June 2005 Archives
Lemonodor notes the latest version of a Scheme-based livecoding environment:
fluxus
I've read Lemonodor for ages, and followed the development of fluxus for a while. Synergy. :-)
Technorati Tags: free software, generative art, hacking
Tattoo someone's body, get ownership of it via copyright. Well, the image of the tattoos anyway:
Technorati Tags: free culture
Via the cc-uk list. Some weird "Open" ideology followed by...
Blogg from the iCommons conference
They've been discussing moral rights, collecting societies, and other hot topics.
Plus photos from the event:
http://www.flickr.com/people/ccsummit/
Did they really throw Lessig in a fountain??? :-)
Technorati Tags: free culture
Proprietary packages that export Free formats may do so poorly, leaving the output corrupt or incomplete. The code cannot be fixed except by the authors, who may be unable or unwilling to do so.
Proprietary packages that export Free formats may displace Free packages, so that when the Proprietary package stops supporting the Free format, artists are left homeless.
Proprietary packages that export Free formats may "embrace and extend" those formats.
Proprietary packages that export Free formats may not work on a given platform (free or proprietary). Their users cannot port those packages to their platform of choice, and the proprietary authors may be unable or unwilling to do the porting.
Given all this, a Free package with its own format is more free, and better for artists, than a proprietary package that exports free formats.
"Free legal tools to help you build your own copyright."
Creative Commons are a reform organization. They are not the people's revolutionary intellectual property liberation front, nor are they the committe for unlimited commercial exploitation of the public domain. As a charity under US law they cannot even lobby the government for copyright reform, as that would be politics.
They have a reformist agenda, based at least as much on freedom of contract as freedom of speech. And it is based on copyright. But as with the GPL, it is an ironisation of copyright, a legal hack or judo throw. It does not make copyright stronger or excuse copyright maximalism. Copyright will get stronger without CC. At least with CC that increasing strength can be reformed.
Creative Commons's motivations may differ from the groups whose interests they support to a greater or lesser degree. So what? The effects of their actions do not. Consensus-building is a lost art and one that CC have succeeded in admirably. Yes, that consensus does not advance more radical agendas. But those agendas would fail quite happily without CC. At least with CC the groundwork is laid for them.
Technorati Tags: free culture
Tom had some kind words for my series 'San Jose':
and mentions Ryan McGinness and Anton Vidokle . Neither of whom I'd heard of, and both of whom are very good. Ryan in particular offers the challenge of more visually complex work, one that I feel I ought to rise to.
Technorati Tags: art
Jon Phillips on Delete! (is that really not a hoax?) and why open source is more art than art about open source is:
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, free culture, free software, hacking, philosophy
Via make:
http://www.vilminko.net/henri/projview.php?id=19&lang=en
If you need more inputs, do what we used to do at the CEA and use a cheap keyboard...
Technorati Tags: hacking, hardware
Via Grafodexia:
Deposit your articles in open repositories rather than just sending people a photocopy...
Technorati Tags: free culture
Free Culture does not owe Free Software its fealty. Free Software is concerned with the freedom of hackers to continue hacking, any other concerns are secondary unless they interfere with this freedom. Hardware, for example, is of interest to Free Software only when it prevents the hacker from hacking. Closed BIOSes and 'Trusted Computing' microprocessors are examples of this.
Stallmanian Freedom is a domain-specific, self-reliant freedom. If you do not have what you need in your creative domain, it is your responsibility to create it. And if another domain interferes with your freedom, it is immoral. What happens if your freedom interferes with the freedom of individuals in another domain? What happens if an individual's lack of ability in your domain interferes with their freedom in their domain? And what happens if unfree work in your domain better supports freedom in their domain?
Imagine there was a mature Free Hardware movement that demanded that Free Software use only Free Hardware, because proprietary hardware is immoral. And imagine that although Free Hardware was readily and cheaply available, it could not support branching instructions (if...then...else) because these were of little interest to Free Hardware engineers, who preferred to work on mathematical instructions.
Free Software hackers would have to down tools and study hardware implementation for a couple of years until they could improve the Free Hardware to the point where they could use it for serious programming. Or they would have to lobby the Free Hardware engineers to stop working on more interesting projects (thus compromising their freedom) to add branching. Or they would have to use proprietary hardware in order to be able to exercise the freedom to be able to create functional works.
I am not making the usual apologies for proprietary work here. I am not a libertarian with corporate stockholm syndrome, desperate for the cultural approval and feeling of self-worth that only VC funding can give. This is an internal criticism: with separate domains, there is a conflict here.
