There isn't a web front end for it yet, but draw-something is making a drawing a day at -
http://robmyers.org/draw-something/drawings/
http://robmyers.org/draw-something/drawings/
Recently in Generative Art Category
Paintr is at http://robmyers.org/paintr/
I came up with the idea for paintr one Friday morning in 2005 while thinking about Harold Cohen's arguments regarding computer art in his essays and while thinking about the work of Pall Thayer. Paintr's tag line was "art in the age of network services", or "art as a network service". By lunchtime I had something working, and by late afternoon on Saturday it was feature complete. A few weeks later I exhibited it at my show "Howto" in Belgrade.
Artists don't make art by sitting around waiting for flashes of abstract conceptual or aesthetic inspiration then realizing it in visual form, but paintr does. The original version did so purely using Web 2.0-style web services; colr.org for colour palettes, flickr for (copylefted) photographs, and an online version of autotrace to convert the photographs to drawings. These paradigmatic web services were glued together with the paradigmatic web scripting programming language PHP.
Many of my projects take a linguistic (verbal or visual language) description of art or reality and drive open the cracks in it by taking it literally to making something ironic and unstable. They are disproofs of theories, illustrations of mistakes, but they have a remainder that has its own meaning or effect. Paintr is a good example of this. It's an analogue to art or artistic activity, the realisation of a popular misconception of how art is made. It's an exploit on the idea of art or on the misunderstanding of it.
The relationship that paintr has to Web 2.0 hype is similarly ironic. Web 2.0 makes it easy to create new software by gluing together the public APIs of web services, but you are limited in what you can ultimately do by the affordances that those services provide. Human socialisation can be planned, effected and recorded online in great detail and with great reach through social networking sites, but it is reified and channeled through normatising affordances. Art isn't something that should be created and vended as a web service like weather data or news tickers, but if that's the case what is special about art as a human activity that isn't about human activity in general?
Paintr makes something that isn't art. It's easy to say why it isn't art but it's less easy to see why it isn't art, unless contemporary art of the housepaint-on-aluminium school also isn't art. This entanglement makes paintr about something more than itself artistically as well as socially. Art computing is usually dismissed out of hand by mainstream art critics because of its perceived lack of psychological content, subjectivity, interiority, or affect. Dismissing paintr on that basis is trivial because it isn't even trying to express something. But the intentional fallacy starts to seep through the cracks, and entanglement means that this leads to collateral damage for more critically acceptable forms of art.
Aesthetics is resistant to corporate information culture because quantifying it doesn't capture its value. We can chain back from this obvious example to the more general case of human experience. The supernaturalism of qualia isn't necessary for aesthetics to have an experientially irreducible core. But paintr itself cannot experience this core. It weaves human affect and activity into its activity (colour palettes and images posted to social networking sites) but it is inhuman, beyond even death-of-the-author, a representative of corporate information culture and its exploitative cultural asset-stripping of "cool". It loops back, conceptually. The remainder of this loop is its artistic value.
The latest version of paintr has a back end written in Lisp and runs autotrace locally. It now has an RSS feed, always part of the plan, although it doesn't have an API yet. It's going to expand to start from expressing emotions rather than from abstract aesthetic inspiration. It will probably use Wordnet to map more creatively from its initial tags to the colours and images it searches for. It is becoming increasingly an example of social-network-based collective intelligence programming and increasingly an example of how this reifies human experience. And it looks good while doing so and in order to do so.
Artists don't make art by sitting around waiting for flashes of abstract conceptual or aesthetic inspiration then realizing it in visual form, but paintr does. The original version did so purely using Web 2.0-style web services; colr.org for colour palettes, flickr for (copylefted) photographs, and an online version of autotrace to convert the photographs to drawings. These paradigmatic web services were glued together with the paradigmatic web scripting programming language PHP.
Many of my projects take a linguistic (verbal or visual language) description of art or reality and drive open the cracks in it by taking it literally to making something ironic and unstable. They are disproofs of theories, illustrations of mistakes, but they have a remainder that has its own meaning or effect. Paintr is a good example of this. It's an analogue to art or artistic activity, the realisation of a popular misconception of how art is made. It's an exploit on the idea of art or on the misunderstanding of it.
The relationship that paintr has to Web 2.0 hype is similarly ironic. Web 2.0 makes it easy to create new software by gluing together the public APIs of web services, but you are limited in what you can ultimately do by the affordances that those services provide. Human socialisation can be planned, effected and recorded online in great detail and with great reach through social networking sites, but it is reified and channeled through normatising affordances. Art isn't something that should be created and vended as a web service like weather data or news tickers, but if that's the case what is special about art as a human activity that isn't about human activity in general?
Paintr makes something that isn't art. It's easy to say why it isn't art but it's less easy to see why it isn't art, unless contemporary art of the housepaint-on-aluminium school also isn't art. This entanglement makes paintr about something more than itself artistically as well as socially. Art computing is usually dismissed out of hand by mainstream art critics because of its perceived lack of psychological content, subjectivity, interiority, or affect. Dismissing paintr on that basis is trivial because it isn't even trying to express something. But the intentional fallacy starts to seep through the cracks, and entanglement means that this leads to collateral damage for more critically acceptable forms of art.
Aesthetics is resistant to corporate information culture because quantifying it doesn't capture its value. We can chain back from this obvious example to the more general case of human experience. The supernaturalism of qualia isn't necessary for aesthetics to have an experientially irreducible core. But paintr itself cannot experience this core. It weaves human affect and activity into its activity (colour palettes and images posted to social networking sites) but it is inhuman, beyond even death-of-the-author, a representative of corporate information culture and its exploitative cultural asset-stripping of "cool". It loops back, conceptually. The remainder of this loop is its artistic value.
