January 2006 Archives

Stupid registration required link from the American version of The Times that is about something interesting to do with theatre and copyrifght expansionism but I now can't remember what. I'm sure it's worth going to Bugmenot to get a password for, though:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/theater/newsandfeatures/29gree.html

Last chance to stop the support of litigation by religious extremists act:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/news/story/0,,1697498,00.html

A groovy-looking Creative Commons Media Kit. Hopefully it's not all NC:

The kit includes a flyer explaing CC, a DVD with CC cartoons and videos, and a CD with re-mixed CC licensed music.

http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5763

The first Libre Graphics Meeting looks excess kewl:

LGM will be a melting pot, with free software graphics developers and artists meeting each other, exchanging ideas and tips, and planning the future of free graphics. Graphics professionals interested in learning about the state of the art in free software are also welcome.

http://libregraphicsmeeting.org/index.php

Art is not terrorism:

http://happyfamousartists.blogspot.com/2006/01/art-is-not-terrorism.html

Free Culture Art Show at New York University:

http://wiki.freeculturenyu.org/wiki/index.php?title=Art_Show_2006

Technorati Tags: free culture

The weblog "Apologen: Anekdotes met een beethe moraal":

http://www.apologen.be/2006/01/13/laat-je-tekeningen-maken/

A Rhizome discussion thread on draw-something:

http://rhizome.org/thread.rhiz?thread=19888&page=2#37963

Technorati Tags: generative art

vectorizeme vs julian opie

http://happyfamousartists.blogspot.com/2006/01/vectorizeme-vs-julian-opie.html

The BNP's Plymouth organiser Graham Green said party members had been handing out leaflets on behalf of the Christian campaign.

He said the "Christian majority" was being discriminated against because a similar show about a minority would not have been allowed.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4640588.stm

And previously:

Arts Council England has denied that it refused to fund a UK tour of the musical Jerry Springer: The Opera over protests by Christian groups.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/4152308.stm

Technorati Tags: free culture

Madhav Sharma, an actor in the sabotaged 2004 production of Behzti (Dishonour) by Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti has written an impassioned account of his experience.

http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2006/01/26/speaking_up_for_artistic_freedom.php

The courts eventually found in favor of Francine, awarding her sole custody of the Cousteau trademark in oceanographic endeavors.

Today, Jean-Michel and his siblings cannot use their own last name in conjunction with oceanographic pursuits.

http://righttocreate.blogspot.com/2006/01/ridiculous-trademark-cousteau.html

CPSD Comics: Bound By Law?

http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/index.html

The Open Rights Group is proud to announce its second networking evening, with guest speaker Cory Doctorow. More details of the evening to come soon.

This free event is open to digital rights campaigners, grassroots activists, the press and the general public, so please do send this information to anyone you think may be interested.

Refreshments and nibbles will be provided free of charge.

http://www.openrightsgroup.org/orgwiki/index.php/Second_ORG_networking_evening

Technorati Tags: free culture

Transcript of Lessig's talk in Second Life (via BoingBoing):

http://secondlife.blogs.com/nwn/2006/01/the_second_life.html

Second Life Creative Commons License Generator:

http://secondlife.blogs.com/nwn/2006/01/creating_creati.html

Second Life Free Culture Group:

"Free Culture", the group created for reserving seats at the Lessig event, will continue on, running in-world events related to Lessig's ideas and projects, including Creative Commons and copyright reform-- some of which, hopefully, will involve Professor Lessig himself. To get in the group from SL, select Find> Groups, then search and join "Free Culture". If you're interested in becoming an officer in this group, helping create and organize future events, contact me-- "Hamlet Linden", or hamlet@secondlife.com, via e-mail.

Technorati Tags: creative commons, free culture, second life

draw-something 0.4 will draw on a number of classic AI applications for its structure whilst building on the existing code and drawing style.

AARON

Harold Cohen, Tate Gallery, 1983, ISBN 0905005392

The drawing will consist of a series of figures, as it does now. Each figure will consist of more than one form, which has an outline and a fill. The outlines and fills of each form may touch other forms, and so not every outline will go all the way around each form. This is the equivalent of the linked lists of figures, developments and lines (each line consisting of a number of points) described in the Tate catalogue.