For an artist, art is the highest calling. Preventing the realisation of art is immoral. And most current Free Software for graphics and presentations is therefore immoral. It is functionally incomplete compared to proprietary offerings. As with the imaginary Free Hardware/Free Software conflict, the artist is not immediately technically capable of working in the domain of Free Software to implement the features that they require to support freedom in their own domain. Nor it is their responsibility to do so for artistic freedom. So again they have three choices: limit their freedom by doing non-artistic work to answer the demands of others, limit a Free Software hacker's freedom by demanding that they implement the feature, or use a proprietary alternative.
Even if a piece of artistic Free Software was functionally complete but lower quality it would be immoral to demand that artists use it. Art is not software. It is qualitative, not quantitative. The fact that a Keynote presentation looks better than a Beamer presentation is part of the work, part of its content, part of its function, not a secondary consideration.
The problem I have is that I am, non-trivially, both a hacker and an artist. I cannot fall back on protecting the freedom of my own domain, as the demands of Free Software would stop me using proprietary software, and the demands of artistic freedom would stop me throwing away functioning tools to use non-functioning ones.
Without common ideological ground, future proprietary problems or current "free" problems are both shackles on creative freedom. That common ideological ground should be a general commitment to freedom, not contained within domain limits. Even with this guiding principle, the problem of how to least compromise one's freedom in order to least compromise the freedom of others remains. This is a historic problem of the ideal of liberty, and is not to be taken lightly.
I believe that it is a defensible position that one should not base one's freedom on unfreedom. It is also a defensible position that one should minimise the risk of future unfreedom occurring as a result of one's actions or failure to act, whether for oneself or for others. Therefore whilst Free Culture may not owe Free Software its fealty, it cannot take an "I'm alright Jack" attitude to exercising its own freedom whilst supporting unfreedom in another domains.
Bad art (and code) comes from the best of intentions, but good art (and code) often comes from engagement with interesting general (social, technical) challenges as (personal, creative) individual opportunities. Freedom is such a challenge^D^Dopportunity, like colour theory, tube paint, psychoanalysis and video before it.
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, free culture, free software, philosophy
Art is
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.5/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA.
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, free culture, humour, philosophy
I have long fingernails. :-(
I'm installing Debian on my iBook. Text based installers, yay! I've botched the X window install so now I need to fix that before I can do anything useful. It was a very fast install, though.
Technorati Tags: free software
Free Culture film logo competition:
Via Jon Phillips .
Technorati Tags: competition, film, free culture
If you like Wired, you'd have loved Mondo 2000. If you'd have loved Mondo 2000, you'll like this:
RU Sirius in Discussion With DJ Spooky
Technorati Tags: free culture, music, philosophy
1.The highly developed products of software, net. or web art require a transparent (free) infrastructure and free access to source (code). Your work is connected with Creative Commons, Free Software, Free Culture.
Yes. I was using other people's work in my own from when I first started seriously making art. When I was at college I asked other people If I could photograph their work to scan in to the computer, and I took photographs at galleries (when you were still allowed to do that in London!). And when I did programming later we were given lots of code and we all looked at each others code.
Free Software/Free Culture is a way of reclaiming that way of working, of protecting and extending it.
How do you feel as an Individual, (after your experience in the collective project SoDa),
SoDA was a group of people who'd been at college together taking what we'd learnt out into the worlds of business and art. In 1996 at the height of the Internet boom those worlds seemed like they were very close, or that they could be.
I didn't like working on catalogues or websites with other people, with a client and a deadline.
about working in groups, institutions? Differences? Advantages? Difficulties?
Possibly I'm just antisocial but I like the way that the Internet and 'copyleft' licenses allow you to build on other people's work without having to have more than one ego in the room. I like being able to use what other people have made, culture is my nature. I'd hate to work on a project like Art & Language's early Indices, they had such bad internal politics. I'd rather share and participate in a public culture than get caught up in the problems of a private project.
But perhaps that just comes from feeling such an outsider and feeling so shy and awkward as a child.
"Net" art supposed the presence of many (virtual) people. You said that your work's connected with other people's work. But you don't like "more than one ego in the room". What is the artist's ego in the epoch of new technologies?
I suppose the danger of the artist's ego now is what programmers call "not invented here syndrome", resisting 'standing on the shoulders of giants'. For example people always want to write their own free/open license for their work, even though that's a bad idea. And people always want to write their programs from scratch, even though they could use other people's code. It's the same for making images.
The potential of the artist's ego is that individuals' sense of self will drive them to distribute and seek out work globally, which with free licensing and peer to peer technology means more people can build on each other's work than ever before. Imagine a global chain of Picassos and Braques.
Less body, more idea?
In films and television the expression of someone's self is usually through their body, how it looks, how they move and the actions they take, rather than their words or ideas. This is romanticism. But it is not the case that removing the limits of the body removes the negative expression of the animal self. Without physical limits animal minds tend to engage in flamewars on mailing lists...
