September 2008 Archives

Bela Emerson's cybernetic cello performances are excellent. New album out soon!

Brad Sucks is mis-named. His college-radio-friendly Beck-ish rock wouldn't normally be my cup of tea but it's BY-SA and it grows on you.

Amanda Palmer is, fortunately, not really dead because her debut solo album is great.

And on the retro front I've been enjoying Tangerine Dream and The March Violets...

When I was at art school, two of my colleagues found a wall from a
demolished building on some wasteland out of town that would have made
an excellent canvas for a mural they were planning. But it was covered
in graffiti. Real graffiti by kids with spraycans, not
destined-for-publication graphic designer posturing. To make their
mural they would have had to destroy it.



One of them later acknowledged to me that they'd done the right thing by not doing so.

http://www.artfagcity.com/2008/09/29/lost-not-found-the-unnamed-sources/

The excellent Art Fag City blog comments on Marisa Olson's contribution to the "Surf Clubs" debate. AFC agrees with some of what Marisa says, then comments -

I don't understand why reposting material without attribution on a blog
should take the work out of circulation, or remove a pre-existing
narrative/economy.  Sure they carry a different authority when posted
by a well respected net artist, but this doesn't negate their history,
nor is it any way distinctive from the mechanisms of other online
social networks.  After all, an influential DIGG member carries
authority too.

For me it is this ventriloquism, and the assumption that artists are somehow doing it better, that is part of the ethical and aesthetic problem of Surf Clubs. And if Surf Clubs are just an accurate representation of the means of production and social relations of Web 2.0, why are they so reliant on the artworld reputations of their contributors?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/09/science/09rock.html

Dr. Malotki's latest focus is on designs called phosphenes, which are
as fundamental to art as time is to language. He said the same 15
abstract geometric constants appear globally in art created as early as
300,000 years ago. They are grids, zigzags and patterns of dots. They
are the first objects drawn by children; we doodle them when we talk on
the phone.

These are the same kind of rock drawings that inspired Harold Cohen in the 1970s with AARON. And if you look at AARON's drawings from the late 1970s you'll see precisely these phosphenic forms (among others) being created by the program. Cohen called AARON's repertoire of the time "cognitive primitives". Malotki's work seems to bear this out.

As capitalism does another ideological reset the excuse du jour is that the credit crunch was a highly improbable event, a "black swan" (it's not just a bad song by Thom Yhork).

If this is true then the people who sold unsustainable mortgages to get the commission on them then sold them on rather than take on the risk of those mortgages were behaving irrationally, because they could not have foreseen that anyone would default on them. This would raise more questions than it answers.

The problem isn't probability. The sub-prime market was exploited in the way it was because of its probabilities, not despite them. The problem is greed. And self-pitying denial won't disguise that, however dense the notation.

It's the twenty-first anniversary of the announcement of the GNU project today. GNU is a project to create a Free Software operating system, that is software for your computer that does not allow other people to restrict your freedom to use it.

I'm writing this on a laptop running Fedora, which is a Free Software distribution based on GNU. I'm writing it in Firefox, also Free Software, using Movable Type, again Free Software, running on a Free Software web server.

From almost no Free Software a quarter of a century ago to pervasive Free Software today. There is always more work to be done, and new threats to the freedom to use software freely, but GNU has been a great success. Never let anyone tell you that pragmatism is more important or more powerful than ethics.

Happy birthday GNU!

To help distribute and archive my work I've created repositories at Beanstalk and GitHub.

I'm uploading my art projects to Beanstalk. The Beanstalk repository is a Subversion repository, accessible here -

http://robmyers.beanstalkapp.com/art

You can find out about Subversion here.

I've uploaded my code projects to GitHub. There's one Git repositor per project, accessible here -

http://github.com/robmyers

You can find out about Git here.

I'm not expecting to accept changes for most of these projects, but I am expecting to change the code projects and add to the art projects and it's good to have a public source for work. So version control repositories seem like a good idea.

A big thank you to Matt for hosting this site for the last few months.

If anything on this blog or the site is broken do let me know.

It should be easier to comment here now, you can comment anonymously again.

ORG, the Open RIghts Group, are the UK equivalent of the EFF (differences in law and political culture aside).

They have been doing excellent work over the last couple of years; getting into government consultations, bringing issues to the attention of mainstream media, observing electronic voting, and giving Andy Orlowski something to wring AdWords revenue from.

You can help support ORG from just five pounds a month. Having been to ORG HQ I can vouch that they are a lean and mean outfit and that your money won't be wasted on bean bags or lava lites.

Click here.

If you're in the UK and you're interested in Free Culture you should support ORG. Don't make me name names, people. ;-)

art_generators has been renamed "frame". It works as a noun and a slightly pretentious verb. I've registered a Rubyforge project and switched the build system to Hoe.

Just a bit more testing then it will be time for a release.

http://www.gnu.org/fry/

Mr. Stephen Fry introduces you to free software, and reminds you of a very special birthday.

An excellent introduction to the GNU project from national treasure and technophile.

I have a sudden craving for chocolate cake.

(Disclosure: I have a mention in the credits for technical services.)

http://www.strangeattractor.co.uk/further/?p=908

The great fortean surrealist, performer, actor and theatre director Ken Campbell has died suddenly aged 66.

:-(

http://github.com/robmyers/art_generators/tree/master

Rails-style generator system for creating and managing digital art projects.

Over the last few years I've developed a fairly standard directory layout and project lifecycle for my art image projects. If you download an archive from a project page at http://robmyers.org/art you'll see there's a folder with the project's name containing a LICENSE file and directories named "final" and "discard". During the course of a project I make images and sort them into "final" for images I'll put on the web page and that should be considered part of the finished project and "discard" for images that don't make the grade.

This can be automated to a degree, so inspired by Ruby On Rails I've created a system to create the directory layout and add scripts to move work between directories, bundle them up for release, and generate web pages to display the images.

Currently the project is going under the terrible title of "art_generators". I really need a better title, something like Rails, so any suggestions will be gratefully received. Cerise, plinth and sketchbook are ideas so far.

I'll bundle this up as a Ruby gem when it's ready for other people to use, but the project creation code works OK and interfaces with SVN. I'll be using it for a couple of projects to get the rest of the scripts working well, then I'll do an initial release.