Boing Boing included something I sent them in a discussion of font copyright.
Remember, kids, never take legal advice from an artist...
Remember, kids, never take legal advice from an artist...
December 2004 Archives
"There was a time but it's long gone
Janie got a crush on the Vietcong
Burning through downtown Saigon
Me I'm sold - down the Mekong"
- 'Dr. Jeep', TheSister Of Mercy.
Remember, kiddies, if the deckchairs on the Titanic had been a different colour, it wouldn't have sunk.
Janie got a crush on the Vietcong
Burning through downtown Saigon
Me I'm sold - down the Mekong"
- 'Dr. Jeep', TheSister Of Mercy.
Remember, kiddies, if the deckchairs on the Titanic had been a different colour, it wouldn't have sunk.
http://www.chrisashley.net/weblog/archives/week_2004_12_19.html#000597
Abstract art after Courbet. Wonderful.
Abstract art after Courbet. Wonderful.
One of the earliest images of Computer Art I remember from my childhood was one created using Kenneth Knowlton's EXPLOR.
Mini-Explor was a minimal, Fortran-based version of the language from the first half of the 1970s. It's described in an old SIGGRAPH that I downloaded a PDF of from the ACM. I'm writing a version using GNU Fortran. Here's where I've got to:
Why am I doing this? It would be amusing to have a GNU Explor. And it would fight bitrot for old Explor programs. But the main reason is that it's a learning experience like copying an old drawing or painting. I'm gaining understanding of how people saw Computer Art thirty years ago, feeling my way into that way of seeing and and that way of thinking about art. It's a fascinating experience. The things a programming language allows you to do are the things you will prefer to do when you make work. Explor is a world of drawing pattern, copying, flipping, inverting and filtering, not of smooth curves, colour, scaling, rotating or "noise".
Mini-Explor was a minimal, Fortran-based version of the language from the first half of the 1970s. It's described in an old SIGGRAPH that I downloaded a PDF of from the ACM. I'm writing a version using GNU Fortran. Here's where I've got to:
Why am I doing this? It would be amusing to have a GNU Explor. And it would fight bitrot for old Explor programs. But the main reason is that it's a learning experience like copying an old drawing or painting. I'm gaining understanding of how people saw Computer Art thirty years ago, feeling my way into that way of seeing and and that way of thinking about art. It's a fascinating experience. The things a programming language allows you to do are the things you will prefer to do when you make work. Explor is a world of drawing pattern, copying, flipping, inverting and filtering, not of smooth curves, colour, scaling, rotating or "noise".
Via Boing Boing, a PDF of a book of million random digits from RAND in the 1950s:
http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1418/
Don't just use randomness in your work. Use *classic* randomness. :-)
http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1418/
Don't just use randomness in your work. Use *classic* randomness. :-)
Via Idle Type:
http://www.thismagazine.ca/issues/2002/11/rebelsell.php
Yes, selling glossy magazines and fat books that eschew empowering analysis of economic and class relations in favour of arguing over what colour the curtain should be are not really changing the face of capitalism all that much. Or at all.
The first place that I saw AdBusters and No Logo was the graphic design bookshop on Tottenham Court Road. The prosecution rests, or would if only it wasn't actually doing something about its own production rather than just complaining about others' consumption.
http://www.thismagazine.ca/issues/2002/11/rebelsell.php
Yes, selling glossy magazines and fat books that eschew empowering analysis of economic and class relations in favour of arguing over what colour the curtain should be are not really changing the face of capitalism all that much. Or at all.
The first place that I saw AdBusters and No Logo was the graphic design bookshop on Tottenham Court Road. The prosecution rests, or would if only it wasn't actually doing something about its own production rather than just complaining about others' consumption.
PAGE, newsletter of the Computer Arts Society, 1969-1985:
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/hafvm/cache/PAGEold.htm
This is something of a mother lode for the history and theory of computer art.
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/hafvm/cache/PAGEold.htm
This is something of a mother lode for the history and theory of computer art.
It would be great if there was a CC metadata plugin for iTunes. I don't know how open the iTunes APIs are, though. Perhaps Apple could add it, it wouldn't take much work (surely?) and would help with their record-company-placating DRM by showing what rights are reserved.