Could you explain what "ego" represents to you?
I suppose it's arrogance and self-interest, self-defeatingly so. The negative of the social self, the bit that gets in the way of art being made by trying to make art. Possibly I mean "id" rather than "ego", but I don't know that there's such a clean split, and common usage of "ego" is generally negative; egomaniac, egotism.
2. Once you mentioned "Photoshop fascism". Could you explain that?
I did??? was probably referring to the use of image processing software (such as PhotoShop) to make people look more like an impossible, Romantic ideal:
like this.
Fascism loves "perfect" bodies. Beautiful bodies are seductive, they can hide ugly ideology. Technology allows most bodies to be made to look "perfect", ideal. It is anti-individualistic, it is certainly not democratic. The visual trappings of fascism imposed through technology. Are the ideological trappings hiding behind the pretty visuals?
If we use new technology as a weapons (to rebuild ourselves and the whole world) does that mean that our (supposed) ethic changes the weapon-nature of new technology into something good-natured?
It depends how strong the technology and the user are. Or maybe how strong their aesthetics are? In Surgical Strike I think I assumed that the technology, and the ideology it presupposed, was more powerful. I wouldn't be so defeatist now. As William Gibson said, "the street finds its own uses for things".
If it does we have a paradox: weapons questionable by the definition...?
Certainly the weapons can be used to attack themselves. And perhaps with general purpose machines (computers), the definition of what they are is what they are.
3. The aesthetic is kind of your "obsession".
Yes. It's an obsession because I feel I understand it so little but that it *must* be what art is about. I don't believe that a truly ugly art can be made, an art that is un-aesthetic but still conceptually interesting. All art "looks good" to someone if it is art.
I don't even know what 'aesthetic' means other than 'looks good'. But why does something look good? And what does that mean?
What about a "trash aesthetic" It looks like a rhetorical question, but could "ugly" things become a branch of aesthetics that you could accept?
My work has always had low cultural or non-artistic inspiration. And I like uncool popular music, and films, and television. Including MTV. And I am a big fan of Jeff Koons.
I went to London last week, and I saw a work by the graffiti artist "Banksy" in a new gallery near Denmark Street. I've never liked pictures of Banksy's work, but the real thing was very fresh and funny. It's not that I'm a snob, quite the opposite: I don't like the idea of bourgeois artists making authentic low culture inauthentic by appropriating it and doing it on canvas like 'proper' art.
I don't know about really embracing a "trash aesthetic". I'll need to think about that. I'd be worried about producing an "urban pastoral" (Julian Stallabrass). I'd rather not use low culture as a ventriloquist's dummy for my morality or my aesthetic. But maybe it could be liberating.
Aesthetic, ideology and technology in your work?
Every person has an aesthetic, every company or politician or religion does. I suppose that 'aesthetic' here means 'style', but 'style' that links to ideology. And I also feel there's a deeper sense of 'aesthetic', one that tells us how all these little aesthetics work. Like Chomsky Grammars. Aesthetics is to art as linguistics is to language. Maybe.
Ideologies are aesthetic, they are choices are about how things should look. Philosophy is actually a branch of aesthetics, and ideologies are degenrate philosophies. ;-)
And technologies are the products of ideologies. In a way they are physical ideologies, they are rules about what you can and cannot do. And technology is aesthetic, very aesthetic, it has to be made to 'look good' to the people who use it, not just visually but in its effects, what it does.
The best example of this connection is Surgical Strike, that was about, how the history of a technology (computing) that has come from a particular ideology (American militarism) may affect attempts to make an aesthetic (computer art). But 1968 and 1969 are about that as well, and Psychetecture was about how architecture serves capital by affecting your perceptions.
4. "Remixing"?
Not all of my work is literally remixing. That's more an early theme I've recently returned to. It's a theme I'm very glad to return to.
The series that are most obviously remix based are my early Mixes and sampling based work, Surgical Strike, 1968 and 1969, and Canto.
But my work always uses the ideas and imagery of others. Psychetecture was based on the calligrams of Ahmed Mustafah, Titled uses colour diagrams from famous twentieth century artists and I've mentioned the designers that influenced me. The only work I've made that wasn't directly influenced by anyone else is San Jose, which I regard as my weakest work.
But your works are formally ("they look like") Neo-Modern, Post- Hard-Edge. Does that style have a quality of expression that is lacking in more recent work?
When I got to art school there was a Macintosh there for the design students to use. But none of the artists were using it, so I had to look to designers to see how it could be used. The look of much of my work therefore comes from British graphic design in the early 1990s, especially design by the design groups 'Designers Republic' and 'Me Company'. The look of their work was in many ways a result of the availability of the Macintosh and programs like Illustrator or Freehand. The Macintosh was the lithographic stone of the 1980s/1990s. Think of Toulouse-Lautrec a hundred years earlier.
