June 2006 Archives

For.

Technorati Tags: art, free culture

In Zoolander, the joke is that vapid, model-beautiful people make excellent assassins.

In Ultraviolet, it's not meant to be a joke.

To work (left) and back (right). Home is at the bottom, work is at the top.

Technorati Tags: GPS

My journey to Tesco for lunch (bottom path) and back (top path).

The differences at the top of the image are to do with crossing the road. The differences at the bottom are to do with following the path or cutting across the grass. :-)

Technorati Tags: GPS

Home is top left. This is a round trip of a couple of kilometres.

Technorati Tags: aesthetics

Mitch Featherston's daily public domain image blog is a wonderful treat. Each image Mitch posts tells a story or gives a taste of a different time, and many are useful resources for artists and designers. It's one of my favourite blogs and I recommend it highly.

Take a look here:

http://opendomain.blogspot.com/

Technorati Tags: free culture

This is post 1010 (decimal) on this blog. Post 1000 was the one about the Foster's blog.

Cococo coco co cocococococo co coco cococo cocococo!

Oil is substitute labour. Hydrocarbon slavery (without exploitation) or surplus. Stakhanov in a tank. Or possibly his tears. Stakhanov's piss?

Technorati Tags: philosophy

Philosophy is a product of leisure. Leisure implies a surplus, the more leisure the more surplus. A large surplus is difficult for an individual to produce. Which may imply exploitation. What is the ethical and class character of leisure and how does this impact philosophy? Does it require a Victorian ethos of different-kinds-of-labour (see the painting) to make it a product of (or producer of) work rather than leisure?

Technorati Tags: philosophy

How to select and drag in minara.

s s (select), click to select

t m (move), mouse down on selection

drag selection, release mouse

s [space] (select nothing), deselect

That's about as involved as the colour specifying. :-) But this does help re-examine user interface concepts that have been fixed since the time of Illustrator 1.0 at the latest. I think that's a useful side-effect of this project.

Technorati Tags: minara

The Commoner N.11 - spring/summer 2006 Re(in)fusing the Commons

After ten issues, The Commoner makes the first timid steps toward changing format and organisation, towards making more explicit and visible the practices of cyber commoning it is grounded on. Watch this space, we are slow, but things will happen. Meanwhile, enjoy the edition that our two guest editors, Nate Holdren and Stevphen Shukaitis, have put together, an edition in which the different contributions are traversed by the problematic of commoning.
Boing Boing: Royal Society to try open access science publishing

The UK Royal Society, the oldest "learned society" in the world, will try publishing some of its journals under open access licensing.

Boing Boing: Wendy Seltzer smokes the MPAA in the Wall St Journal

My pal and former EFF attorney Wendy Seltzer conducted a debate with MPPA exec Fritz Attaway in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. In it, Wendy makes mincemeat of Attaway's arguments, which keep coming around to accusing her of wanting to commit piracy and rip off artists, which, as she explains over and over again, isn't what she's trying to do at all

Boing Boing: Pete Seeger tribute disc locked down with Dr0

Such irony: Bruce Springsteen recorded a tribute album for Pete Seeger, anti-property agitator and old-guard leftist. Springsteen's label slapped a super-restrictive DRM on the disc that prevents PC playback, ripping to MP3, and lots of other freedoms that are totally in synch with the poltiical messages in Seeger's music.

EFF: DeepLinks

The ad collects a century-worth of fear mongering by an industry focused on legislating to protect out-dated business models, rather than adjusting to changing market opportunities:

"I forsee a marked deterioration in American music...and a host of other injuries to music in its artistic manifestations, by virtue—or rather by vice—of the multiplication of the various music-reproducing machines..." -John Philip Sousa on the Player Piano (1906)

