robmyers: May 2004 Archives

Fire At Saatchi Warehouse

By Rob Myers on May 27, 2004 5:50 AM

Art-like objects destroyed including Hirst and Chapman products:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3747963.stm

Hope none of the good stuff was damaged. Do they make flame-retardent canvas?

Creative Commons 2.0 Licenses Are Out!

By Rob Myers on May 26, 2004 9:20 AM

The Creative Commons 2.0 licenses are out.

They cover music and combining works much better than the 1.0 license, but miss the crucial "representation of authority to contribute" clause that makes people think about whether they really are allowed to release Star Wars as Open Content. This was too strict in the original license, but is present in a milder form in several other licenses, and should have been kept in a watered-down form IMHO.

If you are making music or want a good license that allows the kind of cross-media explosion that Lawrence Lessig's "Free Culture" has seen, this is the license for you. If you are concerned about preventing the SCOs of this world attacking Free Culture, the Free Software Foundation's procedures for handling contributions may provide a good model.

Congratulations to the CC team for getting these licenses out and for robustly enabling cross-media Free Culture.

Draw Something More

By Rob Myers on May 23, 2004 2:47 AM

The next thing I want to get Draw Something to do is to assemble and draw figures made from several simpler shapes.
The current system starts with a set of random points (or lines, depending on how you look at it), finds the "convex hull" (the simplest shape that contains them), then draws around that. This is a very, very simple analogue to constructive drawing for illustration where shapes are built up around a skeleton or armature and then drawn around to construct a figure. It is a similarly simply analogue to artistic observation and rendering of some part of the visible world.
Following these comparisons, Draw Something assembling simple shapes (convex hulls again) into more complex figures will trivially model assembling or revising a composition from preparatory sketches. The shapes will be generated randomly on the page then moved into position so that they all overlap (making multiple figures is a future task). I like the idea of drawing the starting lines and hulls in light blue, the assembled hulls in darker blue (or red), and the finished outline in black to show how the figure has been assembled (the colours come from drawing for animation).
I was worried that this was an arbitrary task to set the program until I realised that making simpler shapes, composing them and outlining them is exactly how I constructed my "Blobs". So in fact this is a task I have productively set myself in the past, and it will be interesting to see what Draw Something makes of it.

I've moved to LiveJournal…

By Rob Myers on May 22, 2004 9:32 AM

I've moved to LiveJournal.
See: http://www.livejournal.com/users/robmyers/

Minara In Progress

By Rob Myers on May 22, 2004 9:00 AM

I've finished most of the object picking code I need so far, just line and curve intersection to do (these are well-known standard algorithms. The curve one I'll implement in C for speed). They'll be as sloooow as I expected: rendering the scene to find where the graphics are under the mouse then doing a text search of the image source to find this point in the program is insanely inefficient. And how we'll handle symbols and functions I don't know (keep hashtables of each and have some sort of lookup scheme, probably, with the user responsible for writing picking versions of functions as a worst case).

I'm doing less well with colour. I've got LittleCMS, but the idea of having colour primaries as gamut-limit XYZA tuples means that gamut checking hopefully isn't a problem. What LCMS could be useful for is mapping the abstract percentage of the colour to the actual strength of colour on the screen or the press, which won't be linear. But I don't know if I want to do that just yet.

How do we do colour picking? Make an image with percentages of each of the primaries in, display that, and update the mix when the user clicks, accepting when they double click. Who needs GUI widgets? :-)

Hackers And Painters

By Rob Myers on May 20, 2004 8:06 AM

Hackers and Painters is out. It looks good. I'm just waiting for Amazon.uk to get my copy past the tachyon projectors.

Wired has a good review

Sample chapter, "hackers and painters" (pdf).

See the book site for more details and reviews.

More Paul Graham essays can be found on his web site.

Now if he can just get on with Arc... :-)

Eating My Own Dog Food

By Rob Myers on May 20, 2004 7:56 AM

"1968" needs finishing. It's colour that's the problem. I want a more fluid and accurate way of working with colour than the current crop of illustration software gives me.
Minara needs continuing. it needs real tasks and projects to work on.
So I'm going to write the bits of Minara I need to edit "1968". Defining colours, managing colour accuracy, and possibly hit-testing will all be needed. I'll also have to make sure the import filter works well to convert 1968 to minara format.
In software engineering jargon this is known as "eating your own dog food". Yum.

EU Copyright Diktat

By Rob Myers on May 19, 2004 10:08 AM

The unelected European Commision, under the Microsoft-sponsored Irish presidency, has voted in favour of software patents. This is despite the European commission (the elected government) voting against them
Software patents sound like they protect people's ideas but they don't. They stifle competition, reduce choice and as more and more of our business and culture becomes digital, they impose a burden of cost and control on our day-to-day lives.
See FFII for what we can still do to stop this idiocy.

