a few different colour palettes to give an idea of the progress of my prototypes.

Regarding gameplay, I had the miner as a formerly playable character, but after reading about self-playing games, I felt that removing player interaction would relate my game better to both Bitcoin and online streaming services. It was also my intent for the viewer to feel as merely a helpless spectator.

The lyrics uncovered by the miner are from a song by Ewan MacColl, presented as text along the bottom of the screen. MacColl’s song is about leaving school at a young age to go down into the pit, and I wanted to juxtapose this with a game of childish nostalgia. I had considered using Minecraft and a bot to relay this message but changed to building a self-contained 2D standalone game. Currently, I have the lyrics in English, but I have considered using Welsh translated lyrics for two reasons. I don’t think this song has ever been translated. Secondly, I’d like to see a translation done using something automated like Google Translate, again, reiterating using something of robotic nature for cultural good.

So there are a few little things left to fix for this game but I’m relatively happy with the current prototype in both looks and execution. Watch this space for a proper release soon.

CARDIFF MUSIC CITY

I’m writing this post as my initial reactions to the announcement of Cardiff as the UK’s first ‘Music City’.

I’ve lived in Cardiff for ten years now, and my experience here regarding music has been as a concert attendee, a promoter, and as a musician. I am excited that Cardiff has received this status. In fact, there are a lot of people who are very pleased about this. Cardiff is a great city for music, musicians and gigs. But I have some gripes.

Let me list a few things off the top of my head:

Dempsey’s is now a football-themed grub pub.
The Globe has long resorted to booking endless safe-bet tribute bands.
The Point has been closed down due to noise complaints.
The Coal Exchange is now a hotel.
The Barfly is now a craft beer bar.
The Full Moon is now a prohibition-themed cocktail bar.
The Moon was forcibly closed only to reopened due to outstanding local fundraising support.
The flats & Wetherspoon hotel on Womanby street were eventually vetoed due to the Save Womanby Street campaign.

So with this in mind, what does it mean to be a ‘Music City’? The recognition is given by the London-based company, Sound Diplomacy, who specialise in delivering ‘strategies that increase the value of music ecosystems’. It appears that Sound Diplomacy will now work alongside the local council to create a new music/tourism platform in the capital.

North Sea Gas earlier this year, at the Four Bars

I don’t see this as recognition for an already thriving music city. I see this as the musical lifeline that Cardiff fundamentally needs.

UILLEANN PIPING & UNESCO

There are two things regarding uilleann piping that has happened this week:

UNESCO has recognised Uilleann piping as being representative of the 'Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity'. Excellent news! This result is a testament to the continued hard work and dedication of Na Píobairí Uilleann to the promotion of playing, learning and manufacture of the instrument.

In a particularly insightful message, President Michael D Higgins remarked that the uilleann pipes "connect us in profound ways, weaving together cultural memory and contemporary vision".

Somewhat along those lines, and in much less important news, is that have I gotten a new chanter. I've been looking for a suitable chanter to match my old set of pipes, and the opportunity came for me to acquire this 19th-century instrument which I believed to be the same maker as my own set.

It appears to be related to the Eighteen Moloney, which is in my opinion, one of the best sounding instruments ever (see recordings by David Power and Willie Clancy). Supposedly, the Eighteen Moloney was made by the Moloney brothers of Co. Clare around 1830-40. Both the Eighteen Moloney and my new chanter very much resemble the work Michael Egan of Liverpool and not really like the most famous instrument of the Moloney brothers (The Vandeleur set, pictured below).

Either way, the chanter is an exquisite example of a pre-famine instrument, and I look forward to getting a good reed going (below) for it and marrying it up to my main set of pipes.

Cine Lo-cal

Episode I: The Room



I’ve been sitting on this idea for a little while and was spurred on to see it through to completion by uncovering an article about the tolkieneditor. That is an anonymous editor who has cut the horrendously overlong trilogy of The Hobbit films into one succinct 4-hour experience.

This project is not unlike that, taking what is necessarily a bloated source (The Room) and condensing it down into something more palatable. Where this differs is in that I’ve cut out all extraneous scenes in the film and left only the incidental footage of San Francisco.

The Room has largely been considered the worst film of all time, so much so there is a new comedy about the making of it (The Disaster Artist) coming out soon. When watching this film for the first time, I couldn’t believe quite how much filler material was left in the final cut, and how much of this excess landscape footage worked well.

I felt like this would be a good time to make something slightly humorous and abstract out of the film.


