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tagged: talk

Taking stock: what made a maker business

Kickstarter pitches are now part of maker culture, but when do you hear back from the other side?

How did an Arduino hack turn into £50k in pre-orders? How do you get an assembly line going if all you have is a laptop? Four production runs and a retail partnership later, what were the final accounts?

Join Toby Harris as he talks product and dissects a successful run of a maker business.

A talk about the *spark d-fuser, which retailed on sparklive.net and has a project page with diary posts here.

project | 2019

mixed reality lab

Title:
The liveness of live events, and how we might design for that

Abstract:
This talk will draw a line through Toby’s practice and research to argue for an interactional account of liveness, and where that might lead as we figure out new relationships between the digital and face-to-face; it’ll have to be a remote talk, after all. Topics will include why I really should have just read my email on stage, instrumenting auditoriums, teaching a humanoid robot stagecraft, visualising performer–audience dynamics, and why the HCI and privacy considerations of data-backed immersive theatre might be the crucible for our near future every day.

I’m interested in the MRL’s take on any or all of these topics, and am open to collaboration. More on my website at http://tobyz.net

Biography:
Toby’s practice spans art, design and engineering, “fascinated by the liveness of live events, and how we can design for that” (http://tobyz.net). He performs worldwide as part of the renown audio-visual collective D-Fuse (http://dfuse.com). He develops and sells hardware, software and design services for events (http://sparklive.net). His practice led to a PhD on liveness and performer–audience–audience interaction. He’s currently focussed on live data.

…and happily, the talk was super-well received. quite the relief, as it’s a storied lab (e.g. long-time blast theory collaborators) with an embarassment of ‘best of CHI’ papers.

diary | 05 feb 2021 | tagged: research · talk · liveness

bristech » taking stock: what made a maker business

how to network in a new town? i schemed going to talks is good, but giving a talk is better. plus it would be a good prompt to develop the definitive version of the ‘taking stock’ talk, the nascent version of which i’d made for the 2014 Mini-MakerFaire we effectively launched South London Makerspace at.

Kickstarter pitches are now part of maker culture, but when do you hear back from the other side?

How did an Arduino hack turn into £50k in pre-orders? How do you get an assembly line going if all you have is a laptop? Four production runs and a retail partnership later, what were the final accounts?

Join Toby Harris as he talks product and dissects a successful run of a maker business.

// About Toby

A product-focussed generalist with a soft spot for python and a CV that includes getting a robot to do stand-up comedy.

Bristech Meetup, 5th September 2019

there is a recording, though as with makerfaire there was a hitch; this time the audio starts a few minutes in and the video a few minutes after that.

enjoyed the talk before me, too –

diary | 05 sep 2019 | tagged: taking stock · dvi-mixer · talk

doc fest » expanded and live

Artists Christopher Thomas Allen, Katharine Vega and Toby Harris have forged new forms of events, collaborated across the arts, and embraced cultures and technologies old and new. Join them for an exploration of audio-visual performance, projection design and a whole lot of provocation about what the ‘live’ in Live Cinema can be.

diary | 09 jun 2018 | tagged: live cinema · talk | downloads: livecinemasummit-expandedlivetalk.png

workshop time

the drawing interactions project is not just the app. and even if it were, what is an app without users. so: a workshop, at ‘new directions in ethnomethodology’.

diary | 30 mar 2018 | tagged: talk · drawing interactions · research

the new projectionists

to birmingham, invited to give my talk about the live in live cinema at the new projectionists. formative place, brum.

diary | 24 feb 2018 | tagged: vj · live in live cinema · live cinema · talk | downloads: uk05-poster.jpg

isps » performer-audience dynamics talk

had a lot of fun with my talk ‘visualising performer–audience dynamics’ at ISPS 2017. with a title like that, some play with the ‘spoken paper’ format had to be had.

pleasingly, people were coming up to me to say how much they enjoyed it for the rest of the conference. huzzah!

i recorded it, and have stitched it together with the slides. the video is here, on the project page.

