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Current Projects

  1. Building an LDAP enabled communications infrastructure at Ryerson starting with the new E-mail system. This will eventually extend to integrating things like access to Web course tools (WebCT) and a portal for the University. One interesting piece of this I am working on right now is developing Flash Communication Server applications.
  2. Updating and extending the Account Management System in CCS - an internal project that controls access to computing resources written in Perl and using Oracle.
  3. Chairing the Communication and Design System Committee.
  4. Flash, Java, Perl, and JavaScript. My lecture notes on JavaScript for the Digital Media Project Office and Hands On Internet series are available at http://www.ryerson.ca/JavaScript/lectures. Netscape 4 or later. I did some notes on Perl as well at http://www.ryerson.ca/perl but they are not as complete, should be used with a little caution, but they do show how to do a lot of things on the Unix servers provided by CCS.
  5. Setting up and maintaining multimedia resources in CCS labs and other University labs.
  6. Improving and expanding networked printing and multimedia resources.

Current Interests

Image assembly

Juan Gris described two phases of cubism: Analytic Cubism and Synthetic Cubism. In Analytic Cubism discrete pieces/chunks are painted so that they form a single painting with a logical design. In Synthetic Cubism there are no discrete pieces. Instead, a series of observations are blended together into one synthetic whole.

David Hockney's photographic work and some recent work by Gerald Bybee demonstrate that elements of both analytic and synthetic cubism are available to the photographer. And both present interesting and different aesthetic problems.

If separate photographs are glued/assembled together as separate photographs then how you "paint" with the camera is largely determined by how the final work is to be assembled. You have to worry about all the elements in the photographs flowing together in some way to make a sensible design. Cutting into objects with the frame becomes very important.

If the final assembly is to be done digitally, so that one single synthetic image is the result, then the shooting must be done for the final "blending".

I hope to post some photographic experiments here eventually. You may find the following far more interesting than what I am going to post anyway:

  • Any book of David Hockney's Photographs
  • well... in particular there is Hockney on Photography by Paul Joyce published by Jonathan Cape Ltd.
  • Any book of Braque and Picasso's cubist and post-cubist work
  • The 1995 Communication Arts photography annual containing Gerald Bybee's work.
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