My Second Tutorial –

Today was my second tutorial with Jonathan.  It was great to catch up because I have been working really hard behind the scenes and feedback is always welcome.  I had been working on some new ideas and it was great to hear that I am hopefully on the right lines.  Jonathan suggested that maybe I had set myself a few too many aims for my study statement, but on reflection, because of the way I work, he felt that actually I may be able to manage after all.

We talked about what I was finding hard at the moment.  I explained that probably the thing I found the hardest was trying to understand the logic of Touch Designer.  This is my generative art software of choice.  It is very powerful software that is best suited to programmers who can program in C and Python.  Sadly, although I am progressing with the Processing programming language I am still struggling with Touch Designer.  I will however persevere and there is a wonderful supportive community around this particular software package ready and willing to answer questions if I get stuck.

Jonathan then asked me what I had found the most energising or rewarding thing I had done so far.  Without a doubt this has to be when I manage to get my software programs to work.  I feel like I have actually achieved another step along a long journey towards actually understanding the flow of a program.  We also talked about my plans for doing some knitting.   It’s funny because we had been discussing the importance of hobbies in our zoom session earlier.  Strangely enough I have just started to knit again.

I explained that I would very much like to move my work into a more physical realm and my hope for the coming weeks is to try to produce something physical.  I may use some of my digital experiments as a base but hopefully I can produce some more physical experiments. I also spoke about my frustration with not having a working search box on my website.  I am going to try one of Jonathan’s suggestions regarding this and I’ve already started to grill chatGPT about it. I’m hoping that by our next session I will have my search box fully functional.  One thing that really ‘blew my mind’ was finding out from Jonathan that Central Saint Martins have a Stanley Kubrick collection of items, including some from Arthur C Clarke’s ‘2001 a Space Odyssey’.  All I can say is wow! I’d so love to see it!