;; Too long! Decompose!(define (update-selection-transform buffer sel x y)(let-values (((prev-from prev-to)(sexp-before buffer (picking-hit-from sel)))((next-from next-to)(sexp-after buffer (picking-hit-to sel))))(let ((offset  0)(start-index 0)(prev-symbol (sexp-symbol-string buffer prev-from))(next-symbol (sexp-symbol-string buffer next-from)));; What if it's a rotate but preceded by a translate? Later.(if (not (and (string= prev-symbol "translate")(string= next-symbol "pop-matrix")))(let ((prefix(format#f"(push-matrix)~%(translate~a ~a)~%" x y))(suffix "(pop-matrix)\n"));; Wrap the selection in a new transform(buffer-insert-undoable buffer(picking-hit-to sel)suffix)(buffer-insert-undoable buffer(picking-hit-from sel)prefix)(set! start-index(+ (picking-hit-index sel)1))(set! offset (+ (string-length prefix)(string-length suffix))));; else(let* ((new-translate (format #f "(translate ~a ~a)"(+ x old-x)(+ y old-y))));; Update the existing transform very inefficiently;; Delete the current transform;; Insert new transform(buffer-insert-undoable buffer(- (picking-hit-from sel)1)new-translate)(set! offset (- (string-length new-translate)(- prev-fromprev-to))))(set! start-index(picking-hit-index sel)));; Roll the other selections down or up(update-selection-ranges (selections-var buffer)start-indexoffset))))

A Democratiya Review Fisks Anti-Imperialism

The perfect is the enemy of the good' - this is a proverb that applies to the seductive but bankrupt ideology of 'anti-imperialism', which presents itself as opposition to the most powerful form of oppression but which in practice is something much less positive, indeed negative and reactionary.

In simplest terms, 'imperialism' can be defined as a state's pursuit of empire or the expansion of its power, through acquiring territory from, or power over, other states or peoples. No reasonable person would not oppose this, but 'anti-imperialism' today means something other than opposition to imperialism.

My modestly titled essay "Generative Art Is..." (written in the same time frame as a heated debate about the possibility of machine creatvity on eu-gene :-) ), accompanied by a new draw-something drawing, has been published in the latest issue of online journal Vague Terrain:

http://www.vagueterrain.net/content/archives/journal03/myers01.html

I was very pleased to be asked to write something for this excellent project, and I'm in very good company as there are also contributions from Ben Bogart, Mantissa, Marius Watz, Meta, Neil Wiernik, Paul Webb, Peter Nyboer, Philip Galanter, William Farkas, Ben Fry and Casey Reas.

Take a look, and try the archives as well, the previous issues are just as engaging.

There was a very interesting documentary on Channel 4 (in the UK) this evening about hearing voices:

http://www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/C/can_you_believe_it/debates/voices.html

"Some scientists draw a parallel with forecasting the weather by creating a virtual weather system. The system is designed to have autonomy, so running the model produces results that the meteorologist wouldn't and couldn't have predicted on their own."

Without wishing to trivialise hearing voices, I think this is relevant to generative art as an example of small systems or simulations determined entirely by human minds that can nonetheless surprise and inform them.

My review of Boredomresearch's show at TheSpace4 is now online at Furtherfield:

http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?From=Index&review_id=186

I'm looking at colour palette generation for paintr and draw-something.

Various mathematical systems:

http://openmodo.com/content/view/2/2/

http://www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/sasmac/brewerpal.html

http://www.telecable.es/personales/alberto9/color/index.htm
http://www.sonosphere.com/WebTools/ColorPaletteGenerator/

http://www.colorcache.com/colorpicker.shtml

The usual colour-wheel oriented schemes, plus a scheme that seems based on swapping the RGB values, and a map colouring system I haven't figured out yet.

And there's also many image palette extractors, such as the one at praystation I can't find just now.

Paintr could use other flickr images for colours, but that would remove the folksonomy element.

Why Apple is to blame for iTunes DRM

Many Apple fans were upset that Defective by Design targeted iTunes/iPod DRM, claiming that Apple can't be held responsible for its decision to use its technology to control instead of empower its customers. Seth expertly addresses each of these arguments, showing that Apple's embrace of DRM has been enthusiastic, abusive and thoroughgoing, not merely a necessity of the market.

