robmyers

This blog has moved back to its old home at:

http://www.robmyers.org/weblog

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http://www.robmyers.org/weblog/rss.xml

See you there!

Gatwick "Village" is an enclosed indoor complex of wide, irregularly-angled corridors opening onto generic shop franchises and large open areas filled with low rows of padded chairs. At 3am all the chairs are covered with people. They're asleep, still clutching mobile phones, books, bags and clocks. Dozens of them, all stretched out over chairs and backpacks.
Nothing happens. No one leaves. Nothing is stolen. There's nothing to do and nowhere to go. There's no way to get out and actually get anywhere.
The departure board VDUs update second by second, all the times seeming a long way off. We spend some time in McDonalds then I keep watch as one by one the others pass out as we wait for the first train to London some time after 4am.

I'm back from Tunisia. It's an excellent place. I filled a sketchbook whilst I was there.

Got lots of rest, lazed around the beach and the hotel pool, went to Soose and Monastir, ate far too much. I didn't go to the Sahara with Evie and Tom, though.

I've come back to find the MacOSX Tiger DR waiting for me and my email inbox limit exceeded (!).

One problem I've had with using masking tape or airbrush mask film to mask off areas of canvas when painting is that the paint bleeds under the mask. This leads to unsightly blobs and runs along the edge of the masked area, and just looks ugly.
The solution is to paint the unmasked area in the same colour as the area under the mask first. So the same colour bleeds into the same colour and seals the edge of the mask. You may need to do apply two coats of the same colour for thin paint.
You can then paint over this, and the new colour doesn't bleed. This does build up the paint fairly high with a fairly sharp border, but that can be an interesting effect in itself, and explains what I've seen on lots of contemporary painting. :-)

Thomas Kinkade was on QVC this evening in the UK. He cam across as insincere, or possibly jet-lagged, or possibly someone who has sold something they love too many times before. I believe he is sincere at some level below subject-matter and above technique. If Jeff Koons can sell ironically to collectors, Kinkade can sell super-sincerely to the masses.
Kinkade's technique is pre-modern, oriented to pre-calculated effect. Or is that postmodern? He mentioned Millais. I think of Wright of Derby when I see his work, if only because of that cottage on fire. I want to know if Kinkade takes the differing gamuts of oils and inks into account when painting what are in effect masters for reproduction.
There's lots of satanic imagery that can be found there for the looking: the ghosts in the smoke, the spirits in the waves, the serpents of the bridges and houses. Spooky.
He called the prints "product" at one point then backtracked. Everyone has to sell their work. Kinkade's inbetween the Diamonique (fake diamond) and non-brand brand cosmetics.
The thing that interested me above all was the effect of the canvas on his prints. It adds visual noise. That noise is like the noise at dusk or when you close your eyes. That quality gave his works that are printed on canvas a curiosly realworld, meditative effect. But oh, as I posted to asethetics-L, the horror...

http://www.copy-art.net/

An Open Content Art host. This is great. But it explicitly requires that all work be Noncommercial, rather than allowing a choice of license. Noncommercial is less Free than allowing commercial use, and grows less value (less art in this case). Hopefully they'll allow people to choose their own license soon.
Ideally there'll be a "ContentForge" for Free Culture projects soon like the Sourceforge site for software projects today.

