April 2004 Archives

Art And Fear

By Rob Myers on April 28, 2004 7:39 PM
Virillio's back and he's got the caps lock key working again. He's also got the benefit of a readable translation this time.
It's strange to think that "Art and Fear" was written before September 11th. The Midlantic Tachyon Projectors are as nothing compared to the Chunnel ones...
"Art and Fear" is the closest I've read to any sort of signpost in art in a long time, and that alone would make it worth reading. There's much more to it, though. The triumph of the aesthetics of Auschwitz in art and science and the removal of the right to silence (or rather not to be spoken for) are the twin threads of its two lectures/essays. They're good reading, thought provoking, and have that unsettling, "Twilight Zone"-straw-donkey-with-drugs-in feel of Virilio at his most urgent. And despite the fact that it never mentions them, it's yet another view on just why the Chapman Brothers suck so badly.
I don't know why Stelarc scares Virilio, though. Stelarc hasn't threatened to cryogenically freeze *Virilio's* head.... :-)

Computer Arts Society

By Rob Myers on April 28, 2004 7:27 PM
The CAS is restarting. See the homepage at the BCA, or contact christos@logothetis.co.uk (the name given out on flyers at the Harold Cohen talk).

Harold Cohen Talk Last Night At The Tate

By Rob Myers on April 28, 2004 7:18 PM
Harold Cohen gave a good talk, and a good Q&A session afterwards (including fielding questions from Huw Jones from the Landsdowne Centre For Electronic Arts and Dave Bausola from Ixi). I managed to meet Harold and briefly say hello beforehand.

I can't do justice to the talk in a weblog entry, so it's fortunate that a video of the talk will soon be online here. The talk ranged over Harold Cohen's introduction to computing, the potential of technology, the artistic demands of expertise and technological innovation in an "idiot-proof" age, the struggle to explain colour to AARON, how AARON's latest work came about, and more.

AARON's latest work is painting-based with a wider range of objects, shadows, and more expressive virtual "brushwork" as well as a new palette made possible by its new archival quality large-scale inkjet printer. It's strange seeing AARON's plants and other objects without their traditional black outlines, but AARON is now truly painting rather than colouring drawings. I do wonder about "simulating" the layering of opaque colour to be rendered flat by an inkjet printer: this feels different from the physical "proofs" AARON has produced previously, but the results certainly look good and the effect could be achieved with real opaque paint anyway. I think I missed several minutes of the talk just looking at the slides of the new images as they were shown. I'll need to check that archive myself to see what I missed. :-)

Open Clip Art

By Rob Myers on April 28, 2004 7:00 PM
Via Creative Commons, the Open Clip Art project from Freedesktop.org.

Clip art is horrible. Here's an opportunity to change that... :-)

On “Language�

By Rob Myers on April 24, 2004 11:17 PM
(From a discussion on Aesthetics-L)

The existence of a penumbra does not cause light and dark to wink out
of existence. Ordinary language philosophy's obsession with edge-cases
fills lonely evenings but ignores the break-out strategy of
*generating* language.

I don't know what the opposite of bootstrapping is (self-obviating?),
but linguistic arguments regarding the limit of language have an
obvious and fatal flaw, as do attempts to communicate on the limits of
communication...

Most people don't care how language works. It usually doesn't fail to
in some way. History and fiction are full of examples of the failure of
language and communication both tragic and amusing, the limit of
language is not a stunning philosophical insight. What is stunning
about philosophy is the failure to get with the program and accept
fuzziness, poetry, or any other continuous, combinatorial idea of
language rather than wallow in late Modernism's dreary fascination with
pathology and bogus exactitude. Language is not discrete, and if it was
you'd hit Godel anyway. There is a signal in the noise. Get used to the
static, or ironise it into signal like Trip Hop did.

Language (and art) is (potentially) infinite. It is possible to
characterise and show the limits of infinite series (or whatever, you
can work with them anyway), but given that human experience and lives
are finite, this is unlikely to be a serious problem. At worst we have
to accept that meaning is fuzzy and lazily evaluated. Which is
potential, not limit.

If there are no ideas, no concepts, no language and no communication,
or they are broken, or we are deluded in our understanding of how they
work or that they work, something very strange is going on. That would
be an interesting focus for philosophy, and since it involves
appearance(s), aesthetics.

Linguistic enamourment is masturbatory, and linguistic reflexiveness is
historically deconstructable...

