Art as Code 9/29/21

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] uh [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] do [Music] all right we are here for the very first episode the first of many the first of thousands hopefully millions of art as code episodes my name is bart farrell and i'm very happy to be with you here today to do a special live stream not just because it's the first one but it's the first time that we're really going to be tackling this topic of art as code and where does this idea come from well the idea is relatively simple we see a lot of overlaps between folks that are technically gifted and also have an underlying current of creativity that they would like to express and sometimes don't get to express perhaps all of that creativity in their jobs so we're trying to do here is to create a space where all are welcome and free to share their experiences of working with any kind of arts we say artic could mean cooking can mean literature it could mean music it could be dance or it could be whatever your definition of it happens to be you let us know and we'll get you on the show before we get started just have a couple of announcements couple of reminders of things that are going on as we get closer to kubecon i hope everyone's signed up for kubecon but we got a lot of stuff going on cloud native tv we will be live in los angeles i'm not in los angeles currently i'm in spain but i will be in los angeles as well as of october 11th and i'll be hosting a wrap-up show at leonardo morillo on the 13th where i'll be focusing on different um people of uh latinx backgrounds who will be participating in kubecon but there will be wrap ups every single day apart from that we've got some very very exciting uh really good programs that are coming up on october 4th we've got nana goes to kubecon if you've seen lauren kubernetes with nana you know that she's an amazing teacher she creates amazing content so she's going to be coming on next week we also got a spotlight on the collocated uh security uh security date so there's gonna be security tag that will be fun to october 5th on october 6th we've got cloud native live and a cncf face-off so you definitely check that out if we get some live trivia then on the seventh we've got a pregame show with priyanka so that'll be fun too to hear directly from priyanka what's going to be going on this kubecon what her plans are but once again you can check out all the schedule you can check out you know here on twitch with the click up schedule for all the different programs that are going on coming back to artist code so as you can see i'm not alone i am joined by the one the only nilly toby who i am very happy to say i discovered because of her making her artwork public and that happened in around january february of this year i saw that nilly made some amazing uh slideshow presentations for uh for somebody else and so i reached out on a whim saying hey would you be interested in participating in the day on kubernetes community as an artist and luckily for me nellie said yes and i'm very grateful that she did she could have easily said this guy is crazy she would have been right but she did say yes and since then has been working as our visual learning coordinator in the date on kubernetes community benelli i think you can probably introduce yourself much better than i can so can you just say hi and let everybody know who you are and what you're planning on doing today um hello everyone i'm nelly toby i am i just landed my first job in tech i have been in blue collar and i've been doing art since i was a kid but i finally got my first tech job i'm a product success engineer at jellyfish um i do any kind of art i can get my hands on it fulfills a need in me that nothing else can and that's me that's good and what a coincidence that you have some jellyfish perfectly placed behind you um also a nice little touch of art but if you want to check out an art that's nellie's created for our community check it out on twitter you can jump in our slack she's done amazing amazing stuff and one of the things that i've always emphasized there and will be interesting to interact with our guest on this a little bit further is the fact that a lot of these concepts if we're talking about cloud native kubernetes you name it all these sort of open source projects a lot of times are sort of difficult to get your hands on they are abstract concepts they can be difficult to understand so art in our community has been one of the ways that we've made these things more tangible more accessible and by extension more enjoyable so if people have a connection a link with something that feels like an emotional rush or something that made them happy or smile it makes it easier to be in those environments and engage with things that sometimes see a little bit tricky or might be a bit of an uphill battle that's one of the reasons why as well you may or may not have seen we do a lot of music in the date on kubernetes community we do a lot of raps um to bring these concepts to life so once again so people have different associations with them rather than just a concept that might be tricky we make it a communal effort um and by doing so and allowing people to share things they do in their free time but in these spaces in these contexts we find that it creates a a stronger bond between the people that are participating and speaking of the people that are participating i was thinking about what are all the metaphors that we can use in this first one and i know i hopefully won't exhaust them too much but our guest today is going to be telling us about collage and what would be a perfect example of a collage than the cncf itself we have people from a diverse range of backgrounds i say that as someone who did not come into with a computer science background nelly your i believe your academic background was also not necessarily based on computer science it's something you picked up later in life is that correct um you could say i don't have i graduated high school that counts that's an academic background that's an academic background yeah yeah but what i'm saying is this is that we all come we all arrive here because of different reasons and so we have people that speak different languages last night it was on the cloud native uh tv program with leonardo and three other latinx folks speaking spanish about different stuff that's going on we have people localizing documents a different country in in different languages there's more and more if you need to really kind of open our eyes and not just think about a traditional i.t or computer science background because we see people we also have lots of great work being done as well too and um in the cloud data business group it's being led by jason and catherine they're doing an amazing job making this a very very big inclusive 10 so that lots of people can participate so like i said an easy way to sort of take advantage of the word collage but we're going to hear a lot more about collage in a lot of depth from our guest today so our guest today is lorraine aka atomic mutton you can check her out on twitter check her out on twitter right now and follow her um lorraine thank you so much for coming and being here with us today lorraine is also community manager at time scale but most of all lorraine how are you and who are you okay yeah as you said thank you very much i'm community manager at time scale and um i'm probably at the opposite end of um the the tech thing to nellie that's because i've kind of um i've been through a lot of different kind of roles i've kind of landed with yay i've landed with community manager now but i've come on a background of um being an oracle dba for many years been an oracle developer led a dev team i've kind of had a lot of those kind of experiences and one of the things i really love about your program actually is the whole kind of the creativity and and tech because a lot of tech is very creative and there's a you know kind of the um the curiosity that you need to have a long-term career in tech and the creativity that you need