The First Artificial Intelligence Colouring Book, 1984, ISBN 0865760608

To help allocate space for figures in the drawing, draw-something will use a coarse grid of cells superimposed over the co-ordinates of the drawing, as described in "The First Artificial Intelligence Colouring Book" and elsewhere. As figures are generated, cells will be marked as belonging to each figure. This will allow fast location of space for new figures, and fast location of figures to overlap.

copycat

Fluid Concepts And Creative Analogies, 1995, ISBN 0465051545

http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~mm/how-to-get-copycat.html

Like AARON, copycat is a probabilistic rules system with a knowledgebase that constructs aesthetic structures. But copycat structures its rules as "codelets" and its knowledgebase is a kind of semantic network that allows generalisation, a "slipnet". draw-something's rules will be structured as codelets, initially just simple codelets that re-implement the current drawing system.

draw-something 0.5 will add more codelets and implement a kind of slipnet about pictorial and spatial construction. This is inspired by SHRDLU, which may also have influenced the "block world" version of AARON.

SHRDLU

http://hci.stanford.edu/~winograd/shrdlu/

The interesting part of SHRDLU for draw-something is not its natural language processing but its spatial knowledge: SHRDLU knows how objects can interact and will not allow impossible interactions. draw-something will use a copycat-style series of codelets to identify properties of figures being constructed, and a SHRDLU-style knowledgebase to decide how they can go together.

Technorati Tags: artificial intelligence, generative art

This sounds even worse than "fair dealing":

Big Content would like to outlaw things no one has even thought of yet

The thinking behind the term "customary historic use" is pure newspeak, a real 'talking point'. Who can argue against allowing people to keep their customary, historic privileges?

Anyone who understands that Fair Use is a dynamic, ongoing process that can react to future use rather than fossilising past allowances. That's who.

Technorati Tags: free culture

Jan - draw-something
Feb - website redevelopment, Open Score, remixes
March - remixes
April - remixes, minara
May - draw-something
June - remixes
July - minara
August - minara 0.1 release at end of month

The April minara work will just be cleaning up multi-window operation and the GUI ready for the big push in July.

Interdisciplines is an organisation that aims to link the humanities with the cognitive sciences and their latest online conference focuses on art and cognition.

http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2006/01/art_and_cognition.html

Hyman's paper is notable as it criticises the current trend of suggesting that adequate theories of aesthetics must, in essence, be neurologically based.

Indeed. The sad spectacle of nerobiologists and "cognitive scientists" discovering how a single set of cells functions in the brain and declaring that an entire area of art must be regulated by this really needs to stop. Chemists don't insist that all sculptures must be shaped like hydrogen atoms, or that those sculptures shaped like hydrogen atoms have no experiential, social, or even higher-level cognitive -uh- physical component.

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, cognitive science

A reference card for the SLIME Lisp system, derived from the Emacs reference card. In TeX format with derived PDF.

Click here to download.

Technorati Tags: lisp

It's cento, not canto:

http://www.delamar.org/btwerdtrix.htm

But Canto fitted my work of that name better.

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, free culture

[...] the work that is currently popular in the scene is often focused on immediate gratification, duplicating already existing work. It also often found lacking in niceties like software design, or even a more general understanding of good coding practices.

Karsten used Processing as the basis of his statements, pointing out that the procedural syntax of Processing could educate lazy coders and ultimately a dead-end for serious users of the tool.

http://www.generatorx.no/20060121/processing-or-die/

ActionScript is actually better than Processing for all of this, and there are Free tools available for it now.

