Categories
Art Computing Generative Art

draw-something

There isn’t a web front end for it yet, but draw-something is making a drawing a day at –

http://OFFLINEZIP.wpsho/draw-something/drawings/

Categories
Art Computing Free Culture Generative Art

Paintr

Paintr is at http://OFFLINEZIP.wpsho/paintr/

Categories
Art Computing Free Culture

Why Net Art Software Should Be AGPL-Licenced

Restricting the study, production, display, preservation or other uses of artworks removes the freedom of those involved in art and thereby damages the cultural, social and economic value of art. Where restrictions take the form of copyright, copyleft licences are a good way of restoring peoples freedom. The freedom of curators, critics and academics, collectors, audience, and artists to use software is part of their freedom to use software-based net art as art.

For media-based net art the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike licence is the best copyleft licence. For software based net art a different licence is required (and Creative Commons explicitly state that their licences should not be used for software).

The GNU GPL is the best copyleft licence for software that people use on their own computers, where it is “propagated” to them from elsewhere by downloading it or installing it from DVD. Software delivered to galleries or collections, or to other artists, counts as being propagated under the GPL, so the GPL is the best copyleft licence for software that will actually be delivered to its users.

Software accessed remotely on a server online does not count as being propagated, even if it is used as it would be locally but through a web interface. To handle this a variant of the GPL called the Affero GPL (AGPL) was created. When you use software over a network, for example through a web browser, the AGPL requires that you be able to acquire the source code of that software just as if you were using it locally under the GPL. The AGPL is therefore the best copyleft licence for software used over a network. This includes software-based net art.

The average piece of software-based net art will use a free operating system, and a free software scripting language, web server and web browser. It may use a free software database and many additional free software libraries of code as well. The difficulty of the artwork’s conception or production does not provide an excuse for making it non-free any more than the difficulties of creating the far greater body of work that it build on did.

It is much easier to install and maintain software that is not restricted by its licence and that provides its source code. Art that takes the form of software must be installed and maintained to curate and preserve it. Critics, artists, students and audience can benefit from studying the source code of net art. Even if they don’t fix bugs they can learn from it and maybe even appreciate it. And if the server goes down and you don’t have a backup, someone else may and will be able to give you a copy back. These freedoms are all protected by the AGPL, giving a strong practical benefit to using it. This fact should be borne in mind when discussing the curation, archiving and preservation of net art as well as when discussing its production.

The support of people’s freedom and the practical benefits to artists
from supporting the curation, preservation and scholarship of their
work provide strong reasons for making net art free software. Net artists can and should protect the freedom of the users of their software using the AGPL. See here for details of how to apply the AGPL to your work.

Categories
Aesthetics Art Computing Generative Art Projects

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.

Categories
Aesthetics Art Computing Generative Art

Artificial Affectivity, Artificial Affectivities

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.

Categories
Aesthetics Art Computing

Magazine électronique du CIAC – CIAC’s Electronic Magazine

Magazine électronique du CIAC – CIAC’s Electronic Magazine.

The latest issue of CIAC’s Electronic Magazine is now online.

I have a review of “Invisible Influenced”by Will Pappenheimer and Chipp Jansen in it, and among the other articles are a review of an excellent new artwork by Michael Takeo Magruder and a feature on Surf Clubs.

Take a look!

Categories
Art Computing

Microblogging The Cybernetic Artwork Nobody Wrote

The Cybernetic Artwork Nobody Wrote is now microblogging descriptions of possible artworks on identi.ca. You can follow it by clicking here –

http://identi.ca/cybernetic

Or if you are on Twitter, you can follow its forwarded posts by clicking here –

http://twitter.com/cyberneticart

You can get the source code (which is a modified version of the original Cybernetic… Lisp version) here –

http://OFFLINEZIP.wpsho/git/?p=cybernetic-microblogger.git

Categories
Art Computing Free Culture

LP – Gnash

The world wide web is locked in at least in part to the proprietary Flash format. Replacements such as the HTML 5 canvas tag are emerging (although they have their own issues, see Stallman’s new essay “The Javascript Trap”), but here and now Flash is an unavoidable part of the experience of the internet. The official Flash player is not free. So a free replacement must be written.

That free replacement is the Gnash player. Rob Savoye gave a talk about how that project is progressing. He founded Cygnus solutions and worked on GCC before working on Gnash, so he’s bringing plenty of hacking experience to the project.

Rob explained that the next release of Gnash, later this year, will support Flash 9 and (in a bit of news of great interest to those of us in the UK) the BBC’s iPlayer Flash interface.

In a discussion session on Sunday someone asked about Flash authoring on GNU/Linux. There are tools both for compiling ActionScript (MTASC) and for compiling graphics and sound assets (swfmill). I developed the Flash version of draw-something using MTASC and Emacs for example.

Whether you develop using Free Software or not, if you develop Flash 8 web sites please test them against Gnash and report any differences in behaviour as bugs. This will help the Gnash project help you with an even better Gnash player.

The Gnash project, like many free software projects, needs financial support, so if you can help do get in touch with them.

Categories
Art Computing

Fixing a Dishwasher with 3D Printing and Lisp

Andreas Fuchs’ Journal: Clojure and Art of Illusion: BFF.

Interesting story about using Clojure Lisp to make a program wheel for a dishwasher. Printing obscure replacement parts and tools will be a strong use of 3D printing for domestic users. It’s cheaper for companies than keeping inventory, and easier for consumers than hunting that inventory down.

Categories
Art Computing Free Culture

Why 3D Printing Will Go Mainstream

http://replicatorinc.com/blog/2009/03/why-3d-printers-won%E2%80%99t-go-mainstream/

Couldn’t resist. Sorry.

1. It’s debatable whether publishing on demand has gone mainstream, but word processing, webogs and inkjet printers certainly have.

2. Plastics are complex but so is colour printing. If you can do even a small subset of what professional 3D printing needs with just 3-4 compounds then 3D printing can be the inkjets of manufacture.

3. Laser printers used to be expensive. Now mono ones are less than 100 pounds and colour ones are less than 200 pounds. Innovation and economies of scale can work wonders.

4. Plastics are large and intricate but then so were electronic components. RISC and miniaturization can work in both cases. You can fit a jigsaw in a smaller box than a poster, and it can be more instructive to put together.

5. Designing in 3D is really hard but this is what “commons based peer production” is for. Make 3D design copyleft and it may still be hard but it will be decomposible and improvable. Make copyleft distros of fabbable components and objects made from them and watch them grow.

3D printing won’t go mainstream any more than home photocopiers did. But we will get the Kinko’s, Lulu.com, YouTube and HP Deskjets of 3D printing, and these will change things as much as the Internet and free software have.