It is not art that is weakened as it approaches the condition of design. It is the power of criticism. All art is design: a competent aesthetic response to a set of isomorphic demands.
April 2003 Archives
(Figurative) drawing and programming are both about structuring perceptions in-keeping with representational schemes to enable engaging with subjects. Competent drawing is regarded as technically conservative. Which is ridiculous given that the last fifty years have seen drawing used more than ever before. Animation, computer games, graphic design, movies and web/UI design all use drawing as part of their design process. Programming must also be technically conservative, which means that "technically conservative" is a weak and suspect label.
Data-driven programming allows a lot of the work to be moved from the code to support files. This makes programs easier to maintain and re-implement, and so more bitfast. Lispers claim Lisp is a file-format as well as a language (S-Expressions), and ontologies are often expressed in Prolog. A language that is a way of structuring data might be ideal.
Pseudocode listings, or implementations in languages simple enough to read as pseudocode (Lua) would also be robust. Harold Cohen's verbal descriptions of AARON's production systems would allow re-implementation in any programming language, but some accuracy would be lost without the supporting data.
Pseudocode listings, or implementations in languages simple enough to read as pseudocode (Lua) would also be robust. Harold Cohen's verbal descriptions of AARON's production systems would allow re-implementation in any programming language, but some accuracy would be lost without the supporting data.
Why is conceptual art criticism so hung up on breakthrough works?
This can be parodied by making a SETI-style distributed aesthetic search system, looking for new paradigms during coffee breaks.
This can be parodied by making a SETI-style distributed aesthetic search system, looking for new paradigms during coffee breaks.
Screensavers are contemporary cabinet art, with all the negative associations that brings. But if they give the viewer work to do they need not necessarily be kitsch.
Colour scheme generation by software seems to be as random as everything else (see Tim Head's work). Colour theories are cultural products and random colour is no exception. For random colour to be interesting the viewer must either see some intention into the work, or enjoy exercising their taste unchallenged. A program that works with colour in a directed way would be more interesting.
This program would colour chords to aesthetically satisfy a set of technical or referential demands, making colour schemes that have a relationship to external conditions (visually referential, expressive, social) using a set of discrete colour spaces, a colour ontology, an emotional ontology, a compositional ontology, a relational slipnet and a set of referential palettes (natural colours, city colours, clothes colours, human colours, art colours).
Valence the ontologies and start building, weigh colour proportions and relations, vary colours and backtrack to get things right for each set of conditions. Colour graphical microdomains with the colours. Start 1D (stripes) then go to 2D.
This program would colour chords to aesthetically satisfy a set of technical or referential demands, making colour schemes that have a relationship to external conditions (visually referential, expressive, social) using a set of discrete colour spaces, a colour ontology, an emotional ontology, a compositional ontology, a relational slipnet and a set of referential palettes (natural colours, city colours, clothes colours, human colours, art colours).
Valence the ontologies and start building, weigh colour proportions and relations, vary colours and backtrack to get things right for each set of conditions. Colour graphical microdomains with the colours. Start 1D (stripes) then go to 2D.
High Modernist art is full of graphical microdomains. Its grids, stripes, spots and simple geometries are much easier for programs to work on than an impressionist canvas and allow useful activity to be demonstrated without having to build a general visual parser first. Stripes are particularly useful as they are effectively one-dimensional, making relationships between each element much simpler for a program to manage.
Procion MX and Rit are good on paper. There's anecdotal evidence for lightfastness, but they won't be as lightfast as acrylic (one poster had been told 25% by a sales rep).
VCS games were produced under the Cold War, and later under Reaganomics. What would the same games look like if they were produced under The War On Terror?
Get a tri-field EM meter and search Tate Modern for the aura of the artwork. Dowsing should work well, too.
Hypnostise people, tell them they're Picasso and get them to make paintings.
Self-describing content
Distributed systems
Anti-global-capital
Anti-global-terror
Distributed systems
Anti-global-capital
Anti-global-terror
Visual device.
Compositional device.
Electronic device.
