Rhea Myers

Blog

  • Literate Programming

    I’ve moved my AARON -style program from Prolog to Python to Lisp to Dylan, and now I’m programming it in a literate programming style using noweb. Literate programming means combining a human-readable description of the program with the code and using a program to extract the code and well-formatted documentation from this shared source. It’s like illuminated manuscripts for code, and a technique I’d like to apply more directly to image programs (such as PostScript or MetaPost code).
    Hopefully the extra effort will be worth it:
    • Having to describe what I’m doing is helping me to think more clearly about what I’m doing.
    • This is a long term project, so the documentation will help me to start hacking on it again after any breaks.
    • I can present the program publicly, unlike with AARON.

  • Titled

    There’s overlap between the eye of colour poetics and the eye of cognitive science. They meet in the compression schemes used by digital image systems such as computers and cable TV to squeeze pictures over networks by throwing away details the eye isn’t supposed to notice then reconstituting them later using a standard replacement scheme. In my day jobs I’ve had to learn to spot “compression artefacts” from too much information being thrown away in such images. I have trouble watching cable sometimes…
    The images of “Titled” are standard colour contrast illustrations from colour theory manuals (and “zips”, but that’s another story) degraded by computer compression. The two-dimensional equivalent of Turk’s Judd cubes, only more two-sided. They look aesthetic, which says something computational about aesthetics or something aesthetic about computation. I had to make them, it was necessary.
    They’re uncomfortably pretty images.

    Click here to see the work.

  • Surgical Strike

    Liberal arts and the military technology of computation make strange bedfellows. There is a danger that computer art is just the aestheticisation of military ideology, a sugar coating that makes the military-industrial-entertainment complex easier to swallow on the way to the cubicle. This serves business well, but art is not business even if there is a business of art.
    These images were made using a computer language that I wrote for the project. The language was derived from military terminology, and the images were meant to be parodies of William Latham’s then-famous swirly evolved computer art. It’s no accident that artistic Darwinism was popular at the same time as social Darwinism. Replacing Latham’s spheres and textures with stealth bombers and IT logos seemed more honest. Introducing the history of software into the background and trapping the image between that and the text of the program that executed to create it in the foreground completed the work.
    It’s a concrete allegory.

    Click here to see the work.

  • San Jose

    I was in San Jose for the Apple developer conference in February 2000. California in winter is different from London in winter, but it would be different anyway. It felt like being on a film set; the visual perfection and order, the feeling of everything being staged. The gas station forecourt lawns have sprinklers built into them so they don’t go brown in the heat.
    My hotel was next to the technology museum and the art museum. San Jose Museum of Art’s logo was a distended red star; there was a show of conceptual art on. I eventually found a McDonalds and was served an outsized meal by someone who couldn’t understand my Briddish accent. I went into a bookshop, a grocery. The colours, packaging and smells were different. Brown paper, cinnamon. I saw offices for Bank of America and Adobe. Walking around the wide streets and sidewalks I found the old quarter, wooden houses with people who didn’t have anything to lose in the impending dot-com crash sat on the steps.
    The freeway to San Jose had adverts for dot-coms on its billboards. I’d just left a company that did work for dot-coms and I was at a company that wanted to be a dot-com rather than write another hit game. I saw Steve Jobs live on stage, listened to lots of technology presentations, and negotiated an open source license with a company that wasn’t there for a product I’ve never finished.
    In the evenings I talked Evie on the other side of the Atlantic, called room service and tried to work out how chicken was a vegetable, raided the minibar, watched episodes of “Xena: Warrior Princess” that hadn’t been shown in the UK yet, and beat off my jet lag.
    This all worked its way into the art that I made sat on my hotel bed with my new blueberry iBook running a copy of Corel Draw! that nothing will run or read now.

    Click here to see the work.

  • Inbetween Cities

    I spend far too much of my life commuting as a passenger on mass transport systems. Looking out of the window of a fast-moving vehicle close up all you see are blurs. Further away objects rotate serenely by revealing a good two hundred and seventy degrees of their appearance to you by the time they’re gone. These works are a fairly literal record of this observation. Just with the volume turned up to eleven.

    The “Spins” are based on the (in)famous futurist bust of Mussolini, just using animal silhouettes instead of Il Duce’s profile. Motorways are a fascist invention. I was first struck by how strange animals look seen from a moving vehicle on the back of an open-top four-wheel-drive vehicle driven by a madman speeding down a country lane. You tend to notice things like that when the adrenaline kicks in. The silhouettes are spun away from their centre; this maintains the fact of what is seen whilst destroying the literal record. I made a 3D kaleidoscope program of these as well but I’ve lost the source code.

    The “Blurs” again started fairly literal. They are what you see in tube tunnels, in cuttings, in underpasses, whenever something is too close. Later Blurs became more Vorticist in appearance or began introducing figures (or animals again) into the landscape. I think I’m the first person to have done this sort of thing, I certainly did it differently.

    Click here to see the work.

  • Still Alive

    I changed jobs, which has been very time-consuming.
    I’ve swapped from Python to Lisp for the drawing module. Hopefully if I use Lisp I won’t ever have to learn another programming language. 🙂
    There was a thread about “meritocracy” in fine art on Rhizome. Anyone who is confused about this sort of thing should try The Jackdaw, which is like a Private Eye for fine art, only genuinely funny as well as informative…

  • I’ve been busy

    I’ve been busy. I’ve been writing a drawing module similar to a very, very simple implementation of Harld Cohen’s AARON.
    I emailed Harold Cohen, and got a reply. 🙂
    And I’ve been sketching and writing a lot, which hasn’t left much time for a weblog.

