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"Very soon after starting the book in the 1960s I dreamed of its use as an oracle, and it has taken 40 years for technology to make that possible." He is so pleased with the outcome that: "I've become my own consumer. Each night after midnight I consult, somewhat furtively (even though alone), the Oracle I have made. I'm often surprised by pages made long ago and almost forgotten, as well as by the sometimes uncanny predictions they offer their maker."
Yep, I still love Tom Phillips.
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"I think that the physical and the digital are inseparable in culture in the same way that waves and particles are inseparable in light." This is great, and reminds me how Berger-esque some of James' art-writing is getting.
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"Design critique is not a place to be mean, but it’s also not the place to be kind. You’re not critiquing to make friends. Kind designers don’t say what they mean. ‘Kind’ is not about the work, and design critique exists to make us better, but mostly, it’s to make the work better." Mark Boulton talks about the value of crits. I was introduced to the vocabulary and tone of the design/art-school crit at Berg, and find it useful, though I daren't think what 18-year-old me would have made of it. Stressing that it's not personal, it's about the work, and that that is contained within a magic circle, is really difficult, and it's really important.
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"Topics like linear algebra, topology, graph theory, and machine learning are becoming vital prerequisites both to doing daily work in these fields and, more importantly, to inventing, popularizing, and teaching the new creative tools that are rapidly arising. Without them, artists are forced to wait for others to digest this new knowledge before they can work with it. Their creative options shrink to those parts of this research selected by Adobe for inclusion in prepackaged tools. Instead of the themes and concerns of creative work driving the selection of tools from a growing technical cornucopia, artists find themselves turned into passive users of tools that are already curated, contextualized, and circumscribed by others.
So, I want to do something about this. I want to figure out a way to teach myself and others these more advanced mathematical and computational concepts with a specific eye towards applying them in creative technology."
This is going to be very good. (I'd quote the whole post if I could, but this leapt out at me hardest.) And: on the day Greg's book arrived.
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"Imperfect and internal rhymes are two important features in rap music previously ignored in the music information retrieval literature. We developed a method of scoring potential rhymes using a probabilistic model based on phoneme frequencies in rap lyrics. We used this scoring scheme to automatically identify internal and line-final rhymes in song lyrics and demonstrated the performance of this method compared to rules-based models. We then calculated higher-level rhyme features and used them to compare rhyming styles in song lyrics from different genres, and for different rap artists. We found that these detected features corresponded to real- world descriptions of rhyming style and were strongly characteristic of different rappers, resulting in potential applications to style-based comparison, music recommendation, and authorship identification." Awesome, and something I am going to sit down and read properly.
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"A series of informative posters detailing how some of the most notable drum sequences were programmed using the Roland TR-808 Drum Machine. Each sequence has been analyzed and represented as to allow users to re-programme each sequence, key for key." Gorgeous. (If I had to pick, I'd take Voodoo Ray – which is a lovely piece of drum programming amongst many other things).
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"Unless you design, build, experiment and test in the real world in a tight loop, you can spend a lot of time on the wrong problems" Yep.
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"Seventy fifth birthday looming up and a small self fest to celebrate." All excellent news. Also: 40 years of "20 sites n years"; wonderful.
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Installing Redis on Linode.
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"RequestBin lets you create a URL that will collect requests made to it, then let you inspect them in a human-friendly way. Use RequestBin to see what your HTTP client is sending or to look at webhook requests." Which is very useful.
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"It's sort of a no-brainer. And a fascinating way to think about creating a sustainable source of income to allow, even in part, artists to produce works are genuinely expensive in time and cost to create. It should also prove to artists, and anyone who frets over the illusion of print rights, that they've got nothing to worry about. This stuff is an entirely other material and colour made of light, it turns out, doesn't just magically translate to colour made of pigment the way that, say, a word-processing document does. And if anyone is really going to lose sleep over the people who are already predisposed to print things out on their shitty homes printers my only advice is to give up now. Let them and understand that there are more interesting problems to solve and if projects like 20×200 are any indication there's a whole world of people who want to help with not only their moral support but their wallets." Aaron on the Hockney show, subscription app art, and drawing on iPads.
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"This gem is a C binding to the excellent YAJL JSON parsing and generation library." Ooh, JSON stream-parsing.
Raining on bus (s)tops
05 February 2012
or: “I made some public art”.
It’s been lovely to see Bus Tops finally emerge into the world. If you’re not aware: it’s a series of LED-matrix screens on the top of bus stops around London, displaying a curated programme of art that anyone can submit works to. It’s been beautiful to see it come to life so well: feels like a thing, has its own aesthetic, the public nature of it feels exciting and odd and transgressive.
I decided I ought to start making some things for it. I’m particularly interested in the screens as an animated medium. So far, I’ve submitted two works; one, an original, and the other, very much not, although it’s the kind of thing that needs to be on giant red LED matrixes.
Anyhow.
Ripples has been selected for display, which is quite exciting! It’s a short animation that makes it look a little like it’s raining on top of the bus stop, even when it’s not. It was a nice exercise for me: making something attractive, graphical, in code (which is not my sweet spot of programming).
An hour or so with Processing later and I was getting somewhere, and it didn’t take much longer with the rather lovely gifAnimation library to spit out an animated gif to import into the Bus Tops editor.
The original animation that Ripples is based on can be viewed here. The source code for it is also on that site.
This feels like a good beginning, and I have a few more ideas for abstract moving works that would look good in red, black, and nighttime, from the top of a double-decker.
(And, as reference primarily for myself: the way you fixed “sad about not making things” is by just starting things, ideally small things, and before you know they’re done.)
Update: and here’s what it looks like on top of a bus stop. Static:
and in motion:
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"I went forward with this theme; what if movies we were all familiar with were made a different slice of time? Who would be in it? Who would direct it?" These are marvellous, not just for the art, but for the casting and direction calls. Friedkin's "Terminator"; Peckinpah's "Wolverine"; John Ford's "Drive" starring James Dean. Perfect.
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Interesting list; worth spending some time staring at, for sure.
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"This December, in a surprisingly simple yet ridiculously amazing installation for the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, artist Yayoi Kusama constructed a large domestic environment, painting every wall, chair, table, piano, and household decoration a brilliant white, effectively serving as a giant white canvas. Over the course of two weeks, the museum’s smallest visitors were given thousands upon thousands of colored dot stickers and were invited to collaborate in the transformation of the space, turning the house into a vibrantly mottled explosion of color." Lovely. I really like Kusama.