to address problems you know that's all kind of um has a lot of parallels with kind of art and with any kind of art you know you have to learn the ropes you have to get everything um you have to go through those experiences you have to understand your tools before you can become kind of truly creative if you see what i mean and it's then that you become like the artist whether that's like a coding artist or whether it's like an art artist and having something that you can kind of also like an alternative passion for me kind of it kind of my alternative passions change but always having some kind of other thing that's going on it's just kind of like healthy is the way i feel about it so um that's kind of and of course it's very evident to you know even if some you know other people may kind of check in from a purely coded background go you know the cncf uh data on kubernetes things is a bit kind of crazy off the wall what's going on it's not my normal kind of take on tech but i really admire kind of like where you're going with it actually for all of these reasons and kind of making people realize that they are being creative even if they're kind of coding and learning the ropes so they can become the masters and everything that they're of their art so i'm going to try not to do too many torturous analogies recoded but hey let's see how well that up but that was a good one that was that was definitely a good one no and i think we can all i think we can all relate to that is that you know is tech an art or is it a science we would obviously naturally are pushed to believe that it's much more the scientific side but how much art is there in this you know if we really if you start asking around and and seeing all the different influences and backgrounds that people are bringing to the table that influence the way they do things and how they solve problems particularly as well one of the things i really recommend to everybody as soon as possible work with people from different countries it opens you up in so so many different ways to question your own um beliefs or things that you hold to be true not in a negative way but just really really understanding different ways of approaching things i find it fascinating a great way to learn nelly i think you wanted to comment something as well yeah i was going to say that i when you were saying something about the other people from other countries the first person that i liked here program coded with was a friend i made that was in romania and we've kept in contact this whole time and i've learned so much from every conversation with her we talk about you know romanian she tells me about things there i'm like wow that's so cool you know i'll tell her something she'll go what so yes working with other people from other countries is huge it's a great way to diversify your thoughts much much agreed now lorraine to get into the meat and potatoes of today's talk so we got uh we got we got an outline here but you know you mentioned that you know working as an oracle dba developer things like that okay so we got that that kind of start you know sort of established but can you give us more info about how you got started with art where did this begin how did this begin who is there when did this you know the spark happen what was that like well i said actually that goes kind of a bit way back i have to say and my first a kind of conscious um well not my first conscious encounter my first thought about kind of artist being like a professional being you know doing that kind of work as a job was actually with college when i was kind of hanging out with graphic designers and i think that probably had a great effect on me in the long term you know kind of like i was doing a business course and they were doing like this much more interesting stuff over there and it's like what you need to make money out of doing art what's that all about um and so that that's kind of like where a light interest started and then in terms of like physically creating things um [Music] as i say i always kind of have something else on on the go and for a long time i worked i was working in tech and working in restaurants at the same time which was kind of almost just for fun don't ask me i yeah i'm going for punishment yeah let's go and do some waitressing math or dana cody you know but anyway that that's kind of um and but later on kind of as i was freelance for quite a long time with oracle and you know being a freelancer people move on and leave and i found myself kind of making little books for nearly everybody who left where i'd collect together whatever they'd been collecting or doing in their work and then would get photographs of everyone on the team stick them on and and start to make kind of little stories for them when they're left so that's kind of when i started doing stuff physically with kind of art things it just became a thing that i give people their little story as they're left with photos of everybody they worked with kind of built into the story so that was kind of um some of the some of the kind of direction i came from and then i actually started doing a craft seriously when i had i had two pet sheep this isn't even as as one does as one does i had two pet sheep to keep a horse company and they the horse hated the sheep but that's an altogether different thing and it was kind of taking the police off i was like what the hell am i gonna do with this wall so i learned how to be a felt maker because you do you know i was kind of like no we have to solve this problem there's a coding thing for you straight away you have something you have a problem to solve what am i going to do with this wall i'll go and make something with it and that's a very coding mindset in a way rather than just going on there's all this stuff it's in the way we'll throw it away you actually kind of say no this is a thing we need to solve so um yeah and but i also think as well too by extension a thing you need to solve and also a business line that you can create so i think there's an element of that as well too is like i don't think programmers can ever have too much um too much of business background you know there's always this you know dichotomy of tech versus business and who's on which side but i think that's another sort of application as well and i invite everyone whether it's the example of having two pet sheep to keep a horse company or any other element in your life to try to think about how you can make those connections where seemingly there are none anyway sorry continue no i know you're you're fine because i i mean it's kind of a and what you say making money out of that thing yeah i mean that is one of kind of my little outings in time i was kind of a semi-professional felt maker probably for about five or six years um and actually felt making has kind of elements of collage in it really you know um the other thing that i would say to do with kind of coding programming and i think that everybody will identify with this is that there's a constant need to learn everything's always changing um and so getting into a mindset of lifelong learning and doing it for fun as well i think really helps you along that route you know because i mean at one point that was kind of like with oracle's like not another database version really i gave up with oracle at about 10 g and they're now on 21 i think you know it never stops so you have to have a capacity to keep learning so if you can learn other things alongside um as a way of kind of making that kind of constant learning a more positive experience i think that's uh to me that that's kind of that lifelong yeah does that i've got to say yeah and practice too because like with code same with art you have to practice this thing over and over and over it to get it to a point where you're you know at least somewhat happy with it yeah that's right and and and and are you ever happy with it and actually weirdly i think that's the same with code because you could always actually do something a bit better or you wish you went you can always wish that you started with a different model you