The rumor grapevine has it that Apple will allow the next version of "Garage band" to publish tracks via iTMS. It would be great if they would let you CC-license work to be sold. There are already CC-licensed music repositories (opsound) and record labels (loca, opsound). If iTunes allowed you to search iTMS by CC license type and metadata, that would take it even further.
Since Apple really don't really make any money on iTMS sales, they should allow CC-licensed work to be sold. Indeed they should encourage it, as it will drive sales of garageband and iPods, which is the whole point of iTMS.
iTMS, garage Band and iTunes could provide a user-friendly GUI for buying, creating, hosting and listening to CC-licensed content, searchable and manageable by CC metadata. Since iTMS is a legal fig-leaf for selling iPods, it doesn't matter what kind of content iTMS sells as long as it doesn't upset the record labels. CC-licensed content is still copyrighted and doesn't challenge anyone's rights, so how could they object? ;-)
The only problem is iTMS's DRM, which breaks the CC licenses. Whether Apple or the record labels would accept that artists who license their work CC are within their rights to request no DRM is another matter entirely.
The rumor grapevine has it that Apple will allow the next version of "Garage band" to publish tracks via iTMS. It would be great if they would let you CC-license work to be sold. There are already CC-licensed music repositories (opsound) and record labels (loca, opsound). If iTunes allowed you to search iTMS by CC license type and metadata, that would take it even further.
Since Apple really don't really make any money on iTMS sales, they should allow CC-licensed work to be sold. Indeed they should encourage it, as it will drive sales of garageband and iPods, which is the whole point of iTMS.
iTMS, garage Band and iTunes could provide a user-friendly GUI for buying, creating, hosting and listening to CC-licensed content, searchable and manageable by CC metadata. Since iTMS is a legal fig-leaf for selling iPods, it doesn't matter what kind of content iTMS sells as long as it doesn't upset the record labels. CC-licensed content is still copyrighted and doesn't challenge anyone's rights, so how could they object? ;-)
The only problem is iTMS's DRM, which breaks the CC licenses. Whether Apple or the record labels would accept that artists who license their work CC are within their rights to request no DRM is another matter entirely.
Minara is sticking with OpenGL; adding an intersection callback stopped the crashes. I've cleaned up the buffer and window code, and started working on code to support transforms using PostScript-style matrices for speed (2x3 rather than 3x3). You can also save buffers now (type x,s). The C cleanup can wait. I need to think some more about transforms, and also about dialog-style interactions with the user. Minara needs to prompt for filenames and to display colour choices and other dialog functionality. I don't want to reinvent the wheel, but I do want something that will look good and be fast for power-users to operate.
The Open Art License , by the Open Art Network. I don't think we need another art license. If people want a GPL-style license for art, one that requires that sources be provided, they should probably just use the GPL. GnuArt do this. If you don't want to provide sources, the Creative Commons licenses are best. There have been other attempts at art licenses. The Free Art License has been out for a while now, and I drafted (but fortunately never used) a BSD-style art license a few years back.
Let's not divide culture up into little content ghettos around strangely similar yet strangely incompatible licenses.
Let's not divide culture up into little content ghettos around strangely similar yet strangely incompatible licenses.
Interesting new book on a principle I've been talking about for a while:
A Hacker Manifesto
Eyebeam ask how you can write a manifesto for a movement you're not part of, and whether Eric Raymond hasn't already said everything on the subject.
The book is an outsider's application of the hacker ethic to broader social and economic concerns than just writing software. It is not addressed to the existing hacker crowd. So it's not a manifesto for a movement the writer is not part of, rather it's someone bringing that movement's content to the attention of a wider audience. That is to be applauded.
Eric Raymond's main contribution to hacker culture has been watering down the ideology of Free Software to appeal to incumbent corporate interests. He doesn't understand how cathedrals were built (as multi-generational, iterative realisations of a vision rather than as micro-managed waterfall projects), and the problems he has with current """open source""" are a product of the flaws in his own arguments.
Good posting critical of ESR's writings.
A Hacker Manifesto
Eyebeam ask how you can write a manifesto for a movement you're not part of, and whether Eric Raymond hasn't already said everything on the subject.
