Categories
Free Culture

A Hacker Manifesto

Interesting new book on a principle I’ve been talking about for a while:

A Hacker Manifesto

Eyebeam ask how you can write a manifesto for a movement you’re not part of, and whether Eric Raymond hasn’t already said everything on the subject.

The book is an outsider’s application of the hacker ethic to broader social and economic concerns than just writing software. It is not addressed to the existing hacker crowd. So it’s not a manifesto for a movement the writer is not part of, rather it’s someone bringing that movement’s content to the attention of a wider audience. That is to be applauded.

Eric Raymond’s main contribution to hacker culture has been watering down the ideology of Free Software to appeal to incumbent corporate interests. He doesn’t understand how cathedrals were built (as multi-generational, iterative realisations of a vision rather than as micro-managed waterfall projects), and the problems he has with current “””open source””” are a product of the flaws in his own arguments.

Good posting critical of ESR’s writings.

Categories
Projects

1969 – Technical

I drew the images for 1969 in red and blue peel-off china marker in an A5 sketchbook, then used the images as reference to assemble the layout for images from nuclear fallout diagrams that I’d traced by hand for 1968. Those images were in tints of primary red or green.
I copied and pasted those to their own file, added background colours, and coloured the contours with reference to a Pantone flipbook. The colours were red and blue (for political reasons), green and muted hues for landscape, pink for classical flesh, and other colours as they took my fancy.
At some point I switched from Illustrator 6 to Illustrator CS. After leaving things a few days I discarded about a dozen images I didn’t feel were quite good enough. After a couple of weeks I discarded a few more, bitmapped the images by hand, and ran two scripts to make the various vector formats and the HTML for the images.

Categories
Generative Art

Scriptographer

After upgrading to Illustrator CS I checked on Scriptographer, the excellent interactive scripting tool for Illustrator. Yes, there’s now a CS version.

Categories
Projects

Hacking Away

I’m back to hacking on Minara, which means I’m actually following my schedule for the year. I’ve added code to handle transforms and I’ve streamlined and improved the buffer & window code. I hope to have the code in CVS next week. Transform tools, colours, groups and a decent pen by next summer. Hopefully.

I’m also getting ready to do more work on rob-art. I’m just trying to learn Lisp’s packaging system at the moment, as asdf seems overkill. The next program, called “huey”, will handle colour. It will build on ae ‘s ontology. I’m reading an interesting paper on colour perception and naming at the moment, and Harold Cohen was kind enough to send me a JPEG of a wonderfully colourful current AARON picture when I emailed him recently.

Categories
Free Culture

1969

“1969” is now online under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA-20 license:

Click here to go there.

I’ll be scanning in the preparatory sketches and releasing those as well soon.

Categories
Free Culture

Remix Reading Main Site Online

The Remix reading main site is now online. Take a look (and upload some work!) at:

http://www.remixreading.org/

Categories
Free Culture

Providing Sources For Paintings (via cc-license)

For many artistic works there is source that can be provided: the preparatory work. Preparatory sketches can be provided online or in printed book format. Having access to the preparatory work for an artwork can be incredibly useful for understanding and building on the work, much like having the source code for a binary.

I have two examples of this that feature work in the style of Jackson Pollock. From the point of view of an artistic producer, at art school I was set a project to make a painting that combined two existing images. I chose a Pollock painting and a Futurist cyclist. The library had a book on the Futurists that had the preparatory sketches for the painting of the cyclist, showing how the forms of the finished painting had been abstracted from a fairly literal sketch of a man on a bicycle. This allowed me to understand and reproduce the compositional structure of the piece far more effectively than just copying the finished result would have.

From the point of view of an artistic consumer, Art & Language did some wonderful paintings of and titled “A Portrait of Lenin In The Style Of Jackson Pollock” around 1980. They made sketches of the images before painting them, and these are very useful if you can’t quite “get” the images when you first see them. Those sketches are often reproduced in exhibition catalogues and are available online.

Having access to the source material for even traditional media like painting can be very valuable for both consumers and producers. For consumers, it’s like being able to read the source code to figure out what’s going on in the binary. For producers, it enables remaking, reworking or build on the original work as surely as being able to hack and make the sources to a binary.

Categories
Free Culture

Requiring Modifiable Sources (via cc-license)

If I release an image in, say, PhotoShop format, I am limiting my audience.
If, however, I convert the image to a non-proprietary format, I will lose some of the editability of the work. Which is more important, breadth of access or depth of access? (Hmmm. This parallels some current governmental debates on the arts here in the UK 🙂 ).

In my own work this can best be illustrated by the case of some images I made about ten years ago using Adobe Dimensions (a *vector* 3D package). I couldn’t have done the work any other way at that time, I can’t convert the work to another editable format now, so what do I do? I can release the all-but-unreadable editable format, or I can render the work as a 2D vector image which is editable as far as it goes, but does not have the full editability of the 3D version. I’m about to make some more of this work in Illustrator CS, again using its unique capabilities. As I said before, if one takes FSF-style Freedom as a guiding principle, I shouldn’t even be using Illustrator. But as an artist, I need various facilities it has until Inkscape catches up, facilities Inkscape can’t even render (full-strength masking for example), and I want to provide editable files containing those features.

In the absence of a guiding principle of FSF-Freedom, this is a dilemma. A producer will want the fully editable format, they will probably have the software. A consumer will want the accessible format. I provide various formats, but even with scripts to derive various formats for me from the original, this takes effort, and with (say) a movie, the space requirements would become a consideration.

I’m not arguing against editability or accessibility, far from it, they are vital. But I do want to illustrate that this may mean something (or some things) different for Creative Commons than for Free Software.