can always wish that you started from a different point and you can go back and improve you can have like that constant kind of iterate and prove it rate improve but do you ever because sometimes you're on to the next project you know so but what you do get i think and what is a commonality is that you always learn something from every project in art or in code you learn something from every project that you can apply onto the next one that you can understand and have a deeper understanding of what you just did or what you just did wrong in order to make something a better a better um artifact the next time around whatever that kind of artifact is you know so i think that's um that's a definite parallel as well oh very strong and i find this as well too because i've played guitar since i was 18. which doesn't mean that i'm a super accomplished guitarist but i've been but i have been in touch with it well what i say about that is that very often when playing guitar is that sometimes you'll make a mistake and realize that was the best mistake that you could make because it unlocks something that you weren't previously aware of so sometimes your brain being a little bit clumsy you end up hitting a string or playing a note they're like oh i love that mistake i'm going to keep going with that but i think the main thing is the accidents exactly by bob ross actually i can't believe i didn't i didn't i was not intentionally going to bring bob ross into this you did no but it's true happy little accidents and and also because i think sometimes there's so much pressure and you know we talk about this it's fairly common to talk about in tech you know like embracing failure and things like that nobody like really embrace your failure and also understand that the first time you do something it's going to be a pretty ugly mess and you look back at it five years later i'm like okay wow but but give yourself some credit when you're doing something for the first time do you really expect it to come out being super good and when sometimes like you know and we can also talk about you know with with artists that nature versus nurture and practice all these different things some people are more in programming as well some people are more naturally inclined but it still takes practice like this notion that someone picks up some paint and hits a canvas and the first thing they do is gold i don't buy it i've never seen it i would love to but it's the same thing with music or sport or things like that all these things will take significant amounts of practice and i say this for the young folks that are out there there's a lot of people in a lot of hurry like i want to learn kubernetes right now it's going to take some time and there's going to be some trial and error in that enjoy the process um so that's that's kind of what i focus on there lorraine is there anything that you would like to share in terms of uh stuffed pictures you may have to touch on that first point of kind of how you got started any references there or if not nearly we can move on to the next question a get started one probably i'm going i don't think i've got a get started picture no no it's all good i should i should yeah i mean i have no no no no no no just just everybody knows we'll be sharing a dropbox link after this with all the artwork that uh that lorraine's gonna be covering so no worries there nelly if you want to take the next question go for it okay oh i can't can i open it up it's okay i can i can i can give you are we going off the script or can i just no no no no no no oh yeah anything is we just everybody else we have a script but given given the kind of context i think we can just kind of roll with it lorraine you can share whatever you want but i've already i've already gotten worried yeah yeah i did like like a good i was worried about being tongue-tied and they said like every good artist you have to be able to think on your you know on your feet and and be able to improvise and iterate so yeah anyway nelly fire away yeah so i'm wondering like i know you do collage uh is there any art that you've always wanted to do but you've never had the resources the capability to like do it like like marble sculpture or something is there anyone that you've ever been like intrigued by but never been able to do i i tell you what i think the capacity to do i mean there was there's things like kind of you know um having the equipment for example to do pottery you know having the kilns and things like that that was that side of things and that's a whole investment you know i'm very good at investing things and then thinking oh my goodness you know i haven't used that for three years so what i was gonna say actually though is more my capacity i mean bart touched on it kind of the impatience to be good at things um and i think that i kind of nearly everything that i end up choosing to do has relative to other forms of that craft or are instant gratification involved you know so with collagen you're not having to wait for paint to dry um with um felting you know like i i can kind of um with felting i could make say a bag or a hat in maybe three hours whereas with if you wanted to knit it or design it and sew it you know knitting and it is that kind of patience you know um and tortuous analogy coming along again but you know is that kind of like the patience to see how to make your stuff better you know the patience to work out okay that was the pattern that i just kind of coded a sql query in yeah but that one's slow now i've got to work out and pick what i've done in order to understand how to make it a much better form you know that you do have to have some patience there as well actually because you want everything to work first time you know yeah i mean so um for sure in terms of answering that kind of question i would say there are things that i'd love to be ah photography there you go i would love to be a really good photographer but all of the intricacy of understanding all the different settings on the camera you know when actually i can just pick this thing up and do a point and stick and i've got a reasonable photo yeah i don't think i'll ever be able to do that but i wish i could i do i really do wish i could respect respect to all the shout out to all the photographers out there and people that are able to do things that take a lot of time because i completely identify that with that as well and it's funny that my friend who's helping me here is that we both produce hip hop and and so but the thing is is that i'm i lack the patience like i just want to do something immediately and then it's done in the sense of actually sitting down in a good studio and really analyzing all the sounds and levels and things like that and really building something in a proper way is something that i just lack the attention span to do he is blessed as a very patient person and can sit down but that's also i think the other thing is there too is complementary skills if we're talking about you know like a team in tech because it's so common to work in teams is that you really if you have five people that all are what we can kind of say like us that just really want to get things done quickly that's not a good thing but you'll also have people that only have a long-term vision so i think that that also speaks to that kind of balance um that's important to have now taking it more to the collage territory all right all of us have probably done collage in some way or another in school i remember being you know you know 10 years old and you bring a bunch of magazines and you cut out clippings and of course you find the most inappropriate pictures you possibly can um and put them together but the thing is like i said i think there's sort of a misunderstanding about where collage comes from what it's all about so lorraine can you kind of school us on that like okay everything you've heard about collage is kind of wrong this is what it's really about yeah so most of when you start to look at kind of the the artistic movements that embraced collage in any kind of serious way it kind of actually