Categories
Projects

Minara Progress

I’ve created a web page on my site for Minara.
Here.
I’ve registered a SourceForge project for it as well (link from the page above).
Initial design is just about finished (I know how it will work, again see the above link for details) and I’ve coded some tests.
Next up is planning the milestones and starting on the code proper. Who said “vapourware” at the back? 🙂 It’s past that point, just…

Categories
Satire

But It’s Art…

Earlier in the year, some researchers wired rat neurons to a couple of coloured felt-tip pens over the internet to get scribbly “drawings”. Voila! Art, not bad vivisectionist “science”. The transformational power of art is truly amazing.
Article.
Inspired by this, I propose a project to make science in the same way. Some rat anus cells will be wired to a computer running a scientific typesetting program. Dip the cells in lemon juice. Voila! Scientific equations, not a bad nominative art stunt.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m quite happy for Damien Hirst to get out his chainsaw, but if a researcher has bad conscience, they shouldn’t try to hide it under a sugar coating of “art”.

Categories
Free Culture

Don’t Buy Glossy Lifestyle Magazines Quarter

“Adbusters” were unimpressed by “MTV” not showing an advertisement for “Turn Off Your TV” week.

I propose “Don’t Buy Glossy Lifestyle Magazines Quarter”. Glossy magazines peddle homogenized culture, leech cash and waste time. They propagate unreality more intimately than TV, and are more tailored to demographics. They are a threat to private space and shared reality and another pointless spend.

I can’t wait to see an advert for it in “Adbusters”.

Categories
Free Culture

Open Art: Inbetween Cities

“Inbetween Cities” is now available for download at the Open Content section of my site.
Click here to go there.

It’s in SVG format and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

Categories
Free Culture

Open Art: Blobs

“Blobs” is now available for download at the Open Content section of my site.
Click here to go there.

It’s in SVG format and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

Categories
Free Culture

Open Content: Back Catalogue All Done

All of my public back-catalogue is now available as Open Content, with the exception of “Surgical Strike” which will remain closed and “The Cybernetic Artwork Nobody Wrote” which will be cleaned up and released under the GNU GPL.

“Blobs” includes the graphical elements used to construct the images, so it’s particularly good for sampling.

“1968” will be Open Content when it’s finished, as will “Arrows”, my next project. “Got To Start Somewhere” and my other software projects including Minara will be under the GPL.

Categories
Aesthetics

Playing The Mall (1994)

“walking through a shopping centre is like being in a computer game. different levels to get to, rewards to be had.
it’s a very visual space. metal, glass, mirrors, windows, signs. glistening and reflecting each other, and reflecting you as you look at them.
you’re playing the mall”

Categories
Free Culture

Open Art: Smileys

“Smileys” is now available for download at the Open Content section of my site.
Click here to go there.

It’s in SVG format and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

Categories
Free Culture

Open Art: Titled

“Titled” is now available for download at the Open Content section of my site.
Click here to go there.

It’s in PNG format and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

Categories
Projects

Playing The Mall

I liked the idea that glistening, reflecting, revealing and frustrating optical spaces could be laid bare by base descriptive language standing in for light, colour and texture. I also liked the idea that words could be made spatial. Some people wish that the images looked less stark, or that the language could more poetic. But that wouldn’t work. The images had to be this way to communicate how I felt about manipulative architectural spaces. They double as a parody of lit-crit textuality.
Visually the images draw on Dr. Ahmed Moustafa’s art and the simple photocopied flyers that advertise bands playing in small venues. Conceptually they draw on Dean Motter’s “Mister X” and whoever used the term “postmodern hyperspace” to describe the non-linear space of the mall. The source images came from sketches of The Bentall Centre, Kingston-on-Thames, photographs of Canary Wharf, London, and video footage of a multi-storey car park in Canterbury.
I made these works in 1994. The 386 PCs running Corel Draw let me have a tea break each time I edited a single piece of text, and the more complex images took a couple of weeks each to make. The images were laser printed A4 at 300DPI and digitally photocopied up to A0. They project well, too. You need to see them big to get the full impact.