Generative Philosophy

By Rob Myers on April 23, 2004 8:20 PM
Looking at Bayesian-filter-busting spam email, I had an idea. Train a genetic algorithm to make Markov chains. Train the chain on Project Gutenberg's philosophical texts. Train a spam filter on the same texts. Then evolve philosophical texts, evaluating them by keeping the ones that the filter catches.
Generative philosophy...

…And What I Use

By Rob Myers on April 22, 2004 9:08 PM
Inspired by the animators, I've taken to using red & blue 0.5mm propellor pencil leads from Pentel along with Staedtler Marsmicro 0.5mms for light sketches, and red, blue & black Sanford Peel-Offs for heavier work. Mirado Black Warriors are good on smooth paper, but I prefer Derwent Sketching pencils for rougher paper (sketchbooks rather than copier).

Materials Fetishism Two: Phallic Symbols

By Rob Myers on April 22, 2004 9:05 PM
Pencils seen used by animators in documentaries on Disney, Pixar, and The Simpsons:
(Tuscan Red?) Berol Verithin
Staedtler Mars Lumograph
Sanford Black Peel-Off China Marker (!) Yep, Glen Keane...
Mirado Black Warrior
Mirado Yellow

The lead pencils often have coloured erasers on the end, even those with integral erasers.

Interesting Project Gutenberg Texts

By Rob Myers on April 22, 2004 8:48 PM

Adorno

By Rob Myers on April 22, 2004 8:44 PM
I've started trying to read "Aesthetic Theory". I suspect it's a bad translation, because the introduction is as unreadable as the main text, possibly even less so. Like recent Virilio translations...
There's a critique of the book on Amazon.com that mistakenly believes Adorno's musical biases to be "the intellectual equivalent of white flight", whereas in fact I imagine that they're just anti-American, as he left the place to return to Germany before writing "Aesthetic Theory"...

The Story Of Art

By Rob Myers on April 20, 2004 6:08 PM
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

By Rob Myers on April 19, 2004 6:07 PM
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.

Hacking

By Rob Myers on April 17, 2004 10:55 PM
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.

After “Draw Something�

By Rob Myers on April 17, 2004 3:44 PM
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.

The Cathedral And The Bazaar

By Rob Myers on April 17, 2004 3:40 PM
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...

Minara: Input Handling

By Rob Myers on April 15, 2004 8:45 PM
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.

The Score

By Rob Myers on April 13, 2004 8:37 PM
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.

Stimuli

By Rob Myers on April 12, 2004 2:20 PM
Programs are stimuli for computers.

Intellectual Property

By Rob Myers on April 12, 2004 2:19 PM
If it's intellectual property, how come I don't own it if I pay for it?

The World As Code

By Rob Myers on April 12, 2004 2:18 PM
Religion: The world is declarative.
Atheism: The world is functional.
Management: The world is imperative.

Stop Software Patents In Europe

By Rob Myers on April 11, 2004 8:48 PM
Software patents are bad for business and bad for creativity. Help stop the EU from introducing them. The EU want to override the European Parliament's democratic decision against software patents, and to go against hundreds of thousands of their citizens who have spoken out directly against software patents:
http://demo.ffii.org/

Harold Cohen Talk at Tate Modern

By Rob Myers on April 11, 2004 8:43 PM
Harold Cohen is giving a talk at Tate Modern on Tuesday 27th April at 6.30pm
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/eventseducation/cohen.htm

Drawing People

By Rob Myers on April 11, 2004 5:43 PM
There's the objection to drawing people that you cannot know what another person is thinking or doing, so seeking to represent them is misrepresentation, projection, falsehood. For me, drawing people is the opposite of this. People are unknowable, you have to admit this to draw them, you admit this by drawing them. Drawing them is dealing with the unknowable. There's a sense of wonder in all this, you can't be arrogant, there's no possibility of divine revelation underwriting it.
What am I drawing when I'm drawing people? I don't know. But I wish that I could.

Creativity

By Rob Myers on April 10, 2004 11:25 PM
Work like Gips & Stiny's hand painted shape grammars or Harold Cohen's AARON is creative, as the problems and solutions are identified in the creation of the work and the resulting style is necessary and historically unprecedented. H-creative, in Margaret Boden's terminology.

