If you listened to the clip, allow me to translate. I’m saying, “Hello, my name is Simon Grout and this is my project”; followed by some whistling. Obviously. There are two lots of reasons why the audio sounds like this; there are technical reasons and then there are critical / contextual reasons (which sound made up).

Technically, I’m quite pleased with myself. A while ago, I worked out that all digital sound is, is a series of numbers between -1 and 1. In the case of CD audio for example, there are 44100 of those numbers every second and each number is represented by 16bits of data (hence 44.1kHz 16bit audio). Numbers are good; numbers can be manipulated and moved, transmitted and received. Numbers can go into arrays (I like any excuse to use an array).

Back to my project. You may have noticed that I sound like I’m talking through a Commodore 64 (whereas I’m actually talking through several Apple Macs). This is is because the audio is being transmitted at 8000Hz in 8bits, with no buffering. It’s meant to be that way. Here’s how it works:

• Sound goes into the microphone
• Audio is digitised at 16bits, 44.1kHz
• The numbers from that audio are placed into an array
• These numbers will look like; 0.3000460 or -0.8770540
• Each number is converted into an 8bit integer (-128 to 128)
• These numbers now occupy exactly one byte of memory each
• The array of bytes is sent across a network
• On the receiving end, the bytes are converted back to audio and played

That sounds quite simple put like that, but I felt clever.

Briefly, in the context of the project the audio is supposed to sound digital. Skype and other VOIP applications try their very best to be telephones; they use buffering and error corrections and all sorts of other clever things to sound as analog as possible — which if you ask me is a missed opportunity to make the most of digital technologies. In fact a lot of software spends it’s time pretending to be an tangible object; word processors emulate paper (and seriously, who’s fooled by that drop shadow on the page?) and media players provide you with a nice row of push buttons. My project tries to find it’s own aesthetic, and if that means you can’t actually understand what I’m saying, well so be it!

My space project, titled Helvetica in Space now has it’s own page (which I really, really should test in a browser other than Safari); with a video and everything. And yes, it’s still got capital Rs in it…

Yeah! I’ve managed to edit a capital R in Helvetica. It’s been harder than I thought it would be;

• Find type 1 version of Helvetica (tricky)
• Decompile file to raw text (oddly easy)
• Change some numbers
• Recompile (also surprisingly tricky)
• Fin.

He’s a quantum physicist; let’s call him Dr. Ess for now. Dr. Ess is going to help me tell the story of Schrödinger’s cat; a story that — much like the cat — exists in a state of flux until observed.

Roland Barthes’ Death of the Author argues that a text, once separated from its author, has many possible layers and meanings for the reader to extract. You could say that until a text is read, its meaning exists in a state of flux; neither one thing or the other.

I’m working on telling the story of Schrödinger’s cat; trapped in a state of quantum flux inside a box. What will happen? Will the cat live or die? Will Dr. Ess be found out by animal rights activists? These things will remain in a state of flux until the reader does their part, reading the story and collapsing the waveform…

/slash {
	114 602 hsbw
	20 callsubr
	77 -13 rmoveto
	307 661 rlineto
	3 6 2 6 0 6 rrcurveto
	19 -17 14 -18 vhcurveto
	-20 0 -10 -14 -14 -29 rrcurveto
	-305 -657 rlineto
	-3 -7 -2 -7 0 -6 rrcurveto
	-19 16 -15 18 vhcurveto
	21 0 10 15 12 27 rrcurveto
	closepath
	endchar
	} ND

This little doodle shows how the technologies fit together; the arrows represent audio signal. This is mostly for my benefit, so as to avoid those nasty feedback noises.

The point of this prototype is to demonstrate how the ‘gaps’ that technology can introduce form a part of our experiences. By exaggerating the gap — in this case by using GarageBand to introduce a delay to the audio signal — I’m looking to play around in this space in between interface and experience.

The octalpus is very similar to the more common decimal octopus, the main difference being that it has 10 tentacles.

To play the little game, hold down your mouse button and the triangle will follow the pointer. Eat the ‘food’ and your creature will grow a tail.

First of all, the good. Somewhere along the line, I decided that rather than drawing or importing them, I would generate all of the graphics in the game through code. That’s every single line, polygon, gradient and perlin noise generated cloud field. Luckily, this isn’t too hard to do in flash. I would have done the same for the sound too, but it’s a bit beyond ActionScript 2. Also, I decided that I’d be nice and object oriented by extending the MovieClip object in separate .as classes for most of my bits and pieces. As a result, my flash file has one frame with two lines of code in it (one which says stop(); and one which creates the world) and weighs in at 24KB. This pleases me. The exported swf comes out at just under 2KB so far. This also pleases me.

Things that do not please me are almost everything else to do with coding in flash. If you make a mistake in other programming languages, generally the whole thing will come grinding to a halt with a more or less helpful error message to point you in the right direction. Not flash though. If you make a mistake in flash it will either; a) do nothing, b) carry on regardless giving you no indication of where the problem is or, if you’re very lucky, c) massively fail and give you something resembling a helpful error message.

It’s also horribly inconsistent. I thought I was being clever by extending MovieClip because it gives my objects a lot of handy properties and methods (like _x or _alpha, for example) without having to write them myself. That’s all well and good, but you don’t create your new objects with new, that would be too easy. If you want them to actually appear on screen (which, of course, you do) you have to use attachMovie(). And if you do that, you can’t pass any parameters to the constructor of that object. So to get around it, you have to write an init() method for the object to take the place of the constructor, and then have the init() return the object. Which does work, but has the unpleasant side-effect of ‘causing massive rage’.

ActionScript is quite strong on the graphical side of things, which is just as well really. Unfortunately, it’s slightly lacking on the programming side of things though. Optional parameters are pretty handy; if you need to use the parameter you pass it a value, otherwise the default value gets used. ActionScript 2 doesn’t have them. Also the whole private / public thing isn’t handled all that well; it feels a little bit like flash is making it up as it goes along.

It’s a love-hate relationship.