The bestest quote on 'Pataphysics is by Jack Kerouac:
I even plunge into all the books and magazines around, I read up on "Pataphysics and yell contemptuously in the lamplight " "T'sa'n intellectual excuse for facetious joking, " throwing the magazine away, adding 'Peculiarly attractive to certain shallow types"
- Big Sur.
I'm busy working on Minara and other projects at the moment but I will be getting to London this weekend and next to get to two Free Culture events:
Because I always forget:
export CVS_RSH=ssh
cvs -d:ext:USERNAME@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/minara commit -m "Commit message."
Technical difficulties trace all manner of lives lived, and their material circumstances. They are all but invisible from the land-of-Cockayne of Cultural Studies, and from the professionalised production in its thrall (academic art), which makes none but the smartest of moves.
http://jcamd.londonmet.ac.uk/nowtheyaresurrounded/onemain_3.html
Brilliant discussion of Paul Graham's programming style in his classic book "ANSI Common Lisp":
Good book of practical Lisp techniques and tricks:
Lisp for hot programming topics:
Technorati Tags: hacking
Via the deeply necessary NewsGrist:
http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol2_2/lotringer.htm
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, philosophy
Via Boing Boing:
I wish I could get to this and take a sketchbook...
Zeitgeist-wise, between this and that artist doing a channeling show in LA it's time to dust off SPAR, the Society for Paranormal Aesthetic Research. Where's my ELF meter?
Orange, the CC-licensed Blender movie, is ramping up pre-production and looking good. The project now has a blog and you can pre-order the DVD. I used to use the example of DVD extras for animation as something that should be Free. Orange is providing source materials and even the code they write for effects.
Now if I can just persuade Paramount to make Star Trek Free then all of my examples will be actual. :-)
Technorati Tags: art, free culture, free software
I am now a real art blogger:
I'd better blog some more art quickly. :-)
PostScript was my first coding love. I worked on PostScript viruses at art school, and I still use it today as the output format for draw-something.
So it's great to see a PostScript output library for Processing, and to see it being used for some cool stuff (via Generator.x):
Technorati Tags: generative art, hacking
Some good observations sparked off by the current Negativland show:
update: This is post 666 on this blog! :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Word_games
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constrained_writing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mathematical_games
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Surrealist_games
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Surrealist_techniques
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Artistic_techniques
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_illusion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Optical_illusions
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Optical_phenomena
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Optics
"It's not the social content,
It's always the political form."
- 'Keep All Your Friends', Art & Language and The Red Crayola.
Let's take the commons metaphor for a moment (I'm not entirely happy with it). The Diggers seem to have been about reclaiming common land, and allotments were a shim for the lack of it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levellers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diggers_%28True_Levellers%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartists
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_Act
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allotment_%28gardening%29
Let's ignore the commons metaphor for a moment and look at organisational metaphors for Free Software and culture. These historical models are ironised in Free Software, becoming inclusive rather than exclusive:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guild
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_union
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative
And ignoring both let's look at social or political metaphors. The focus of Free Software is programmers, not programs. The name Free Software is like the name Free Society, don't confuse the structure with the content. Meanwhile, Mackenzie Wark treats the GPL as cultural security, like social security:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_society
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_security
But I think metaphors and precedents can be misleading.
The BBC has released content under the Creative Archive License, and are holding a remix competition:
You can now book a place at the Open Congress event at the Tate:
ORG, the UK equivalent of the EFF, is ramping up:
Lawrence Lessig will be talking in the UK at the end of the month:
Pan and zoom are working a little. The concept works, which is a relief. Once I've majorly tidied up the code and written an API for getting the cursor position on the page rather than in the window they'll be done.
Then I can rewrite the toy pen tool to work with that API and you'll be able to see what you're drawing when you've zoomed in. :-)
I also need to put another buffer under the translate buffer to handle the window resizing. OpenGL and Minara measure positions from the bottom left-hand corner, which chanegs when you resize the window. So when you resize the window the whole image moves, which isn't right.
Via 43 Folders:
11 Tips to surviving a day job with your creativity intact
I'd ignore number 11, and not everyone agrees that music helps, but the rest are cool. In particular getting up early. I did most of the design for Minara's pan and zoom tools, and sketches for a new unnamed series of images after getting up early to leave the Novotel in Bristol after FAVE.
Undo works. But not redo. Pressing z makes drawn objects disappear. Pressing Z does nothing.
I think the undo/redo architecture needs reworking. At the moment "marks" go before series of undo events. I think they need to go between, so one at the bottom and top of the stack, with marks on boundaries. Redoing has too much special logic at the moment. It should only have as much special logic as undoing, which will be the case with a mark at the end of the undo list as well as at the beginning.
Update: undo/redo now works as described. OpenGL transformation matrices and the pan/zoom tools are next.
Traditional freedom of speech is under attack in the UK, and our authors aren't happy about it. This is traditional creative freedom under attack.
Using computer models to identify important American jurisprudence
One complaint I've heard about free culture is that it's concerned with edge-cases, with obscure points of law. But this study shows that the rulings handed down on edge-cases set precedents, certainly in US law.
The Customer Is Always Wrong: A User's Guide to DRM in Online Music
DRM will not keep your secrets safe, it will not help you own digital "property", and it will not bring about the singularity. As the EFF show, it also doesn't help your music collection.
Online Inkscape book, about 90% complete, via planet.openclipart.org:
Inkscape is an excellent Free Software vector graphics editor, well worth a try. I've used and even written software for use with Illustrator for well over a decade now and whilst Inkscape still lacks a few vital features that Illustrator has, it's well worth using for its own good features and to get used to something new that shows great potential.
Common Content is back, with more admins to keep link spammers away.
Common Content is a directory of Creative Commons licensed content on the web. Register, submit a link to your content, and your work will be added to the directory. It's great for finding work that isn't in the big repository sites.
I want to control Minara via custom input devices eventually.
Via Make:
Via 43 Folders:
The Definitive Collection Of Idea generation Methods
Goes far, far beyond the usual deBono and Buzan stuff.
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