Two from Joy Garnett (You really should be reading NewsGrist):

Newly Launched: The Fair Use Network

This is the site we've all been waiting for, the hub of "all things fair use", a newly launched online resource tailored for artists, scholars and creative people that includes practical resources, reference guides and glossaries, a budding attorney network, and a nifty newsfeed in the left sidebar generated by their internal blog....

A NEW MANIFESTO FOR THE COPYRIGHT WARS

Susan M. Bielstein distills decades of experience as an editor of illustrated books for a guide to navigating the treacherous waters of copyright, Permissions, A Survival Guide: Blunt Talk about Art as Intellectual Property. She gives frank advice on how to determine whether an artwork is copyrighted, how to procure a high-quality reproduction, how to use "fair use" to your advantage, and many other issues.

RIAA finds a new way to alienate its customers

The RIAA is sending C&Ds to kids who post videos of themselves dancing
to music on YouTube, because the kids -- who are giving musicians free
viral marketing -- haven't paid a license fee.

Slashdot | Another Sky Press Driving Neo-Patronage

Another Sky Press is making a serious go of the neo-patronage / tip jar model

Read the slashdot comments for other similar projects.

TV teen sex orgy complaints came from people who never saw the show

They were just robotically following the orders of their cult leaders at the PTC and the American Family Association

First ever minara drag! I used the select tool (s s) to select the green (minara) graphic, then used the move tool (t m) to drag the red selection. Now I just need to get the code working for moving the original graphic when you release the mouse.

The red selection is actually the green graphic's future position. It would be tortuous to split the main buffer around selections and re-unite it afterwards. So this is how we do it.

Open Score is an attempt to meaningfully describe the requirements for work that can be used Freely. This is different from defining what Freedom is, rather it defines what you need to exercise your Freedom.

This is a work in progress. Feedback is welcome.

Open Score

Creativity is key to the economy. But creativity in science and engineering, not in the "creative industries". Which is why the Lisbon Agenda needs not DRM but investment in chemistry departments. Or the opposite of what is actually happening.

In what is actually happening is the spectre (or fetish if you're in Cretinous Sundries) of Affective Labour. Of work not at machines but at interactions (relational labour...). Aesthetics as the product of the proletariat. Precessive kitsch, if kitsch is industrialised folk culture. With the smile as the core competence, not the added value. With no job security, respect or prospects (welcome to how the rest of the world lives, "precariat"-fearing web designer weekend marxists).

These relational loan-stretchers in the cargo-cult economy of governments that still believe we should all be Living On Thin Air have useful idiots to lead the unwashed into the abbatoir. The artist-statement-writing-workshop sector of the non-art non-market, bourgeois would-be-career-artists (hi), lurching from subsidised training day to temporary residency, are the harbingers of the new economic order of the post-Lisbon cracked mirror.

Highly collectible gestures of resistance to the ancient regime aside, there are two strategies for art. Non-instrumentalised, disruptive, qualitative, unimproving pleasure. Or institutional critique that actually critiques the current institutions. Or possibly both. Art always serves new money, so let's not kid ourselves, but if we can start serving the next-but-one regime, we can speed up firing the ejector on the current boss. Which, since they want art to be socially instrumental, should please everybody.

The red shape was a black shape drawn with the pen then selected. So it is now highlighted in red.

[Note to self: don't forget to make the selection buffer inserts non-undoable!].

Now I just need to debug dragging.

Of a different key to previous series highpoint "The Girl In The Fireplace", this two-parter took The Doctor and Rose to a planet orbiting a black hole ("The Impossible Planet") and to the prison that something claiming to be the devil has been locked in since before the start of the universe ("The Satan Pit"). This was perfect science fiction TV. The murderous aliens, the possessed humans, the lost civilisations and a climax fought with synapses rather than sidearms, the tragedy of the loss of individuals against the backdrop of a threat to the entire universe.

This was dark and scary stuff for 7pm on BBC1, and more than that it was genuinely thought provoking. And dramatic, one of the kids said they thought The Doctor had died after - what do you mean you didn't watch it? Go and watch it now!