The book is an outsider's application of the hacker ethic to broader social and economic concerns than just writing software. It is not addressed to the existing hacker crowd. So it's not a manifesto for a movement the writer is not part of, rather it's someone bringing that movement's content to the attention of a wider audience. That is to be applauded.
Eric Raymond's main contribution to hacker culture has been watering down the ideology of Free Software to appeal to incumbent corporate interests. He doesn't understand how cathedrals were built (as multi-generational, iterative realisations of a vision rather than as micro-managed waterfall projects), and the problems he has with current """open source""" are a product of the flaws in his own arguments.
Good posting critical of ESR's writings.
I drew the images for 1969 in red and blue peel-off china marker in an A5 sketchbook, then used the images as reference to assemble the layout for images from nuclear fallout diagrams that I'd traced by hand for 1968. Those images were in tints of primary red or green.
I copied and pasted those to their own file, added background colours, and coloured the contours with reference to a Pantone flipbook. The colours were red and blue (for political reasons), green and muted hues for landscape, pink for classical flesh, and other colours as they took my fancy.
At some point I switched from Illustrator 6 to Illustrator CS. After leaving things a few days I discarded about a dozen images I didn't feel were quite good enough. After a couple of weeks I discarded a few more, bitmapped the images by hand, and ran two scripts to make the various vector formats and the HTML for the images.
I copied and pasted those to their own file, added background colours, and coloured the contours with reference to a Pantone flipbook. The colours were red and blue (for political reasons), green and muted hues for landscape, pink for classical flesh, and other colours as they took my fancy.
At some point I switched from Illustrator 6 to Illustrator CS. After leaving things a few days I discarded about a dozen images I didn't feel were quite good enough. After a couple of weeks I discarded a few more, bitmapped the images by hand, and ran two scripts to make the various vector formats and the HTML for the images.
After upgrading to Illustrator CS I checked on Scriptographer, the excellent interactive scripting tool for Illustrator. Yes, there's now a CS version.
I'm back to hacking on Minara, which means I'm actually following my schedule for the year. I've added code to handle transforms and I've streamlined and improved the buffer & window code. I hope to have the code in CVS next week. Transform tools, colours, groups and a decent pen by next summer. Hopefully.
I'm also getting ready to do more work on rob-art. I'm just trying to learn Lisp's packaging system at the moment, as asdf seems overkill. The next program, called "huey", will handle colour. It will build on ae 's ontology. I'm reading an interesting paper on colour perception and naming at the moment, and Harold Cohen was kind enough to send me a JPEG of a wonderfully colourful current AARON picture when I emailed him recently.
I'm also getting ready to do more work on rob-art. I'm just trying to learn Lisp's packaging system at the moment, as asdf seems overkill. The next program, called "huey", will handle colour. It will build on ae 's ontology. I'm reading an interesting paper on colour perception and naming at the moment, and Harold Cohen was kind enough to send me a JPEG of a wonderfully colourful current AARON picture when I emailed him recently.
"1969" is now online under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA-20 license:
Click here to go there.
I'll be scanning in the preparatory sketches and releasing those as well soon.
Click here to go there.
I'll be scanning in the preparatory sketches and releasing those as well soon.
The Remix reading main site is now online. Take a look (and upload some work!) at:
http://www.remixreading.org/
http://www.remixreading.org/
For many artistic works there is source that can be provided: the preparatory work. Preparatory sketches can be provided online or in printed book format. Having access to the preparatory work for an artwork can be incredibly useful for understanding and building on the work, much like having the source code for a binary.
I have two examples of this that feature work in the style of Jackson Pollock. From the point of view of an artistic producer, at art school I was set a project to make a painting that combined two existing images. I chose a Pollock painting and a Futurist cyclist. The library had a book on the Futurists that had the preparatory sketches for the painting of the cyclist, showing how the forms of the finished painting had been abstracted from a fairly literal sketch of a man on a bycicle. This allowed me to understand and reproduce the compositional structure of the piece far more effectively than just copying the finished result would have.
From the point of view of an artistic consumer, Art & Language did some wonderful paintings of and titled "A Portrait of Lenin In The Stryle Of Jackson Pollock" around 1980. They made sketches of the images before painting them, and these are very useful if you can't quite "get" the images when you first see them. Those sketches are often reproduced in exhibition catalogues and are available online.