started as a bractum picasso were like the first ones playing around with it arguably although there is kind of some evidence of it slightly being before those those guys and um from then on it's you then get to the darda news movement um hannah hawk there's a lot of collage in all of those kind of um early 20th century kind of art movements um they're kind of expressionists and kind of no i'm going to look for my i won't do that don't worry go for it it's fine this is one of the kind of first um the first kind of times i got really in love excited by collage and that's uh that was kind of an expressionist kind of um okay maker so a lot of the collage has been to do with communication and kind of underground art and kind of um there are kirch twitters and oh mezzan i'm going to forget his name now but you know there were a lot of there was a in the 30s in the late 30s in germany just before the second world war the there was a whole kind of anti-degenerate um thing to the extent that they had a degenerate art exhibition that was put on by the german government at that time and all of the artists that were involved in that exhibition a lot of whom were collages had to flee because it's a really easy easy medium is a very easy medium to um be [Music] or to make those kind of like kind of statements like it lends itself very well to like political and underground statements and um kind of protest art and and that's what really interests me about it actually is the whole kind of political protest are the the the obviously hidden because you can get a beautiful painting and you can study that for hours and hours and again this this is patience coming into it again i think actually for me because you can un unpick the messages very gradually and understand them and see more and more in a very beautiful painting but actually a lot of collage is in your face because it's about protest and it's about a kind of political messaging and you know kind of it perhaps starts with um posters but then has the kind of the whole underground movement associated with it so i think that's kind of the fascination of it for me and it comes through all these kind of anti programs and kind of the groups have been very much of the underground and the kind of surreptitious pasting of posters in in places and just being kind of that kind of rebellious edge to them um and that has carried on throughout you know and i'd say there's been kind of a peak in interest again in you know these things come in kind of ways you know everything kind of comes in kind of bits and ways as just tech different kind of lever that one in again um but you know kind of collage has kind of been having a moment for the last few years and it tends to you will kind of tend to see it kind of um ebb and flow with the state of the world because how much people protest and how comfortable are they um so things like zines and kind of you know those kind of like cutting things into pieces and being angry at them almost i think i kind of mentioned to you this kind of like one of the things that i enjoy from it sometimes is that that whole kind of cutting and tearing and sticking together again and making something maybe quite ugly can be quite personal instead of going onto twitter and kind of having a go at someone over there do you know what i mean just get yourself a magazine tear up a few pictures and kind of make them look ugly then throw it away you know that's probably a better way nobody gets hurt you know you can do it that way so uh so yeah i mean and i mean some of the kind of the the kind of artist that i really enjoy and picks up another book okay pictures to show but you know yeah peter kennard is um an official war artist i mean this this book is like devastating because it's just um a lot of it's kind of very it's just like pictures and numbers and kind of like kind of how long have you been around laureen that looks a lot like how long has he been around this probably i think he's probably started in the 60s he's easy as he's kind of is he's an older fellow but he's kind of started in the 60s um protesting against um nuclear war really that's kind of like but i think this is one of the pictures i've actually got in the in the kind of set that i shared but kind of um the missiles on the hay wave you know because the uk being a nuclear um a nuclear um nuclear country where you use those words but yeah um and and a lot of um i think my kind of work and my kind of thinking because of all this influence you know i tend to be very kind of post-apocalyptic kind of in kind of the images that and they've gone incredibly out of fashion actually it's like you know kind of what she put in kind of nuclear explosions all over um kind of bits and things that she's sticking together but actually even that's kind of coming around again now isn't it you know we're kind of starting to worry about if we're kind of heading headlong into some awful so you're ready you're ready you're ready yeah well i live i live in a hill in west wales where you can see anybody coming for miles so you know i'm ready for it yeah and you have you have your your attack sheep that are ready to kill at a moment's notice i'm sure i'm sure no but i want to touch on a couple things that you mentioned is that i think something that's really interesting and tons of parallels here is that you mentioned the sort of cathartic notion well i think a few things the cathartic notion of cutting something i relate to this a lot because of my mom who i will definitely want to have on this program at some point is uh is has worked for many many years with ceramics particularly making mosaics and for her and she had a lot of good reasons to be to to what an outlet you know the act of breaking things smashing plates and tiles doing exactly what you're not supposed to do with this kind of stuff is extremely cathartic it's like i'm going to go out to the garage and make a bunch of noise and do all this and then i'm going to put something together with the things that i broke so there's you're being destructive but then also constructive so i think that's a really interesting thing i think also just particularly in the case of collage perhaps compared to other art forms is the fact that like you're kind of saying it's quite low cost what do you need which is why as a counter culture thing is like who's got some scissors and glue and and i mean like um and and you don't have to have this um self belief that you can draw that's true too right you can kind of guess it's so inviting that way yeah yeah and everybody can probably draw but everybody criticizes their own drawing you know i can't draw yeah i'll still say that it's critical yeah yeah you know um and you're you're kind of a lot more shy of showing your own drawing in a lot of people can be more shy of showing a drawing in the same way they might not sing in public they'll sing in the background and show their you won't sing in public but you know you won't show um showing something you've stuck together that's made of other things is not so harmful you know you know it's not so personal in some ways and maybe you know that that so in that way as a as an entry art form i think it's actually quite um perfect like that whole humor thing the bit and the kind of you know the kind of the kind of obvious meanings as well as the hidden meanings and stuff you know i think that because you're not you're you're not being judged on how well you draw you know you're being if you're feeling that you're being judged at all you just judged on how well you stick things down if the edges are showing or something you know but uh or whether the tight face from the other side of the piece of paper came through because you over soaked it with something you know that's that's kind of like the limit of the criticism that can be kind of placed on you so if that makes sense it definitely does it definitely does nelly next question's yours oh uh so how do you think all of this collage has impacted your your impact on the community community management and stuff you've done how does yeah impacted it well one