Blog
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Dropping A Constraint on rheart (ouch)
The previous images from rheart used “convex hulls” (shapes with no inward-heading lines) to draw around. Dropping the convexity (and also the non-intersection) constraint by using a random set of points (and taking out the skeleton for the last three) gives results like this:
There’s some cases where the drawing algorithm can’t find its way around such a random set of lines. It’s useful to see this for debugging. You can’t see it on these small images, but the lines are still slightly random as a result of the pathfinding algorithm (which is the effect I want).
I quite like these shapes, they’re like some of my early Blobs prototypes. The rounded corners are an emergent property of the drawing algorithm, which is nice because I wanted this effect but I hadn’t worked out how to get it yet. 🙂 -
And Some UK Links
Online rights:Open Source advocacy:
Copyright basics:
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Art As Programming
Here’s Knuth’s original “Art As Programming” lecture as a PDF:http://www.bluetail.com/~luke/misc/knuth-turingaward.pdf
Any new activity tries to dignify itself by declaring itself “the same as” an older, more respected activity. Art is still trying to make out it’s a liberal art… As the new activity becomes more respected for its own achievements, this becomes less of a necessity.
I’d make the opposite claim to Knuth. It’s not that programming is an art. it’s that art is a form of programming. By this I mean it is a way of structuring a set of symbols to generate a state or set of states in a given system, in this case human consciousness. The state generated may not be the same in all people but then a program may not generate the same states (or even run) on different machines, even if it’s written in java or ANSI C.
Cave paintings are programs for hunts or rituals, and it goes on from there…
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rheart In Progress
Here’s rheart (formerly Got To Start Somewhere) making some baby steps drawing around shapes. The second image is the bottom-left part of the first image to show how the path around the shape is slightly random.
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Drop The Constraint
An aesthetic can be regarded as a set of constraints. “Realistic” representation has the constraint that everything share a common viewpoint and space. Other constraints may be more important. If showing forms from their canonical viewpoint is more important, you have to drop the constraint on showing things from the same viewpoint. If you do so, you get Egyptian art or some of Picasso’s work. -
Drafting The Gift Domain
Greg London’s “Drafting The Gift Domain” is an excellent introduction to the legal basis of Free Culture. Greg takes a nonpartisan look at the history, development and current state of copyright and patent law (in America), the recent development of Copyleft and why some licenses are better than others for ensuring the development of what he calls the “gift domain”. Well worth a read. -
Free Culture
Lawrence Lessig’s new book Free Culture is available under a Creative Commons license. I’ve just started reading it and it looks like a very good description of the history and current primacy of the cultural asset-strippers who drive our “intellectual property” law.
As you know, my art is available under a CC license. Creative Commons are working on a UK-tailored license, and a revised 2.0 license. I’m worried that the 2.0 license will take out too much boilerplate (notably any representation that the licensed work is the licensor’s own) and allow the licensing to be arbitrarily changed (the composite work section of the license). Creative Commons achievements so far have been incredible, I hope they don’t weaken their licenses to please a vocal minority of bandwagon-jumping bloggers and weekend DJs otherwise I’m going to have to stick with CC 1.0.