Categories
Art Computing Culture Howto

MU*s

The FTP archives and homepages of the 1990s may be gone but some of the
best known MU*s are still there.
You can connect from the command line using Telnet.
LambdaMoo:
telnet lambda.moo.mud.org 8888
MediaMoo:
telnet mediamoo.cc.gatech.edu 8888
FurryMUCK:
telnet muck.furry.com 8888
On modern GNU/Linux distros, Telnet may not be installed by default. You
will need to install it. e.g.:
su -c “yum -y install telnet”
or:
sudo aptitude install telnet

Categories
Uncategorized

Evie

Evie Matthieson died last night. She was an excellent cultural person, my ex partner, and the kids’ mum.
I had spoken to her on the phone earlier in the evening. I’m glad I got to chat with her, even if only briefly. I wish she wasn’t gone. I really wish she wasn’t gone.

Categories
Aesthetics Art Computing Art Open Data Free Software Howto Projects

Logging Colours To ThingSpeak

ThingSpeak is a Free Software-based web service for publishing (geolocated) data. This makes it better than proprietary services for publishing data.

Using it is very easy, as this tutorial demonstrates. here’s some code I’ve written in the Python programming language to grab a palette of 8 colours from a webcam image of my studio every 10 minutes and publish it to a ThingSpeak “Channel”:

http://OFFLINEZIP.wpsho/git/?p=thingspeak.git

And here’s the resulting data, in JSON format:

http://api.thingspeak.com/channels/357/feed.json

Update [17th April 2011]

Thanks to ThingSpeak suggesting it, here’s a jQuery display of the colours:

http://OFFLINEZIP.wpsho/git/?p=thingspeak.git;a=blob_plain;f=studio_colours.html

It starts with the 100 most recent palettes, and adds them every 10 minutes as more are uploaded.

Categories
Art Free Culture Projects

The Urinal Is In A Show

The Urinal project is being presented as part of a collection called:

Free Yourself?

Curated by Furtherfield, in:

International Art in Village Halls
Penryn Town Hall
Cornwall
Private View: Friday April 15th
6.30pm – 8.30pm

Categories
Aesthetics Art Art Computing Culture Free Culture Politics

An Aesthetics Of Disappearance

I stumbled over this anti-face-recognition project again and, post-“world’s ugliest t-shirt” from “Zero History” I enjoyed it even more:

http://ahprojects.com/blog/117
http://ahprojects.com/blog/122
http://ahprojects.com/blog/146
http://ahprojects.com/blog/146
http://ahprojects.com/blog/156
http://cvdazzle.com/

This technique can work in reverse, causing false positives and misdirected automated actions:

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/12/02/google-street-view-p.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/5356031/Google-Street-View-blurs-face-of-Colonel-Sanders-at-every-KFC.html

And it can use objects other than faces, operating on sensors other than 2D cameras:

http://we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2010/09/subverting-the-lidar-landscape.php
http://www.constructingrealities.com/?p=20

When more and more human activity is being structured and quantized to make machine processing easier, aesthetics can disrupt this.

“…the opacity of the aesthetic offers some much needed resistance to the kinds of transparency increasingly demanded…”

http://www.systemsart.org/a_lpaper.html

An “Aesthetics Of Disappearance” and of false positives

[Via Netbehaviour]

Categories
Art Computing Art History Art Open Data Projects

Exploring Art Data – The Plan

I’ve been very, very busy recently and I haven’t had time to work on the “Exploring Art Data” series of blog posts.
I will get back to them. First I will finish the Graves Art Sales exploration. Then I will use Joy Garnett’s images of her paintings as an example of processing a (small) large dataset. Then I will analyse the Netbehaviour mailing list archive as an example of a social network.
And that’s the plan. Unless anyone has anything else they’d like to see.

Categories
Free Culture

You Can Find Papers That Argue Anything On The Internet

…as any idiot can tell you. But these ones are interesting:

LSE economists: file sharing isn’t killing music industry, but copyright enforcement will

U.S. Paper Says No Decline in New Music In Napster Age

Natural and intrinsic motivations will cause technology and the arts to flourish even in the absence of externally supplied rewards, such as copyrights