Month: January 2004

Grafittibot

Post author By Rhea Myers
Post date 2004-01-31

I love this grafitti-drawing spraycan robot:
Hektor
It’s like a grunge version of AARON.
Art & Language’s idea that painting could be justified if its products couldn’t be created any other way applies to drawing machines as well. There are scales and complexities a human being couldn’t draw at speed (Nobson Newtown being a case in point) but that might be relevant to a contemporary realism. A drawing machine could achieve this and allow a more iterative creative process rather than a painstaking postconceptual rendering ritual.

Free Culture

Freedom From, Freedom To

Post author By Rhea Myers
Post date 2004-01-28

Freedom to is suffering in the name of freedom from. Manufacturing enemies for people to want to be free from doesn’t really cover removing their freedom to publicly question this.

Projects

Minara

Post author By Rhea Myers
Post date 2004-01-28

Minara is going well. Basic graphics and buffers are implemented so I’m onto the Lisp code for event and tool handling now. I’ve written utilities to convert to and from Minara format and PostScript, and Minara can render its own logo. 🙂 Just lots of testing to do now…

Aesthetics

Atheism

Post author By Rhea Myers
Post date 2004-01-23

As the prefix indicates, atheism is the absence of belief in God rather than the belief that God does not exist. It’s therefore not contradictory to be an atheist and to be open to proof of the existence of God or anything else should it ever come along. It’s simply rational.
Article on this aspect of atheism.
Being an atheist has its comforts. When bad things happen to good people, you don’t have to look for a reason why. You just have to help them deal with whatever random misfortune has befallen them. You also don’t need any motivation beyond basic human sympathy for doing so (or enlightened self-interest if you’re cynical). Whatever I do in life I don’t expect eternal life as a reward, so I have to do the best I can while I’m alive.

Satire

The Difference Between hackers And Painters

Post author By Rhea Myers
Post date 2004-01-20

A collection of Paul Graham’s essays is going to be published by O’Reilley under the title “Hackers and Painters”.
Book announcement.
The title comes from a lecture/essay of Graham’s.
Original Hackers and Painters article.
The art/science commonality (both order signifiers) was made in an article in Leonardo many years ago, and it wasn’t new then (Constable said that “Art is a science…of which paintings are but the experiments”). Graham makes the correct point that hacker culture is vanguard at the moment. So for social history of art, hacker culture is currently very important, although not for the reasons new media dilettantes and their sponsors claim.
The difference between hackers and painters is what they drink. Hackers drink caffeine, painters drink alcohol. Both suppress seratonin (IIRC), but alcohol is a relaxant whilst caffeine increases stress levels. Go figure. Go ground.

Generative Art

Jasia Reichardt

Post author By Rhea Myers
Post date 2004-01-17

Jasia Reichardt was Assistant Director of the ICA in London in the late 1960s at the time of “Cybernetic Serendipity”.

Tate Jasia Reichardt webcast.

She wrote three essential guides to Computer Art at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s.

“Cybernetic Serendipity, The Computer and the Arts “,
Frederick A. Praeger, 1969 or
Studio International, 1970, ISBN: 0902063065
As the title suggests, this is the book accompanying the show “Cybernetic Serendipity”…

“The Computer in Art”,
Studio Vista, 1971, ISBN: 0289795508
An overview of the Computer in fine art, animation, design and art education at the time. Recommended

“Cybernetics Intuitions and Art”,
Studio Vista, 1971 ISBN: 0289701082
A more philosophical/polemical work apparently (I haven’t been able to get hold of a copy yet).

Try ABEBooks… And be prepared to pay through the nose for “Cybernetic Serendipity”…

Generative Art

Classic Generative Art Texts

Post author By Rhea Myers
Post date 2004-01-16

Two classic Generative/Computer art texts available online:

Expanded Cinema

Algorithmic Aesthetics

I wish I could find a hardcopy of Algorithmic Aesthetics. The usually reliable ABEBooks can’t help me…

Satire

Mouse Droppings

Post author By Rhea Myers
Post date 2004-01-15

As the shareholder value maximisation continues at Disney the management’s reaction to a report showing that flooding your market with shoddy exploitation sequels destroys your core value proposition (something the staff have been telling them all along, apparently) is to shut down their most successful studio.
The excellent Jim Hill Media is tracking this story.

Aesthetics

Duchamp Stoppages Hoax?

Post author By Rhea Myers
Post date 2004-01-14

An article showing that Duchamp’s “Stoppages” function on a different level to the one most Duchamp scholars accept, via Sam Woolf on eu-gene:
TOUT-FAIT Article

Aesthetics

Materials Fetishism One: La Vie Boheme

Post author By Rhea Myers
Post date 2004-01-13

Amongst other things, Evie gave me a Moleskine for Christmas. I’ve used Paperchase, Muji and Smiths for notebooks, but Moleskines are just altogether more notebook-y. My Newton will continue to gather dust… 🙂
Moleskine US, slightly larger site.
Moleskine ink discussion…