| | ..'''' | | | .'' | | | ..' | |_______ | ....'' |_______
 
Ludic Interfaces for Scrabble Lovers ------------------------------------ Workshop Linz 2011 ------------------------------------ Text-driven Tools for Graphic Design
 
28.10. + 29.10.2011 11.11. + 12.11.2011 ------------------------------------

The GNU/Linux com­man­d­line is a ludic inter­face, play­ful, user-generated and user-driven, flex­i­ble, low-cost and coop­er­a­tive*. Noth­ing but a bunch of plug-ins to be promis­cu­ously plugged into each other. The appli­ca­tion can be built, and the solu­tion invented, by users them­selves. On the com­mand line, usage seam­lessly extends into pro­gram­ming*. It pro­vides func­tions, not appli­ca­tions; meth­ods, not solu­tions*. GNU/Linux sys­tem util­i­ties are a sort of Lego con­struc­tion set for word-smiths. Pipes and fil­ters con­nect one util­ity to the next, text flows invis­i­bly between. Work­ing with a shell […] is lit­er­ally a word dance*.



The work­shop will pro­vide an intro­duc­tion to the manip­u­la­tion of text on the com­man­d­line. In com­bi­na­tion with text-based doc­u­ment for­mats this enables unusual work­flows for graphic design.

Dur­ing the work­shop par­tic­i­pants will invent and built text-driven poster machines. To take part, you just need a cer­tain curi­ousity about tin­ker­ing(DIY). It helps to have some basic knowl­edge on com­put­ers, read­ing and vec­tor graphic edit­ing. We will pro­vide you with a run­ning GNU/Linux.


Der Work­shop bietet einen Ein­stieg in die Textprozessierung auf der Kom­man­dozeile. In Verbindung mit textbasierten Dateifor­maten eröff­nen sich so unge­wohnte Arbeitss­weisen für Grafikdesigner.

Im Laufe des Work­shops erfinden und bauen die Teil­nehmer textbasierte Plakat­maschi­nen. Maßge­bliche Voraus­set­zung für die Teil­nahme ist eine Affinität zum Sel­ber­ma­chen(DIY). Hil­fre­ich sind außer­dem gewisse Grund­ken­nt­nisse im Bere­ich Com­puter, Lesen und Vek­tor­bear­beitung. Falls nicht vorhan­den, wird eine lauf­fähige GNU/Linux Instal­la­tion bereitgestellt.


The work­shop is made pos­si­ble and organ­ised by servus.at.
No idea what we’re talk­ing about? See some examples!


By the way

You shouldn’t expect out-of-the-box solu­tions, for free, like beer and speech, polit­i­cally more cor­rect than the Cre­ative Suitetm and by the way the next hot shit for human-computer inter­ac­tion. This work­shop will NOT pro­vide you with a newer and bet­ter Pro­cess­ing for Type­set­ting or Desk­top Pub­lish­ing.

This is an intro­duc­tion, espe­cially for non-programmers, to the world of quick hacks, workarounds and almost-good-enough solu­tions. Search­ing, find­ing and replac­ing, fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples for com­puter based text pro­cess­ing and fre­quently used in fork­able tools, becomes here a style of work­ing. Search for a tool, the almost-good-enough solu­tion, hope­fully find it and replace what does not fit your needs.


Rec­om­mended texts

Ele­ments of Style: UNIX as Lit­er­a­ture
In the begin­ning was the com­man­d­line
the UNIX Haters hand­book
$(echo echo) echo $(echo): Com­mand Line Poetics