For.
Technorati Tags: art, free culture
June 2006 Archives
“Zero influence!” » Blog Archive » Brand Vs. Brand
I am being paid a million dollars to shill for the above link. OK, that's not true, but I have been asked to mention it. Brand Vs. Brand is a kind of BrandFight. If brands are sexy, then two brands fighting it out in a Web 2.0 interface must be even sexier. Go take a look.
In Zoolander, the joke is that vapid, model-beautiful people make excellent assassins.
In Ultraviolet, it's not meant to be a joke.
My journey to Tesco for lunch (bottom path) and back (top path).
The differences at the top of the image are to do with crossing the road. The differences at the bottom are to do with following the path or cutting across the grass. :-)
Technorati Tags: GPS
Mitch Featherston's daily public domain image blog is a wonderful treat. Each image Mitch posts tells a story or gives a taste of a different time, and many are useful resources for artists and designers. It's one of my favourite blogs and I recommend it highly.
Take a look here:
http://opendomain.blogspot.com/
Technorati Tags: free culture
This is post 1010 (decimal) on this blog. Post 1000 was the one about the Foster's blog.
Cococo coco co cocococococo co coco cococo cocococo!
Oil is substitute labour. Hydrocarbon slavery (without exploitation) or surplus. Stakhanov in a tank. Or possibly his tears. Stakhanov's piss?
Technorati Tags: philosophy
Philosophy is a product of leisure. Leisure implies a surplus, the more leisure the more surplus. A large surplus is difficult for an individual to produce. Which may imply exploitation. What is the ethical and class character of leisure and how does this impact philosophy? Does it require a Victorian ethos of different-kinds-of-labour (see the painting) to make it a product of (or producer of) work rather than leisure?
Technorati Tags: philosophy
How to select and drag in minara.
s s (select), click to select
t m (move), mouse down on selection
drag selection, release mouse
s [space] (select nothing), deselect
That's about as involved as the colour specifying. :-) But this does help re-examine user interface concepts that have been fixed since the time of Illustrator 1.0 at the latest. I think that's a useful side-effect of this project.
Technorati Tags: minara
The Commoner N.11 - spring/summer 2006 Re(in)fusing the Commons
After ten issues, The Commoner makes the first timid steps toward changing format and organisation, towards making more explicit and visible the practices of cyber commoning it is grounded on. Watch this space, we are slow, but things will happen. Meanwhile, enjoy the edition that our two guest editors, Nate Holdren and Stevphen Shukaitis, have put together, an edition in which the different contributions are traversed by the problematic of commoning.
Boing Boing: Royal Society to try open access science publishing
The UK Royal Society, the oldest "learned society" in the world, will try publishing some of its journals under open access licensing.
Boing Boing: Wendy Seltzer smokes the MPAA in the Wall St Journal
My pal and former EFF attorney Wendy Seltzer conducted a debate with MPPA exec Fritz Attaway in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. In it, Wendy makes mincemeat of Attaway's arguments, which keep coming around to accusing her of wanting to commit piracy and rip off artists, which, as she explains over and over again, isn't what she's trying to do at all
Boing Boing: Pete Seeger tribute disc locked down with Dr0
Such irony: Bruce Springsteen recorded a tribute album for Pete Seeger, anti-property agitator and old-guard leftist. Springsteen's label slapped a super-restrictive DRM on the disc that prevents PC playback, ripping to MP3, and lots of other freedoms that are totally in synch with the poltiical messages in Seeger's music.
The ad collects a century-worth of fear mongering by an industry focused on legislating to protect out-dated business models, rather than adjusting to changing market opportunities:
"I forsee a marked deterioration in American music...and a host of other injuries to music in its artistic manifestations, by virtue—or rather by vice—of the multiplication of the various music-reproducing machines..." -John Philip Sousa on the Player Piano (1906)
Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog » Blog Archive » Zoomorphic Calligraphy
Our friend Peacay over at BibliOdyssey has posted a number of fascinating pieces of Islamic art in the form of zoomorphic calligraphy. This piece, like several others on his site, is by a Sudanese artist named Hassan Musa (see also).
This (but more the art of Dr. Ahmed Moustafa) is the sort of thing that led to Psychetecture.