Technorati Tags: generative art

This is a great encapsulation about the recent decision (Nov 2005) that reverses the damage done by Koons vs. Rogers, aka "String of Puppies" ca. 1988.

http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2006/01/koons_wins_land.html

Technorati Tags: free culture

This is a good follow on from exquisite corpse and cut-ups:

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/01/20/mark_dery_on_spam_li.html

Technorati Tags: aesthetics

Museums cannot use preservation as an excuse for banning flash photography (although it could be annoying for bystanders):

To actually double fading would need 100,000 amateurs a day. Most museums would kill for those attendance figures!

http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2006/01/flash_bulbs_and_artifact_prese.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890

DRM erodes consumers' rights, says NCC:

http://www.out-law.com/default.aspx?page=6546

The broadcast flag is back in the US:

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/01/21/broadcast_flag_is_ba.html

Singer Tom Waits spends much of his time trying to stop other people even sounding like him:

http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2006/01/tom_waits_copyr.html

Technorati Tags: free culture

NERVOUS TV bosses have axed an episode of South Park which OUTS a fictional Tom Cruise character as gay — because they are scared the real actor will SUE.
[...]
The episode is entirely fictional and there is no suggestion that the events are true.
It was shown in America last year but Cruise, 43, is believed to have threatened legal action if it is shown again.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2006020708,00.html

Fred sez, "The UK trade association for independent film and TV producers is proposing that Ofcom [Britain's telecoms reguloator] levy a tax on digital personal video recorders like TiVo."

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/01/18/uk_filmtv_producers_.html

Technorati Tags: free culture

I'm moving house over the next week. Woo.

The first draft of the third version of the GNU General Public License is out:

http://gplv3.fsf.org/draft

You can add comments to the draft, so go and take a look.

I think it is very good, particularly the way it handles DRM and internationalisation, but that it is too complex, and the compatibility clauses are too open and will lead to BSD-style clause accumulation.

Here's some notes from the launch, via Groklaw:

http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/webmink?entry=gpl_v3_released

Technorati Tags: free software

Technorati Tags: generative art, lisp

...it might have something to do with...the work pushing all kinds of interesting buttons about painting supposedly being the last refuge of authenticity in a synthetic world. Also, because New York is having a "head up its ass moment," with nouveau riche collectors buying art that as January blog has noted reminds them of work by their kids, or the kids they never had...

http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/?34641

But art is always sold to the nouveaux riche, and it reflects their ego. Perhaps the best one can hope for is to ironise it...

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art

Notes from "What is an image"
Appendix 2 in particular...
AARON keeps a list of co-ordinates for each figure as it is drawing it,
and can access this should very precise intersection be required.
That version of AARON has a maximum of 32 figures.
It marks line cells in various ways. Outline, shading, dividing line &c.
this kind of rich information might be good to keep.

Notes from "How To Draw 3 People..."
p9 for drawing speed, tighness, sampling rate rules.
Skeletons are mapped into the matrix as marked cells.
Do figurative drawings still use ntermediate destinations?

Notes From "Further Adventures"
Finished outlines are closed. All contained cells are claimed by the figure.
Matrix resolution is set by (hi-res) monitor resolution, eg 1280 x 1024
The "did not seem to be anything on the shelf" quote is from here.

Technorati Tags: generative art

These rectangles are meant to be avoiding each other.

And they're meant to be bounds (see the cream shape near the bottom). I'll take a look at this tomorrow with a fresh pair of eyes.

This is work towards making drawings that satisfy constraints (overlapping shapes, non-overlapping shapes, etc.).

Technorati Tags: generative art

Microsoft trying to patent smiley faces. I have prior art...

The UK's "Digital DJ" license was clearly drafted by cretins. And it will require DRM soon. Who makes up this stuff?

VW threaten to sue artist for drawing a car. The Beetle was designed by Hitler and originally built using slave labour. Go VW.

Academy judges putting review copies of films on P2P. Don't do as we say, do as, no that's wrong...

Picasso clan fail to airbrush out car name. " " "

And on a more positive note:

In praise of imitation. Even Macca has imitation anxiety...

Technorati Tags: free culture

Wonderful Public Domain images scanned From Old Books:

http://fromoldbooks.org/

Technorati Tags: art, free culture

Need a score or source material to derive from?

Try this search at Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/by-sa-2.0/tags/sketch/

Lots of sketches and drawings photographed and uploaded at high resolution ready to use. Beware obvious photographs of other people's sketches, and drawings of photos or cartoon characters, though.