I have no problem with the idea that my art has been so heavily influenced, even determined, by technology. There's more to Lautrec than lithography and toothbrushes, there's more to the Impressionists than paint in tubes and state-sponsored colour theory, there was more to the Renaissance than plaster, perspective and archeology. There's always technology, and there's always more than technology.
I believe that much of the traditional role of art has passed into graphic design anyway. But some of its content remains left behind. Certainly its most important content. And that content is not caught by conceptual art, performances, or other attempts at making an "expanded image". Not in the way I personally wish to catch it. So I have to make images rather than any newer form of expression.I feel very awkward doing so.
5. Art & Language are your favorite artists. Your latest works are inspired by Matisse. Could you explain that?
It was an accident. :-)
Art & Language are interested in the canonical works of Modernism, which means they have based paintings on work by Picasso, Pollock, Rothko and others. They use these works to analyse their social content through their form. So I'd love to be able to say that I read up on Matisse's work then decided to make work that uses the social content of his work to make a serious point.
What really happened is that I found an image on the Remix Reading website, I liked some of the shapes in it, and I wanted to make work that was a remix. So I used those shapes, without thinking very much about what they meant, just enjoying working hard on the compositions. I think my subconscious remembered the Matisse prints that I sit next to in McDonalds with my children when we go for hamburgers sometimes(!), and that is what guided me.
But I am open to accident and humour (and embarrassment) in my work, so once I realised that the first work (Canto For Evie) looked like Mattise, I decided to make more work from the same source material. And I had to re-evaluate Mattisse, who I didn't like before. I'm now doing some paper cut-outs.
There is a quality my work often has where I don't know if I am being very, very serious or very, very silly. I think that quality is present in my best work, and I think it means that the work is doing something that can't be fully described in words. Which is one reason Art & Language give for making art rather than doing anything else; if it says something that you can't describe any other way.
6. Connection between theory and praxis? In computer generated art the artist must know so many thing. Isn't that a paradox in a time of narrow specialization?
But art is made for the ruling classes, and the ruling classes are now managers. Even the politicians are managers. Managers are not specialists, they have only general, conceptual skills. And so these are the skills we see artists using to make art now, to reflect the ego of the manager.
Therefore for an artist to learn a practical skill, like programming, well enough to practice it themself is the real paradox. Even although they do so alongside learning about many other things, such as aesthetics, or drawing, or art history. Specific ability in any area, rather than just general, conceptual, managerial ability is the paradox.
The Modernist artist was not a modern subject: even when they tried to be boring or ordinary they made this interesting and it took a heroic effort on their part to do so.
Your last comment invokes an essential, romantic vision of the artist. Tragic and impractical for contemporary aims. But your activity seems to us like something quite far from that. How do you live with this opposition?
Hacking is technological Romanticism. I am an art hacker (in the sense of a good programmer rather than a computer criminal).
My work is Romantic; emotion projected onto the environment. It's also tragic, it's melancholic and it's dispossessed. But it is a romanticism that finds its excesses funny, like the best Goths do.
A perky Romanticism. My Smileys are the art Munch would have made if he'd had access to a Macintosh and a presciption for Prozac. :-)
paintr is now beta. That means I'm going to leave it running for a while to check that it works OK, then come back to it in a few days to finalise the supporting HTML.
The original hack took a morning, the Java applet took about a day, but getting the damn thing working online has taken ages. This is why I don't like writing software for public performance.
Technorati Tags: art, generative art, net.art
It seemed that Gödel hatched an audacious ambition while still a young student: to produce a mathematical result that would have meta-mathematical implications implications, or at least suggestions, about the nature of mathematics itself. It's as if a painter produces a picture that has something to say about the nature of beauty, perhaps even something to say about why beauty moves us.
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/goldstein05/goldstein05_index.html
Via ALDaily.
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, philosophy
"Common sense isn't". So what should we make of OpenMind? Thousands of statements of common sense input by contributors (then licensed, ugh), available either in their raw format or as a computer program.
The GPL-licensed raw statements have the gnomic banality of so much conceptual and net.art that making art using the dataset is irresistible:
A box can hold things
A flag is for displaying in public the political group of the owner of the flag
A goldfish is a type of carp that makes a nice pet
A lawn is a place outside where grass grows
A nightgown is a long, loose garment worn to bed
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, artificial intelligence
Legal documents and art:
Mel Ramsden's Guaranteed Paintings.
Angela Bulloch's Rules Series.
Carey Young's Disclaimers.
I love all these works, but Young's disclaimers are for me the most artistic because they involve negative space. They were exhibited at the Moore centre, their creation of form through negative space makes them appropriately sculptural.