For many years I have been making things…small sculptured heads, masks, jewelry, drums, etc….which appear to be artifacts (fetishes, totems, allies) from some primitive tribal culture. The materials and techniques used to make the objects are both ancient (bones, stones, horn, hand-shaping, chipping, cutting etc.) and high tech (acrylic polymer clay and paint, digital scanning and image manipulation, archival Ultrachrome printing, etc.). People who have seen these objects cannot put their finger on what part of the world or time period they may be from, and I have not attempted to copy artifacts I might have seen from any particular culture or period. The only way that I can account for the nature of this “evidence” is to say that it has simply emerged from some imaginal region and time.
'Pataphysical art.
A Matter of Principle - Jim Baen's Universe
let me begin with a brief discussion of what copyright is in the first place. That's as much as I can cover in this first column.
I want to begin there, with that most basic question, because I've found that many people—including an astonishingly high percentage of authors—have the most preposterous misconceptions about it.
Has a link to:
newscomic recycles the news, re-mixes it, subverts and distorts it. It takes live news feeds (RSS feeds) from major news sources, chops them up at random and puts the resultant text into speech bubbles in a comic. The comic illustrations reflect the current latest news, and are regularly updated to keep up with the news. The result is a disjointed comic, where the words and pictures don't quite fit but make their own story.
Often the story is quite surreal, but can by chance make sense, and even be quite revealing.
Kinda like paintr for sequential art.
;; Too long! Decompose!(define (update-selection-transform buffer sel x y)
(let-values (((prev-from prev-to)
(sexp-before buffer (picking-hit-from sel)))
((next-from next-to)
(sexp-after buffer (picking-hit-to sel))))
(let ((offset 0)
(start-index 0)
(prev-symbol (sexp-symbol-string buffer prev-from))
(next-symbol (sexp-symbol-string buffer next-from)))
;; What if it's a rotate but preceded by a translate? Later.
(if (not (and (string= prev-symbol "translate")
(string= next-symbol "pop-matrix")))
(let ((prefix
(format
#f
"(push-matrix)~%(translate~a ~a)~%" x y))
(suffix "(pop-matrix)\n"))
;; Wrap the selection in a new transform
(buffer-insert-undoable buffer
(picking-hit-to sel)
suffix)
(buffer-insert-undoable buffer
(picking-hit-from sel)
prefix)
(set! start-index
(+ (picking-hit-index sel)
1))
(set! offset (+ (string-length prefix)
(string-length suffix))))
;; else
(let* ((new-translate (format #f "(translate ~a ~a)"
(+ x old-x)
(+ y old-y))))
;; Update the existing transform very inefficiently
;; Delete the current transform
;; Insert new transform
(buffer-insert-undoable buffer
(- (picking-hit-from sel)
1)
new-translate)
(set! offset (- (string-length new-translate)
(- prev-from
prev-to))))
(set! start-index
(picking-hit-index sel)))
;; Roll the other selections down or up
(update-selection-ranges (selections-var buffer)
start-index
offset))))
Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog » Blog Archive » Foster's Blog
Wowwowwow! A production blog for the amazing retro-styled, Flash-produced, Cartoon Network cartoon "Foster's Home For Imaginary friends".
Secret door!!!!!!?????
Ramon Llull and Image Idea Generation
Ramon Llull was a Christian philosopher who used a mechanical way of investigating truth, a set of concentric wheels on which words were written. By rotating the wheels, the words were combined in unexpected ways.
A Democratiya Review Fisks Anti-Imperialism
The perfect is the enemy of the good' - this is a proverb that applies to the seductive but bankrupt ideology of 'anti-imperialism', which presents itself as opposition to the most powerful form of oppression but which in practice is something much less positive, indeed negative and reactionary.
In simplest terms, 'imperialism' can be defined as a state's pursuit of empire or the expansion of its power, through acquiring territory from, or power over, other states or peoples. No reasonable person would not oppose this, but 'anti-imperialism' today means something other than opposition to imperialism.
Remix World: towards a global digital commons - Discussion forum
In conjunction with the iCommons summit in Rio next week, openDemocracy is running a series of articles examining the future and relevance of the global and digital iCommons culture .