of the things um now we're talking about kind of like the dark arts you know kind of like some of my stuff is kind of written on not safe for work but um what i have kind of found is that it's made me more aware of how something that you can do can be misinterpreted so what you the message that you think you are giving um is not necessarily the message that people are receiving and i think that's actually really important in tech teams in community management in life really and when you start realizing that and i'll give you i i can give you an example of that it's a collage that i wouldn't show i said it wouldn't show here i in my kind of whole post-apocalyptic thing i had done and i'm not touching on anything really too badly here but i kind of got a collage of a flat with um some national geographic is a great place to start when you're doing the collage they have amazing photos but i'd cut out some kind of um some monkeys and sat the monastery with nuclear war going outside and they're watching their tv and i thought that i was very obviously saying the people have stuffed up and they've come in to you know the animals have taken over thank goodness they're watching the tv while it all kind of held brady's breaking outside the window because people saw that and and were saying that that was some kind of uh comment on a kind of race and society that i never ever intended and that is a really really good example of something you can just like walk into something with totally not that as as what you were thinking about you know um [Music] so yeah i mean that's kind of like that is a really good example of kind of learning by what you i never ever would have done that's what it meant and you have that same kind of communication when you're working online all the time you have to be very aware of what you're saying you know as a community manager for example because you don't want things to be misunderstood and what you were saying about how working with people from different countries you can't assume and this is this is now applying to like tech and remote work at this point don't assume that you have the same kind of um starting point in the same understanding of things that are going on or how you receive things and from the course that i i did a post-graduate course a really good example from that um that i finished in 2018 which was graphic communication but i was working with a lot of middle eastern students and there was a young woman that was doing some art that was very out there for where she lived she kind of was from palestine lived in dubai doing very kind of at the edge of kind of what was acceptable in her society and probably not acceptable in her society and the tutor who was an english fellow had given her some written commentary that said it's a great shame that and there's this thing that it's a great shame that you didn't complete that piece of work or you didn't take it further i don't know what he was saying but she read that and was came to me in kind of absolute floods wanting to speak to me because he thought that he he she had interpreted a great shame as as being you've brought shame on yourself and your family and that's literally how she had interpreted it so i had to go through this whole english usage thing with her that a great shame was actually a very empathetic thing for an english person to say you know an english-speaking person to say it was nothing to do with her having to be ashamed of what she was doing because she was doing like these kind of imagery so that there's a really good example of how you can kind of learn from from that kind of communication i think it's a really really strong example and i think regarding the communication i think i think anybody even if it's in a local context is that i think it would be interesting to kind of pull other community managers and say like have you experienced something similar i would imagine that most would agree because it's trial and error and it's not until you have a moment like that you're like wow like i really gotta think that or or maybe i should run this by somebody before i publish it because stuff because it's i mean those things can happen and in other cases as well people have an amazing incredible ability to twist things that you said you're like that's totally not what i meant um but other times just innocent misunderstandings can happen and and things like that going back to the other thing as well too i think it's particularly important in the once again the cncf we have lots of different people from lots of different backgrounds and so just from a language perspective because of living in spain for 10 years and interacting with a fair amount of people who are learning english when you talk to somebody and they say oh i speak english it doesn't mean they speak english like you do and it doesn't mean that they've that they're going to understand all of your cultural references your jokes your tv series your political stuff your favorite bands they're going to be tons of things it doesn't mean that they're not intelligent they just didn't grow up in the place that you did so it's how are they possibly supposed to know that so i think that cultural empathy factor once again if we're looking at teams or communities as a collage is to really like i said to appreciate those things but i think it's i do feel that cncf's a very welcoming place i've been very welcomed as a non-technical person sometimes though i have to remind people of that in order to have a more successful conversation so that we get kind of on the on a level playing field um but i think it's i think it's very nice that you shared that example because like you said you can do things with the best intentions um nelly next question banksy that's that's i was thinking the same thing i was thinking what do you think about banksy and who do you think banksy is well we keep being told that it's been that this has been exposed don't we but it's never really quite true some some guy from bristol that's what i want yeah that's that's where the kind of all the hot money is i think but that's been that's been the kind of for a while for a while a long time you know it's like somebody from massive attack or something you know there's kind of different bands from bristol that this person's supposed to be from but we were actually while bart was elsewhere was detained elsewhere we were saying or perhaps banksy is somebody that you don't expect them to be perhaps banksy has to adopt i mean do you want to you want to say your theory actually yeah my theory is that banksy is someone who wouldn't normally be accepted by a art society or society in general as an artist and so the whole reason everything has been anonymous and has been completely hidden about this person's identity is maybe this person wouldn't be accepted maybe they have a disability maybe they're very dark-skinned maybe it's a female maybe you know there's all these things that in in a lot of societies artists artist art you know i mean look bob ross the castle rembrandt what do they all have in common all of these famous artists they all have something in common and we know what it is yeah we were we were going to this is the oh that's the wrong one isn't it i was going to show you the gorilla girls you got my screen coming up yeah we do yeah we do but but the pictures are coming out a little bit small oh are they that's part that's that's part of the challenge of art is code we invite the viewers to look very closely at their screens no this is this is this this is a collage by the gorilla girls one of one of my favorite fruits um and this is what we're really saying isn't it this is what we're saying here yeah if you keep the women out they get resentful or they have to hide and pretend they're bouncing and everybody has a kind of a it's this guy who leads a band but maybe it's not you know so that uh yeah um only keep those gates up so long we're getting in yeah exactly and it was and that led us um again kind of uh while mark was doing the tech stuff we were kind of saying that i i another kind of um while i was