“The internet is about the free exchange and sale of other people’s ideas.” – Kidnappster executive, Futurama.
Blog
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Painting
It’s funny watching this year’s crop of bands on MTV trying to be New Order. That simulacral quality is something that Damien Hirst’s new paintings share. Why is it important that a human being makes the paintings if the human being is trying to embody a notionalised procedure for making authentic paintings? Wouldn’t it be better to offload that process into software? But that wouldn’t reflect the managerial ego as well as using teams of assistants to work on each element of the painting. Software is not of itself exploitative, and it manages (of itself) no real resources, never mind human ones. So teams of assistants it is, adding noise and acting as labour to capture the vibe of the corporate state.That and I doubt Hirst can program. 😉
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The Cult of Reduction: Modern Kicks Discussion
Retrotech hacking and rock authenticity: -
Learning To Drive
I had my first driving lesson last night. Steering is easy but pressing the pedals the opposite way to each other carefully or forcefully depending on what you’re trying to do is difficult. I was fine on the road but once it was over and I got out of the car I got a bit shaky. It was fun, though. -
WoW2
Ways of Working 2 was excellent.Favourite audience question of the day (paraphrased):
“If you find a way for artists to legally copy other people’s work, won’t they just find something else transgressive to do?”
Even better than the presentations was meeting people. I’ve never been asked “Are you the Rhea Myers…” before, so having the experience a couple of times on the same day was cool. 🙂
Favourite comment from someone I met (paraphrased):
“I thought you’d be a grumpy old professor […] like Brian Sewell.”
Fortunately not. 🙂
Cool links:
http://twenteenthcentury.com/uo/index.php/HomePage
http://www.copy-art.net/
http://creativecommons.org/worldwide/uk/
http://www.britishcouncil.org/
http://www.artquest.org.uk/artlaw/ -
RR Launch
A report with photos and stuff. No shots of the (my 🙂 ) art yet… -
Daemons
I’ve yet to find any convincing differences between programming and magic. A one-step positivist might argue that programming works whilst magic doesn’t. They should try debugging a program some time, or reading Alan Moore’s thoughts on magic.In both cases one is trying to invoke various barely comprehended supra-(or sub-)human entities, with uncertain results. Magic is hacking gods. Programming is prayer to the machine. And this is not poetic or provocation. One of my favourite books is “Managers and Magic”, an anthropological look at the faith of business that convincingly casts accountants as priests and shareholders as deities. It is a scathing, funny and illuminating critique. Which is what magic, code, and hacking all aspire to. Or should.
Don’t limit your understanding for appearances sake.
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Playlist
Radiohead: Hail To The Thief
Bloc Party: Silent Alarm
Auf der Maur: Auf Der Maur
Meme: Affectivity
Interpol: Antics
The Cure: The Cure
The Killers: Hot FussMTV2 had a Killers/Bloc Party half hour. Every three years I’m in synch with popular taste…
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Flood Fill
The algorithm that draw-something uses to outline object skeletons is basically a wall-following pathfinding algorithm such as a simple maze-running robot might use. I didn’t just use an algorithm “off the shelf”, I painstakingly developed one myself. For draw-something’s painting algorithm I’m definitely getting something off the shelf. I’m looking at adapting a stack-based flood-filling algorithm to fill the outlining algorithm’s lines with colour. Hopefully I can get something that looks similar to how I colour images without re-inventing the wheel.AARON’s painting algorithm (from the screensaver) looks like a modified flood-fill, only with various constraints appropriate to physical paint. Maybe I will imitate this later, but for now I just want to get something colouring on-screen.