I wanted to do some indemnified paintings, but I think using licenses themselves, as assisted readymades could be more interesting. CC-*, FDL, OGL. It would be good to do the Gödel thing of encoding a contradictory message using the license, ironising it. It would be even better to encode a meta-message, also Gödel-style.
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, law
I'll read this later. Via 43 Folders:
OVERCOMING PROCRASTINATION THROUGH THE PULL METHOD
Technorati Tags: productivity
Via CopyFight:
One might think that open access to high resolution 3D scans of Michelangelo's David and other cultural heritage works would be a goal of the works' trustees. Nope. They're busy figuring out how to keep people from "pirating" the data.
http://www.corante.com/copyfight/archives/2005/06/20/stealing_the_david.php
Technorati Tags: free culture
Cool work by Tom Moody, and images of how it was made:
I like the technique used to make the image (repeated printing, alteration, scanning and retouching). Using the computer as part of an ongoing, iterative, creative process.
Update (27/06/05): Tom says it was overprinting and an X-acto knife rather than rescanning. Which is even cooler. :-)
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, hacking
Via NewsForge:
Open Source Academy Logo Competition
Technorati Tags: free culture, free software, competition
Via Boing Boing:
Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein
A side-by-side comparison of Lichtenstein's paintings and the usually far superior original frames from comic books.
Wikipedia notes that: Artist Dave Gibbons, who illustrated the graphic novel Watchmen (written by Alan Moore), said of Lichtenstein's works: "Roy Lichtenstein's copies of the work of Irv Novick and Russ Heath are flat, uncomprehending tracings of quite sophisticated images."
Lichtenstein's graphic design-inspired work is much better than his comic book-inspied work, though.
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, drawing
Via Future Feeder:
find the physcial materials you need for that project.
Technorati Tags: art, hacking, hardware
The EU has produced a united Europe - a Europe united against the EU technocracy. But this time the technocrats can't just keep on telling the people to vote until they give the right answer:
Euro elites in denial in Brussels
Reason on bogus socila critiques of too much choice, via ALDaily:
"At the heart of the anti-choice argument is a false dichotomy: We can have a narrow range of standardized choices, or we can live with options that are infinite, dizzying, and always open."
Technorati Tags: free culture, philosophy
Via GTA:
Reading Potential: The Oulipo and the Meaning of Algorithms
Article on a writers' group encountering computers in the aerly 1960s.
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, generative art, hacking
Article on productivity via 43 Folders:
Your Central Nervous System: Your Biological Key to Productivity
My most productive times over the last couple of months have been going for a walk by the river and doing the gardening. So I think there might be something to this. :-)
A high-quality 2D graphics engine in C++ under a revised MIT-style license:
could be useful for portable 2D graphics (I hate getting tied down to platform APIs, even good APIs).
Technorati Tags: free software, generative art, hacking, graphics
An idea from MTAA-RR:
One of the things very few people get about Koons is how incisive and indexical his work is on/to class criticism. Moving a stainless steel bunny into CGI might shear this off, might bring in a whole new set of indexes/insights, or might update them for an age when intangible property is valued more than steel.
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, humour
Not the "awfully big marine", the fabric and patterns:
via makeblog.
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, visual reference
Things to stop holding back on:
• Hardware hacking for art visuals, especially games consoles.
• Custom 'display' hardware.
• Textual descriptions of work.
• Mash-ups and sampling.
• 'Expanded pixels'; art quark systems (a la AARON's cells / n-d space & various space systems), retro-style bitmap & icon references, and realworld/artistic quantization.
• Game engines & 'Second Life'.
Things to spank:
• Managerial ('Relational') Aesthetics.
• Decorativeness.
• "Committed" net.art .
• Art as advertising (GPS art...).
Technorati Tags: art
Another excellent competition from Creative Commons:
"Real: industry is used to competitions, and uses them as a driver for innovation and value. The music industry can learn from this and from Magnatune's example here.
Technorati Tags: free culture, music
I think these are going to be about everything that's wrong about "Relational Aesthetics".
Self-managerial drawings playing with scale and other transformations, self-similar and enabled to expand their extents. Not as a dreary "questioning of originality" (a Romantic notion in itself)), as what is required of drawing, and what drawing requires.
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, drawing
I love the fact that Processing defaults to giving you the source when you publish work with it. This means that you get to see how work like this is created:
Dataisnature linked there a while back.
Source code is the preparatory sketches of art computing.
Technorati Tags: art, generative art, hacking, net.art
Salman Rushdie on why secularism is wrong to want love from religion:
Just give me that old-time atheism!
