serial consign

The above diagram was generated by my friendfeed account which tracks and aggregates a good chunk of my online activities. If you haven't heard friendfeed is the lifestreaming platform du jour and it is probably a service that is worth keeping an eye on as it seems to have picked up where jaiku left off. The point of this post is not to split hairs regarding the microblogging turf war, rather to gesture towards the very slender section of the above pie chart that is dedicated to "other." That is Serial Consign, which the above image proves I have thoroughly neglected while I've been busy building permalinks elsewhere through my twitter, del.icio.us and tumblr activity.

Unfortunately I can't qualify the rest of my non-digital life through friendfeed yet, so that pie chart is not entirely accurate as to where I've been spending the majority of my time. Truth be told, I've been prolonging the death rattle of a semi-involved writing project over the last few weeks. That crunch has now passed and I'm very excited to announce Information Visualization and Pervasive Interface Culture, a book chapter that will be published in a forthcoming digital humanities text. I'm quite happy about this project as it gestated right here on this blog. The text provides an alternate backstory to information visualization in light of the GUI and 20th century imaging technology. It also scans the work of several key theorists (Lev Manovich, Alan Liu, etc.) and curates some great information design and imagery from John Maeda, Edward Tufte, Ben Fry, Burak Arikan, Catalogtree and Santiago Ortiz as well as several participants to be confirmed. The text won't be published until early 2009, so after letting it breathe for a while I think I'll return to the material and repurpose some of it as content here on Serial Consign. I'll definitely announce more about the publication in the coming months.

All of the above said, please note the following "coming attractions" now that I can return to a semi-regular posting schedule.

• Interviews aplenty! In various stages of construction are conversations with Tobias c. van Veen, Alex Munt and Anne Helmond. I am also super excited about a pending chat with Marius Watz about his evolving Generator.x project as it is an endeavour I've been watching develop for quite a while now.
• I have two DVD's sitting on my desk by way of Francis Théberge's TIND collective in Montreal. I'm looking forward to digging into this work after Francis' great contribution to the last issue of Vague Terrain.
• I have a diverse range of spring/summer projects under development. I'm very excited to share this work and probably will consolidate it all into a giant "this is what I'm working on" post in the near future.
• Last but not least, my good buddy Tom Kuo has enlisted me as a selector for the warm-up party for this years Flash in the Can festival in Toronto. This event will take place on Saturday, April 19th and I'll post some more information about it shortly. Tom and Markus Heckmann have an ambitious AV project that they will be premiering at this event.

I woke up a bit earlier than usual on Saturday with the intent to run a routine site upgrade. What was supposed to be a relaxing weekend of writing and drawing ended up as a semi-manic crash course in database repair. Somehow a chunk of the archives were garbled during my upgrade and then in restoring things I zapped a bunch of the site functionality. Apologies to anyone that tried to access the site over the weekend, I certainly learned a valuable lesson and will take my time in upgrading to Drupal 6. I am happy to report that I used the site downtime to do some UI housecleaning, so please note the rejigged sidebars and content taxonomy.

I'd like to send a big shout-out to Crispin Bailey and Jordan (the problem solving princess) for putting up with my increasingly incoherent ramblings on Saturday. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming...