Categories
Free Culture

Libertinage Font Now Available

OSP’s Libertinage font is now available here.

Libertinage was commissioned for the FLOSS+Art book. It’s licenced under the OFL, which is emerging as the standard licence for fonts.

OSP say –

Libertinage is a remix of Linux Libertine and was designed in August 2008.

For more detailed information: ospublish.constantvzw.org


We built Libertinage by copying and pasting parts of Linux Libertine
glyphs. There are 26 variations, one for each latin letter in the
alphabet.


Libertinage.ttf is the ‘Full’ version, containing all modifications.


Single letter versions are named Libertinage-a, Libertinage-b,
Libertinage-c… depending on the letter that was changed. All 26 are
gathered in the Libertinage package as .ttf files.


‘La vie est triste comme un verre de grenadine’


Mylène Farmer, Libertine (1985)

OSP have an excellent blog on using Free Software for design work here.

Categories
Free Culture

How pure:dyne is for Artists

pure:dyne is made by artists for artists. It is used by artists to create and display or perform their own work, and to run workshops and events at galleries, educational institutions and media labs. This means that its design has had to meet the needs and tastes of artists in real-world situations.

Which means that:

  • It’s based on a robust base GNU/Linux distro, Debian. Anything that the standard pure:dyne installation lacks can usually be found available for Debian.
  • It has a real-time kernel and a lean and resource-light window manager. This means that the system is faster and more responsive, which is vital for live music and video or for intensive media editing.
  • It includes all the most popular media art packages, some from Debian, some packaged by the pure:dyne team. The pure:dyne packages will be pushed back upstream to Debian.
  • It has a minimal desktop UI that is intuitive and empowering while taking up the minimum of screen real estate and avoiding distracting, resource-draining visual bling.
  • It is available as a very reliable live CD or USB system as standard. This is important for workshops, where the hardware available may be old, heterogenous, flaky or all three.

pure:dyne may not be for the likes of Jeff Koons or Damian Hirst, but it has the support of the Arts Council in England and an international team of developers for whom it is part of their practice and livelihood as artists. It has evolved through real-world usage into a very usable tool that looks, feels, and performs well for its chosen user base.

Categories
Aesthetics Art Computing Free Culture

Pure:dyne Discussion on Netbehaviour

http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=322


Marc invited two team members of the GOTO10 collective, Heather Corcoran and Aymeric Mansoux to discuss about pure:dyne on the Netbehaviour.org list.


The discussion took place between October 16th – 23rd Oct 08. An
interview and an open discussion was joined by other list members of
Netbehaviour.

This is an excellent insight into an art computing project.

I’ve now switched to pure:dyne based on this discussion.

Categories
Free Culture

FLOSS+Art Book Now Available

http://goto10.org/flossart/

FLOSS+Art critically reflects on the growing relationship between
Free Software ideology, open content and digital art. It provides a
view onto the social, political and economic myths and realities linked
to this phenomenon.

With contributions from: Fabianne Balvedi, Florian Cramer, Sher
Doruff, Nancy Mauro Flude, Olga Goriunova, Dave Griffiths, Ross Harley,
Martin Howse, Shahee Ilyas, Ricardo Lafuente, Ivan Monroy Lopez, Thor
Magnusson, Alex McLean, Rob Myers, Alejandra Maria Perez Nuñez,
Eleonora Oreggia, oRx-qX, Julien Ottavi, Michael van Schaik, Femke
Snelting, Pedro Soler, Hans Christoph Steiner, Prodromos Tsiavos, Simon
Yuill

Compiled and edited by Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk.

Categories
Free Culture Projects

FLOSS+Art Book Launch


FLOSS+Art: Book preview, panel discussion and software party


Thursday 23 October
18:30 – 20:30


@ Mute Magazine HQ
The Whitechapel Centre
85 Myrdle Street
London E1 1HL


ABOUT THE BOOK:


FLOSS+Art critically reflects on the growing relationship between Free
Software ideology, open content and digital art. It provides a view onto
the social, political and economic myths and realities linked to this
phenomenon.


With contributions from: Fabianne Balvedi, Florian Cramer, Sher Doruff,
Nancy Mauro Flude, Olga Goriunova, Dave Griffiths, Ross Harley, Martin
Howse, Shahee Ilyas, Ricardo Lafuente, Ivan Monroy Lopez, Thor
Magnusson, Alex McLean,
Rob Myers, Alejandra Maria Perez Nuñez, Eleonora Oreggia, oRx-qX,
Julien Ottavi, Michael van Schaik, Femke Snelting, Pedro Soler, Hans
Christoph Steiner, Prodromos Tsiavos, Simon Yuill


Compiled and edited by Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk.

My contribution to the book is a greatly expanded version of the most popular post from this blog, “Open Source Art Again”, with additional quotations and references. I’ve seen one of the other contributions and I know several of the other contributors so I can say without being arrogant that I know there’s going to be some very good stuff in this book.

Categories
Aesthetics Howto

The Agile Artist 3 – Getting Real

Getting Real” is 37 Signals’ book of advice for developing internet software more quickly, more easily, and more successfully. As with “Getting Things Done”, this may not at first sound particularly relevant for making art. But Getting Real’s approach to projects is a very dynamic and creative one, and even if not all of its details are appropriate for art making (or for every artist), there’s lots of good ideas if you take the time to map them onto art practice.

To pick a few section headings…

I always try to solve my own problems in art, I can never get enthusiastic about art for an external agenda. I usually pick a fight when
making art, many of my series of works are ironizations of worldviews I
disagree with or of artists whose work I dislike. I try to get at least one piece in a series finished as soon as possible to keep up my morale. I give samples away for free
with images of work available on the website and as postcards and other
physical items available from me in person. And I always try to give
series of works memorable names.

Just read “art” for “software” and “studio” for “organization” and much of it makes sense, or is at least thought provoking. The chapters on “Staffing”, “Code”, “Interface Design” and “Words” won’t be relevant. Do surprise me in the comments, though… 😉 .

Categories
Aesthetics

Value In The Work

Damien Hirst’s diamond skull “For The Love Of God”, 2007, is owned fractionally by Hirst, his dealer and an anonymous investment group. As the monetary value of the work rises and falls, the value of the fraction of it owned by each investor in the work will rise and fall with it. Their values have proportion and relations.

It’s possible to imagine short selling, leveraging and other financial abstractions and transformations being applied to this value. The fact of their application might affect the monetary value of the work. And the monetary value of the work is in no small way part of the work aesthetically. The economics of the work reach into its aesthetics.

Ashley Bickerton’s “Le Art (Composition with Logos 2)”, 1987, is covered with a number of corporate logos. The recognizability and relevance of the logos is part of the aesthetics of the work. The work will change as the fortunes of the companies or their logos vary.

With both Hirst’s work and Bickerton’s there is still a physical artwork as the ground for the financial figures of the aesthetics of the piece. As with relational art, a more thorough dematerialization of the artwork (a greater primacy for its gross ideological rather than aesthetic principles) might require a greater physicality. Rather than a work of pure economic figures, the ground of a flea market (or its haute couture equivalent, an auction house) might be required.

Categories
Howto

Setting the SVG MIME Type in Subversion

If you have directories containing SVG files that you wish to add to a Subversion repository and you wish them to display as images rather than XML when someone broswes the repository in a web broswer, run the following in the local parent directory then commit it:

svn propset svn:mime-type image/svg+xml */*.svg

Categories
Aesthetics Howto

The Agile Artist 2 – Web 2.0 Productivity

There are many Web 2,0 sites that allow you to organize projects using Wikis, checklists of to-do items, calendars and other systems. These can be of use to artists.

37 Signals are the leaders in this area but their work is not Free Software so I recommend Joyent’s Connector and Wikidot instead, or even better software installed on your own server.

Two posts from 37 Signals’s blog illusttrate how to use Web 2.0 productivity services to help organize art practice.

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1226-how-to-manage-long-breaks-in-your-software-side-projects

Use a todo/checklist service to remind you of ideas you have yet to try or tasks that you need to complete for a project. Then when you return to the project after an interruption you can quickly remind yourself of what needs doing.

http://37signals.blogs.com/products/2008/08/backpack-helps.html

Use a wiki-style service to gather research materials such as images, references and notes for a project.

Although these examples are for software develoment and an academic research respectively it is easy to see how their lessons can be used to help organize art porjects.

Categories
Aesthetics Howto

The Agile Artist 1 – Getting Things Done

The book “Getting Things Done” by David Allen describes an over-arching system for organizing work and life. It has two ideas that I think artists can use without adopting the system wholesale.

The first is to organize the working materials for projects into their own, physical, folders. Then when you need to return to the project you just get the folder and you immediately have all the materials you need to hand. Substitute “area of the studio”, “rack”, “drawer” or “portfolio” to taste. You don’t need separate sketchbooks, and the system allows for an unsorted folder and other ways for ideas to mix and percolate.

The second is to break tasks down into quickly achievable “next actions”, ideally achievable in 20 minutes or less each. So rather than “make 20 paintings for the show”, “mark up the next canvas” or “sketch the cat”. Yes, much of the value of art is long periods of visual contemplation or creative “flow”. But you need to get there, and worrying about the big picture is less constructive than building up to that state slowly but surely.

There may be more in Getting Things Done of interest to individual artists, and its system is applicable to admin and other non-art work as well. It’s well worth a read.