22:24
Paul over at dataisnature has just written an interesting post about procedural drawing, in part following up on the post here about Matthew Lewis Sketch piece. He mentions some interesting artists working with traditional drawing in a procedural manner:
Be sure to read Paul's observations about this work.
17:36
Tom Moody has an interesting blog entry about sales of DVDs as art objects. Essentially, he’s quoting another post by Paul Slocum (the guy who made the dot_matrix_synth) about sales of DVDs from a recent show.
Paul Slocum writes:
I didn’t really expect the video pieces to sell, so I had to scramble to figure out archiving issues with DVDs. For most artists that we would show, getting a DVD produced would be cost prohibitive, so everything’s going to end up being a DVD-R. And how long these will last is unknown. I’ve read that playing burned media reduces its lifetime. I’m not sure this is true, but if it is, DVD-Rs repeating over and over in a collectors home could have short lifespans. And using the wrong kind of marker could reduce its life. Or a minor scratch.
Rather than go to great lengths to test DVD-Rs and research all the details of archiving, I’ve decided to take a “fair use” approach instead. First of all, I archive all DVDs that we sell via ISO images. If the collector’s DVD fails, then the we can replace the DVD. But as a secondary backup, I burn those ISO images onto a CD-ROM that comes with the purchase, and suggest that the buyer copy this data to their own computer and keep it safe. It seems a bit much to instruct the collector on how to rip a DVD and burn a copy, but if they have the ISO image it’s easy to burn a copy. Maybe this all seems like a little much, but I guess it’s the role of the gallery to figure out this kind of stuff.
Read Tom's post and the comments for more background info. His point about both the artist and the buyer having the means of (re)production is particularly relevant.
These are essential issues for anyone who wants to be able to sell their work in a gallery context, whether as software in executable form or pre-rendered video in DVD format. The classic issue of limited edition runs of something which is infinitely reproducable also comes up. Some video artists sell tapes or DVDs with a contract that guarantees the buyer that the artist will make new copies available if the storage medium should fail. C.E.B. Reas sells his Process pieces as uniques, complete with the computer hardware to run them.
If anyone has more real-world examples of how artists and galleries are dealing with these issues, any input would be most welcome.
Update: Paul Slocum has posted a tip about using Taiyo Yuden pro-quality storage media. Of course, I’m now completely paranoid about the safety of my backups…
12:08
An interesting link just came down Tom Carden's del.icio.us feed, by way of mflux posting it on Processing.org:
The Art in Computer Programming is an article by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas, both veteran programmers with views on how programming practices can be improved. At the core of the article is the assertion that programming can be seen as an art form, and that approaches from painting etc. can be gainfully used to improve the process of coding.
Comparing programming to art is not new. Donald Knuth’s monolithic series The Art of Computer Programming establishes the connection quite firmly, even if he uses art as a measure of quality rather than as a description of an aesthetic / critical practice. Paul Graham also seizes on the analogy to painters in his book Hackers & Painters.
Apart from some slightly distasteful analogies involving military scenarios of “hitting your target”, Hunt and Thomas have some interesting points that will be recognizable to experienced coders and newbies alike. The challenge of the blank canvas and writer’s block is familiar, as is the issue of when to stop. On these points the article gives clear and useful suggestions. The issue of “Satisfying the Sponsor” is all-important to software engineers and designers, but perhaps less critical to artists.
For another interesting take on how to program, read this quote from an interview with Bram Cohen in Wired 13.01. Cohen is the genius behind the notorious yet much admired BitTorrent filesharing protocol:
Final quote: “[premature] optimization is the root of all evil.” The author of this famous quote is the afore-mentioned Donald Knuth. It was mentioned in a post over on Vogon Poetry (again found through Tom C.) The post summarizes a talk by Cal Henderson on the building of Flickr, interesting reading as it describes how to create a scalable web application almost exclusively from Open Source software.
19:45
Quote from Krome Barratt’s Logic & Design in Art, Science and Mathematics
Just came across Krome Barratt’s wonderful Logic & Design in Art, Science and Mathematics. The book outlines ideas somewhere between art, design and science, applying semi-scientific evaluations to aesthetic issues. The quote above jumped out:
Now, if only life was that easy.
Some calls for proposals that ought to be of interest to Generator.x readers. Sorted in order of deadlines, note that the first two deadlines are this week.
Deadline: 19 March 2006
http://www.nifca.org//residencies/programmes/SPonAD.html
Computational Models of Creativity in the Arts, a two-day workshop. This workshop will bring together practitioners and researchers who are involved in the use of computational systems in the fine and performing arts, literature, design and animation as well as the associated fields of aesthetics, cognitive science, art history and cultural theory.
Deadline: 19 March 2006
Announcement email
Cybersonica 06: Call for works As part of Cybersonica 06, there will be a two-week exhibition of sonic artworks. These works will explore new forms of interactivity, moving away from the keyboard and mouse and into the physical realm. We are now accepting submissions of existing sonic art works from artists wishing to exhibit and present at this year’s festival.
Deadline: 31 March 2006.
http://www.cybersonica.org/_call_for_entries/
Jan van Eyck Akademie: Artists, designers and theoreticians are invited to submit proposals for individual or collective research projects for a one-year or two-year research period in the departments of Fine Art, Design and Theory.
