Visual Literacy and Creativity

Not a chicken

I remember a conversation I had with my late father – he was the head of the local PTA at my primary school. I think I was about twenty years old when we had this chat. In short, someone from the government  education department came to talk to the PTA about the importance of the arts and creativity.

They did the following exercise. They got the group of adults, and sat them down, and asked them to draw something, the results were interesting. Most of the work didn’t look that advanced; there were no great artists.

What they did discover is that most people don’t draw much after about the age of twelve  or thirteen  years (this includes the humble author) this fact was reflected in their art. 

For a number of years now, during the month of October I’ve been plonking away, taking part in the “Inktober” phenomenon. Which is basically the challenge of creating a drawing a day for a month. I’m not good at drawing but it is an amazing process.

The Australian artist Brett Whiteley, once recommended (and I’m badly paraphrasing here) that a student get a large roll of brown paper and sketch every day for a couple of hours for at least six months. At that point apparently a degree of fluidity, a natural and unique style starts to evolve.

It’s a thought that sticks in the back of my brain for some reason.

All this computation we indulge in is amazing, but an inadvertent side effect of all this technology has been the proliferation and cause of a monolithic amount of very bad typography.

Do you know what well presented text looks like? Text that has readable line lengths, no widows or orphan paragraphs? Kerning? You probably don’t because the quality of typography (Good typography) is obliterated via our screens and formatts and the need for text that can be reflowed via  anything from an apple watch to a 36 inch monitor. 

The subtle knowledge that goes into layout and how the text of a book should look, the structure (that involves a table of contents, an introduction, an index, page notes, quotes etc) took about four hundred years to evolve. We are losing this.

It’s interesting, in that Visual Literacy is not something that people talk about. But the ability to understand and communicate, to stimulate visual interaction, is an important skill. I think what I’m trying to say is that there is now this sort of creative blind spot in the human psyche. 

People don’t value the visual because you can go up to a chain store, buy a premade look. It’s presented as “Hip” or “Cool”. We are losing something and it’s got to do with algorithms, and a disconnect from the physical.

I’ve been picking away at this blog article for a few days now and it’s admittedly a bit rambling a bit all over the place. But I’ll try and tie it all together with this.

During the pandemic and lock down, like so many people I indulged in binge watching of various movies, shows etc. One of those shows was “Survivor”. What I found interesting was that more often than not the people who made it to the end, and won the show nearly always had a creative project. Whether it was carving a stick with pictograms, or making and playing a drum. To help them physicaly survive, creativity and its expression was something sustaining. 

There was a Jazz band called “The Modern Jazz Quartet ” I’ve been listening (ironically) to their last concert album for a number of decades now. All of the members of that band have now passed over the rainbow bridge (To use a cat / pet lovers term) but whenever I listen to that beautifully crafted music, I pretty much always experience a positive happy energy ( a natural dopamine / serotonin hit). Their music makes me happy. I think that this is an incredible gift from beyond the grave for these amazing musicians to have passed on.

My advice for the day is get up and draw something. Build something. Play some music or write a poem. Paint a picture. It might just be good for you. Maybe you can reflect on the degree of visual literacy, creativity that exists in your life? 

 

Runeaudio some thoughts

I spent a few hours this weekend mucking about with an old V2 Raspberry pi and the open source product roon audio. http://www.runeaudio.com It’s a pretty good little media management system. I can keep all my music (I’ve copied it to a usb attached to the pi) in one place and access – play that data from the pi to the amplifier. The beauty of course is that I can control the playback and search etc via any device on my local network (be it a phone or computer, ipad, tablet – anywhere in the house). One thing that is nice is it’s simple interface, and it is fairly easy set up. But I also have a few concerns that I thought I’d mention hear.

Security Once you have burnt the roon audio image to your pi you just plug it in and start the device. You can access it via the url http://runeaudio.local/ or by working out the ip address / number (you might have to look at your router to find this).This is very convenient but the issue is the product is not Password protected. So if your neighbour some how hacks your wireless network password, he or she could crank up your music system at 4 AM as a prank!

Another thing to consider is that the image has – uses a root super god user, and the password to that user is publicly available.  So after that neighbour cranks up your music they can ssh to the device with root privileges! Also there is no basic user space (ie anyone on the network can control the server) although there is a hack that can be run via the htpasswd process within the web server . This allows you to hand code that functionality into the product. http://www.runeaudio.com/forum/password-protection-t4372.html This is not ideal for a basic user! If you do install a roon audio server in your house – Do change the root ssh password, … NOW!

See this link for more information on how to do that. https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-set-change-password-how-to Also at the time of writing – wireless is not a secure medium. I recommend a long wireless password that will take hours if not days to hack. As it is currently configured a roon audio server could be a nasty attack vector for a hacker. Changing the root ssh user password is a good start but the file system is rather open (see screen shot) and that could be problematic if not managed in a better way. Unfortunately this is typical of may IOT style products – they need to take security as an important issue – an  initial configuration script could easily manage all of these faults and create a rounder better more secure product. So to sum up.

Ease of setup 8/10
User interface 8/10
Security 2/10

I’ll be keeping an eye on this product – If your not comfortable with the command line and security is important (it should be to everyone!)  it’s probably a good idea not to use this product just now – but if they get their act together around the security issues, I think it has the potential to be something that rivals some of the more expensive commercial products.