  • Oh, the irony

    Compare the figures in a Maloney painting to the figures in an AARON painting. AARON is working hard to reach this state, Maloney is dumbing down to it. AAARON comes from a fondness for painting, figures, and art. I don’t really care where Maloney is coming from. Both ironise the figure through technique, yet ‘s cack-handedness tells us much less about people at the end of the twentieth century than AARON.
    It’s the difference between Nu Metal’s not-knowing-enough-to-cover-its-ineptness signifying and electronic music, where you have to find your own soul if any. This potential for representing, ironically, humanity is becoming one of the main things that interests me in making art with technology

  • Cabinet Of Disinterest

    Cabinet paintings are reviled as the precursor of kitsch. Kitsch is reviled by critics. Left-wing critics object to the content of Kitsch, which they regard as saccharine distraction, sentimental, void of social content, worse than null. Right-wing critics object to the form of kitsch; its low quality and therefore its low value. Neither particularly object to the subjects of kitsch. People, animals, scenery, all can be found in high art. If realism is the necessity of the translations required to maintain isomorphism between real-world referents and aesthetic signs, then Kitsch transformations are degenerate, destroying value and reference and substituting low-level self-referential sentimentality. Kitsch is unrealistic, even anti-realistic.

    Cabinet paintings are also the precursors of screensavers. Small, personal distractions that ironise their context. Beyond this, it is the screensaver’s avoidance of work for the viewer to do that places it firmly in the category of kitsch. Screensavers need not be kitsch. Julian Opie has made screensavers, and AARON is available as a screensaver. In both cases the relationship of the screensaver and the user to work is what gives the piece value. Opie’s ever-changing abstract landscapes and cubes don’t allow the viewer to rest, finally forcing them to leverage their environmental aesthetic knowledge to complete the work and exercise some degree of control over the experience. The screensaver version of AARON creates original compositions at a frightening rate whenever a computer’s user isn’t doing anything else. It is working, even if the user isn’t.
    Critical fetishism of breakthrough and transitional works operates against anything as seemingly prosaic as the screensaver. This should be taken and ironised, or at least parodied.

  • ae In Progress

    Here’s an example of the (very basic) current output from ae, a program I’m writing as a proof-of-concept for the generative principles I mentioned in an earlier posting:

    Aesthetic:
    Criterion: emotional Property: medium chroma Weight: -0.990090351373
    Criterion: environmental Property: triangle Weight: -0.92098300276
    Criterion: environmental Property: smooth Weight: 0.464487999345
    Criterion: perceptual Property: pale Weight: -0.42954300998
    Criterion: cultural Property: very large Weight: 0.52576391209
    Criterion: political Property: oval Weight: -0.824683353734
    Criterion: spiritual Property: star Weight: 0.332525761786
    Criterion: emotional Property: scribbled Weight: 0.389517234695
    Criterion: historical Property: scribbled Weight: -0.394053851375
    Criterion: emotional Property: purple Weight: 0.657695420143
    Image:
    Figure: Property: smooth Weight: 0.77514274481 Property: medium sized Weight: 0.804924205912 Property: very small Weight: 0.134779215508 Property: small Weight: 0.998254223669 Property: square Weight: 0.877359494311 Property: triangle Weight: 0.770580597379
    Figure: Property: rough Weight: 0.294859738413 Property: smooth Weight: 0.386463663764
    Figure: Property: medium sized Weight: 0.257203904622 Property: very large Weight: 0.823282759862 Property: grainy Weight: 0.500935480986
    Figure: Property: very large Weight: 0.238379999714 Property: medium chroma Weight: 0.226417026224 Property: large Weight: 0.28003655038 Property: smooth Weight: 0.640733831832 Property: pale Weight: 0.0949973486808 Property: scribbled Weight: 0.306013047604 Property: red Weight: 0.3334115855
    Figure: Property: spiral Weight: 0.225828900109 Property: dark Weight: 0.67675402324 Property: oval Weight: 0.00497709246932 Property: small Weight: 0.66997465332
    Figure: Property: circle Weight: 0.861863092243
    Figure: Property: very small Weight: 0.511500266605 Property: star Weight: 0.633589779492 Property: scribbled Weight: 0.857063666956
    Figure: Property: rich Weight: 0.764279205804 Property: smooth Weight: 0.933009749928 Property: line Weight: 0.440738562043 Property: star Weight: 0.319753143385 Property: very small Weight: 0.703559370589 Property: medium sized Weight: 0.110725644256 Property: bright Weight: 0.684350809239 Property: rough Weight: 0.938225240413
    Evaluation: environmental – smooth -> 0.360044502743
    Evaluation: environmental – triangle -> -0.709691632443
    Evaluation: environmental – smooth -> 0.179507734001
    Evaluation: cultural – very large -> 0.432852364581
    Evaluation: cultural – very large -> 0.125331601214
    Evaluation: emotional – medium chroma -> -0.224173313051
    Evaluation: environmental – smooth -> 0.29761317566
    Evaluation: perceptual – pale -> -0.0408054470924
    Evaluation: emotional – scribbled -> 0.119197356083
    Evaluation: historical – scribbled -> -0.120585619979
    Evaluation: political – oval -> -0.00410452530944
    Evaluation: spiritual – star -> 0.210684924085
    Evaluation: emotional – scribbled -> 0.33384106951
    Evaluation: historical – scribbled -> -0.337729238838
    Evaluation: environmental – smooth -> 0.433371832113
    Evaluation: spiritual – star -> 0.106326157588
    Score: 1.16168094087