Technorati Tags: free culture

I like the pictures in A New Kind Of Science but it's low on my list of things to actually read. I think Wolfram is going to be digital art's Baudrillard. Shudder. My least favourite part of NKOS is the New Kind Of Copyright License Wolfram has at the start of the book. Hint: Wolfram either doesn't know about, or is choosing to ignore, fair use/fair dealing. Actually that's not true, his treatment of Matthew Cook makes that pale into insignificance.

Anyway, this brings us to the most wonderful review of NKOS that I've read in a while:

A Rare Blend of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity.

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, generative art

Lawrence Lessig will be in Second Life next Wednesday. I wonder how SL are getting on with Creative Commons licenses in their game world?

I think it depends on whether you view virtual worlds as collaborative works or as ISPs (internet hosts).

If you view VRs as ISPs, then Creative Commons - Licensed work in one user's posession is like Creative Commons - Licensed work on one user's website. It doesn't affect the other users. Or you could argue that even if the world is a collection of different people's work, it is a collective work or mere aggregation.

But if you view virtual worlds as collaborative works there are two ways of treating CC licensing then this doesn't work. I could take BY-SA work from a BY-SA world and use it in a world of my own (or a non-BY-SA area of Second Life) without return. Which breaks the BY-SA licensor's intention. But it does impose a single license (or a couple of compatible licenses) on a world which is meant to support individual intentions.

It might be possible to suggest a "containment principle" for copyleft licensing and virtual worlds. If the world is copyleft licensed, then any object within it is *and must be* copyleft. If the world is not copyleft licensed, then any object or area within it may be copyleft licensed, but this does not affect the rest of the world. Non-copyleft items may interact with copyleft items (notably my non-copyleft avatar may walk into a castle or a mall that is copyleft without having to be relicensed), but if they are to be permanently contained by them then they must be made copyleft.

How workable and easy to subvert this is in practice I don't know. But I feel it should be possible both to allow freedom of contract in Second Life and ensure that a GPL-ed VR isn't ripped off by proprietary competitors.

Technorati Tags: creative commons, copyleft, second life, virtual reality

Technorati Tags: copyleft, creative commons, second life, virtual reality

Links to my site from the following interesting places:

The excellent Chris Ashley's weblog - Weblogs of Note

Graphic Design Blog - Minara Colour Tool

Markmaking - Maybe My Invitation Was Sent to the Wrong Address

Technorati Tags: blogging

I think Creative Commons is and was a great effort, but I think they made one critical mistake, the non-commerical clause. I can understand that at first glance that making it possible to limit 'commercial use' seems like a good idea, at least in order to get people onto the idea of copyleft style licensing, but in practicality it kills the basic purpose of the license, to allow people to freely copy.

Christian Schaller - Where Creative Commons botched

Creative Commons are the biggest promoter of NonCommercial licenses, and it's hard to promote pure copyleft against that. :-/

Technorati Tags: copyleft, creative commons, free culture

Some of my favourite blogs have picked up on draw-something, which is very cool:

Lemonodor - DRAW-SOMETHING

Future Feeder - Draw-Something draws something for you

Eyebeam ReBlog - draw-something

Thanks also to everyone on Rhizome Raw and the comments here who have had things to say about draw-something.

The shapes are random. The colours are random. At worst I'm showing one in every three of these images.

Randomness gives good results far more often than it should. Is it the heuristics I'm coding in, or is aesthetics really random?

Time to start adding rules.

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, artificial intelligence, generative art, lisp

Steven Spielberg will most likely not get any nomination for the BAFTA (British Film Academy) awards for "Munich" because of a massive DRM cock-up.

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/01/09/drm_keeps_spielbergs.html

Technorati Tags: free culture

Technorati Tags: art, artificial intelligence, generative art, graphics, lisp

I changed the way that figure bounds were decided, and started varying the size of the drawing as well. This has made draw-something's output more how I want it to look. But it's disturbing that random images look this good. I'm reminded of Harold Cohen's comments regarding AARON about the (un)importance of composition in aesthetics.