Technorati Tags: atheism, philosophy
You can get some of the texts this article mentions online, but others will require a trip to Amazon:
Portrait Of the Artist As A Young Mess
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art
Programming microcontrollers on MacOS X:
PIC
Tiger automator pic downloader
Stamp
Technorati Tags: hacking, hardware
These are mash-ups of pictures by well-known British artists, made in 1993. As with any mash-up they set up a tension between their sources, in this case different subjects of regard. Or desire.
I can't find the original files for these so I had to scan them from the video prints. And I can't remember whether these were done on an Amiga or a 286 PC, I think probably a 286 with a slide scanner, but they were mashed together using morphing software available at the time. The above image was also painted, oil on canvas.
Technorati Tags: art, free culture, mash-ups
The ever excellent Mindhacks on a site covering art and mental illness:
http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2005/06/art_and_the_altered_.html
This isn't just a cliché, art requires nonstandard visions and nonstandard minds are one way of getting them.
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art
I dug out my graphics tablet and tried it with Inkscape:
You know, this might go somewhere. The problem I had in the late 1990s was that I did lots of drawings that were excellent as drawings but they got stuck in my sketchbooks. This way I can do the drawings and they're ready to go.
The EFF have posted a legal guide for bloggers. As ever, it's based in US law (the EFF being a US-based organisation), but good stuff:
http://www.eff.org/bloggers/lg/
Technorati Tags: free culture, blogging
New Ward CD over at Loca Records. As always it's licensed CC-BY-SA.
Technorati Tags: free culture, music
My copy of "No Business" arrived.
You get a copyright whoopie cushion. :-) Oh, and a CD and a booklet in a folder. The CD is way-above-average appropriation/cut-up/mix-up music. The booklet is a cool essay on creativity and the public domain. There's a video on the CD as well. It's all under the CC-Sampling license. Which is slightly incongruous, the same as it was for People Like Us. Did I mention the whoopie cushion?
Cool.
Technorati Tags: art, creative commons, free culture, music
A couple of handy hardware hacks:
Hacking A Mouse For Optical Encoders
I must get a PIC or a stamp. It's been ten years...
Technorati Tags: hacking, hardware
The review of Ranciére's and Badiou's respective aesthetics in Radical Philosophy 131 complains that neither tackle capitalism head-on.
This is both vital (ignoring capitalism renders aesthetics irrelevant or distractive) and pointless (capitalism is atmospheric, and already distorts and redirects everything else).
Possibly this should be double-whammied; render capitalism aesthetic, and aesthetics capitalistic. This would be neither Naomi Klein nor Walter Benjamin, rather an analysis of the projective geometry of exchange value.
"Handbook Of Inaesthetic (Meridian (Stanford, Calif.).)" (Alain Badiou, Alberto Toscano)
"The Politics Of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible" (Jacques Ranciere, Slavoj Zizek)
Links to Amazon Ironic. ;-)
Technorati Tags: aesthetics
paintr is draw-something's evil twin. It's the post-dot-com approach as opposed to draw-something's pre-ai-winter approach.
It would be interesting to transcend the two approaches, but it's easier for now to combine them, getting draw-something to draw the shapes and manage the colours. Whether that would be interesting enough I don't know. Maybe I could prototype something quickly.
Technorati Tags: generative art
colr.org going down has forced a switch to colourlovers.com, which in turn has caused me to reconsider paintr.
This image is derived from Jaen Whuf's the GNE by Stacie, and is therefore licensed under a Creative Commons License
I want to use folksonomies as the externalised knowledgebase and opinionbase of online humanity, the ironised triumph of classical artificial intelligence. Each folksonomy must be exemplary in its class.
These folksonomies are to be used by a process that makes something "almost, but not entirely, quite unlike" art. A parodically simple 'social history of art' view of the production of art would be that an artist identifies some social need and produces an aesthetic account of or resolution for this.
So paintr should:
1. Go to technorati, find some of the most popular tags.
2. Find an image at flickr with these tags.
3. Find a palette and apply this.
A more Adorno-influenced paintr would use wordnet to find the opposites of the tags in order to provide a critique, or possibly invert the palette.
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, folksonomies, generative art
I wanted to remix images again, and I found an image at Remix Reading that appealed to me. It was a posterised photograph of a street in Reading by Tom Chance, and it had lots of shapes (probably tracing artefacts) that I liked quite independently of any descriptive function they had. I autotraced the image and took the shapes I wanted, arranging them into new compositions, subconsciously influenced by the Matisse prints at my local McDonalds and some ceramic drinks coasters that my mother made.
Mackenzie Wark regards hacking as releasing pure virtuality, which I take to mean latent or unrealised potential. Paul Miller regards remixing as an interrogation of meaning. The two are at odds, as remixing is hacking, but they are complementary, as meaning is not finite. Even a single image has so much potential.
