Rhea Myers

Blog

  • Joy Garnett &&“Open Source Art”

    Garnett on Garnett:

    http://www.nyfa.org/level3.asp?id=349&fid=6&sid=17

    Wikipedia article linked to in the article:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_culture

    Two things about the idea of an “Open Source Culture”.

    Firstly, it does make sense to provide the source material for your work. Be it preparatory sketches, midi files and sample banks, character and plot notes or earlier drafts of stage notes. The principle and advantages are the same as for software: others can learn from, remake and build on your work. As a visual artist I have encountered works that I couldn’t understand without the preparatory sketches and that were wonderful when I got the hang of them, and I’ve seen reproductions of lost works that are the only surviving record of them. I’ve made versions of works from preparatory sketches, and used unrealised ideas to make completed works.
    I wish there was a Creative Commons “Provide Source” module, a “CC-PS”.

    Secondly, “Open Source” is a weasel term designed not to scare incumbent corporates. It has no moral or ideological power to describe or to direct, it merely describes a decontextualised, dehistoricised way of working that is cheaper for businesses to use. “Free Software”, the term that Open Source was designed to disempower, is a much better term, more descriptive and with a clearer sense of purpose, as is the cultural equivalent “Free Culture”. The economic advantages of Free Software are a side-effect of its moral basis. Open Source obscures this, and without a firm moral basis it can neither defend nor maintain its social and economic advantages. It cannot answer questions of direction or purpose, only of monetary value. A merely Open Source culture will share these problems, a Free Culture will not.

    Stallman is clear on the failings of Open Source:

    http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html

    Article I’m sure I’ve posted before but found again whilst writing this:

    http://www.nothing.org/osc/WhyArtShouldBeFree.htm

    Article that would be a lot less confused with the idea of Free Culture to guide it rather than the idea of Open Source Culture to mislead it:

    http://rejon.org/writings/openSourceArt/openSourceArt-phillips.pdf

    The mighty Saul Albert on Open Source Art:

    http://chinabone.lth.bclub.org.uk/~saul/docs/mirrors/saul/os.htm

  • “Futurist” Runners

    Frames from an animation from 1991 (they were progressively overlaid).

  • “We’re not Goths, we’re Industrialists”

    NIN release a remixable track. Not exactly Progen but radical for a mainstream American band, via BoingBoing :

    http://www.boingboing.net/2005/04/15/nins_trent_reznor_re.html

    Macintosh “Garage Band” archive of the track.

    Are NIN fans called Ninnies? ;-P

  • Good Slashdot Comment

    Slashdot comment on open source and art:

    http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=146567&cid=12279170

  • Canto For Gabrielle (in progress)

    You wouldn’t believe how hard it is getting the balance of blobby shapes right…
    CC-BY-SA, contains elements from “Remix Broad Street” by Tom Chance.

  • w00f!

    w00f!
    or, possibly:
    w00F!
    depends on how you like your wide hex dogs. 🙂

  • Open Source For Designers

    Good Introduction to some of the applications you can use:

    http://www.underconsideration.com/speakup/archives/002282.html

    I use Inkscape when I can. I use Illustrator for envelopes, perspective, and Boolean operations.
    I should use minara, but it smells of mothballs.

  • Creative Archive Launches

  • Canto For Tom (In Progress)

    CC-BY-SA, contains elements from “Remix Broad Street” by Tom Chance.

  • What Is A Hole?

    What is a hole? More specifically, what should draw-something do to draw a hole in an existing shape?

    A quick look at Canto or Blobs shows how I think of holes. They’re, well, holes, usually related to the exterior form rather than an unrelated shape that just so happens to be inside the other shape.

    The current drawing algorithm generates an outline at a set distance from the closest line in a set of lines. This gives draw-something two possible forms to draw inside, the “skeleton” (the set of lines) and the drawn outline. If the lines were a convex hull (as they sometimes are), there are a set of points inside the shape that could be used to generate holes skeletons. But sometimes the lines are random, complete with concavities, so this might not always work. So generating a skeleton for a hole to be drawn relative to isn’t simple.

    And then there’s the question of how to draw holes relative to the skeleton. I’d imagine that the outline of a hole is drawn inside its skeleton. This would require a different drawing algorithm, one that can handle gaps being too small to draw through, and that is happy crossing skeleton lines. Drawing outside a hole skeleton has its own problems. It seems counter-intuitive, and might result in the hole being drawn outside the exterior outline.

    I don’t think AARON is much help here. 1970s AARON draws holes the same way it draws forms, one section at a time without a skeleton. Later AARONs don’t draw holes that I can see, interior forms such as eyes and mouths are positive features.

    So I’m drawing holes by hand, trying to understand this.