Recently in Projects Category

I did the graphic design for some new tshirts from the FSF -


 
Order them, and many other fine GNU and FSF products, here -

http://shop.fsf.org/category/gnu-gear/

"Like That" is back in the art section of the site. Make sure you have Jave enabled and take a look!

FLOSS+Art: Book preview, panel discussion and software party

Thursday 23 October 18:30 - 20:30

@ Mute Magazine HQ The Whitechapel Centre 85 Myrdle Street London E1 1HL

ABOUT THE BOOK:

FLOSS+Art critically reflects on the growing relationship between Free Software ideology, open content and digital art. It provides a view onto the social, political and economic myths and realities linked to this phenomenon.

With contributions from: Fabianne Balvedi, Florian Cramer, Sher Doruff, Nancy Mauro Flude, Olga Goriunova, Dave Griffiths, Ross Harley, Martin Howse, Shahee Ilyas, Ricardo Lafuente, Ivan Monroy Lopez, Thor Magnusson, Alex McLean, Rob Myers, Alejandra Maria Perez Nuñez, Eleonora Oreggia, oRx-qX, Julien Ottavi, Michael van Schaik, Femke Snelting, Pedro Soler, Hans Christoph Steiner, Prodromos Tsiavos, Simon Yuill

Compiled and edited by Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk.

My contribution to the book is a greatly expanded version of the most popular post from this blog, "Open Source Art Again", with additional quotations and references. I've seen one of the other contributions and I know several of the other contributors so I can say without being arrogant that I know there's going to be some very good stuff in this book.

Open Art History is a proposed project to gather and distribute reproductions of artworks and art historical documents. Art is a form of knowledge, and art history is a way of presenting that knowledge. Access to high quality reproductions of images of art and to literature & data concerning art history is of great value to artists, critics, art historians, art theorists and educators.

http://okfn.org/wiki/OpenArtHistory

The initial aim of the project is to identify standards for data and image formats for projects.

The pilot project for Open Art History will be Open Hogarth. This is due to the availability and comparative ease of reproduction of Hogarth's work, its social and historical relevance, its art historical importance, and its popularity with the general public. Hogarth's literary nature is also a link to the Open Literature project, and his place in the history of the copyright of art makes him an interesting subject for a Free Knowledge project.

http://okfn.org/wiki/OpenHogarth

http://www.knowledgeforge.net/project/openhogarth/

The initial aim of the project is to find sources for high-quality digital photographs or scans of Hogarth etchings online.

If you have any comments or suggestions then please post to the okf-discuss list, join in the OKF IRC meeting on Wednesday, and/or add material to the OKF Wiki.

To help distribute and archive my work I've created repositories at Beanstalk and GitHub.

I'm uploading my art projects to Beanstalk. The Beanstalk repository is a Subversion repository, accessible here -

http://robmyers.beanstalkapp.com/art

You can find out about Subversion here.

I've uploaded my code projects to GitHub. There's one Git repositor per project, accessible here -

http://github.com/robmyers

You can find out about Git here.

I'm not expecting to accept changes for most of these projects, but I am expecting to change the code projects and add to the art projects and it's good to have a public source for work. So version control repositories seem like a good idea.

art_generators has been renamed "frame". It works as a noun and a slightly pretentious verb. I've registered a Rubyforge project and switched the build system to Hoe.

Just a bit more testing then it will be time for a release.

http://github.com/robmyers/art_generators/tree/master

Rails-style generator system for creating and managing digital art projects.

Over the last few years I've developed a fairly standard directory layout and project lifecycle for my art image projects. If you download an archive from a project page at http://robmyers.org/art you'll see there's a folder with the project's name containing a LICENSE file and directories named "final" and "discard". During the course of a project I make images and sort them into "final" for images I'll put on the web page and that should be considered part of the finished project and "discard" for images that don't make the grade.

This can be automated to a degree, so inspired by Ruby On Rails I've created a system to create the directory layout and add scripts to move work between directories, bundle them up for release, and generate web pages to display the images.

Currently the project is going under the terrible title of "art_generators". I really need a better title, something like Rails, so any suggestions will be gratefully received. Cerise, plinth and sketchbook are ideas so far.

I'll bundle this up as a Ruby gem when it's ready for other people to use, but the project creation code works OK and interfaces with SVN. I'll be using it for a couple of projects to get the rest of the scripts working well, then I'll do an initial release.

"Surgical Strike" was a 1996 art computing project concerned with the social history of art computing. "Surgical Strike Free Software" is a 2008 reimplementation of the original project.

Computing has trickled down from military applications through corporations to universities and finally into art practice. This history is present in the language and social assumptions of computing. This culture sits uncomfortably with the culture of art, or at least it should. Surgical Strike depicts these contradictions in the form of ironized computer art in order to make them explicit.

The source materials for Surgical Strike were military jargon, the art of William Latham (due to its status as paradigmatic "computer art" at the time), 3D models of stealth aeroplanes, 1990s computer software logos, and verbal descriptions of awkward facts from the history of commercial computing. The swirly structures of stealth bombers replaced the innocent spheres and cylinders of Latham's computational Darwinism with more significant forms. The texturing of these forms with commercial trademarks rather than procedural textures was another level of indexicality. These were then sandwiched between texts describing things the computer industry would rather forget in the background and the source code for the depicted form asserting its primacy and interfering with the unreflective consumption of the image in the foreground.

The composition of the images produced with the original system was probably based, unconsciously, on Art & Language's "Hostages" series. The idea of an indexical computer programming language came, again unconsciously, from PJH Halls at KIAD. The project came to me fully formed as I walked to the CEA at Middlesex University early on the morning that I desperately needed to have a project to start.

Surgical Strike proper is a toy programming language for creating patterns of textured 3D objects. The keywords of the language are intended to sound militaristic. Although Surgical Strike can use any 3D models or textures, it is intended to use models of military artefacts and images of software logos. The language features iteration but not branching or even variables so it is not Turing complete.

The original version of Surgical Strike was written in C++ using Apple's QuickDraw 3D for Power Macintosh on Mac OS 7.x . The parser was hand-written and compiled programs were executed using a bytecode format inspired by the public documentation of Display PostScript. Given the unmaintainability of this code and possible rights issues the current version has been written from scratch.

Surgical Strike is not anti-militaristic except to the extent that it works with the assumptions of the cultures it is targeted at. Those cultures were idealistic mid-1990s art computing and mid-1990s art criticism ignorant of the content of art computing. The title is a piece of military jargon that served to illustrate the gap between depiction and reality. But the gap that it indicated was in the target cultures, not (neccessarily) between the ideals and reality of militarism.

http://aboutfoo.com/blog/2008/08/04/exploring-freedom-the-book/

In more book news, I'll have some blog posts ^D ^D essays in a new book about Free Culture issues out later in the year.

"Like That" turned into a code generation project but I think this was more trouble than it was worth. Beware the seduction of time-saving code that doesn't save time. I took the "make a large number of exhibitable works" part and missed out the "quickly" part. And I ended up having to exercise editorial control, and Processing isn't the right environment for it, and it didn't make doing the hard things any easier, and so I got discouraged.

So I'm going to roll back "Like That" to the hand-written works, re-make some of the more interesting generated works, and try to push on into the areas I wanted to go but that the code generator made difficult to do.

Now I just need to rescue that work and put it back on the restored web site...