The Ontology For “Draw Something”

By Rob Myers on May 17, 2004 12:42 AM

I've started working on the ontology for my program "Draw Something". It's currently based on my unpublished "ae" toy aesthetic program, but I need something heavier duty for the full program.
In computing an ontology is data that represents knowledge, particularly facts and rules. So for a medical program, the ontology would contain information about which drugs treat which conditions, and how those drugs interact. In philosophy, ontology is the metaphysics of being and categories of being. Both meanings are applicable to Draw Something's ontology; it's a computer representation of an investigation into what art is and how you produce art-objects.
I have a certain way I want Draw Something's ontology to work - more as active "daemons" than as passive symbols. I've been looking at Paul Graham's writing on "closures" in his book "On Lisp". Closures combine data and instructions in a more active way than other programming techniques do, but I'm not sure they're what I need (in particular I don't know how to copy closures in a program or get polymorphic behaviour from them). And very few people understand closures. And I'm not really one of them yet. :-)
My favourite type of ontology is Douglas Hofstadter's slipnet, as seen in his & Melanie Mitchell's "CopyCat" program, explained in "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies". A slipnet allows more specific ideas ("the number 5") to be generalised to less specific ideas ("numbers") if the a particular problem cannot be solved with more specific ideas. Copycat also has a nice split between its built-in concepts and its current working memory. Hopefully this will be a useful model to use for Draw Something.

Aesthetics Is Subservient to…

By Rob Myers on May 17, 2004 12:14 AM

(From Aesthetics-L)

I look forward to the first book on art by a chef. We will find that
aesthetics is inferior to cooking, that pigments are inferior to
spices, that the gesamtkunstwerk is a sizzling platter, and that
criticism should be replaced by large gratuities. Sadly this is
self-undermining, as the chef must themself eat.

Harold Cohen Tate Talk Now Online

By Rob Myers on May 15, 2004 6:16 AM

The RealMedia archive of Harold Cohen's talk at the Tate is now online at:

http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/archive/harold_cohen/

Click on the "play" link to watch.

I'm sat next to Dave, who asks how AARON decides when to finish a work during the Q&A session at the end. I was too involved in looking at the projected images of AARON's latest work to ask a question...

Crisis

By Rob Myers on May 13, 2004 9:33 AM

(After 'Art & Fear' p70).
Not a crisis in representation in art, an art in representation of crisis.

Aesthetic of Work, Ethic of Play

By Rob Myers on May 13, 2004 9:33 AM

"Prosumers" are consuming production. Having survived the dot-com boom I've seen work structured to look like play. This is play structured to look like work, consumption structured to look like production.

Perfect Language

By Rob Myers on May 13, 2004 9:17 AM

One of the more tedious quests in philosophy and aesthetics is the one for Perfect Language. A Perfect Language would unambiguously allow representation and discussion of its subjects. But any translation (for example from subjects to terms in the langauge) risks losing information (or worse, introducing it). Perfect Language might therefore be reflexive. Reflexive language avoids translation and is in a trivial way self-underwriting.
The Perfect Language for discussing writing is therefore writing, for art is art, for music is music. This means that the best language for discussing the real world is the real world. But this reduces communication to wollen (ew) if another meta-principle can't be found.
If no universal Perfect Language can be found, an imperfect language (one bereft of philosophical terms) should be used (which still suffers from wollen, but ironises philosophical pretensions). This removes any question of the suiitablitiy of the language: it is manifestly unsuitable. I recommend Bislama for English speakers and Creole for French speakers.

Ethics Or Aesthetics

By Rob Myers on May 13, 2004 9:06 AM

"Ethics or aesthetics?" - Paul Virilio, 'Art And Fear', p61.

Aesthetics. This was decided decades ago in the 'First World'. But the question is what the constraints on or values of those aesthetics will be.

Algorithmic Aesthetics

By Rob Myers on May 12, 2004 8:55 AM

I finished reading "Algorithmic Aesthetics" today. It's a tantalising glimpse into how entirely procedural, rule-based description, evaluation and/or generation of artworks might function. I'm not convinced that length of input divided by length of output tells us very much about an object's aesthetic interest, but Gips & Stiny cite more than one historical example of just such an aesthetic measure, and the complexity of execution versus the complexity of effect of a work can be a convincing measure of one dimension of an artwork's interest.
I think that the examples Gips & Stiny construct deal with style and pattern rather than with higher-order aesthetics. But style is certainly part of aesthetics, and the authors' separate work on describing specific styles of architecture and design using Shape Grammars shows that their ideas could be effective even with 1970s technology.
The book contains the first reference to "generative" art, well, "generative techniques", that I'm aware of. Well worth a read if you can find a copy, or you can browse the complete text on the web.