diary | 01 sep 2017 | tagged: comedy lab · performer–audience dynamics · phd · qmat · research · iceland · talk

splice » live cinema panel

was part of the live cinema panel, with chris allen, sally golding and lisa brook. chris, sally, and i have talked on this before, but new and outside-of-our-scene is lisa’s live cinema org.

here’s a moment from the talk, as i recall it:

lisa – come to the sheffield doc fest, we’re curating live performances and there’s budget

chris – what! they’ve been turning down live work for years. it’s been maddening.

i mention this as it might mark the point where live cinema pieces (a wide definition per lisa, but including what i’d say and like to see) might start to be commissioned and appear in more mainstream contexts.

diary | 27 may 2017 | tagged: vj · live in live cinema · splice festival · talk · live cinema

the live in live cinema at test card

invited up to manchester to give a talk at test card.

Test Card is a community exploring the developments in new software, technologies and techniques in the area of audio visual performance.

given i’d recently revived rbn_esc, seemed only fitting to do ‘about the live in cinema’ followed by a performance of the piece you see in the film.

diary | 27 apr 2016 | tagged: live in live cinema · talk · live cinema

taking stock: from arduino hack to shipping product

it’s common to hear people talk about the beginnings of projects, but rare to witness a post-mortem. doubly so in the world of kickstarter: the pitches are now part of maker culture, but where’s the venue for a summing-up at the end?

i wanted to do that. with what could be called the modest success of the *spark d-fuser, i had something i could be proud about. moreover, and this probably gets to the heart of the issue, without the disincentives of stratospheric success shrouding the business in secrecy or abject failure making me want to crawl into a hole or quietly move on.

and where’s the venue? well, elephant and castle mini-maker faire seemed a good place to get a draft together and punt it out.

it’s still a work-in-progress, to be done when the last mixer is sold and accounts reconciled, but nonetheless it’s great to have the bones together.

diary | 15 oct 2014 | tagged: taking stock · slms · dvi-mixer · talk

igloo creative coding night

james sheridan saw SPK-RectPack, and invited me to see the dome setup he develops the tech for: igloo, the company, could do with something like screenrunner running in the dome, and more generally james is a creative-coding guy keen to meet like-minds. well, i was impressed; it wasn’t long before screenrunner was running on the dome’s mac pro[1], and not long after that james was organising a creative coding night in their mini demo dome.

as part of that he invited the london quartz composer group along, and invited me to show what quartz composer was doing in screenrunner. i was happy to talk about it[2], i really like the mix of cocoa for the app, OpenGL + QCRenderer for the rendering engine and Quartz Composer.app to visually patch each client’s bespoke design and animation together. it’s not often i can show what lies underneath!


  1. happily rendering 9600x1080 and handing this over to james’s openframeworks edge-blending dome warper via syphon. the ease and painless 60fps of this blew my mind. ↩︎

  2. doubly so as tom butterworth would also be there, and in thanks for ^1 i could buy him a real — not over the internet — syphon pint in thanks and respect. https://twitter.com/tobyspark/status/433157752073224192 ↩︎

diary | 10 feb 2014 | tagged: quartz composer · titler · video-out · dome · talk

b-seite » *spark's stall out again

b-seite charge one: provoke vjs into thinking about the future of their practice, via showing the toys and talk about how i made it as a post-vj. this was a tidied up version of the talk i improvised at LPM last year, except that then the mixer was a final prototype, and here I was at a festival with two d-fusers as part of their tech setup. mixer’s i’d sold but had never seen, the boxes opened up by hands other than mine, in a country far away.

diary | 23 mar 2013 | tagged: titler · dvi-mixer · *spark · vj · b-seite · talk

live cinema foundation » av assembly by day

the live cinema foundation finally hits the ground with ‘av assebmly’. an idea much talked about over the years between various london folk, chris found the kind of venue that could incubate work, and made a booking on spec. jump-cut a month later, and i’m presenting ‘about the live in live cinema’ to an on-topic audience as you can get.