Having access to the source material for even traditional media like painting can be very valuable for both consumers and producers. For consumers, it's like being able to read the source code to figure out what's going on in the binary. For producers, it enables remaking, reworking or build on the original work as surely as being able to hack and make the sources to a binary.
I have two examples of this that feature work in the style of Jackson Pollock. From the point of view of an artistic producer, at art school I was set a project to make a painting that combined two existing images. I chose a Pollock painting and a Futurist cyclist. The library had a book on the Futurists that had the preparatory sketches for the painting of the cyclist, showing how the forms of the finished painting had been abstracted from a fairly literal sketch of a man on a bycicle. This allowed me to understand and reproduce the compositional structure of the piece far more effectively than just copying the finished result would have.
From the point of view of an artistic consumer, Art & Language did some wonderful paintings of and titled "A Portrait of Lenin In The Stryle Of Jackson Pollock" around 1980. They made sketches of the images before painting them, and these are very useful if you can't quite "get" the images when you first see them. Those sketches are often reproduced in exhibition catalogues and are available online.
Having access to the source material for even traditional media like painting can be very valuable for both consumers and producers. For consumers, it's like being able to read the source code to figure out what's going on in the binary. For producers, it enables remaking, reworking or build on the original work as surely as being able to hack and make the sources to a binary.
If I release an image in, say, Photoshop format, I am limiting my audience.
If, however, I convert the image to a non-proprietary format, I will lose some of the editability of the work. Which is more important, breadth of access or depth of access? (Hmmm. This parallels some current governmental debates on the arts here in the UK :-) ).
In my own work this can best be illustrated by the case of some images I made about ten years ago using Adobe Dimensions (a *vector* 3D package). I couldn't have done the work any other way at that time, I can't convert the work to another editable format now, so what do I do? I can release the all-but-unreadable editable format, or I can render the work as a 2D vector image which is editable as far as it goes, but does not have the full editability of the 3D version. I'm about to make some more of this work in Illustrator CS, again using its unique capabilities. As I said before, if one takes FSF-style Freedom as aguiding principle, I shouldn't even be using Illustrator. But as an artist, I need various facilities it has until Inkscape catches up, facilities Inkscape can't even render (full-strength masking for example), and I want to provide editable files containing those features.
In the absence of a guiding principle of FSF-Freedom, this is a dilemma. A producer will want the fully editable format, they will probably have the software. A consumer will want the accessible format. I provide various formats, but even with scripts to derive various formats for me from the original, this takes effort, and with (say) a movie, the space requirements would become a consideration.
I'm not arguing against editability or accessibility, far from it, they are vital. But I do want to illustrate that this may mean something (or some things) different for Creative Commons than for Free Software.
If, however, I convert the image to a non-proprietary format, I will lose some of the editability of the work. Which is more important, breadth of access or depth of access? (Hmmm. This parallels some current governmental debates on the arts here in the UK :-) ).
In my own work this can best be illustrated by the case of some images I made about ten years ago using Adobe Dimensions (a *vector* 3D package). I couldn't have done the work any other way at that time, I can't convert the work to another editable format now, so what do I do? I can release the all-but-unreadable editable format, or I can render the work as a 2D vector image which is editable as far as it goes, but does not have the full editability of the 3D version. I'm about to make some more of this work in Illustrator CS, again using its unique capabilities. As I said before, if one takes FSF-style Freedom as aguiding principle, I shouldn't even be using Illustrator. But as an artist, I need various facilities it has until Inkscape catches up, facilities Inkscape can't even render (full-strength masking for example), and I want to provide editable files containing those features.
In the absence of a guiding principle of FSF-Freedom, this is a dilemma. A producer will want the fully editable format, they will probably have the software. A consumer will want the accessible format. I provide various formats, but even with scripts to derive various formats for me from the original, this takes effort, and with (say) a movie, the space requirements would become a consideration.
I'm not arguing against editability or accessibility, far from it, they are vital. But I do want to illustrate that this may mean something (or some things) different for Creative Commons than for Free Software.