Compositional device.
Electronic device.
Tron's cyberspace.
Star Trek ; The Next Generation's computer displays
Vector graphics ( Pollock on a Vectrex )
Low resolution pixmaps ( Mondrian on a VCS )
Silkscreen gradients
R2D2's casing
Printed circuits
Star Trek ; The Next Generation's computer displays
Vector graphics ( Pollock on a Vectrex )
Low resolution pixmaps ( Mondrian on a VCS )
Silkscreen gradients
R2D2's casing
Printed circuits
Multiple shadows imply multiple light sources which implies artificial light. Or, less literally, epistemic relativism or the absence of God.
What colour would a white cube be at Arcturus? At Alpha Centauri?
What colour would a white cube be at Arcturus? At Alpha Centauri?
What it says.
Programming in Perl or Java is the conservational equivalent of painting with household gloss. For software, conservation means being able to run the program. Targeting specific systems or fashionable languages (Windows XP or Perl) will not immediately cause problems beyond limiting distribution, but when the targeted hardware starts breaking and the system or language used is no longer current or even maintained, work is left unexhibitable.
In the worst case, decades from now, software artworks will be completely incompatible with contemporary systems and they will have to be remade from source code. The language used should therefore have shown longevity and be easy to re-implement. To make it suitable for programming in the first place, the language should be expressive and should be Turing complete.
The oldest languages still in widespread use are FORTRAN, Lisp and COBOL. Lisp is the most general-purpose language of the three, but the current Lisp standard (Common Lisp) is too complex to be easily re-implemented. There is however a more lightweight version of Lisp available called Scheme. Scheme is easy to implement yet powerful enough to use for real-world programming. Scheme interpreters and compilers are available for most operating systems, and a Java-cross compiler (KAWA) is also available.
Archival quality ("bitfast") code should use well-commented and well-structured Scheme, with LIDL (a portable library suite) and a CLOS-like (object-oriented) library if required. Graphical and other interfaces should be written as needed, kept as simple as possible, and thoroughly documented. The code, its documentation, the libraries, the language standard and sample output in a raw format (also documented) should be provided on archival CD. These measures will make software art conservation a more realistic prospect than it is for much currently produced work.
In the worst case, decades from now, software artworks will be completely incompatible with contemporary systems and they will have to be remade from source code. The language used should therefore have shown longevity and be easy to re-implement. To make it suitable for programming in the first place, the language should be expressive and should be Turing complete.
The oldest languages still in widespread use are FORTRAN, Lisp and COBOL. Lisp is the most general-purpose language of the three, but the current Lisp standard (Common Lisp) is too complex to be easily re-implemented. There is however a more lightweight version of Lisp available called Scheme. Scheme is easy to implement yet powerful enough to use for real-world programming. Scheme interpreters and compilers are available for most operating systems, and a Java-cross compiler (KAWA) is also available.
Archival quality ("bitfast") code should use well-commented and well-structured Scheme, with LIDL (a portable library suite) and a CLOS-like (object-oriented) library if required. Graphical and other interfaces should be written as needed, kept as simple as possible, and thoroughly documented. The code, its documentation, the libraries, the language standard and sample output in a raw format (also documented) should be provided on archival CD. These measures will make software art conservation a more realistic prospect than it is for much currently produced work.
What it says.
The role Rosalind Picard ascribes to emotion in limiting search in "Affective Computing" is played by 'temperature' in Douglas Hofstadter's programs from "Fluid Concepts And Creative Analogies".
"There are now two conditions of the possibility of art: the address to the High Modernist spectator, and the satisfaction of the consumer of transparent images - however dressed up in the literal or the virtual." - Art & Language, 'Mother, Father Monday'.