The problem with Open Content is that it is concerned with end products, not source material, and is aimed at consumers, not producers. This reduces its value to both.
Free Software (Open Source), the inspiration for Open Content, ensures the free availability and free circulation of source code and supporting files. These are the materials that are used to make the program. If you want to change, extend, build on or borrow part of the source code existing program you can because it is the responsibility of everyone who works with the source code to make it publicly available.
Open Content only requires that the end product be made available. You can sample Open Content, remix it or compile it, but you don't have access to the source materials used to make it as a guarantee of the license. If Open Content were software, the binaries (the runnable application) would be free, but the source code wouldn't be released.
Open Content licenses must contain a guarantee to make source material available. The Midi files, the samples, the LaTeX or Docbook sources, the 3D models, the textures, the shaders, the patches, the PhotoShop or Gimp layered files, the graphical elements and scans, even the preparatory sketches, the written score, the script, the character and plot descriptions, unfinished versions of the work. All this will allow other people to build on Open Content rather than just to recycle it. Physical media are no limit. Free Software began when programs had to be distributed on bulky magnetic tapes. Open Content doesn't necessarily need the Internet; photocopies of sketches and scores are much better than no source material at all.
Moving from Open Content to Open Source Material will enable a creative explosion in culture like the one that Free Software has enabled for programming. And for the same reason: shared source material improved and added to by a creative community that creators can build on.

This essay: The End of Art Theory, argues that Art Theory is finished.
It does this by trying to show that The Institutional Theory of art is untenable. The Institutional Theory, it claims, contains so many free terms that it is all-inclusive and unable to separate art from any other objects. It is circular to boot. In fact, the Institutional Theory is not a theory.
Ironically, if this is true it means that the Institutional Theory is the only tenable post-Art-Theory means of identifying and considering art. If the Institutional Theory is not a theory, it can survive the End Of Art Theory. Worse, without any guiding theory to identify or evaluate art, identifying art becomes a matter of nomination, of saying that something is art. The Institutional Theory is based on nomination, and is slightly stronger than random nomination as it is underwritten by the social authority of those doing the nominating (the critics, theorists and curators of the Artworld).
If this is the death of the Institutional Theory, it's a Freddy Kreuger kind of death...

From Vision Research vol 44 p1493 via NewScientist 26.6.04.

Adding visual noise to a picture of the Mona Lisa affected how people saw it. No, really. The scientists responsible for this study believe that the visual system's own noise causes this effect. But anyone looking at the picture can see that if visual noise affects the picture, it -er- affects the picture. If the researchers don't believe this, I have a project that involves adding random noise to their research grant budget figure...

An easy way to view Creative Commons metadata embedded in web pages for Mozilla/Netscape-based browsers.

MozCC

Article at Guardian Online.

Complexity or difficulty are both effects of art with internal or contextual complexity. This is art that does something, or requires that you do something. Art that has to work for its living. The mute, evacuated objects so beloved of curators and essayists of the last forty years cannot engage aesthetically or critically with anything much, and are no better than the conservative Good Old-Fashioned Art that is their Other.

Art open to complexity and open to making demands on viewer and artist other than "questioning" sanctioned "problematics". Art giving rewards other than the warm fuzzy glow of throwback Beaux Arts or Institutional Burlesque. Bring it on... ;-)

I've made very few paintings, but I need to make some now. I think that 1968 needs some painted images, and a project called "Indemnified Paintings" needs painting as well (obviously :-) ).

I'm reminded of Art & Language talking about how paint and brushes were "kryptonite" to some conceptual artists. I came to computers at the same time as painting and printmaking, so there's never been that ideological split for me.

This isn't part of any general drift from technology, or a need to make something saleable, it's just what I need to do. OK so I'm having fun with Conté charcoal pencils and blue col-erase at the moment as well, but I'm coding and clicking away as hard as ever. Yessir. It's important to get the medium right and not to fetishise it.

Paint is a good way of making certain kinds of one-shot images. Why make it on-screen and then laboriously print it out? It's easier to just paint it, if the process of painting or the lack of undo doesn't get in the way. ;-)

All the tools you need to make art digitally are available as Free Software projects. These aren't toys, they are serious tools used in production on real projects.

