Categories
Generative Art

Jason Santa Maria | Learning from Atari

Jason Santa Maria | Learning from Atari

I scanned in all the pages from the catalog and posted them on Flickr: Atari Game Catalog, 1981. Look at how enigmatic the artwork for titles like Haunted House or Super Breakout was. Stunning.

Categories
Generative Art Projects

Chordinator – Sort By Value

This version sorts by value (brightness – saturation), but still only alters brightness. The effects are good, although some colours are obviously too saturated for their position. Possibly saturation needs linearising as well. So the dark blue in the first palette below looks too dark for its position (it isn’t, but it is too saturated), and the magenta in the palette below it looks too bright (again, it isn’t, but the saturation is out of position).

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I tried linearising the saturation as well but that looked too bland. I’ll try it again, but looking at the illustrations in “Colouring Without Seeing” I think the colours in figure 16 have the same quality of occasional intensity mismatches. Or possibly its just the greater difference in colour between those colours and their neighbours.

Much better. I now need to add the conceptual colour stuff from ae and cybernetic, beef up the slipnet and assign colour values to the colour names. This will allow the colours to be chosen referentially and relationally rather than randomly.

When I roll this code back into draw-something the colours from the palette will be applied to the shapes in a drawing by varying them conceptually (tint/tone scales and shadow/midtone/highlight-type application). The palette will be organised something like plane/object/group/item, with each stage adding a function to be composed to get the final value (I’m using closures like a real Lisp programmer now! 🙂 ).

Categories
Free Culture

Free the Pig

Push the Third Button Twice: Free the Pig

So what does it cost to Free the Pig? 100 people pledging $20 each.

Help make a book BY-SA! 20USD is about twelve quid, and you’re building the commons. I’ve paid already.

Categories
Generative Art Projects

Chordinator

chordinator is the name of the stand-alone colour palette generator for rob-art. It’s based on the system that Harold Cohen describes in “Colouring Without Seeing”.

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I think I need to combine the brightness and saturation scores into a single value, and possibly add weights for different parts of the colour wheel.

When it’s working well I’ll roll the code into draw-something (it currently uses copied-and-pasted versions of the colour and postscript code).

Categories
Free Culture

The Crown’s copyright con Becky Hogge – openDemocracy

The Crown's copyright con Becky Hogge – openDemocracy

As the UK government abuses copyright law to stifle free speech and obstruct freedom of information, the case of Craig Murray reveals how the impulse of power to control dissent is crushing democratic rights anew.

Categories
Aesthetics Free Culture

Cultural Functional Equivalency?

GNU’s not UNIX. But it can provide a functional equivalent to UNIX. A functional equivalent is something that you could swap the original for and it would perform the same. So a UNIX program, properly recompiled, should run on GNU the same as it would run on UNIX.

Computer programs run by linking to libraries of pre-written code that allow the program to draw on the screen or access the internet or whatever. This linking is a form of reference to existing work, but it is also a form of inclusion, since the program includes the functions of the library. In American law this makes the program a derivative work of the library, a fact that is used by the GNU GPL to enforce copyleft. The program may configure or alter the behaviour of the included library (through the use of callbacks or parameter blocks for example), which would amount to a form remixing (with normal inclusion as sampling).

Can there be a functional equivalent for a cultural work in the same way there can be for a work of computer code? That is, can we produce Free equivalents to canonical works of Proprietary culture? Computer code is essentially mathematics, and there may be more than one way to model the same mathematical algorithm in code. Cultural work may or may not be mathematics, but there is a factor that works against functional equivalency for cultural work. That is authenticity, or the spectre of the fake.

An attempt at a functional equivalent for a cultural work that resembles the original directly will be a fake. Nelson Goodman argues that a work’s status as a fake may have aesthetic import, and that even if a work is not visible as a fake today it may be visible as a fake in the future. It is the aesthetics of a cultural work that are its function, however one conceives of aesthetics. A fake cannot be a functional equivalent, since its status as a fake may be perceptible and this will cause its aesthetic function to fail.