Blur (focus), uneven lighting, dust on the plane, dust in the volume, fading & yellowing of pigments due to 'age', creasing & scratching of the support, tearing & crumpling of the support, crak(l)ing/blooming/yellowing of varnish, fading of edges, photographic grain, canvas/paper texture, halftone, digital pixels & quantisation, compression artefacts, water stains, coffee cup rings, lens flare, video blurriness, video generation degredation, black&white reproduction, b&w halftone, bad colour halftoning, 50's red, 70's yellow, 80's green & blue
The drum track has static and scratches. This is the lowest level of the music suffering the most basic ironisation. Static/scratches on vinyl are also inherently rhythmic.
Instruments are obvious samples retaining their recording (spatial and temporal) quality, or made too bright/bassy to ensure distance (ironisation).
The vocals are brought close, their raw qualities emphasised, the edges sent of the top of the meter.
Gavin Turk's rusty mirrored cubes.
Fiona Rae (no noise, though?).
The noise becomes part of the signal.
The drum track has static and scratches. This is the lowest level of the music suffering the most basic ironisation. Static/scratches on vinyl are also inherently rhythmic.
Instruments are obvious samples retaining their recording (spatial and temporal) quality, or made too bright/bassy to ensure distance (ironisation).
The vocals are brought close, their raw qualities emphasised, the edges sent of the top of the meter.
Gavin Turk's rusty mirrored cubes.
Fiona Rae (no noise, though?).
The noise becomes part of the signal.
Space, depth, perspective.
Colour, form.
Colour, form.
"The quintessentially modernist ideal of a transparent, shadowless work" - 'States of Secrecy', Michael Gauthier in ''Too Dark To Read.
"...the replacement of 'visual art' by texts was being celebrated as the driving out of allusion and shadow by transparency - a direct channel thereby being opened to the 'meanings' and 'intentions' of the artist" - 'Almost Too dark To See', Charles Harrison ibid.
"...the replacement of 'visual art' by texts was being celebrated as the driving out of allusion and shadow by transparency - a direct channel thereby being opened to the 'meanings' and 'intentions' of the artist" - 'Almost Too dark To See', Charles Harrison ibid.
Most AI art producers begin from a model of child art.
Children's art is knowledge-based, figure based, and emergent (unplanned).
In contrast, an "adult" (professional) figurative artist is observation-based, balances positive and negative space, and works on the composition before the content of the work.
A program that worked in this way would pre-scan the picture plane and tag its elements (pixels or pre-generated polygons) with relational information:
• close to the edge, centre, top, bottom, left, right
• on the edge of the picture plane
• proximity to other elements
• relative size
• formal qualities (jagged, smooth, triangular, square)
The next stage of the program can then work with a richer environment.
Embody compositional principles: golden sections, horizontal/vertical/diagonal, ground/sky line, etc.
Valence the plane, valence the compositional principles, then build the composition.
Give equal weight to figure and ground, to positive and negative space.
This is a technical exercise, but figure/ground relations are important in art. The boundary or distribution of shapes must be aesthetically interesting in some extra-aesthetic way. This sounds like "No Logo" or philosophy/business theory.
Children's art is knowledge-based, figure based, and emergent (unplanned).
In contrast, an "adult" (professional) figurative artist is observation-based, balances positive and negative space, and works on the composition before the content of the work.
A program that worked in this way would pre-scan the picture plane and tag its elements (pixels or pre-generated polygons) with relational information:
• close to the edge, centre, top, bottom, left, right
• on the edge of the picture plane
• proximity to other elements
• relative size
• formal qualities (jagged, smooth, triangular, square)
The next stage of the program can then work with a richer environment.
Embody compositional principles: golden sections, horizontal/vertical/diagonal, ground/sky line, etc.
Valence the plane, valence the compositional principles, then build the composition.
Give equal weight to figure and ground, to positive and negative space.
This is a technical exercise, but figure/ground relations are important in art. The boundary or distribution of shapes must be aesthetically interesting in some extra-aesthetic way. This sounds like "No Logo" or philosophy/business theory.
The beholder gazes at the artwork, disinterested, finding immanent and unmediated emotional experience contained within it.
The consumer views the artwork, their discourse unreflectingly illustrated by it.
The participant renders the artwork, engaging with it to generate the experience of it. Canvases are scene-graph scripts or interactors.