We would love to hear your opinion about the 'Remix Culture': Do you remix? What is the relationship between remix and culture? Do you have example of cultures from your specific local scene that you see as using remixing in order to create something new?
My modestly titled essay "Generative Art Is..." (written in the same time frame as a heated debate about the possibility of machine creatvity on eu-gene :-) ), accompanied by a new draw-something drawing, has been published in the latest issue of online journal Vague Terrain:
http://www.vagueterrain.net/content/archives/journal03/myers01.html
I was very pleased to be asked to write something for this excellent project, and I'm in very good company as there are also contributions from Ben Bogart, Mantissa, Marius Watz, Meta, Neil Wiernik, Paul Webb, Peter Nyboer, Philip Galanter, William Farkas, Ben Fry and Casey Reas.
Take a look, and try the archives as well, the previous issues are just as engaging.
There was a very interesting documentary on Channel 4 (in the UK) this evening about hearing voices:
http://www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/C/can_you_believe_it/debates/voices.html
"Some scientists draw a parallel with forecasting the weather by creating a virtual weather system. The system is designed to have autonomy, so running the model produces results that the meteorologist wouldn't and couldn't have predicted on their own."
Without wishing to trivialise hearing voices, I think this is relevant to generative art as an example of small systems or simulations determined entirely by human minds that can nonetheless surprise and inform them.
My review of Boredomresearch's show at TheSpace4 is now online at Furtherfield:
http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?From=Index&review_id=186
I'm looking at colour palette generation for paintr and draw-something.
Various mathematical systems:
http://openmodo.com/content/view/2/2/
http://www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/sasmac/brewerpal.html
http://www.telecable.es/personales/alberto9/color/index.htm
http://www.sonosphere.com/WebTools/ColorPaletteGenerator/
http://www.colorcache.com/colorpicker.shtml
The usual colour-wheel oriented schemes, plus a scheme that seems based on swapping the RGB values, and a map colouring system I haven't figured out yet.
And there's also many image palette extractors, such as the one at praystation I can't find just now.
Paintr could use other flickr images for colours, but that would remove the folksonomy element.
The Foundation for P2P Alternatives study the impact of Peer to Peer on society.
via openbusiness.
The romantic's favorite mathematician.
Does Gödel Matter? The romantic's favorite mathematician didn't prove what you think he did.
Conceptualism was a kind of aesthetic platonism. But Duchamp's philosophical equivalent was Wittgenstein, not Godel: anti-art goes with anti-philosophy.
Why Apple is to blame for iTunes DRM
Many Apple fans were upset that Defective by Design targeted iTunes/iPod DRM, claiming that Apple can't be held responsible for its decision to use its technology to control instead of empower its customers. Seth expertly addresses each of these arguments, showing that Apple's embrace of DRM has been enthusiastic, abusive and thoroughgoing, not merely a necessity of the market.
Two from Joy Garnett (You really should be reading NewsGrist):
Newly Launched: The Fair Use Network
This is the site we've all been waiting for, the hub of "all things fair use", a newly launched online resource tailored for artists, scholars and creative people that includes practical resources, reference guides and glossaries, a budding attorney network, and a nifty newsfeed in the left sidebar generated by their internal blog....
A NEW MANIFESTO FOR THE COPYRIGHT WARS
Susan M. Bielstein distills decades of experience as an editor of illustrated books for a guide to navigating the treacherous waters of copyright, Permissions, A Survival Guide: Blunt Talk about Art as Intellectual Property. She gives frank advice on how to determine whether an artwork is copyrighted, how to procure a high-quality reproduction, how to use "fair use" to your advantage, and many other issues.
RIAA finds a new way to alienate its customers
The RIAA is sending C&Ds to kids who post videos of themselves dancing
to music on YouTube, because the kids -- who are giving musicians free
viral marketing -- haven't paid a license fee.
Slashdot | Another Sky Press Driving Neo-Patronage
Another Sky Press is making a serious go of the neo-patronage / tip jar model
Read the slashdot comments for other similar projects.
TV teen sex orgy complaints came from people who never saw the show
They were just robotically following the orders of their cult leaders at the PTC and the American Family Association
TomC's Processing Sketchbook: AI library for Processing
Does what it says on the tin. Processing is becoming the de facto generative art platform and it's good to see AI being added to the mix.
