An observational drawing program, sourcecode available:
http://pallit.lhi.is/autodrawn/
Very cool.
Blog
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Agile Process
The site for the show Agile Process: A New Economy for the Digital Arts in Scotland:The resources section has lots of useful Free Culture resources.
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Dembroski and Art Hacking
Ben Dembroski’s site, devoted to “Open Content” (i.e. Free) Art:ArtHacking, the site for his PhD dissertation:
http://arthacking.org/php/index.php
Personally I’d take Stallman as a starting point rather than Raymond, but lots of artists seem to prefer Raymond. I don’t know why… 🙂
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Mackenzie Wark: A Hacker Manifesto
This is the book-length version of an essay that has appeared online in several versions over the last few years. A little red book in a clear acetate wrapper, the design is portentous and, with its grunge-type titles and drop caps, slightly irritating. The book consists of some four hundred numbered paragraphs in a dozen chapters.It is a hacker manifesto, applying class analysis to intellectual property. It’s about time someone did this. Brand and Big Media critiques like “No Logo” would have been so much better if they’d used the tools of class analysis that cultural studies’ fashionable postures denied them. Wark is a Marxist, well a crypto-Marxist, so he has no such limitations. And this allows him to get to the heart of the matter from the word go.
Wark identifies a new “vectoralist” class as successor to the capitalists and pastoralists that have previously made up the ruling classes. He never really defines all his terms, but you get the hang of them as the book goes on.The vectoralists seek to dominate the production and distribution of information, creating a new kind of property; intellectual property. The vectoralists rely on the creative classes, the hackers, to hack new abstractions form nature to create new value, releasing nature’s “virtuality”. But intellectual property denies hackers the fruits of their labour, and so we see why hacking and intellectual property are at odds.
There’s much, much more to Wark’s investigation, but it emerges from, and supports the idea of, the vectoralist class’s creation of and exploitation of the idea of intellectual property and how this is against the class interest of the creative class.
Wark comes to call for a recognition of shared class interest amongst the world’s hackers (one that my own experience shows is lacking between hackers sat in the same room, never mind on different continents) and an expressive politics to escape the representative politics that is all to easily commodified by the vectoralists. He also shows how this shared interest has come about, and how all the productive classes (agrarian, industrial and technological) can benefit from and be of benefit to the Hacker class.
Any book that name-checks Art & Language and Rhizome in the endnotes can’t be all bad, and despite the excesses of its design, its sometimes florid prose style and its occasional vagueness, “A Hacker Manifesto” isn’t bad at all. In fact it’s a watershed. The critique Wark provides is urgently needed, incisively argued and far-reachingly applied.
Hackers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your NDAs…
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Computational Narratology
When I was at Kingston Polytechnic in 1991/92, I stumbled across Propp’s “Morphology Of The Folktale” in the library whilst looking for books on shapeshifter mythology, which started my interest in narrative representation systems and generative narrative. By 1995/96 I’d come up with a proposal for a complete system for distributed representation of narrative and the rendering of scene descriptions in 3D. The stories were even skinnable so you could be in a 1920s detective story and the other readers/players could be in a mediaeval fantasy. But I’ve never done anything with it, and whilst I keep scouring the net I don’t think anyone else has done anything similar. I pitched the layout manager idea from the rendering system to one company but I just got blank looks. Which part of “allow your users to create their own environments with just a few commands, a few stock items and a few stock textures” didn’t they get?Enter Computational Narratology:
a project to “theory and tools for new generation interactive media, to enable plots, metaphors, images, and so on to be generated on the fly, in response to user input”.
It’s vital that we move away from the monolithic games, stories and narrative media (TV & Movies) and towards a Free cultural repository of elements and arcs, and the systems to assemble them. Away from blockbuster economics and aesthetics to a genuinely popular/mass production of narrative.
This looks like a good step in that direction.
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Dr Who: Father’s Day
I cried. Apparently I’m not the only one: -
rheart
Checked in a few trivial changes to draw-something.Checked in carbon-draw-something, a MacOS X full-screen version of draw-something. You need to add the code from draw-something to the directory to build it, hopefully I can hack asdf to find the code itself. It’s based on Mikel Evins Bosco application framework.
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Minara
Checked in the latest additions.Some code to handle the maths for checking for intersections.
Refactored window drawing and added a status line to the bottom left of the screen. Hopefully it can be used to fake up an emacs-style input minibuffer.
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Wikipedia
I just created my first Wikipedia article:I’ve got an entry on Harold Cohen in the works and I need to make the OGL entry more NPOV.
Wikipedia really makes me think of A&L’s Indexing projects of the early 1970s, as do folksonomies.
What is the artistic equivalent of an encyclopedia (Wikipedia) or an operating system (GNU) ?