Open Source Show and Tell November 26, 2009

Once again, The Team (Design Agency) and Osmosoft (Open Source Innovation arm of BT) have asked some of London's open source peeps to come and show what they're up to. Entry is free, each slot is about 10-15 minutes, and afterwards we go for beers at a pub near Borough Market.

Here's the tentative line-up (subject to change):

(Speaker TBC), Canonical - Ubuntu Update
Julien Fourgeaud, Symbian - Managing the Symbian community
Jeremy Ruston, Osmosoft - HTML5 and the slow death of Flash
Leisa Reichelt, Disambiguity.com - Drupal 7 Update
Phil Hawksworth, The Team - Playing with each others toys: Developing with open technologies
Rain Ashford, BBC - Open Source Gaming for Handhelds
Robbie Clutton, BT - iPhone development using web technologies

Keep an eye on The Team's Twitter stream for updates.

Also, Andrew Back is bring along his art exhibition "No Numbers", fresh from an outing at the Horse Hospital:

"No Numbers" is a playful response to Foxx's seminal 1980 electronic music work, Mr No. The music is transformed into a sequence of numbers -- digital samples -- which the viewer is encouraged to copy down using the paper and pencils provided.

At a rate of one number per second it would take 4 weeks to transcribe the original 3'18" work in CD quality. The futility of this task reflects the artist's interest in what we may be compelled to do but that which is ultimately, humanly, impossible.

The reduction to a slow, seemingly random series of numbers highlights the essentially approximate nature of digital sampling. This links to the artist's interest in exploring the aesthetic and cultural questions suggested by the analogue-digital distinction.

The title of the piece suggests remix and reappropriation, but also codes for a putative request from the copyright holder of the original work. Downloading music, we're told, is theft. Four weeks of laborious, transcription seems more like pilgrimage."