Boing Boing: Sculpture's wooden mount on display instead of sculpture
This is like the reverse of the "cleaner puts conceptual work in the bin" antipattern.
First ever minara drag! I used the select tool (s s) to select the green (minara) graphic, then used the move tool (t m) to drag the red selection. Now I just need to get the code working for moving the original graphic when you release the mouse.
The red selection is actually the green graphic's future position. It would be tortuous to split the main buffer around selections and re-unite it afterwards. So this is how we do it.
Open Score is an attempt to meaningfully describe the requirements for work that can be used Freely. This is different from defining what Freedom is, rather it defines what you need to exercise your Freedom.
This is a work in progress. Feedback is welcome.
Elephants Dream » Archive » Complete score available for download
See #30 for the composer's arguments for why the score is NC-ND. I sympathize, but I don't agree. Elephants Dream shows that you can get paid for freedom, and if idiots use your work objectionably then they are idiots.
Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | Charlie Brooker: Supposing ... Sandi Thom is the musical antichrist
Wait. It gets worse. I've just looked it up on Napster - oh Christ. I didn't realise how far this had gone. The B-side is a cover of No More Heroes by the Stranglers. "Whatever happened to the heroes?", she warbles, knowing full well she's replaced them. She's the musical antichrist.
A Mathematician Reads Social Text
What follows are a few observations on some of the other articles in the Science Wars issue of Social Text.
Creativity is key to the economy. But creativity in science and engineering, not in the "creative industries". Which is why the Lisbon Agenda needs not DRM but investment in chemistry departments. Or the opposite of what is actually happening.
In what is actually happening is the spectre (or fetish if you're in Cretinous Sundries) of Affective Labour. Of work not at machines but at interactions (relational labour...). Aesthetics as the product of the proletariat. Precessive kitsch, if kitsch is industrialised folk culture. With the smile as the core competence, not the added value. With no job security, respect or prospects (welcome to how the rest of the world lives, "precariat"-fearing web designer weekend marxists).
These relational loan-stretchers in the cargo-cult economy of governments that still believe we should all be Living On Thin Air have useful idiots to lead the unwashed into the abbatoir. The artist-statement-writing-workshop sector of the non-art non-market, bourgeois would-be-career-artists (hi), lurching from subsidised training day to temporary residency, are the harbingers of the new economic order of the post-Lisbon cracked mirror.
Highly collectible gestures of resistance to the ancient regime aside, there are two strategies for art. Non-instrumentalised, disruptive, qualitative, unimproving pleasure. Or institutional critique that actually critiques the current institutions. Or possibly both. Art always serves new money, so let's not kid ourselves, but if we can start serving the next-but-one regime, we can speed up firing the ejector on the current boss. Which, since they want art to be socially instrumental, should please everybody.
The red shape was a black shape drawn with the pen then selected. So it is now highlighted in red.
[Note to self: don't forget to make the selection buffer inserts non-undoable!].
Now I just need to debug dragging.
Art & Language : Homes for Homes II - Les presses du réel (book), 2006
This publication is built around an important installation "Homes from Homes 2" (2000–2001), which simultaneously references the development of Art & Languages's work over the decades and the collection of the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich, in which it is now included.
Each element of the installation is described, annotated, and put in the context of aesthetic, theoretical, and political problematics through extended captions and essays by the artists.
Questioning the notions of conservation, of institutional politics, and the relation between art and its institutions, the publication is designed by NORM in close collaboration with the artists.
Stanford prof sues James Joyce estate for right to study Joyce
Most tragically, there was a brief moment when Stephen Joyce was irrelevant. The works of James Joyce were in the public domain until the EU copyright directive extended copyright by 20 years, putting Joyce's books back into the care of his capricious grandson for decades.
I sometimes snap pictures of strangers and post them on my blog and Flickr. Could I get into legal trouble for violating their privacy?
MPAA: The Grateful Dead's Success Was An Abomination Against Nature
Witness this bizarre exchange between John Perry Barlow and the MPAA's Dan Glickman debating the future of the entertainment industry.
BY-SA 2.0 abstract lineart made using the Gimp image editor.
The Style of Numbers Behind a Number of Styles
Mathematically quantifying artists' styles using "stylometrics".