Aesthetic Semiotics

By Rob Myers on May 9, 2004 7:32 AM

[From Aesthetics-L]

Meaning may have a larger existence as a direct product of its have no existence beyond individual mental associations. Symbols may exist as fuzzy isomorphisms across minds, transferred to verbal, textual or other forms then reconstituted. Below a given threshold of accuracy, many minds will identifiably share a concept. Above a given level of accuracy, none will. Miscommunication, ambiguity and other edge-cases don't falsify the existence of meaning: the fact that they are identifiable strengthens the case for meaning.

This does not give us timeless or metaphysical meaning, but it does give meaning that will last as long as humanity and its media do, and beyond the arrogance of any given individual or group. Which is as much as is possible given a non-deistic worldview.

Semiotics must quantise this mental fuzziness to grep symbols, otherwise it has nothing to work with. Once we have a system of quantised symbols, these can be mapped into another system, assuming that that system is sufficiently powerful (pace Godel or Turing). Communication is therefore possible, unless this won't work, in which case semiotics is impossible anyway.

Quantising an already quantised system can result in loss of information, so this makes communication problematic. However it also introduces the possibility of *generating* meaning, as the system being mapped into must extend or create new structures to allow isomorphism. Blah blah blah metaphor blah blah blah.

Any reduction of art, or indeed language, to an unambiguous, discrete system will make it tractable to theory but have none of the expressive power of the system supposedly being studied. I would further state that any attempt to do so is unlikely to ethically survive historical or psychological deconstruction.

What does this have to do with aesthetics? Aesthetics is concerned with the surplus value of symbol systems, with the interrelation of the structure rather than the arcs of the structure. Semiotics is concerned with the structure (allegedly). Semiotics is an aesthetic, a way of seeing the world. It produces symbols from symbols, it has a stopping problem like deconstruction. Its structures need analysis in terms of their interrelations. Semiotics needs aesthetics.

Forget semiotic aesthetics. What's needed is aesthetic semiotics.

Goethe

By Rob Myers on May 8, 2004 7:21 AM

I'm probably porting Draw Something back to Lisp. And I'm porting ae (the toy aesthetic description generator) to Lisp to use as the basis for the art knowledge-base (ontology) that the programs will use. I've decided to start with colour, and as there's no rational basis for colour choices, the program will be called Goethe...

Sourceforge haven't approved rob-art yet. It's a shame that Lipparosa doesn't seem to have come to anything...

Quote From Harold Cohen's Talk

By Rob Myers on May 8, 2004 7:12 AM

"If programming in C is like marching, programming in Lisp is like dancing".

Too true. To which it might be added that C++ is like walking on hot coals...

Asset Stripping Licenses And Value Creation Licenses

By Rob Myers on May 2, 2004 4:20 AM

"Asset stripping" is breaking up a company and selling off its assets. This does the company no good whatsoever but makes the asset stripper (or "corporate raider") a lot of money.

http://www.anz.com/edna/dictionary.asp?action=content&content=asset_stripping

An "asset stripping license" would be one that allowed work to be broken up and sold off by an asset stripper (or "cultural raider") without any value returning. This would be done to make sure that business isn't scared of the work and feels comfortable using it, as per "Open Source" vs. "Free Software".

"Value creation" is revenue generation that is "greater than the sum of its parts". Good management, customer loyalty, new products and services and other innovation or good corporate citizenship can add value.

http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue8_8/cedergren/

A "value creation" license would be a "Gift Economy" license (still don't like that phrase...), ensuring that value is returned with use and protecting against asset stripping, literally creating value in the commons.

Both terms are ones that businesspeople will recognise, and so are useful for boosting or disparaging concepts in that arena.

Things AARON Doesn't Do

By Rob Myers on May 2, 2004 4:20 AM

What AARON does is fascinating, but AARON doesn't do is interesting as well.

AARON doesn't:

Remember anything between drawings.
React to the outside world.
Request extra information or abilities.
Write its own programs.

These capabilities are handled by another module called "Harold Cohen". :-)

Draw Something

By Rob Myers on May 2, 2004 2:44 AM

I'm getting Draw Something ready for a release, which will include the code and PDFs of the literate documentation and outputs (unless everybody has a Dylan compiler :-)).
I'll probably get my creative coding projects hosted at SourceForge, so that will make distribution easier as well.

May 2004 Archives