The School of Interactive and Algorithmic Art (SIAA) is organizing a Digital Summer School in Sheffield this August. They will be having two-day workshops in VVVV (taught by Sebastian Gregor), Javascript in Max (taught by Jeremy Bernstein) and Processing (taught by me).

The workshops will cost £50 each and are intended for people with a working understanding of code and creative practices. The two-day format should be perfect for diving a little deeper into the field or learn a new coding platform. The number of workshop participants will be limited, so interested applicants should submit a short description of their practice and why they would like to attend.

More information on the SIAA site.

The recently discovered awkwardness regarding Flickr's new SafeSearch feature seems to be getting even worse. Now Flickr has disabled SafeSearch options for users based in Singapore, Germany, Hong Kong and Korea. Those affected by the change will find SafeSearch permanently set to maximum, and will not be able to search for “unsafe” images - including screenshots or computer-generated images.

It would seem this move is related to local standards for obscenity and censorship of information, but honestly it still makes no sense. The censorship aspect is far worse than the simple blocking of non-photographic images, striking at the core of the service as a community. Sascha Pohflepp has a capsule review of the situation, for more detail see the new Against Censorship Flickr group.

For now, the best policy for Flickr users whose accounts have been reviewed as safe would be to leave all images marked as photography. Anything else will put your images in the middle of this controversy.

I just bought a new toy for live performance: The Doepfer Drehbank MIDI controller. Sporting 64 rotary knobs, it should satisfy all my needs for live control of obscure parameters. In fact, I doubt I’ll ever come up with that many parameters, but having the option is nice.

Compared to the FaderFox LV-1 which I’ve been using so far, the tradeoff is control vs. portability. The Drehbank is fairly hefty, weighing at least 2 kg and measuring maybe 40 x 12 x 6 cm. If I already had a lot of performance gear that would probably be too much, but since I mostly only use one laptop and a controller it’s not too bad.

Plugging the controller into Processing was painless. The knobs are solid, with good resistance so that you can get a smooth turning motion. There’s even just enough room between the dials to allow a small white space for labelling. My only concern is about the power plug, which sticks out a bit far and would seem prone to coming unplugged if the unit is moved. But seeing as the unit is so heavy I won’t be moving it much anyway.

The Drehbank is going out of production, and Doepfer is selling off its remaining stock at the relatively low price of €299. Their site say that it’s sold out, but when I sent them an email to check they still had some left. There is also the smaller Pocket Control with 16 dials.

By accident I happened to notice a new detail on my Flickr account page last night, a sentence just below the top title: “Your account has been reviewed as safe by Flickr staff.” A link to a Flickr FAQ provides more information (more on FlickrBlog.) It turns out the reviewing is related to the NIPSA system and the system of “Safesearch” and content filtering Flickr has implemented to replace it. The stated intention of this system is to make sure images on Flickr are “suitable for a global, public audience”.

Now, being “reviewed as safe” sounds like good a good thing, so I thought I’d go one step further and mark all my non-photographic images as such. Flickr calls this “moderating your photostream”. One of the side effects seems to be that all my non-photographic images are no longer available in public searches. You can observe it by searching for the title "Randbox". It won’t show any results, meaning that my RandBox images are now NIPSA’ed. They can still be found via my photostream, but not through searching. Any non-photo images that were in Flickr's Explore are no longer there.

For artists and designers using Flickr to document and share their work, this development means that their non-photographic images are now second-class citizens. If Flickr goes any further in censoring non-photographic images, it would make Flickr unattractive for sharing anything beyond holiday snaps. I honestly don’t understand what they are hoping to gain by this strategy, as non-photographic images don’t present any problems unless there is a copyright violation. Nor do I understand why screenshots or CGI images would be unsuitable for a public audience.

If you have a Flickr account, you can see your review status for yourself. Individual users can set their “SafeSearch” setting to include non-photographic images, but by default it is set to exclude them. The setting is so obscure that I doubt any non-experts will ever see it.