I finally bought a copy of Illustrator CS. It’s got the old “Dimensions” engine that I used for some of Inbetween Cities built in, so that could be fun. But mostly it does modern file formats, AppleScript, and metadata.
Blog
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Ten Years Since Fuse94
It’s ten years since “Fuse 94”. I was there, an art student at a typography conference, and it was great. The best speakers were definitely Letterror, whose work on smart fonts influenced my work quite majorly.I spent lots of time in the lab as well, making some Psychetecture in PhotoShop amongst other things. It was the first time I had my work put on the web (and the first time I’d been on the Internet). I don’t have the files any more, they wouldn’t fit on a disk then and the site isn’t there now.
People still use the word “vernacular” too much. Vernacular to postmodern graphic design is like Pastoral to yBA art: a displaced, ironised aesthetic social virtue masquerading as an aesthetic.
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My First Remix
I saw the first remix of my work today. It’s quite a coincidence that the remixer added arrows as they are the central motif of my next project.© 2004 Ber Kessels, Rhea Myers.
Licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA-2.0 license.
Derived from “London (For Evie)”. -
Remix Reading
The Remix Reading site is shaping up very well. They’ve got a domain but it’s just a placeholder with the flyer on at the moment. Do download the flyer, though. -
I Thought We Were The Judean People’s Front?
This site is excellent, but the debates they link to very quickly go all Wolfie Smith: -
Minara
It’s not as hard as I thought to add an intersection handler, so I’ve added one and now Minara doesn’t crash when the pen tool is being used.
This means that I can keep using OpenGL rather than switching to libart or another rendering library. So I can concentrate on refactoring and adding new code next month instead. Yay! -
1969 – Nearly There
All the images of 1969 have been coloured and divided into Final and Discard groups. I’ll go through them again at the weekend and then 1969 should be finished, with around 30 Final images. See the sketchblog for an example. -
p2p Tuple Space
Use a p2p network as a JavaSpaces/Linda – style tuple space.Create data structures as (possibly metadata-rich) xml packets referring to resource files/urls, and to other xml packets. The data structures from the JavaSpaces book can easily be modelled this way. A weblog or serial could be an open-ended queue, an album, lecture series or split large file could be an array. Use MD5 hashes, domain limits, time limits or other constraints for “security”.
Use the entire internet as a tuple space described in xml packets. Extend the format to allow specifying sub-elements of resources and assemblages of elements/sub-elements for remixes and other derivations.
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Cover Versions
“This is not my song to you and this is not me singing it,
A cover version, words I found, dressed in black with eyes seductive.
I remember yesterday but someone else bought yesterday,
Dead with nothing left to say, screaming it out anyway.”
– ‘Body Elective’.One of the themes post-“Free Culture” (the book) that speakers on copyright always come back to is remixing and its historical precedents. The canto is a fascinating example, classical poems made form lines of other poems. Another more problematic example is Shakespeare. Shakey’s re-presentation of themes are more cover versions than remixes. If a remix is a reworking of a performance, a cover version is a reworking of a score. The idea of a score is central to Goodman’s aesthetic theory, and to traditional music copyright, but that’s not why it’s important here. The freedom to re-create a work rather than just to use a particular realisation of it one of the key freedoms of the GPL, and one of the reasons why providing source code is a requirement of it. The source code for a program is its score, and vice versa. The cover version should not be forgotten in the current lionisation of sampling any more than it should be used to obscure the common theme of reworking that it shares with sampling.