Deadline:15 April 2006.
http://www.janvaneyck.nl/
23:14
Wilfried from Socialfiction sent us this info about a new Crystalpunk event in Utrecht:
11-12 March 2006 Utrecht: A “Crystalpunk Workshop for Soft Architecture” event; Oudenoord 275, Utrecht, NL
Essentially it was William Butler Yeats who defined soft architecture as early as 1888 when he wrote:
“Behind the visible are chains on chains of conscious beings, who are not of heaven but of earth, who have no inherent form but change according to their whim, or the mind that sees them. You cannot lift your hand without influencing and being influenced by hoards. The visible world is merely their skin.”.
12:18
London views: National Theatre, Dan Flavin retrospective, Rachel Whiteread
I am passing through London on my way back from the AV.06 festival and using the opportunity to meet up with the London scene. Last night saw a very pleasant gathering of Tom Carden, Karsten Schmidt, Andreas Müller (who turns out to be Swedish / Finnish, not German as one might suspect), Christian Giordano, Ed Burton and more.
A London Flickr set is already up, more blog posts to come.
Things seen:
Tate Modern: Rachel Whiteread’s Embankment installation
Hayward Gallery: Dan Flavin retrospective
Relevant books purchased:
Alex Coles: Design Art
Frances Follin: Embodied Visions. Bridget Riley, Op Art and the Sixties
Eye Magazine #58 (it has an article on the “decriminalization of ornament”)
11:36
Jill Walker’s excellent jill/txt blog about electronic literature, social networking and, well, blogging, has won an award from the Meltzer Foundation at the University of Bergen. She will receive NOK 100 000 (approx EUR 12 000) in recognition of her “excellence in research dissemination”. This is exciting, as it reflects an official recognition of the potential of blogs to create and disseminate knowledge. Read Jill's blog post for more info, and her publications page for more of her work.
Congratulations, Jill, keep up the frontier work!
Apropos: If you are hip blogging scientish, you should have a look at the Hard Bloggin' Scientist manifesto. It provides operating guidelines for a new movement. While a bit tongue-in-cheek, it’s got some valid points.
They even have sticker images (in pink!) that you can put on your blog to represent the blogging massive. What better way to feel like a part of something important…
16:07
Images shown are not from the Swarm exhibition.
Julie Mehretu: Ruffian Logistics
Matthew Ritchie: Self-Portrait in 2064
(detail)
This has been blogged elsewhere, but it’s interesting enough to bring up again. The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia currently have a show they call “Swarm”. The title is a tip of the hat to scientific and cultural theories, as well as a more general idea of “unplanned and decentralized modes of organization”. Some obvious references:
- The swarm in Artificial Life as an expression of emergent behavior.
- Negri & Hardt’s social theory of swarm intelligence
- Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome, less popular these days, but still…
Curated by well-known designers and curators Abbott Miller and Ellen Lupton, the exhibition brings together artists that typically would not be shown together. Painting is juxtaposed with generative software works and installation art, well-known art world names mix with less obvious ones. Generator.x readers will be familiar with C.E.B. Reas and Jason Salavon, but perhaps less so with Julie Mehretu or Matthew Ritchie. Of course, the reverse would be true for readers from the mainstream art world.
The interesting aspect of this exhibition is how the works are selected for relevance to a cultural idea (the swarm), and not for their inclusion in specific art trends. Generative art, still an outsider art form as far as the art world is concerned, suddenly makes sense in the show. After all, it tends to address issues similar to those explored in the complex paintings of Mehretu or Ritchie (if nothing else, then certainly on a visual level). While generative artists usually shy away from talking about the relationship between their work and the human condition, this show makes just that connection.
Julie Mehretu reference via dataisnature. More to follow.
12:27
Murray McKeich (img from Memory Trade)
Troy Innocent: lifeSigns
The main program of Third Iteration was a mix of academic papers and artists’ and technical talks, with disciplines from comp. sci to visual art and music represented. Highlights included Alan Dorin's "Beyond Morphogenesis: Enhancing Synthetic Trees through Death, Decay and the Weasel Test." Anything that messes up the idealised vitalism of generative art is fine with me – but Dorin’s paper also opened up interesting issues about the abstractions used in modelling plants, and what it would take to make your L-system trees wither, die and rot! On a historical angle, Mike Leggett discussed his experiments from the 1970s in what was called formalist film – but which Leggett now recognises as a generative practice (not computational, but based on formal rules and procedures). Also interesting, Tim Kreger & co’s “Time Space Modulator” project is an industrial design / cultural theory / generative art project, to make a physical interface to a complex, generative media database. The prototype device resembles an oversized, rapid-prototyped Rubik’s cube; lots of potential as a rich and intuitive interface / controller.
In the artists’ talks the standouts included UK duo Boredom Research (Vicky Isley & Paul Smith), who among other things presented some great workshops for kids on generative processes (all done with pencil and paper). Melbourne artist and conference chair Troy Innocent presented his lifeSigns work, which continues his interest in a living, iconographic digital language, and his pursuit of “generative meaning systems”. My favourite was from another local, Murray McKeich, who over the past decade has developed a trademark aesthetic of intricate monochrome digital collage, constructed from a massive personal database of scanned found objects. McKeich has recently turned to generative techniques for purely pragmatic reasons, and is now making multi-field, side-scrolling video from the same material. McKeich uses the scripting features of AfterEffects to generate huge populations of compositions, then selects the best for rendering. As I said to anyone who would listen, I’d love to have one running in my house as an ambient display. Or better still, have it generated on the fly by your ridiculously powerful games console…
Next post: forums and wrap up
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial- ShareAlike 2.5 License.
This license applies to blog entries only.