I made the first image Evie was away, then when she came back and told me she was going away for good I dedicated it to her. It seemed fitting. These goth-Matisse pieces are the anti-Blim, at the other end of ten years of my life. The title is a reference to a comment on 'The Creative Remix' about remixes of classical poems, but also refers to a section of a hymn or poem. Again it seemed fitting.
Technorati Tags: art, creative commons, free software
Via hobbyprincess:
A community/structured content site to present projects and howtos. Kinda like a make community site.
Technorati Tags: online communities
colr.org is down at the moment. One of the questions paintr asks is "What happens if a service you base your work on goes down?". I didn't expect to get such a quick answer. :-)
The colr website lists some alternatives to colr.org, I'll have to recode paintr to be able to use one of them instead:
Or there's an algorithmic palette generator:
But that goes against the folksonomy emphasis of paintr.
Technorati Tags: art, generative art, folksonomies
Common Content is back, with an admin team to keep out the link spammers. I always liked the idea of Common Content, a directory (rather than a repository) for Creative Commons licenced work. Submit links to your work and people can find it by category:
Art was traditionally made for the ruling classes. Actually, that's not true, but high art was by definition made for the ruling classes. Access to high art technology was limited to high art, so rich colours, perspectival mathematics, or computing machinery were off-limits for the plebs.
There's the possibility of breaking or reaffirming this divide now.
A hacker/maker/participatory culture could render high art genuinely obsolete by distributing the knowledge to produce the tools and ideology to make high art in any home. This could be empowering, but it could also destroy the critical potential of art.
Or alternatively, getting access to high-end technology, paintboxes or clusters, could reaffirm or produce a new high asethetic. This could be used to critical ends, or could end up as simply demo art, sales apologia for widgets.
Which path, and which risks, one takes depends on ones ideology. But sitting on commodity computer technology fiddling with the same software as everyone else doesn't cut it either way.
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art
"Wikidraw is a project to create a free-content resource for drawing that anyone can edit.":
Don't tell MIT, but a 3D pixel is called a voxel. :-)
Links to pixel-related projects:
The Complete Guide To Making Isometric Pixel Art
Ada Camara Ortega has written a review of my series "1969" for the Danish website cultur.com:
1969 (in Danish)
Colour schemes from art & design of the 1950s to the 1980s were a strong influence on the images, so I think Ada's right to mention 1970s psychedelia and wallpaper designs. Evie even bought me a book of wallpaper designs after I produced 1969. :-)
Thanks Ada!
The Creative Commons 2.5 licenses are now live. Choose a license from:
http://www.creativecommons.org/license/
and you get a 2.5 version.
The only changes are the attribution provisions apparently requested by a mysterious quorum of wiki owners. These are open to abuse, they are unworkable outside of the US due to Berne's moral right of Attribution (which is inalienable in some jurisdictions), and are they *really* needed by the giant attribution databases that are Wikis?
DeviantArt is just a cool art community site, in case you were wondering:
http://inkscapers.deviantart.com/
A selection of links from the Liquid Culture launch, discussion and handouts.
The Association For Free Software
I'm evaluating a project using autotraced samples from the Yorck Project. The title "Gib mir wieder etwas schöne" is a line from a song. :-) And the content is politics and relationships, all of which makes it a sequel to 1969.
But first I need to download lots of images and get autotracing working as I want it.
On The Commons on collage and creativity:
"The real lesson, for me, is that collage is not just an interesting sideshow in the creative process; it is a central element."
Conference referenced form the blog entry:
Sampling and remixing are indexical collage. Mash-ups are atomic indexical collage.
In 199x I was on holiday in Turkey. Half way through my two week stay, a bastard newcomer told me that Microsoft had bought part of Apple. I didn't enjoy the second half of my holiday nearly as much as the first half. But that was as much the bar by the pool looping Queen's greatest hits as anything else.
So Macs will have Intel inside. So, Linux or BSD?
The people who regard Prisoner's Dilemma as an illustration of economics rather than an attempt to justify a pathological ideology will probably take this as showing how natural money and markets are:
I on the other hand wonder just what kind of pervert tortures monkeys until they have to act like office workers in order to try to naturalize their weird worldview.
Some experiments prove a bit more than they are meant to. This is definitely one of them.
An arc is a tag on a link, or a series of links, rather than an address. Arcs express a relationship rather than a property. They can be ordered (a series or graph) or unordered (a set or bag). Arconomies should be the next big thing® for the net.
Tags can be used to create tuples, e.g.:
- arcs, relationships between tags.
- bags, collections of objects under a very specific tag.
- series, possibly open ended series, identified by numeric or seminumeric tags.