The program is "chatty" again, describing what it does. It saves images under a unique filename (so I don't lose development images), and it opens the results in Preview.app on OpenMCL. Here's what you see on the command line:

$ openmcl -l run.lisp

Starting draw-something.

Generating 5 figure skeletons: 1 2 3 4 5.

Drawing 5 figure outlines: 1 2 3 4 5.

Writing drawing to file ./drawings/drawing-20060108-172815.eps .

Finished draw-something.

Note to self: vary the potential min/max of figure bounds rectangle sizes. The previous images (draw-something In Development) used the same potential bounds for figures as the image bounds. And they looked interesting in their own way. So make sure they can happen.

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, generative art, lisp

Multiple figures, but they don't relate yet (I'm working on it).

With skeleton shown for debugging.

With no skeleton.

This version just uses PostScript's fill operator to handle outline visibility, but I'm working on an algorithm to only draw outlines where they would be visible.

I reworked the Lisp version of draw-something to be more like the simpler ActionScript version, ready for more development.

Technorati Tags: generative art

draw-something is vector graphics based. Everything is lines. I like vector graphics, I feel it's my medium. But this implementation has the problem that every line added to the drawing makes calculating distances between parts of the drawing more complex. It adds a lot of lines, one per pixel or so. Every time I think about this, I think that I should be using a pixel-based approach like AARON, where adding a new element to the drawing can never increase the complexity above the level of detail the pixels start at.

AARON is pixel based. Early (and recent?) versions draw directly into a pixel map, I think that the versions that use recognisable objects project outlines onto the pixel map from a 3D vector graphics space. It's a multi-dimensional pixel map, each pixel stores information about which figure it belongs to and where the drawing through it is going.

I could optimise draw-something using bounding boxes, "fat lines" along the lines of the polyline and other techniques. I could handle shape clipping by linking intersection points on outlines to the outlines they intersect. These are all game programming optimisations, and they should work well.

So I'm torn. draw-something is inspired by AARON and having a pixel layer would solve a lot of problems. And any given vector image will be rendered on a picel-based device for viewing. But sticking with vectors feels purer for what I want to do and may have different possibilities.

Any advice greatly appreciated. :-)

Technorati Tags: art, artificial intelligence, generative art

The current version of draw-something uses PostScript's fill operator to fill the shape with flat colour. Problem solved.

Or is it? Calling fill feels like cheating. draw-something should be colouring in, not flood filling. They are conceptually different. And they have different visual qualities. draw-something's drawing is based on my drawing, so draw-something's colouring in should be based on my colouring in.

The existing fill algorithm that I like is called the boundary fill algorithm. It's a simple recursive fill. I think I could convert it from a bitmap-based system to a vector-based system using a turtle (like draw-something's pen).

Something like (C pseudocode):

int step = 10; // Brush width
public void boundaryFill(Polyline outline, int fromX, int toX, int y, Polyline & fillOutline)

{
if (! outline.intersects(fromX, y, toX, y) && // Keep inside shape
! fillOutline.intersects(fromX, y, toX, y)) // Don't re-colour. Will get slower :-(

{

fillOutline.addLine(fromX, y, toX, y);
boundaryFill(toX, y, toX + step, y); // Try next along
boundaryFill(fromX, toX - step, y); // Try previous
boundaryFill(fromX, y + yStep, toX, y + step); // Try next up
boundaryFill(fromX, y - yStep, toX, y - step); // Try next down
}
}

But there are some things the system must do that a boundary fill won't:

• If a section of the figure is very thin, follow it along its edge rather than scribbling left and right.
• If a section of the figure is thicker than the scribble width, break it into a number of columns and rows. Fill these diagonally top left to bottom right.

Technorati Tags: generative art, graphics

An excellent drawing program, via runme:

http://www.doc.gold.ac.uk/aikon/

Reminiscent of Shizuka's image processing and drawing model but with more gestural drawing.

Technorati Tags: generative art

I'm proud to announce that draw-something now has an entry at runme.org:

http://www.runme.org/project/+drawsomething/

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, artificial intelligence, drawing, free software, generative art, graphics, hacking

Happy 2006 an hour ago!