Art has a longer history than code. Prior to the turn of the twentieth century, most of the history or art is available to refer to. With the rise of “no photography” museums and the threat of DRM, this cannot be taken for granted. Most twentieth century art, and all contemporary art, is available only under limited and shrinking Fair Use or Fair Dealing provisions. This is in contrast to the wholesale incorporation of existing iconography and compositions in historical works.

Prior to Modernism, functional equivalents are not currently necessary. For Modernism, because of Goodman, functional equivalents may not be possible. But much modernism is based on abstraction, particularly geometric abstraction. It is based, in other words, on mathematics. So functional equivalents might be possible. Works that directly resemble canonical Modernist works might still infringe copyright. I do not know how different a work would have to be, and if it is too different it would not be a functional equivalent. This leaves work that attempts to achieve indirect functional equivalency, using different colours or shapes or schemata to achieve the same aesthetic or conceptual effects. Where this is not nonsensical, it will be difficult to evaluate equivalency and works may simply not be recognisable as an aesthetic equivalent to a specific work or oeuvre. It will be an original work, and any reference to it will not be the equivalent of a reference to the work it is intended to replace.

Functional equivalency may not work as a foundation for Free Culture as it does for Free Software. We may have to simply ignore modern and contemporary work that cannot be licensed. This fact may still provide a negative creative space for Free Culture to create its forms around. Finding allusive means of reference, locating works that can actually be sampled, and making attempts at indirect functional equivalents may be interesting aesthetic tasks in their own right, may have their own cultural value, and may provide indices as interesting in their own way as the increasingly proprietary recent history of art.

Categories
Aesthetics Free Culture Howto

Fallon Planning Blog: Culture: Experimental Research Methodologies

Fallon Planning Blog: Culture: Experimental Research Methodologies
I have been collecting interesting approaches that Planners may consider with regard to documenting (and imaging) the pulse of the people, beyond our customary street poll, focus group and omnibus surveys. Here are some great, natural and organic methods to explore what’s going on in people’s lives (see the PUBLIC SPEAKS links on the sidelines to the right, too, for ongoing sites, and suggest more if you know any).

Categories
Free Culture

Open Source Culture: Resource Files

Open Source Culture: Resource Files

Open Source Culture Filez

Categories
Free Culture

Pragmatists and Idealists On The Commons

I wrote below that I have no time for this “pragmatists vs. idealists” false dichotomy that some people are trying to set up in free culture. There are social idealists and economic idealists in the free culture community, and the social idealists have ceded far more to economically-oriented “pragmatism” than the economic idealists have ceded to socially-oriented “pragmatism”.

Politics is always the business of the other side, one’s own politics is simply pragmatism. Concentrating on tools or noncommercialness is an ideological decision, and serves someone’s ideals. These may not in reality be your own ideals. Concentrating on tools or noncommercialness may in fact undermine your ability to concentrate on tools or noncommercialness, as you serve ideals globally that are different from the ones you pursue locally.

Success and popularity are not the same thing. The latter may or may not be a measure of the former, the former is not implied by the latter. The millions and millions of noncommercial works that will never be re-used, built upon, transformed or even used to start with are a good illustration of this. And they will make millionaires no more effectively than the studio systems of music, media and publishing. Which is to say not very.

Reflexivity is the key to the commons. Venture Capitalists and Marxists can both benefit from reflexive projects, projects that exist to serve the commons and do not prevent the commons being used pluralistically, to whatever ends people wish as long as those ends do not harm the commons.

The most-used, and largest, free culture project is Wikipedia. That is a copyleft project, reflexive, and it allows commercial use (I must come up with a word for that which has the trance quality of “noncommercial”). These two facts are not unrelated. Wikipedia’s strong social ideology allow people to get on and work on tools, not worry about noncommercialising anything, and, dare I say it, to just have fun.

Categories
Free Culture

A Skeptical View Of CC

A Skeptical View Of A Worthy Pursuit – Niva Elkin-Koren

This is an in-depth guided tour of the problems that Creative Commons licensing has as a project. I don’t agree with all of its conclusions, but it is spot on about licence pluralism and the need to tackle more general reform. (Via Technollama).