diary | 17 mar 2013 | tagged: live in live cinema · live cinema foundation · vj · talk · live cinema

twelve minutes on all my phd

to oxford for the ‘Inaugural RCUK Digital Econmy Theme CDT Student Research Symposium’, ie. gather the guinea-pigs and see what they’re up to. happy to regain the overview of my research though, and working on a presentation is so much more enjoyable a process than writing for me.

given my research is on liveness and lecturing comes into it, there had to be a punchline or some way for the act of presentation to be reflexive of its subject. so the slides ended up looking like tweets, and they sent themselves out hashtagged up as parcels of backchannel fodder. unfortunately i didn’t realise the script i found wasn’t clever enough to parse multiple tweets per slide until afterwards, so all the links and asides that went with each slide didn’t get out, which was kinda the magic i wanted to happen - as if i was talking on two levels with two modalities at once. brushing off my applescript, that is now fixed and available for all.

diary | 03 jul 2012 | tagged: liveness · phd · qmat · research · talk | downloads: tobyharris-livenessresearchpresentation-v01-tweets.pdf · tobyharris-livenessresearchpresentation-v01.pdf

lpm'12 » *spark's stall: mixers, screenrunners, and making it as post-vj

in which i set out my stall, hawking the wares and ideas that have helped make my ‘post-vj’ life. half an hour, somewhat off the cuff, and probably ill-advised in parts. the bulk of the talk covers some of the backroom work and event life of the dvi mixer hardware and screenrunner software projects, but contextualised by how i. vjs should work towards exploiting the liveness possible in their practice, ii. which should lead to a more rewarding, less clichéd life, iii. and one more profitable and sustainable.

diary | 02 jun 2012 | tagged: titler · dvi-mixer · *spark · vj · live performers meeting · talk

heckling at ontologies demo

to newcastle to the all-hands meeting of the digital economy programme, aka where my funding comes from. the summer had seen an internship project use the data i had generated in my bbc internship the year before, and from this me and saul got talking about how that could go further. importantly for me, in the demonstration proposal for it, the first bit of writing i’ve been happy with.

it also meant i could get back to the visualisation i’d made for the bbc project, and tie the display of the story-world information to the playing video. and my, how browsers have come on: processing.js, fonts and the canvas element are now happy bedfellows, and will happily alpha-blend over smooth playback of a movie. check it on github

Media consumption is increasingly networked, with richer experiences requiring ever-richer metadata to provide context and so link-ability. However creating meaningful metadata for rich media such as TV programming is fraught with practical and philosophical issues, starting with just who has the time to make it anyway. Through two Media & Arts Technology DTC internship projects – with the BBC (2010) and BT (2011) – two very different sets of metadata have been created that, representing the same TV programme, provide an interesting opportunity to investigate these issues. In one set we have a semantic, authorial representation modelling the content and narrative, in the other a free-text aggregation of mediated conversation about the programme by viewers. As the programme plays, we can compare viewers’ utterances with the TV production’s own modelling of the content.

Our demonstration will be an installation that plays the TV programme – an episode of Doctor Who – with corresponding animation juxtaposing the two sets of metadata. Our research agenda centres around the practical benefit of a mixing the two approaches in creating metadata and exploring the dissonance between the two representations. In short: how much top down do you need to make the bottom up work (or should that be the other way around?); where do attempts to map one to the other fall back to attempts to find some tractability fall back to conclusions that one or the other representation is invalid (and if so, which one – a librarian’s fantasy exposed or interactions ill-suited to being co-opted).

