Month: April 2004

The Story Of Art

Post author By Rhea Myers
Post date 2004-04-21

I finished Gombricht’s “The Story of Art” today. It’s excellent, if a little pre-political-correctness in places.
I particularly like the way he pulls out universals whilst showing a progression of ideas. I need to re-read it with a notebook (it’s too good a story to treat as a study source on the first go).
I should have read it years ago, but I was too busy reading Art&Language and various programming manuals. 🙂

Free Culture

Post author By Rhea Myers
Post date 2004-04-20

I’ve just finished Lessig ‘s “Free Culture “. It’s excellent. Read it. Now. 🙂

This is one of the few times in history where art can be effectively political. Not by content but by the way it is made and distributed. Put anything you make under a Creative Commons license (make sure you understand the legal implications of this…) and let people build on your work.

Generative Art

Hacking

Post author By Rhea Myers
Post date 2004-04-18

I was relieved to read Paul Graham’s description of writing code in the debugger: that’s how I write code. I’ve also recently enjoyed thinking up code then writing it once I know what I want to write, which is more the case with Literate Programming.
Hacking is fun. It’s the same deep, where-does-the-time-go engagement as making art. But contrary to what Neal Stephenson says, there’s more than one way of doing it.

Projects

After “Draw Something”

Post author By Rhea Myers
Post date 2004-04-18

Next up will be “Paint Something”, which fills in the shapes and deals with colour, and then “Get Ready”, which will generate multiple figures and work out a composition through a number of ‘preparatory sketches’.
Before that I want to add noise to Draw Something’s lines (to simulate neural noise; hand jitters) and clean up the PostScript generation.

Free Culture

The Cathedral And The Bazaar

Post author By Rhea Myers
Post date 2004-04-18

Eric Raymond, who gave the world the “Open Source” tag so companies wouldn’t be scared of Free Software, is finally seeing the error of his ways. 🙂
He’s written an article criticising Open Source software for having bad user interfaces due to bad planning. He’s right, both about the UIs and why they are so bad. But he only has himself to blame. Some time ago, Eric wrote an essay called “The Cathedral and The Bazaar” criticising the FSF for writing monolithic, monumental Free Software and lauding Linux for taking all comers and their Open Source code.

Now, out of a cathedral and a bazaar, which has an overarching design, and which is a chaotic mess?

Abandoning principles for popularity doesn’t make sense when doing so prevents that very popularity…

Projects

Minara: Input Handling

Post author By Rhea Myers
Post date 2004-04-16

I’ve been working on keymaps and tool handling for Minara. Keymaps are Emacs’ way of handling input. Tool event hooks are a more GUI-ish way of doing things. I was worried they’d clash, but they form natural layers. So raw input is handled by event hooks, actually by an event protocol (like Dylan’s iteration protocols: a list of functions). The keyboard handling hooks can then use a standard keymap facility if they want to or provide their own functionality.
It’s a nicely layered approach that hopefully gets the best of both worlds.

Free Culture

The Score

Post author By Rhea Myers
Post date 2004-04-14

One problem with the current Creative Commons licenses is that they are used to license end products rather than cultural materials. So the recording is licensed, not the score. The film is licensed, not the CGI models. The image is licensed, not the preparatory work. The CC licenses look like licenses for end-users who will simply distribute content, rather than producer-consumers who will work with culture. The very name “Open Content”, rather than Free Culture, gives this impression.
This is an educational rather than a conceptual problem, and can be fixed. people must make sure that they provide the code with the binary -uh- they must make sure that they provide the midi files and samples with the MP3, the tex file with the document, the preparatory work and the graphic elements with the image, the screenplay and the CGI elements with the video. That way the work is much better placed to be worked with and extended rather than simply distributed and consumed.

Generative Art