Categories
Aesthetics Art Art Computing Free Software Politics Projects Satire

SendValues

SendValues is a network testing tool that sends mathematical, aesthetic and textual values using the properties of rather than the contents of network messages.

You can get the source code here: https://gitorious.org/robmyers/values-sender

Both a stand-alone command-line version and an IRC-client version are included.

SendValues uses a naive pulse-width-modulation scheme for encoding values. Any improvements to the code gratefully received.

Here is the README:

SendValues is a system for transmitting aesthetic expression and political speech using properties of network protocols.

There are two versions, a command-line client and an IRC client. They use the same code and concepts apart from their different interfaces.

* Concepts

** Senders

A sender is a way of sending information over the network using an IP-based protocol. SendValues has the following senders:

TCP – Sends messages as TCP/IP connections.
UDP – Sends messages as UDP packets.
SYN – Sends messages as SYN requests.
HTTP – Sends messages as HTTP requests.
PING – Sends messages as ICMP echo requests.

Senders may be specified to the command line or IRC clients by these names.

** Values

A value is a message to be sent to a host using a sender. Values are quantized by the sender and transmitted over the network as naive pulse width modulation values.

SINE – A sine wave (argument is number of steps).
SQUARE – A square wave (argument is number of steps).
SAWTOOTH – A sawtooth wave (argument is number of steps).
TRIANGLE – A triangle wave (argument is number of steps).
TEXT – A block of text (argument is text to send).
IMAGE – An image, to be sent as 1-bit pbm data  (argument is image URL).

* The Command Line Client

The command line client takes all of its arguments from the command line.

-h, –help       – Print the help and exit.
-o, –host      – The host address to send to.
-s, –sender     – The sender to use (from the list above).
-m, –method     – The values generation method to use (from the list above).
-a, –argument     – The argument to the values generation method.
-c, –cell     – How long each value takes to send (in milliseconds).
-d, –duration     – How long to send values to the host.

These all have default values, including host which defaults to localhost.

* The IRC Client

The IRC client takes its initial configuration from the command line. Once it has connected to an IRC channel it takes commands from messages on that channel.

Command line arguments:

-h, –help    – Print the help and exit.
-s, –server    – The IRC server to connect to.
-p, –port    – The port on the IRC server to use (defaults to 6667).
-c, –channel    – The channel on the server to take commands from (omit #).
-u, –user    – The user on the channel to take commands from.

Channel and user default to “artcommands”.

Commands to the IRC channel have the following formats:

START [sender:]host[:port] kind[:argument]

Start sending values of the given kind to host using sender.
Where only sender or port are specified, the clients will guess which.
Argument can be a number of steps for wave senders, a url for the image sender, or arbitrary text for the text sender.

STOP host

Stop sending to the host. The host must be specified exactly as it was in the START command

STOP

Stop sending to all hosts.

Categories
Aesthetics Art Art Computing Free Software Generative Art Projects

Streaming Aesthetics: Shape

Streaming Aesthetics: Shapes
Here’s the code for Streaming Aesthectics: Shape . You can compile and run it in Processing.

https://gitorious.org/robmyers/streaming-aesthetics

It follows Twitter to see when people tweet shape names and then draws those shapes, packing them inside each other.

There’s some unused code for more complex shapes, but “star” and “cross” appear in the Twitter firehose more often than geometric shape names.

Next is Streaming Aesthetics: Pattern .

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 Free Culture

Artistic Freedom Of Speech Under Threat

In the US a judge has declared a series of paintings illegal because of copyright. They cannot be shown by their owners:

http://www.edwardwinkleman.com/2011/03/appropriation-prohibition-or-why-i.html

This will have a chilling effect on artistic production in the US. It’s also deeply silly.

In the EU a clothing manufacturer is suing an artist for making a painting including an image of one of their handbags. Again:

http://eyeteeth.blogspot.com/2011/03/louis-vuitton-sues-artist-nadia-plesner.html

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110316/01551613518/louis-vuitton-wins-lawsuit-supressing-artwork-about-lv-ish-bag—-genocide-maybe.shtml

This would have a chilling effect on artistic production in the EU if we had any kind of Fair Use culture here to chill.

But don’t worry, Fair Use still applies to lawyers’ blogs when they want to explain that it shouldn’t apply to artists:

http://artmeetslaw.blogspot.com/2011/03/as-simple-as-asking-for-permission.html

Permission culture and censorship may seem reasonable when they don’t apply to you. But they’re not.

This is the worst environment I’ve seen for artistic freedom in the West in some years. We urgently need to promote and protect artistic freedom as part of free culture and freedom of speech in general.

Categories
Art Art History Free Culture Projects

Shapeways Urinal Print

My print of the Urinal has just arrived from Shapeways.

Here it is in its packaging with an SD Card for scale:

IMG_20110215_135052.jpg

And here’s a tasteful installation shot of it:

IMG_20110215_135403.jpg
The original blog post about this project, with links to the source files, is here.
Categories
Art Projects

Urinal Follow-Up

The conversation in the comments at Thingiverse has been great, do take a look –

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6261

And the BotFarm printed one! –

http://www.thingiverse.com/derivative:6474

Categories
Art Art History Free Culture Projects

Freeing Art History: Urinal

I commissioned the ultra-talented cwebber to make a 3D model of a urinal suitable for 3D printing and signing. It’s licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported licence. Here’s a picture of it:

urinal.pngYou can download the original Blender file here.

And there’s a version suitable for 3D printing available for download here.

Which you can also download from thingiverse here.

(You’ll need to scale it to fit your printer.)

If you don’t have a 3D printer yet, you can order a 3D print of the model from Shapeways here. If it’s too large/expensive you can upload and print a smaller version.

Next I’d like to commission a 3D printable model of a glass ampoule suitable for containing a small volume of air from a town such as Paris…

Categories
Art Art Computing Art History

Explor Update

example6.pngI have updated my Explor compiler.

The new version uses a shared library for the Explor functions, and cats the source file to the Fortran compiler along with a file that contains the “END” command rather than creating an intermediate file.

You’ll need git, autotools, libtool and g77 installed. On Fedora the command to install them is something like:

su -c "yum install git gcc-gfortran libtool autoconf automake"

Fetch the source code:

git clone http://OFFLINEZIP.wpsho/git/explor.git

Set up the build environment:

cd explor
./bootstrap

Build:

./configure
make

And install:

su -c "make install"

You can then make a test image:

cd examples
explor example6.explor

This will print messages something like this:

Compiling example6.explor to example6
Running example6 with output to example6.ps

And if you open the resulting .ps file, you’ll see the image at the top of this post.

Categories
Art Art Computing Art History Art Open Data

Art Data Analysis: Art & Language

art&lang_index1-01.jpgArt & Language are a conceptual art group founded in the late 1960s in England. Much of their early work didn’t look like art. It was essays, mathematical notation, transcripts of conversations, all different kinds of written materials. Faced with the opportunity to exhibit in a gallery setting to an artworld audience, A&L needed a way of realistically presenting their work in a way that a viewer who hadn’t been part of the original conversations might have a chance of being able to navigate the results.

161.jpgA&L’s solution was to assemble copies of all the texts in filing cabinets and produce an index to them. Texts were given “markers” (tags) and indexes of the relationships between each text’s tags were produced in print or on microfilm. Mainframe computer time was used to create the index for Index 04, although reports differ on which computer was used and whether the index was in fact random or not.
162.jpgThis is an obvious forerunner to Google or del.icio.us. It is also a use of what would now be regarded as search technology to produce a genuinely artistic solution to a genuine artistic problem.
100_clip_image012.jpg