Creativity (Not)

By Rob Myers on April 8, 2004 7:41 PM
The fact that some programs can produce variations on existing styles (usually Kandinsky or Mondrian) does not show that programs can be creative. The mechanisation of an existing style in humans shows a lack of creativity. The creation of new styles (the discovering and solving of new problems) is the hallmark of creativity, as long as the results are Realistic for the conditions of their production.

Proofs

By Rob Myers on April 8, 2004 7:41 PM
One advantage of using programs to make art is that the results are "proofs" of the theory of artistic production embodied in the program. Like the proofs of a mathematical theory, or the proofs of an etching. Or like an aesthetic Turing test, if a human being can't tell the difference between a drawing made by a program and one made by another human being, the program has been proven to be successfully reproducing a human level of artistic production.

Bait And Switch

By Rob Myers on April 7, 2004 10:29 PM
Totalitarian art is brought to the attention by extra-aesthetic means; its association with and dissemination by totalitarianism. It might not otherwise be noteworthy. Any attempt to turn a somehow made-innocent eye on it to find aesthetic value in it is rehabilitating its extra-aesthetic aspect, not its aesthetics.
To do so is a bait-and-switch:
1. An object that is aesthetically uninteresting is given prominence.
2. It is suggested that since this object has prominence it may be aesthetic.
3. It is suggested that this is independent of its extra-aesthetic qualities.
4. Voila! An unaesthetic object of interest only because it has been peddled by totalitarianism is rendered an object of aesthetic regard.

A Free Library

By Rob Myers on April 5, 2004 9:51 PM

Random Aesthetics Links

By Rob Myers on April 5, 2004 9:46 PM

Dropping A Constraint on rob-art (ouch)

By Rob Myers on April 3, 2004 3:05 PM
The previous images from rob-art used "convex hulls" (shapes with no inward-heading lines) to draw around. Dropping the convexity (and also the non-intersection) constraint by using a random set of points (and taking out the skeleton for the last three) gives results like this:




There's some cases where the drawing algorithm can't find its way around such a random set of lines. It's useful to see this for debugging. You can't see it on these small images, but the lines are still slightly random as a result of the pathfinding algorithm (which is the effect I want).
I quite like these shapes, they're like some of my early Blobs prototypes. The rounded corners are an emergent property of the drawing algorithm, which is nice because I wanted this effect but I hadn't worked out how to get it yet. :-)

And Some UK Links

By Rob Myers on April 2, 2004 1:12 PM

Good Links on (American) Copyright From Groklaw

By Rob Myers on April 2, 2004 1:01 PM

Art As Programming

By Rob Myers on April 1, 2004 11:13 PM
Here's Knuth's original "Art As Programming" lecture as a PDF:

http://www.bluetail.com/~luke/misc/knuth-turingaward.pdf

Any new activity tries to dignify itself by declaring itself "the same as" an older, more respected activity. Art is still trying to make out it's a liberal art... As the new activity becomes more respected for its own achievements, this becomes less of a necessity.

I'd make the opposite claim to Knuth. It's not that programming is an art. it's that art is a form of programming. By this I mean it is a way of structuring a set of symbols to generate a state or set of states in a given system, in this case human consciousness. The state generated may not be the same in all people but then a program may not generate the same states (or even run) on different machines, even if it's written in java or ANSI C.

Cave paintings are programs for hunts or rituals, and it goes on from there...

rob-art In Progress

By Rob Myers on April 1, 2004 3:23 PM
Here's rob-art (formerly Got To Start Somewhere) making some baby steps drawing around shapes. The second image is the bottom-left part of the first image to show how the path around the shape is slightly random.



Drop The Constraint

By Rob Myers on April 1, 2004 1:19 PM
An aesthetic can be regarded as a set of constraints. "Realistic" representation has the constraint that everything share a common viewpoint and space. Other constraints may be more important. If showing forms from their canonical viewpoint is more important, you have to drop the constraint on showing things from the same viewpoint. If you do so, you get Egyptian art or some of Picasso's work.

Drafting The Gift Domain

By Rob Myers on April 1, 2004 1:16 PM
Greg London's "Drafting The Gift Domain" is an excellent introduction to the legal basis of Free Culture. Greg takes a nonpartisan look at the history, development and current state of copyright and patent law (in America), the recent development of Copyleft and why some licenses are better than others for ensuring the development of what he calls the "gift domain". Well worth a read.
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