Blog

  • Canto

    I wanted to remix images again, and I found an image at Remix Reading that appealed to me. It was a posterised photograph of a street in Reading by Tom Chance, and it had lots of shapes (probably tracing artefacts) that I liked quite independently of any descriptive function they had. I autotraced the image and took the shapes I wanted, arranging them into new compositions, subconsciously influenced by the Matisse prints at my local McDonalds and some ceramic drinks coasters that my mother made.

    Mackenzie Wark regards hacking as releasing pure virtuality, which I take to mean latent or unrealised potential. Paul Miller regards remixing as an interrogation of meaning. The two are at odds, as remixing is hacking, but they are complementary, as meaning is not finite. Even a single image has so much potential.

    I made the first image Evie was away, then when she came back and told me she was going away for good I dedicated it to her. It seemed fitting. These goth-Matisse pieces are the anti-Blim, at the other end of ten years of my life. The title is a reference to a comment on ‘The Creative Remix’ about remixes of classical poems, but also refers to a section of a hymn or poem. Again it seemed fitting.

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  • iFabricate

    Via hobbyprincess:

    iFabricate

    A community/structured content site to present projects and howtos. Kinda like a make community site.

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  • Alternatives to colr

    colr.org is down at the moment. One of the questions paintr asks is “What happens if a service you base your work on goes down?”. I didn’t expect to get such a quick answer. ๐Ÿ™‚

    The colr website lists some alternatives to colr.org, I’ll have to recode paintr to be able to use one of them instead:

    COLOURlovers

    ColorWhore

    Colorspeak

    Or there’s an algorithmic palette generator:

    Colour Scheme Generator 2

    But that goes against the folksonomy emphasis of paintr.

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  • Common Content Is Back

    Common Content is back, with an admin team to keep out the link spammers. I always liked the idea of Common Content, a directory (rather than a repository) for Creative Commons licenced work. Submit links to your work and people can find it by category:

    Common Content

  • Art, Privilege, Democracy

    Art was traditionally made for the ruling classes. Actually, that’s not true, but high art was by definition made for the ruling classes. Access to high art technology was limited to high art, so rich colours, perspectival mathematics, or computing machinery were off-limits for the plebs.

    There’s the possibility of breaking or reaffirming this divide now.

    A hacker/maker/participatory culture could render high art genuinely obsolete by distributing the knowledge to produce the tools and ideology to make high art in any home. This could be empowering, but it could also destroy the critical potential of art.

    Or alternatively, getting access to high-end technology, paintboxes or clusters, could reaffirm or produce a new high aesthetic. This could be used to critical ends, or could end up as simply demo art, sales apologia for widgets.

    Which path, and which risks, one takes depends on ones ideology. But sitting on commodity computer technology fiddling with the same software as everyone else doesn’t cut it either way.

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  • Kurator

    A software art curation system, via Rhizome:

    http://www.kurator.org/read/Software

  • Wikidraw

    Wikidraw is a project to create a free-content resource for drawing that anyone can edit.”:

    http://www.wikidraw.org/

  • cultur.com Reviews 1969

    Ada Camara Ortega has written a review of my series “1969” for the Danish website cultur.com:

    1969 (in Danish)

    Colour schemes from art & design of the 1950s to the 1980s were a strong influence on the images, so I think Ada’s right to mention 1970s psychedelia and wallpaper designs. Evie even bought me a book of wallpaper designs after I produced 1969. ๐Ÿ™‚

    Thanks Ada!