This summer I attended three aRt-related events:
* Semin-R (http://rug.mnhn.fr/semin-r/)
* Microbites (http://microbites.me/)
* r-art meeting, co-located with UseR! (http://user2017.brussels/)
As usual, participants at all three of the symposia suggested many
things for me to look at. Unlike usual, difficulties with airports left
me rather tired and with disorganized baggage. I will try to find all my
notes and write them up some day. Until then, here are some highlights.
Semin-R
=======
I discussed data music with Jérôme Sueur, developer of seewave
(http://rug.mnhn.fr/seewave/). He confirmed that he is aware of people
using the package only for study of sounds, not composition of sounds.
How unfortunate. Perhaps one of us could change this.
One attendee expressed interest in integrating data music into his
securities analysis software, but I doubt that's going to happen.
Microbites
==========
I met several of the leaders in the field of data gastronomification:
Audrey Samson & Francisco Gallardo (http://fraud.la/), and Markéta
Dolejšová (http://materie.me/). Markéta and I discussed the possibility
of collaborating on a typology of data gastronomification
implementations. (I had the idea because I have been meaning to compose
a similar typology of data music implementations.)
I had extended discussions with Richie Cyngler (http://glitchpop.net/),
but my misunderstanding of the schedule unfortunately led me to miss his
performance of data music.
Microbites was the art track of a very ordinary human-computer
interaction design conference. Apparently conferences with art tracks
are trendy in some fields these days. They involve token artists
showing their creative work to make the conference seem very innovative
and creative, even though the conference really is a resume-building
vacation for acadamics. This is exactly what I had expected, of course,
and the Association for Computing Machinery funded my attendance, so
I had a very good time.
This conference was ordinary in both the sense that it was typical and
the sense that the research was of mediocre quality. Regardless,
I managed to have productive discussions even outside of the art track.
Most notable to r-art is a discussion with (I think) Nimesha Ranasinghe
(http://nimesha.info/) on best practices for the development of taste
and smell interfaces for computing.
I was the only useR in attendance, even among the academic track, but
aRtists may take interest in Emotion Hero (https://emotionhero.com/),
by Ruben van de Ven (https://rubenvandeven.com/), a demonstration of
the stupidity of data science methods as applied in industry.
UseR!
=====
During UseR! 2017, r-art held its second meeting.
https://thomaslevine.com/!/places/atomium/
I had some interesting aRt discussions outside of the r-art meeting.
Antony Unwin conveyed his opinions on the futility of visual inference
and similar methods: The random generation of null plots imposes a
quantitative model that inhibits the use of visuals for exploring
relationships that one had not thought to model. (I have paraphrased.)
He also presented a paradigm for plotting outliers. (And I unfortunately
missed it). Here are its slides.
https://schd.ws/hosted_files/user2017/02/UnwinO3user2017Slides.pdf
There was one presentation on a visual inference application to
low-dimension data.
https://schd.ws/hosted_files/user2017/f2/useR2017%20Kossmeier.pptx
I discussed tuneR (https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/tuneR/) with
Uwe Ligges, the developer of the package, and some other people who
happened to be sitting around the table. He explained that the gfortran
dependency is necessary only for certain exotic wave file
specifications, and he or someone else at the table acknowledged that
64-bit little endian floating point pulse-code modulation (my preferred
R sound output format) is indeed the simplest to implement.
For future reference, in case a staRving aRtist wants discounted
admission to a future UseR!, the Cyber Wizard Institute is able to issue
student cards for students enrolled in online courses. Enrollment is
free (http://cyber.wizard.institute/), and so is the student card.
You can contact me for more details.