We would gladly host a ‘Heckle at Who’ session, where delegates will watch the TV programme and use their mobile device to contribute to the conversation around the programme. We could even turn this into semantic bingo: can we produce meaning from their utterance derived from the semantic modelling work. This would be well-suited to an evening, social activity.

diary | 15 nov 2011 | tagged: triplestore · processingjs · html5 · talk · heckling at ontologies · research · qmat

la » live in live cinema at imap

a day in a coffee shop making a major revision to the about the live in live cinema talk, and then back to USC to give it as a IMAP seminar. the host was holly willis – former editor of the amazing res magazine amongst other things – and somebody who not only is published on digital cinema and live cinema, but whose definition of live cinema is often embraced: “real-time mixing of images and sound for an audience, where the sounds and images no longer exist in a fixed and finished form but evolve as they occur, and the artist’s role becomes performative…” Holly Willis (Afterimage July/Aug 2009, Vol 37, No 1, p. 11/). my talk is not about definitions however, its about exploiting the liveness, and what that could mean.

also found the adage that everything can change in two blocks is indeed true, routing from the recommended coffee shop that turned out to be closed to one that was open put me through some streets i’d prefer not to walk down, let alone with a bag packed with my digital life. the no-healthcare-mashed-up-bodies of the homeless seemingly kettled / corralled to then be routed around: it isn’t a phenomenon unique to america, but its the one that alienates me the most.

diary | 25 apr 2011 | tagged: live in live cinema · research · talk · teaching · live cinema

la » d-fuse workshop

as part of the rhythms and visions event, a day of workshops was organised. los angeles visual artists - lava had the morning, and covered the past and present of ‘visual music’ works. mike, matthias and i had the afternoon, which we nailed the four hours precisely with a tour through the d-fuse oeuvre and a journey through our particle production process. the latter was my main contribution, and its a tricky balance to give: lots of really cool stuff – shooting, taking crops, building abstracting effects – but with what can reduce down to a sea of noodles and buttons. pretty happy though, good feedback that the thread was there and it all tied up: people got it.

diary | 23 apr 2011 | tagged: teaching · talk · video-out · vdmx · quartz composer · dfuse · vj

vjing research panel » live in live cinema

and onto me

In the 1970’s cinema was expanded; in the 1990’s it met ‘new media’ as soft cinema. In 2010 the technological landscape is ripe to combine these, siting cinema in a live performance context. As such a body of work is built, called ‘live cinema’ by its practitioners and curators, it is worth taking a step back and asking just what the value of the live in live cinema could be?
To examine this closely, we first need to address what live cinema could be, and what current practice is.
To address what live cinema could be, we will extrapolate from the aforemen- tioned expanded cinema as characterised by Gene Youngblood, and soft cinema as characterised by Lev Manovich. We will consider a ‘cinema of the imagination’ as practised by oral storytellers, and hear of directors such as Peter Greenaway and Mike Figgis who have experimented with live perfor- mance as well as enjoying Hollywood success.
The current practice of live cinema will be presented through an experimental documentary offering a novel approach to representing this overtly ‘broken out of a pre-determined, linear, framed practice’ in pre-determined, linear and framed video.
In summarising the characteristics that could make cinema live, we will con- clude that an analysis purely of production and medium does not provide suf- ficient differentiation from previous forms of cinema to justify any claim of live cinema to offering what could not be offered before. We shall instead turn to studies of other kinds of live performance and focus on the human interaction and ideas of audience. By identifying some unique qualities of storytelling, we shall arrive at a conclusion of what could truly make live cinema an art form with unique, compelling qualities: where core to the experience is that as well as a story is told, the story world is explored as a group experience.

full presentation: http://vimeo.com/17485334

photo by blanca: http://www.flickr.com/photos/whiteemotion/5189942616

diary | 18 nov 2010 | tagged: research · vj · live in live cinema · talk · live cinema

vbfest » dvi mixer presentation

having spent most of my time since arriving in berlin behind a laptop screen, it was time to unveil effort #1: a dvi mixer project presentation, keynote document with i’s dotted and t’s crossed. more importantly, for the swedes won’t buy a pig in a sack, the presentation was followed by a demo of - and hands on with - the new *spark d-fuser prototype.

thanks to prack for the photo, although i do look like a muppet…

diary | 11 jun 2010 | tagged: *spark · vj · visual berlin · dvi-mixer · talk