Blender is an excellent 3D modelling, animation and game-making application: http://www.blender.org/

Renderman is the tool that's used for rendering movie effects and computer animation, free implementations are available: http://www.renderman.org/RMR/OtherLinks/index.html#Renderers

For video editing there's Kino: http://kino.schirmacher.de/

For frame editing there's CinePaint (formerly Film Gimp), developed and used by Hollywood effects houses: http://www.cinepaint.org/

For photo and image editing there's Gimp: http://www.gimp.org/

For vector illustration there's Inkscape: http://www.inkscape.org.
And there will eventaully be minara :-) : http://minara.sourceforge.net/

For fonts (typefaces) there's Fontforge: http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/

For desktop publishing there's Scribus: http://www.scribus.net/

Other Free Software media resources, including sound, sampling and sequencing (which are outside my area of expertise): http://lib.fo.am/cgi-bin/view/Libarynth/FreeMediaTools

There's an Open Source cola drink, it's been around for a while now:

http://www.colawp.com/colas/400/cola467_recipe.html

Whilst this is very funny, formalising the idea of competing on manufacture & distribution and collaborating on research & development is one of the aspects of Free Software that transfers very well to consumer goods.

AdBusters would do much better to release Open Trainer designs rather than hyping their Closed "Blackspot" Trainer vapourware. Their centralised, corporatist, old-school branding just leaves me looking from man to pig...

I've started reading "Painting As An Art", so I've been thinking about the Institutional Theory of art (which Wollheim starts the book by discussing). This is the theory that art is irrelevant to art: the thing that makes art into art is its recognition by the "artworld". Quite how the artworld recognises art I don't know, but I think it can be summed up as: "the art world likes what it likes". It's not a very useful theory for actually making art, but curators love it.
It's very simple for an artwork to enforce its acceptance by the artworld, thus upsetting the Institutional Theory. If you don't believe me, try getting a watercolour painting of a scottie dog painted by an old lady into the Tate's modern art collection. There's no way the artworld will accept it. Theory falsified. ;-)

An excellent article on why DRM (Digital Rights Management) is bad for consumers, artists, and companies (via SlashDot):

http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt

This was delivered as a lecture to Microsoft! We're an Apple household (Macs and iPods), but if Steve Jobs can't apply himself to finding a way that both Apple and Pixar can make money from the network without selling my computer to the MPAA out from under me, it's going to be Linux time.

rob-art has been uploaded to SourceForge and a first release is available. Sources for Draw Something, ae and The Cybernetic Artwork Nobody Wrote are include, as is some documentation in PDF and HTML format.

You'll need a Lisp interpreter/compiler to run the code and a PostScript viewer to view the output from Draw Something.

Click here for details.

Ken Brown's efforts on behalf of Microsoft have shifted to creating new terminology for proprietary software vendors to use and trying to change the meanings of words. Ken wants to change "Open Source" to mean asset-stripping (BSD) licenses, which for him means that value-creation licenses (GPL) become -shudder- "Hybrid Source".

It's Newspeak, and for a good example of a "Hybrid Source" project of mixed Open Source (BSD) and proprietary code, look no further than Windows. Its networking code was shown to have come from BSD. Yes, the world's most successful proprietary software is "Hybrid Source". Which Ken Brown says destroys the value of intellectual property and should be shunned by government.

On the plus side, obviously Microsoft's new best friend Sun can't use an evil, hybrid-source license like the GPL for Solaris and Java. They'll have to use an asset-stripping license, which will allow other proprietary software vendors (such as Microsoft) to cherry-pick their code. But at least they won't see the reduction in value of their intellectual property that they would if they went GPL. Um...

UK Arts Minister questions artistic instrumentalism:

Story at Guardian Online.

Instrumentalism has distorted perception and funding of art in the UK, giving rise to an aesthetic of access and trivialising art in the process.

The essay's available here online. Click here for more information.

Michaelangelo is the latest victim of Asperger's Syndrome Syndrome. This is where a publicity hungry psychiatric hack assigns a pathology to someone famous using the famous bullet-point-comparison test.

Hopefully some day a cure will be found for the poor individuals who suffer from this syndrome syndrome. Or perhaps we'll find that their inexplicable drive to pathologise notable historical figures is a result of their work, not a mental disorder, however much it might look that way when you reduce it to a soundbite.