Peter BG Shoemaker

This isn’t quite dreamlike (at least certainly not my dreams), but it is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.

Drift from mustardcuffins on Vimeo.

Since my old-school food blog – Delicious Libertine (see link to right) – is out-of-commission for a while (and maybe forever), my friend M, over in Austin, took pity on me and offered some electrons if I wanted to capture some of my thoughts on a recent trip to North Africa. Check out Place Djemaa el Fna – the Night Market of Marrakech for some unabashed enthusiasm for open-air eateries.

I’ve been laboring away on the conceptual framework for a project that would gather and process computer use vectors like keyboard and mouse clicks, hard drive accesses, memory calls, and application openings and closings to produce music. I’ve been stymied by the technical side of things, specifically, how to. This morning I ran across the very cool SourceForge project SuperCollider, which looks like it can do anything I want it to in terms of capturing actions and running it through a synthesizer. Shortly after finding SuperCollider I ran across a new collection of pieces created with it, each one composed with only 140 characters of code (a la Twitter). I have hope.

Tags: music

Now that I’m out from under the delightful onus of 50,000 words in a month, I’ve had an opportunity to let my mind wander a bit. And, despite the fact that there is enough work with Pinyon to banish sleep where I to let it, I can’t be all about the future all the time. The past is important for a futurist, and I’ve never regretted all those years and hundreds and hundreds of hours I spent exploring the life and times of those long dead.

This morning, BoingBoing had a couple of interesting visuals that made me once again appreciate the importance of the past in contextualizing the present. The first was a map of malarial infection across the US in 1870. We think of epidemiologic topographies as modern inventions, bringing together the glories of GPS, digital cartography, and transnational health authorities, yet public health has been a central concern of governments for thousands of years. I was struck by how modern – in terms of presentation  - this map appeared.

The other interesting thing was a link to a collection of old photographs of people segregated by gender. These sorts of photographic studies I always find fascinating because of their intrinsic voyeuristic capacity – an opportunity to see into a world long gone – and because we’re wired to find interesting similarities and difference when looking at a group of people. In the first photo, I was struck as I always am, with the mantle of maturity that many newspaper boys (and by extension all the kids that went to work early) accepted and nurtured. In the second, I was intrigued both by the active poses and how our ideas of female beauty change, and don’t.

Tags: future, gender, history, maps, past, photos

I’m currently in the midst (although here on 21 Nov not so much the midst as the quickly diminishing back half) of NaNoWriMo, a fevered exercise in writing a 50,000 novel in thirty days (mostly early or late days, and frankly a couple of nights) in support of young writers. Should you care to donate some of your hard-earned (or recently acquired ill-gotten booty from the Stimulus package), please do. In addition to helping young people exercise their right to look defiant in light of their parent’s assertion that ‘majoring in business is the only smart thing to do’, it’ll make you feel warm and fuzzy. It might also save civilization. But you decide.

I’ve also got a writing project that is coming together attempting to engage directly with the fabric of democracy and the weight of history. It’ll ultimately be a multimedia undertaking, and might (ten years or so out of fashion) be epistolary in character.

Finally, I’ve got a photography undertaking jerking madly at my coat sleeves that would examine our relationship with our handheld devices, solitude, and beauty. More on that later.

Tags: media, NaNoWriMo, writing