a freelance wordpress developer which i did for a few years which is kind of like then where i started getting more interested in like being professional about my art if you like because of having to do websites and and things like that i did actually do mailchimp for the first gallery that ever exhibited banksy and so i kind of like was they kind of a and deeper gallery in london and i was kind of working with them on my mailchimp so that's kind of um you know art and art and tech overlapping again because they were kind of helping them do that and they had when they had their banksy exhibitions in the really swanky area of london um they had cues round the block of the kind of people that would never ever be in that area of london and it caused so much upset but all these kind of kids and things were coming to see banksy and it's kind of into this art gallery that belonged to um a family of kind of 16th century art the um in the background italian art yeah like the like the yeah going going to the medici gallery exactly yeah i mean and i mean the other i mean and this is where kind of like the protest kind of idea comes in i'm just looking for barbara kruger here no but it's just funny when you mention the protest stuff because i think that's one of the and once again going back to the low cost factor is that it's so inviting because you can take these random elements that to draw on your own would be next to impossible if you're not a great artist and even if you are it's not going to have the same impact um so i think that like i'm just thinking off the top of my head well anyway tell us about this first i mean well this one's another i mean you know that's a really simple image but you can see exactly what it's about in kind of like in three parts of an image of peter kennard and his kind of crushing cruise kind of thing so you know that um that kind of imagery is really kind of yeah look around the protesting side yeah i mean i was just done no no no no not at all no because i was just i was just asking i wasn't even like women can multitask i can't look at pictures yeah but whether it but whether it's multitasking or anything else what can men do i don't know that's that's another episode that's another episode we're not here to beat up no no no we're we're gonna have to have the rain on quite a large foreign of my favorite artists that i'm sharing are our fellas actually that's that's okay i i'm not discriminatory here but now but now we want to get to we want to get to something even further is that okay so we've looked at a couple things from from different artists but what's the best lorraine piece if we if we want to go out and find something tell us about things that you've worked on and also where we can find this stuff yeah so um i well at atomic mutton on facebook is kind of i don't keep it up to date this is one of the things that you do find difficult actually is kind of having a serious a serious kind of um attempt to keeping up to date with your artwork at the same time as working and there have been times um if you get kind of really unhappy kind of like the creativity side of your brain also switches off i'm actually feeling quite creative at the moment which is kind of good for time scale scale i'm very happy in my life so um but i think that and and some of the stuff i guess is a little bit that's what i'm saying is a bit unsafe for work i mean one of my favorite i won't climb up and get it there's a picture here i haven't shared with you which is kind of um to do with um lockdown it's probably you know kind of yeah if you want to get it if you want to go get it go get it because actually i think and and this is something that we can touch on while you're getting that so there's plenty of time is i think that um in in once again just only personal experience and knowledge i'd like to hear your thoughts on this is that life guarantees difficult moments and adversity guaranteed like that if at the age of 35 if i know anything i definitely know that so i think one of the things is you're going to be faced with adversity you do get to decide to a certain extent how you will respond to that and so that's why i think it's very it's poignant to bring this out about the pandemic about the lockdown situation about how you were dealing with it how you decided to express it is once again the what i want we're not telling everybody you need to become artists or collage experts or musicians or things like that but find something that you can connect with outside of work that gives you uh an outlet for expression and you don't have to be good at it you just have to enjoy it i think that's the most important thing so anyway let's take a look at this okay so this was this was my lockdown piece there we go let's go zoom out yeah so it says how to how to what how to end it oh wow so but it could be what and what are we ending locked down are we ending coffee are we ending you know so this is where like this is kind of like my thing about um [Music] illustrating the different layers but this actually came from there's a financial time she's like a posh paper in the uk and every weekend they have a magazine that is eye-watering i eye-wateringly ridiculous and it's called how to spend it because it's aimed at the people i have a lot of money i'm going to say people who work for google at this point no no i didn't say that but it's aimed at people kind of who have got a lot of wealth so actually and this is where like the layers come in because all of these things all of these pictures because we get it at the weekend because it's a good read it is actually a genuinely good read about newspaper but i find how to spend it as a magazine supplement quite offensive so everything here is kind of like this is a this is a cup by tracy emin who's a famous artist uh that's one of her cups that was sold at the museum that was their kind of cheap piece you know if you kind of got you know you just fancy throwing a bit of cash around that's the cheap piece but everything else is kind of made for very branded goods and kind of teslas and all kinds of stuff in there to make all the colors so just kind of getting all the so if you look really closely you can see a lot of stuff there and that was an interesting experiment as well because this on top of that which you can't really tell unless you see it in person i guess um there's a layer of wax because like when you stick magazine this is the kind of experimentation and moving on to the next level thing you know because when you just stick papers down from a magazine it's quite unsatisfying because they're just shiny and they just look like bits that are cut out of a magazine but if you do encore stick it's called encaustic and you kind of put a layer of wax across it it kind of knocks it back enough that it no longer looks exactly like like one after the other yeah yeah from a magazine you know so that's the kind that's kind of where that one came from so so yeah that was that was my lockdown thing and it was like you know sad person sat in a cup of tea which isn't very british because isn't that like the trope is that like they over in england they think that anything could be solved and carry on and drink a cupboard yeah that's right so that's exactly right so yeah so um yeah so that that would be kind of you know those kind of things like i like doing and yeah i think and then my little book i mean ridiculous project that um this is how i started talking about um this kind of thing actually because he was talking about art on slack and that his mom like collage and this type and i for my project for my m.a that i finished two or three years ago because i did that alongside kind of work in my part time for fun lifelong learning it's good folks you know i collected the rubbish they get from the charities in your mailbox that you didn't ask for and they're always really sad you know they're always like pictures of starring children or sad animals and all the rest of it so kind of i set up so i collected all of this stuff from um houses about five or six houses around the uk that they got