An article on a Life Drawing class in Second Life:
http://secondlife.blogs.com/nwn/2005/04/artists_muse.html
Looks fun. (Oh, and raises all sorts of philosophical blah blah blah).
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, virtual reality
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Month: August 2005
I sat in the gallery, using its wireless network connection. As I formatted up images for my talk, something was nagging at my brain. I looked up at draw-something, projected on the wall to my left. A complete image, no problems. After a couple more minutes in Gimp, I got that nagging feeling again. Looking up, I saw that draw-something was still showing the same image.
I counted to twenty. Same image. Another twenty. Same image. They’re only meant to display for twenty seconds once drawn.
So I started hacking the copy of the code on my iBook. Maybe I could add a limit to the number of steps the code would take around its guide shape when drawing. I compiled it, it ran, I popped the new version onto the PowerBook driving the projector.
Back to Gimp. But after a while draw-something jammed again. So I went through the code, eventually realising that I’d put a counter increment in the wrong place. I moved it into position, set the count to a ridiculously low value to watch it work, and then set it back to 5000 when it did. I compiled it, it ran, I popped the new version onto the PowerBook driving the projector again.
This version would occasionally fail to complete a drawing, but it now drew the failure, rather than just jamming. Hopefully this will help me work out why the drawing process sometimes fails. And hopefully it will interest viewers in the gallery.
Technorati Tags: generative art
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Web Site For “Now They Are Surrounded”
Web site for an Art & Language project. Featuring middle-sized dry goods and other definitions of art:
http://jcamd.londonmet.ac.uk/NOWTHEYARESURROUNDED/
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art
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Confusing Symbols And Reality
Via MindHacks, how kiddies confuse symbols and reality:
http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2005/08/confusing_symbols_an.html
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, cognitive science
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Dance
Dance is human activity made strange.
(I just saw the video for Kate Bush’s “Hounds of Love” on VH1.)
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, dance
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New ShareAlike Images
Some good abstract base images from Mitch Featherston:
http://featherston.blogspot.com/2005/07/new-sharealike-images-uploaded.html
Technorati Tags: art, creative commons, free culture
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Freedom And Mediocrity
[Adapted from a response on Lessig’s blog comments pages to another poster.]
Talent should no more be a requirement for freedom of speech than gender should be a requirement for freedom of association or wealth should be a requirement for freedom of contract.
What was it that Voltaire said? “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it as long as I think it’s any good.” Or something.
JK Rowling was taken to court in the US by an author who had written a story about a boy wizard and “muggles” a few years before.
White Wolf Games and Nancy Collins sued Sony Pictures for copyright infringement over a vampire film that Sony made.
And in music even my local bus driver knows that George Harrison lost a copyright case in the 1970s over plagiarism despite protesting that the rhythms in question were public domain.
In each of these cases the defendants are generally regarded as very creative. In each of these cases they either didn’t know about the original material or it was woefully unoriginal anyway. But neither genius nor ignorance are defences against lawsuits that take thousands of dollars and several years to defend. And George Harrison lost.
If you don’t have millions of dollars or several years to spend on this kind of thing, a DMCA takedown notice will suffice.
Technorati Tags: free culture
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Me And My Billboard
To start the images, here’s a photo by MANIK of me in front of the billboard advertising my show.
Here’s a close up of the same image for those of you who don’t know what I look like. 🙂