The Clockwork Penguin

Daniel Binns is a media theorist and filmmaker tinkering with the weird edges of technology, storytelling, and screen culture. He is the author of Material Media-Making in the Digital Age and currently writes about posthuman poetics, glitchy machines, and speculative media worlds.

Year: 2017

  • DOMs away

    75% of the way through an Essentials course in JS, and I can’t wrap my head around the DOM. I get the concept, but the logistics of actually manipulating it are eluding me.

    Yes, I realise there are simple syntax solutions to most problems. Variables, functions, arrays, etc, have well and truly sunken in, but the DOM is a wall in which I can’t seem to find a doorway.

    Bah.

  • Entering the matrix

    I’ve found myself frustrated in the last twelve months or so with a few mundane computer tasks that I have to undertake regularly, both for life admin and for work. Things like sorting out variable savings budgets, typing the same sentences over and over again in emails and other correspondence… I have also found myself wanting to play with websites in interesting ways, and am looking forward perhaps to looking at some of the intersections between cinema and code for research. All this — along with an institutional subscription to Lynda — has led me to undertake something of a crash course in programming. My initial efforts are the usual (Hello world, guess my number etc), but it’s enlightening to see how much work goes into the simplest of applications.

    Stay tuned…

Her language contains elements from Aeolic vernacular and poetic tradition, with traces of epic vocabulary familiar to readers of Homer. She has the ability to judge critically her own ecstasies and grief, and her emotions lose nothing of their force by being recollected in tranquillity.

Marble statue of Sappho on side profile.

Designed with WordPress