in a year and then i made a book from it but i turned it into a children's story book about kind of how many mana joy in the sadness of the world that was the idea of it is like she's kind of getting all this sadness just shoved through her letterbox uninvited all of the time um and it's kind of like that you didn't ask for that to come in your door so now why are you having to deal with it you know why you have to look at the picture of the sad animal and things and that's kind of that was kind of probably the favorite work i've ever done and yeah this is this book i did send about a copy but it's stuck in spanish customs yeah it's on it's finally on its way there so yeah that was that was kind of um and then when you look at something like that but funnily enough after that the amount of charity mail dropped off because there's a whole load of cases in the uk that were it was a problem that this kind of mail was coming through and begging for money and old ladies were kind of killing themselves because they kind of signed up to so many charities they didn't know you know what to do next and they couldn't pay out anymore but it was making them so sad and that was a reason that's a really true bad thing that was happening you know and the consequences of something that seemed quite innocent charities asking for money were actually quite dire um but when you actually i kind of got all this paper from like six houses around the uk there were several things that really interesting one was the complete diversity and the difference of the charities that um ask for money from the london expensive house to the ones ask for money from west wales yeah because i live like in the poorest region of i think northern europe versus london which is clearly not and you know the nature of the charities was really different and that was interesting um and the other thing is that i then did a rough calculation that if this amount of paper was going into every household every year it's something like you know ridiculous square miles of forestry being knocked down just so that we can have charity mail that we never invited come true at all you know and not only do we not invite it where we get it it makes us sad what is that about you know so think of the consequences because that's the point really but anyway so yeah that that's kind of probably my favorite and you can see that you can see that book actually nanojoy.co.uk and i left the i've left the website up there so uh where did did you put that in zoom yeah i think so okay yeah can you send that to me by slack yeah and then i'll get the you said that to me anyway no no you can or you can or he can it's fine either way because that way we can put that here on twitch um okay now i guess we we unfortunately i mean this was scheduled for an hour but we could obviously be here for much longer um but nellie do you have any final questions that you want to ask um no this was so cool and i just kind of picked your brain about art so bad because i no keep going and keep going keep going we've got it we've got eight minutes yeah that's the point yeah so so what else have you done i mean you've done the collage have you have you done other ones like other because i know you said you're impatient like me like bleeding the paint to dry so you know what that's about i know what that's about i do yeah um other collages yeah um let me show my screen again yeah one thing one thing is one thing as well the rain have you also done digital art alongside actually i have okay i have individuals because i think that'll be interesting as well for nelly because nelly also works with you know a tablet sometimes but then also switching back and forth so i think that's interesting too so here's some practical work and database related ones that i was editing the kona blog so that's all about postgresql mysql post about i know they're references yeah so that that's uh that's um a digital piece and likewise this was um uh extension called chameleon that was to do with bringing data between postgres and um mysql well this isn't a dolphin because piccona's version of mysql had a lion or a puma as its logo so they all have there was a top point when all open source databases had animals as their logos um those are those are a couple of digital art pieces um and talking to paint i mean yeah there's a kind of national geographic again it strikes again with a painterly background those are quite fun you know you kind of do random um again they're kind of a bit apocalyptic really no but i think it's you know what like we're saying about banksy but also because like i lived in in um uh you know i lived in egypt for a year but then also traveled around uh different parts of the area and seeing you know the separation wall uh between israel and the west bank you're tons and obviously banksy is no exception but there's tons and tons of art on there so i think i think in some ways with collage it sort of invites you can say it's a theater i don't i don't want this might be an extension but i might be reaching too much but a sort of theater of a powerless where you can remix things and you get to be the narrator and create new kinds of realities that are otherwise like um inaccessible that you that are out of out of reach and i also think you know just from seeing your other thing is like uh how to end it you know this sort of like remix mischief humor that you find in there too that is also very empowering just a silly example that i thought of when we got started is like the sex pistols album cover of god save the queen of like i can take this like sacred almost image and i can do whatever i want to it because i can and i'm a rebel and so i think i think there's if i take anything away from this conversation or one of the things i definitely take away is one of the things that collage provides in that sense that perhaps other art forms don't give as immediately so i i think it is that kind of i think it's the um constant association with the underground in the hidden message i think you know i think that's really you know it's not about beauty and it's not about and like you say you reference like the sex pistols and we didn't touch on that really a lot of the work i do is square because i kind of it you know that totally went out of my head in this conversation but it doesn't matter yeah what the hell um but yeah a lot of mine is album square album-sized square that's what's gonna say with that with that financial times like this is now yeah yeah and loads and lots of the work i just find it really satisfying to work in the square and i realize when kind of talking about this and coming towards this is like oh actually it's because i'm so influenced from the album art of the 80s which was you know a kind of famous artist and and typographers like neville brody um barney bubbles who you are come to go barney bubbles who the hell is that but if you saw the album covers you would absolutely you know barney bubble uh was um and this this book this is this is an excellent book for that which has all kinds of the graphic art of the underground all right because that's almost all about um kind of music covers and this is probably not yeah it's not all about album covers but but there's that whole kind of other thing about um being able to the do-it-yourselfness she says reaching for this one i got this for about three pounds which is about six dollars well done well done and then i was looking last night i was saying i wonder if it's kind of like you can not that you'll ever get this money but if you can get it for 73 pounds at the moment on amazon i think oh wow so this is like oh do it yourself like brown bag things you know um where people have had to they're kind of independent um independently doing their records and and their vinyl and making their own album covers so that's the real um that's a real treat and again a lot of those will be quite large just because you don't have to be able to draw you can just kind of stick brown bags together and stick things on and print and whatever so it's like the practical and the kind of what