Brexit is like… Bad Art?
We’re exceptionally busy at Cogapp at present; but some things are too important to let slip just because we’re time-poor, and two of these are cake and m̶u̶c̶k̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶a̶b̶o̶u̶t̶ research. So every Thursday afternoon we stop for cake and chat; and every few months, most of us take a Friday to work on things which aren’t directly relevant to immediate projects, but which interest or amuse us.
We had another hackday last month — unfortunately, even those of my colleagues who managed to put down their regular keyboards to take part, are now too engrossed to describe what they did; so here’s a brief round-up of the more successful results.
Some hackdays are quite serious and useful affairs; others more frivolous. In this case the frivolous was in the ascendant.
What is Brexit?
Tristan and Neil are interested to know more about Brexit — who isn’t? — and huge believers in the wisdom of crowds. So they decided to deepen their understanding of Brexit, by looking for analogies posted on Twitter.
Specifically, they built a system which searches for tweets beginning with the phrase “Brexit is like…” and then catalogues the results. By skilfully blending some Python scripts, AWS API gateway, and Vue.js they have created a web site that allows interested citizens to find out just what our future holds. Arusha added some appropriately brutalist design, Gavin contributed an appropriate painting as a backdrop, and voilà, an interface was born.
The results speak for themselves — so check it out at https://cogapp.github.io/brexit/. It’s not perfect, but then… oh never mind.
What is Art?
On a less tragic note: at Cogapp we spend a lot of time helping museums share their collections of fine and beautiful art with the world. Apparently however Vicki feels this is too narrow a remit — so she set out to build a Museum of Bad Art.
This gave Vicki a chance to flex her Unity skills (and her architectural flair), creating a navigable 3D building hung with more diverse examples of artistic enterprise; and Vicki was also kind enough to invite her colleagues to assist as curators.
At present, Vicki’s museum is available to visit by appointment only; if you’d like to know more, or have some suggestions for new acquisitions, please get in touch.
What was that?
If you’ve followed our blog or our work you may be aware that for some time we’ve been pursuing ideas of helping people take more time to appreciate art. In particular, this has resulted in our various experiments with “slow looking”. In the same contrarian spirit as Vicki, Kevin and Pete decided to go the other way — with a new ‘fast looking’ viewer which can be applied to any images available via IIIF.
We confidently expect that IIIF-using organisations will be queuing up to offer this interface to their images.
What went wrong?
It wasn’t all frivolous: Andy and I spent the day fighting on several fronts simultaneously — hardware, software, networks, external services — on a top secret mission to produce something that would have been genuinely useful… if we’d managed to get it working. Alas, we failed very hard indeed. But one day we’re going to have another go, and I’m optimistic that we’re going to succeed. Unlike… oh, never mind.
What would you like to know?
If you’re interested in why we do this, how we organise it, and the things we’ve learnt about how to do it better, we’re taking part in a panel discussion about hackdays at the Museum Computer Network conference next month in Denver. If you’re in Denver in November, please come and join the conversation!
