Blog
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TomC’s Processing Sketchbook
I love the fact that Processing provides source code for work by default. Dataisnature mentioned this a while ago but it’s good enough to take another look:I’ve finally bitten the Processing bullet and I’m working on a version of my old pieces Ghosts/Subjects with a view to taking them further.
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Where Is The Art Commons?
A year ago I placed all my art under a Creative Commons license. I assumed that other people would follow suit. But they haven’t. Where is all the other Creative Commons licensed art?
Ultimately, I feel like Rauschenberg knocking on DeKooning’s door to ask for a drawing to erase. License just one work. You’ll lose some part of it, but you’ll be contributing to something more. And, unlike DeKooning, you may get more back in return. -
CC-BY-SA Illustrations
CC-BY-SA Illustrations from Wikimedia, including a CC’d aardvark character for children’s books:http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:CC-BY-SA-2.0
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ArdvarkTheAardvarkMaybe I should SA the characters from my graphic novel…
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Greenberg and Lyotard
Interesting post on Greenberg and Lyotard: -
Live Coding
I first found out about the idea of Live Coding, hacking running code live onstage to generate music and visuals, from an O’Reilley article mentioned on Slashdot.Toplap are the Live Coding masters. They’ve featured at a number of shows.
Other groups are springing up, such as Openlab, who seem less hardcore about coding live?
Can you really code live? I don’t know. Can you really jam live?
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Flash Formalism
Like all good names for art movements, “Flash Formalism” came about as a criticism of a perceived negative trend. That trend is the increase of work based on mathematical or algorithmic aesthetics, at first written with Flash and increasingly with Processing.“Formalism” is a damning accusation for a critic to level at a work. Work which has only form, not content, is presumably vacuous. Certainly it has no critical potential. And yet the requirement that work have obvious, easily recovered content that critics can relate to their existing theories is a requirement of illustration, not critical content. That is, there’s a difference between illustrating critical theory and making something that stretches or even breaks critical theory. If the search-engine chic and in-faux-mation graphics of vaguely political net.art is more to criticism’s tastes, I’d say it’s criticism that has the problem.
Refusal of illustrative content is a political position. And given how complicit would-be net.art criticism is with existing power structures it’s actually a very critical position. It is a position that presents a genuine and useful challenge to and for criticism.
Like process art or the original computer art, both dating from the hardly apolitical 60s and 70s, Flash Formalism is not an art without social meaning. It is just a meaning that cannot immediately be reduced to sound-bite Poststucturalism. It is also a meaning that is not merely textual, another cardinal sin. It is mathematical.
Mathematics is not undemocratic: anyone can learn some maths. And it is not anti-individualistic: theorems and proofs are named after their discoverers. Alan Badiou claims that ontology is mathematics, and uses many mathematical concepts in his philosophy, so maths isn’t unreflective. Whatever narcissistic claims theory may make for “the text”, we live in a mathematically determined culture, not a textually determined one.
What the mathematics of Flash Formalism shows us is an analogue for an increasingly procedural social and aesthetic world. It shows us a simultaneous concretisation of and abstraction from it, a simultaneous engagement and an escape. No wonder it is so intractable for net.art criticism. It takes subtlety and imagination to see how this work relates to and allows a critique of where we are. You can’t just write about it.
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rheart: Colour For Cheats
I’ve had a busy evening. Some of the better results from purely random colour choosing:
It’s doubly cheating: there’s no intelligent choice in the colours, and the shapes (and ground) are being filled by a PostScript fill call rather than with a painting algorithm. This is all temporary. In particular, working out why some random colour schemes are better than others will help to decide how to choose colours more intelligently.
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rheart: Probabilistic Pen
A probabilistic pen for draw-something that uncannily resembles my freehand line:
The first image is a drawing around a convex hull, the other two are drawings around polylines.
How likely the pen is to turn left or right depends on how far it is from an ideal distance from the form it is drawing around. I’ve seen some mis-drawing so far (not shown), so the algorithm (or its parameters) needs some fine tuning, but I’m very pleased with how this looks.