you're able to do while still making it look kind of underground and raw you know so we we all got a little bit of rebelness we want to let out once in a while some of us more so than others we didn't even touch on music as collage did we we haven't talked about that whole kind of no no but i think but once again as i think that that's what is really inviting about all this is like how many different you know social collages if we talk about food and mixing different ingredients if you talk about having people over to your house and you have people with different backgrounds because you know that they're going to mix well or not and that can always get dicey as well um i think there are so many different sorry go ahead that's the collaboration on open source and that's one of the things and that's one of the things i was going to say whether it's about collage or art in general one of the things that we were talking about sort of like whether it's writer's block or burnout or things like that one thing is starting a project but then the other thing is that i think that's why with open source you know what's the definition of done how many people are going to be need needing to be in on this at the rate at which we're going how is this going to advance is one of the things that somebody told me in the in the contributor experience marketing group that i'm in it's like it's nice if you come for one day and you're very very active but it's much better that you're consistently there and just contributing you know something that's but it's difficult because once again we go through spurts there are good moments and there are bad moments that's called life but i think that you know open source projects can help artists to better understand the different things you know ever if you want to make it if you want to make a film it's a lot of work uh it's gonna involve a lot of people or an album or things like that but i think so that's why i think that kind of a vision and the collaborative vision that goes into that you know make things uh as much of a people problem as you can rather than just a technical problem that's what somebody in one of our kubernetes datum kubernetes meetup said and i completely agree in your case with that in mind because you've mentioned lifelong learning but in the collaborative sense of things do you primarily work alone do you get feedback from other artists how do you do that so primarily i work alone but there are some really interesting collaborative projects and especially collage lens itself really well to these which do have some dire getting back to the code analogy thing but do have some real direct kind of um parallels with open source projects in particular where you kind of start a piece and you pass it on and you start the piece and you pass it on and people add their own sticky thing to it so and that's kind of unlike the whole project is about sending either um sketchbooks around but more frequently postcards and things you just send to each other so then by the time that first person gets it back it's kind of not even like what they're imagining it to be and i think there's probably quite a lot of that goes on you know you know people oh yeah and stuff you know yeah this isn't what i was thinking when i started that no that's a super good point and it's like the silly thing of like you know the game you play where everyone's in a circle it's you know telephone where like you tell somebody and by the time it gets back to you like what like that's not so i think that i think there's there's a lot to be said for that okay we are at our time limit unfortunately and it's gone by super quickly because when you when you're enjoying it when you're enjoying like no you have to be sorry we did but i think we may have to start extending these no we have to start extending these into two hour sessions but i think this is something once again because this has been very much off script is that i think what i'm kind of inspiring i'll have to talk about this with nelly but i think maybe after each one of these programs we can kind of take the idea that the guest has been talking about and we can try to maybe apply it on our own so i'm kind of inspired now to make a collage um i don't know if you are nelly but i think that i think that'll be a fun way to take this to the next step and also invite other people in the audience or in the cncf to do the same thing and we can all kind of celebrate these things together um share them with us on twitter that's it that's it that's what i'm saying that's what i'm saying um so i think that would be a fun way to kind of put these ideas into practice um i don't know nelly any other questions doubts that you'd like to have clarified before we wrap it up um no no i'm i mean this was great i got to hear all about collage and now i really want to make a question i know it's right so yeah so i think i don't know is there any final message you want to leave us with any references we didn't get to anything yeah my one last thing when the conferences start coming open again and you're all collecting your stickers instead of just putting them on your laptops do something wrong with the makeup collage or something and i was looking for i'm frantically reaching for no i can't find it frantically reaching for the one that i've got over hoopie who's a devrel consultancy and mongodb kind of stuck together into a picture so i want to see all those stickers made into collages instead of just happening on laptops this is a very good point challenge i am going to la i'm going to la for kubecon and i plan on having a very very full suitcase in terms of swag and all kinds of accoutrements crossing the atlantic on the way back so yeah um i will i think it'd be interesting to have a swag collage at some point or stickers or whatever but there's a lot of there's a lot of stuff we could do with that there's a lot of stuff we could do with that upcycling um so anyway this was a smashing success for our first episode of artist code i'm extremely i i'm as happy as i expected to be because having met lorraine previously i knew this conversation was going to be really good we got the dropbox link which we'll be putting in once this gets uploaded to youtube it'll be on twitch for a bit then it gets uploaded to youtube be sure to put that there with some of the references obviously the website we've shared with in the chat as well um this is an amazing conversation and we will be having you back whether you like it or not lorraine um so we'll be making next time good night yeah yeah yeah i know we could i mean okay because they wouldn't flip pancakes yeah it's yeah it's it's crazy how popular the great british break off is outside of outside the uk like that's a really really big deal so that's true i like i i make a mean chocolate chip cookie so i i and i stand behind that um but anyway uh also if you want to what we're talking about you know shout outs and twitter and things like that lorraine you were at atomic mutton nelly you were at nelly's noodles and i am birthmark bart so we're pretty easy to find uh we're very active people and in all the things that we do uh thank you very much for joining us in our inaugural program we don't have a set date yet uh as to when we'll be doing the next one uh we don't have a set date yet because we like to be unpredictable but basically after kubecon um and keep checking all the stuff on cloudnativetv have a wonderful evening and we'll see you in slack in twitter and linkedin all those other ephemeral spaces that we inhabit and soon as you said lorraine is when conferences start to come back we'll be able to see each other in person so anyway thank you all very much have a good day thank you all right take care my pleasure cheers bye bye everyone yeah we're good foreign you

Channel: CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation]

Views: 129

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: art as code, cloud native tv, cncf, cloud native

Id: 4cLYj42DJAs

Length: 69min 38sec (4178 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 04 2021