Cine Lo-cal Episode I: The Room from rouse_j on Vimeo.

What has actually happened, and to my surprise, is a somewhat coherent stitching together of typical San Francisco scenery that alludes to both the nature of tourist photography and traditional Hollywood filmmaking. The footage is quite peaceful to watch, and I think it stands alone rather well as in its singularity.

For added absurdity, I’ve repeated this 3-minute sequence until to fill approximately the length of the original feature film of 1 hour 40 minutes. To watch the entire thing would be considered a slog, and to some extent this references the source material too. What we have left of the film appears in exact order with stock city ambience as the audio.

In deciding on a title I came up with Cine Lo-cal, a little play on words for something that is both about location and also a stripped down (or low calorie) substitute. This also allows for some development of the project to include perhaps a few more films in the series. We’ll see how this goes.

ART & CREATIVE PRACTICE

JASON ISBELL & GEORGE SAUNDERS

I read a conversation between Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Jason Isbell and Man Booker Prize winner George Saunders where they discussed each other’s creative practice.

In the piece, they both bring some genuinely fascinating points about their thoughts on ‘art’ and being an ‘artist’. Much of their discussion mirrored my ideas on creativity, in that I’ve always considered art (in whatever form) as running something of a parallel to science. It is important to have scientific research that eventually leads to scientific breakthroughs. I see art as being the same. I’d argue that it’s important to have people making art which will eventually lead to cultural breakthroughs. The quote below outlines Isbell’s thoughts on the subject.

"I feel like art exists because it is needed. And I think a lot of it has to do with how you aim the work that you’re doing, and if you don’t aim it at all, if you’re just throwing chickens out the window, then I think in some ways you’re making art. Because if it’s more important to you to say something, even if that something is convoluted and hard to understand, than it is to attract something, or to sell something, then I think you might be making art."

Link to the article here. Worth reading for some further elaboration and discussion.

DUBLIN TRIP

EXHIBITION RECAP

About a week ago I made a quick trip over to Dublin and visited a few exhibitions. In the intervening days I’ve managed to pick up some abhorrent stomach virus so for my own clarity I think I’ll discuss only two of the exhibits here:

IMMA Collection Freud Project
Irish Museum of Modern Art
http://www.imma.ie/en/page_237084.htm

I find it sometimes takes the sustained experience of multiple pieces to partially comprehend an artist’s work, and I certainly left this exhibition (of 50 pieces) with a newfound appreciation and something of a more profound understanding for Lucian Freud.

The content was quite mixed, with both paintings and etchings represented and various subject matter across the mediums.

Reflection (Self Portrait), 1985, Oil on Canvas

Included in the exhibit were one unfinished painting and an etching plate. As an artist, I feel preconditioned to place value and intrigue on medium and process, and seeing these objects, along with some telling descriptions regarding certain paint colours, is truly fascinating. Much has already been written about Freud’s long and labour intensive live sittings, but seeing behind the scenes is always inspiring to me. The collection spanned three floors of the outer building at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, one of my all time favourite galleries.

Eithne Jordan: Tableau
Hugh Lane Gallery
https://www.hughlane.ie/past/1667-eithne-jordan-tableau

Before this exhibition, I was unaware of the work of Irish artist Eithne Jordan. Her work consisted of mostly small paintings of uninhabited interiors. I’ve had my paintings described as having ‘Irish colours’ quite a few times, and, looking at Jordan’s work I can say the same. The subject matter is often functional rooms. The image included here is one that caught my attention, some part due to the projector displaying a little error message to the bottom right and also due to my fondness for the desktop as a great revelator.

Conference Room II, 2017, 50 X 65cm, Oil On Linen

Although you lose the sense of ‘scale’ of the objects in the painting, something about removing people from the composition has always felt important to me. In an article in the latest Irish Arts journal, Jordan explains:

‘…if I introduced [a figure] then the painting became about the figure, not the space or the structures’

Personally, much of my work has evolved from painting gamescapes typically devoid of figures. This aspect of my own work has always been important. Like I’m capturing a moment before something wild and unknown going to happen as it typically does in such games. Perhaps I’ll write a little more on this in a future post as I have some thoughts evolving on the subject.

Elsewhere in the article, I read that work for another exhibition was explicitly completed for Butler Gallery in Kilkenny. This work focused on random findings while walking around a small town in rural Ireland. This resounded with me as I had dabbled with this in the past, and I am looking to develop a series of paintings about small town life to compliment a larger 3D game piece.

Watertower II, 2017, Oil On Linen, 50 X 65cm