Specific tags for tuples can take the form of Java names (org.robmyers.digital-art). Seminumeric tags can take a similar form (org.robmyers.digital-art.27) or be part of a general parameterized tag system (org.robmyers.digital-art(27, blue, 'a dog') ).
A tag tuple space would make the entire net the subject of a system like Linda tuple spaces or JavaSpaces.
As well as specific and parametric tags, hierachical tags (blue tagged with colour tagged with property tagged with concept) can be used. Or the author of a tag can provide personal information to help understand how they might be using that tag (which could be dangerous for privacy as marketeers mine this information), tagging their tags with contextual information.
Since tagging tags can be useful, possibly arcs and tuples on tags can be useful as well.
As tags grow in popularity, tag spam and tag boosting will become common, as will spam-encoded and 1337 tags. Hopefully bayesian filtering will work well on tag/URL/author combinations to protect against this.
A proposal for a project I'm unlikely ever to do. A hyper-image Wiki based on SVG.
The interface is SVG and JavaScript. Any element of any object is selectable. Groups get selected first.
You can select any art and make a link to a new image, taking the art as the basis for the new image, uploading a new image, or starting with a blank image.
You can make any selected art into a re-usable symbol.
You can annotate, tag and externally link any art.
Each image or symbol has its own history, diff and discussion page.
Ideally, the interface would eventually be a full vector art editor, or at least allow for external vector art editors through an open API.
Projects that use content enclosures as source:
Yahoo Image Search Art (see halfway down the page: Web Pages, Image Search)
And howtos/libraries/APIs:
Yahoo Image Search API (No Google Image Search API yet!)
Yahoo Creative Commons Search API
Via Web Zen and Boing Boing:
images are representation (Wark) is query (Google) is search (AI) is culling (shape grammars)
an image is not a degenerate text, such claims are ideology
a bicycle is multi-dimensional (flatterland). projection (rendering) is reduction of dimensions through transformations. an image is a projection. a picture or a painting is not necessarily an image.
is a unicycle a reduced-dimension projection of a bicycle, an image of a bicycle? :-)
images, projections are indexical, if lossy. transformation, if lossy.
performance, installation, social action may be images.
images are aesthetic (indexical ideological choices).
Adornian aesthetic isomorphism. indices, indexing
quantization, search, query, state-space, dimensions, discrete/continuous, syntactic field.
draw-something already draws holes.
It draws holes in a rectangle, the rectangular ground of the format. We just see them as figures.
Those figures can extend outside the ground, but that is a conceptual wart. They should be limited by the bounds of the format, which is easy enough to do.
They are drawn outside their skeleton, which means that holes holes should be as well. I didn't like this idea, but it solves two problems. If the skeleton is a polyline, how do we draw 'inside' the end lines if they don't join. And if the skeleton is a single point, how do we draw inside that? Always drawing outside solves both problems.
If we always draw outside, either the skeleton's points must always be far enough from their enclosing form that they won't intersect it, or the drawing algorithm must be capable of handling cases where the line of the skeleton is coincident with the line of the enclosing form.
So. The next point on a drawing must be:
> minimum distance outside the 'hole' poly (the skeleton)
> minimum distance inside the 'figure' poly (the ground or the parent figure)
Which means the points of the hole poly must be > minimum distance *2 from the 'figure' poly, or we drop the minimum distance and either go for a max either side or a max only?
A Kuro5hin article on an artificial intelligence program that can do analogies, with a very interesting take on "Relational Mathematics".
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/5/26/192639/466
Analogical reasoning is considered very important for creativity, and therefore modeling it is very important for simulating creativity.
Liquid Culture 5.06 was a well-organised and very engaging event. Concentrating on Free Software and Free Culture together is absolutely what is needed. Overviews of Free Software, software patents and Creative Commons licenses were given, with case studies of "Open Source" software from Goldsmiths and free culture from Remix Reading. Siva's dissenting response at the end was excellent, and nobody really disagreed with him. :-)
The speakers were all good, the discussion was heated, and I met Tom and Ed from Remix Reading. Who are cool.
One person who knew me from a mailing list said that they expected me to have a big beard. I must change my net presence. I don't even have a goatee.
I handed out some CDs of my work that I'd made and grabbed lots of flyers and leaflets.
Video of the event was recorded but that doesn't seem to be online yet. Various people had materials that I think should end up online but the only URL I have to hand is:
http://www.alexhudson.com/talks/intro-free-software
for Alex's talk.
Liquid Culture is definitely a project to watch.
10,000 Paintings From Directmedia at Wikimedia Commons. High resolution, public domain. Lots of German art, much of it wonderful.
I hope this sets a precedent, and I applaud Directmedia and Wikimedia. Hopefully this will provide a challenge to the hoarders of art who won't share. If you shut your culture away, those who don't shut their own culture away will be the foundation of future culture...
