This month, we had our first encounter with Meta, which Google defines as

of a creative work) referring to itself or to the conventions of its genre; self-referential.

Here’s what happened…

Zombie Kernel

First up this month we had Davide Della Casa. He’s created a crazy thing called Zombie Kernel which is an ouroboros, super-meta, GUI/live experimenting desktop oddity, inspired by a whole raft of tools like Squeak and Pharo. Despite being JavaScript under the hood, Davide describes it as being strangely similar to PowerPoint.

Watching Davide demonstrate it was like watching someone creating an infinity mirror, or pointing a video camera at a TV showing the camera output; windows that spawned windows that had windows in that were windows into the windows that had spawned the windows. Confused? Get over to GitHub and clone his repository to try it out. It’s mindbending!

Hellicar and Lewis

Joel Gethin Lewis from Hellicar and Lewis showed some of their project portfolio, including their well known Night Lights, from 2009. Their approach is to make their new works for artistic, education and theraputic applications but then to show it to commercial clients who are willing to pay for adaptations of their work.

He takes a hard-nosed approach with their clients, preferring to cut to the chase and discuss the stuff that puts the client off right at the start. They open source all their code and if the client won’t agree to that, there’s no point discussing it further. Be warned though, they don’t tidy up any code prior to release.

Lightning talks

After the two main talks, we had a quick break for a chat and to meet new members before a short session of 3 minute presentations from anyone who had anything interesting to share.

Darren showed us Carbon3d.com a new 3D printing technique, which is gaining some attention.

Martin Robinson talked a bit about Context Free Art, amazing crazy art things with minimal code, including fractals and lights with psychedelic oil wheels.

I showed Daito Manatabe’s new dance/drone piece which has just hit YouTube.

Davide returned to show us livecodelab.net. He used it to describe live coding as a flow of data travelling through a programme, so what if you imagine it as diverting the flow of water through a system?

I didn’t note who but someone told us about Deocracy, a dystopian future movie.

Finally to finish the evening before heading off to the pub for more socialising, we took a look at something described as Tolkeinesk which I think might have been Dwarf Fortress which is an ASCII generative storyline fantasy game based around drunken dwarves.

We’ll be back next month! Thanks for coming down.