YOU ARE INVITED TO TAKE PART IN COLLIDE/COLLABO A WEEK LONG EVENT
DEALING THE NOTION OF HOW TO BRIDGE ART AND ACTIVISM CHALLENGING
TRADITIONAL ART WORLD VALUES OF TO ENCOURAGE COLLABORATIVE ART
PRACTICE.
Includes the talk "Al-Qaeda as an Open-Structure Organization & Idea-Led Movement", the wiki page for which suggests inviting a "rep. of radical muslim org."
If there is a more perfect example of how cultural studies helps the merely inept pupate into dangerous fuckwits I haven't encountered it.
Excellent examples of using Inkscape to make SVG graphics that react to a user interface.
Of a different key to previous series highpoint "The Girl In The Fireplace", this two-parter took The Doctor and Rose to a planet orbiting a black hole ("The Impossible Planet") and to the prison that something claiming to be the devil has been locked in since before the start of the universe ("The Satan Pit"). This was perfect science fiction TV. The murderous aliens, the possessed humans, the lost civilisations and a climax fought with synapses rather than sidearms, the tragedy of the loss of individuals against the backdrop of a threat to the entire universe.
This was dark and scary stuff for 7pm on BBC1, and more than that it was genuinely thought provoking. And dramatic, one of the kids said they thought The Doctor had died after - what do you mean you didn't watch it? Go and watch it now!
Julie Gross - Gallery of Paintings
Entirely groovy coloured blobby abstracts.
showtime: happy famous artists
Data visualisation art with artists as the data.
Boing Boing: Responses to Jaron Lanier's crit of online collectivism
My response is quite simple: this alleged "core belief" is not one which is held by me, nor as far as I know, by any important or prominent Wikipedians. Nor do we have any particular faith in collectives or collectivism as a mode of writing. Authoring at Wikipedia, as everywhere, is done by individuals exercising the judgment of their own minds.
http://www.mat.ucsb.edu/~dano/sensors/index.php/Resources
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/categories.php
http://www.paia.com/touchsw.htm
http://www.mat.ucsb.edu/~jcastellanos/projects/NAP/nap.html
http://www.billbuxton.com/InputSources.html
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=741
http://autopilot.sourceforge.net/
http://itp.nyu.edu/physcomp/sensors/Reports/MMA7260Q
I'll file these later...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac&search=Amen%20break%20nate%20harrison%20jungle
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5041684.stm
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/06/06/cop_duffs_up_photogr.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/06/06/ingame_artshow_asks_.html
Open Road Trip | A transparent exploration of America and culture.
A copyleft road movie.
SITO - Synergy - Collaborative Art Projects
Early collaborative net art from 1994 on.
On the modelling of creative behavior
Harold Cohen's paper written whilst he was at RAND. Highly recommended for students of AARON or of artificial creativity.
http://www.britishrobotics.com/pictures/taosin/BR800230Desc.htm
http://itp.nyu.edu/physcomp/sensors/Reports/TAOSTCS230
http://www.pacer.co.uk/product_details.aspx?companyProduct_id=62
http://www.parallax.com/detail.asp?product_id=30054
http://www.mytutorialcafe.com/Microcontroller%20Project%20Thesis%20TCS230%20Color%20Sensor1a.htm
http://www.siliconchip.com.au/cms/A_104677/article.html
http://www.taosinc.com/downloads/pdf/tcs230wp.pdf
http://www.taosinc.com/application.asp?cateid=11&appid=16
http://www.pacer.co.uk/img/pdfs/DN11_Color.pdf
http://www.parallax.com/dl/docs/cols/nv/vol4/col/nv98.pdf
http://www.taosinc.com/faq_category.asp?cateid=11
"The board housing the sensor has two LEDs for illumination and a 5.3mm lens.
The sensor should be about an inch away from the source of the colors it needs
to detect. Conveniently, the two LEDs converge into one brightly lit spot when
the sensor board is approximately one inch from the source."
http://www.parallax.com/dl/docs/prod/datast/TCS230.pdf
http://www.parallax.com/dl/docs/prod/compshop/tcs230matchlinux.gz
http://www.tigoe.net/pcomp/code/archives/arduino/000748.shtml