The consumer views the artwork, their discourse unreflectingly illustrated by it.
The participant renders the artwork, engaging with it to generate the experience of it. Canvases are scene-graph scripts or interactors.
Richter's blurry photo paintings as critique.
JPEGs are a 'green' format, conserving limited resources (in bad conscience). They prioritise distribution over fidelity. Their participant's gaze ignores loss. reconstituting it from expectation, glad to receive an approximation in less time.
'JPEG is designed for compressing either full-color or gray-scale images
of natural, real-world scenes. It works well on photographs, naturalistic
artwork, and similar material; not so well on lettering, simple cartoons,
or line drawings. JPEG handles only still images, but there is a related
standard called MPEG for motion pictures.
JPEG is "lossy," meaning that the decompressed image isn't quite the same as
the one you started with. (There are lossless image compression algorithms,
but JPEG achieves much greater compression than is possible with lossless
methods.) JPEG is designed to exploit known limitations of the human eye,
notably the fact that small color changes are perceived less accurately than
small changes in brightness. Thus, JPEG is intended for compressing images
that will be looked at by humans. If you plan to machine-analyze your
images, the small errors introduced by JPEG may be a problem for you, even
if they are invisible to the eye.' - http://www.faqs.org/faqs/jpeg-faq/part1/
JPEGs are a 'green' format, conserving limited resources (in bad conscience). They prioritise distribution over fidelity. Their participant's gaze ignores loss. reconstituting it from expectation, glad to receive an approximation in less time.
'JPEG is designed for compressing either full-color or gray-scale images
of natural, real-world scenes. It works well on photographs, naturalistic
artwork, and similar material; not so well on lettering, simple cartoons,
or line drawings. JPEG handles only still images, but there is a related
standard called MPEG for motion pictures.
JPEG is "lossy," meaning that the decompressed image isn't quite the same as
the one you started with. (There are lossless image compression algorithms,
but JPEG achieves much greater compression than is possible with lossless
methods.) JPEG is designed to exploit known limitations of the human eye,
notably the fact that small color changes are perceived less accurately than
small changes in brightness. Thus, JPEG is intended for compressing images
that will be looked at by humans. If you plan to machine-analyze your
images, the small errors introduced by JPEG may be a problem for you, even
if they are invisible to the eye.' - http://www.faqs.org/faqs/jpeg-faq/part1/
Flecks of light cast by a glitterball.
Scanned by a laser.
Hit by a torch beam.
Glass under a spot light.
Lit by a photocopier or a scanner.
A camera flash.
Scanned by a laser.
Hit by a torch beam.
Glass under a spot light.
Lit by a photocopier or a scanner.
A camera flash.
Practice masking acrylic with advesive vinyl.
Is it possible to photosensitise oil paint, or to dry oil by exposing it to UV through a negative and then wash off any unexposed areas with solvent?
Is it possible to photosensitise oil paint, or to dry oil by exposing it to UV through a negative and then wash off any unexposed areas with solvent?
"Imagine you are in England."
"Anthony, sculptor."
"Placebo"
"Anthony, sculptor."
"Placebo"
Nine different coloured black squares (3x3 grid canvas).
Nine different white squares.
Nine coloured greys.
Nine different white squares.
Nine coloured greys.
• Screensaver?
• Algorithmically simulate paint pours.
• Flow & topography.
• Algorithmically simulate paint pours.
• Flow & topography.
• Modulate colours to encode info - barcodes? Five levels.
• Halftone.
• Red/blue 3D.
• Ultraviolet paint.
• Non-repro blue.
• Varnish/transparent medium.
• Gloss.
• Halftone.
• Red/blue 3D.
• Ultraviolet paint.
• Non-repro blue.
• Varnish/transparent medium.
• Gloss.
• Paint splashes and pours with words masked over
• Tie-dye with words masked over.
• Pours, drips, splatters masked over each other.
• Masked word drips/pours.
• Tie-dye with words masked over.
• Pours, drips, splatters masked over each other.
• Masked word drips/pours.
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