The latest version of paintr has a back end written in Lisp and runs autotrace locally. It now has an RSS feed, always part of the plan, although it doesn't have an API yet. It's going to expand to start from expressing emotions rather than from abstract aesthetic inspiration. It will probably use Wordnet to map more creatively from its initial tags to the colours and images it searches for. It is becoming increasingly an example of social-network-based collective intelligence programming and increasingly an example of how this reifies human experience. And it looks good while doing so and in order to do so.
Artificial affectivity is the emotional equivalent of artificial intelligence. It is the simulation, emulation, or functional replacement of human affect by software or hardware models. Not neccessarily or just the simulation of emotion, but the simulation of the effects and expression of emotion.
In software the history of artificial intelligence has moved from rule based and expert systems through production systems and frame-based systems to statistical models, state machines and collective intelligence algorithms. Even crowdsourcing through Amazon Mechanical Turk is a form of machine intelligence, although an inversion of the original idea of artificial intelligence through the lens of economics.
All of these techniques are open to artificial affectivity. An artificial affectivity (the equivalent of an artificial intelligence) can be constructed using any of them or any combination. They can function as characters in a narrative, performers, pets or shamans. The question of whether a computer can feel can be framed in a kind of affective Turing Test; not whether it feels but whether you feel that it feels.
In software the history of artificial intelligence has moved from rule based and expert systems through production systems and frame-based systems to statistical models, state machines and collective intelligence algorithms. Even crowdsourcing through Amazon Mechanical Turk is a form of machine intelligence, although an inversion of the original idea of artificial intelligence through the lens of economics.
All of these techniques are open to artificial affectivity. An artificial affectivity (the equivalent of an artificial intelligence) can be constructed using any of them or any combination. They can function as characters in a narrative, performers, pets or shamans. The question of whether a computer can feel can be framed in a kind of affective Turing Test; not whether it feels but whether you feel that it feels.
"Like That" is back in the art section of the site. Make sure you have Jave enabled and take a look!
http://www.pawfal.org/forum/
A forum for artists coding and free software to make and be art, especially the fluxus livecoding environment.
Sign up and ask away!
A forum for artists coding and free software to make and be art, especially the fluxus livecoding environment.
Sign up and ask away!
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/09/science/09rock.html
Dr. Malotki's latest focus is on designs called phosphenes, which areas fundamental to art as time is to language. He said the same 15abstract geometric constants appear globally in art created as early as300,000 years ago. They are grids, zigzags and patterns of dots. Theyare the first objects drawn by children; we doodle them when we talk onthe 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.
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.
"Surgical Strike" was a 1996 art computing project concerned with the social history of art computing. "Surgical Strike Free Software" is a 2008 reimplementation of the original project.Computing has trickled down from military applications through corporations to universities and finally into art practice. This history is present in the language and social assumptions of computing. This culture sits uncomfortably with the culture of art, or at least it should. Surgical Strike depicts these contradictions in the form of ironized computer art in order to make them explicit.The source materials for Surgical Strike were military jargon, the art of William Latham (due to its status as paradigmatic "computer art" at the time), 3D models of stealth aeroplanes, 1990s computer software logos, and verbal descriptions of awkward facts from the history of commercial computing. The swirly structures of stealth bombers replaced the innocent spheres and cylinders of Latham's computational Darwinism with more significant forms. The texturing of these forms with commercial trademarks rather than procedural textures was another level of indexicality. These were then sandwiched between texts describing things the computer industry would rather forget in the background and the source code for the depicted form asserting its primacy and interfering with the unreflective consumption of the image in the foreground.The composition of the images produced with the original system was probably based, unconsciously, on Art & Language's "Hostages" series. The idea of an indexical computer programming language came, again unconsciously, from PJH Halls at KIAD. The project came to me fully formed as I walked to the CEA at Middlesex University early on the morning that I desperately needed to have a project to start.Surgical Strike proper is a toy programming language for creating patterns of textured 3D objects. The keywords of the language are intended to sound militaristic. Although Surgical Strike can use any 3D models or textures, it is intended to use models of military artefacts and images of software logos. The language features iteration but not branching or even variables so it is not Turing complete.The original version of Surgical Strike was written in C++ using Apple's QuickDraw 3D for Power Macintosh on Mac OS 7.x . The parser was hand-written and compiled programs were executed using a bytecode format inspired by the public documentation of Display PostScript. Given the unmaintainability of this code and possible rights issues the current version has been written from scratch.Surgical Strike is not anti-militaristic except to the extent that it works with the assumptions of the cultures it is targeted at. Those cultures were idealistic mid-1990s art computing and mid-1990s art criticism ignorant of the content of art computing. The title is a piece of military jargon that served to illustrate the gap between depiction and reality. But the gap that it indicated was in the target cultures, not (neccessarily) between the ideals and reality of militarism.
I've found it surprisingly easy to get started running OpenSim. Here are some good guides to going beyond just starting a sim.http://gwala.net/blog/2008/08/resources-for-running-your-own-opensim/A good collection of resources.http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/other-grids-virtual-worlds/13507-howto-get-opensim-running-osgrid.htmlHow to get your own OpenSim hosting for 15USD a month.http://opensimuser.wordpress.com/2008/07/16/opensim-mysql-install-guide/How to use OpenSim with MySQL.
