...more recent posts
Class #4
A few loose ends I should tie up from last class since we got sidetracked with youTube hacking.
First of all, I meant to show you some of links to work that show some different collection strategies (some more successful than others):
http://doublehappiness.ilikenicethings.com/?p=173
http://doublehappiness.ilikenicethings.com/?p=504#comments
http://doublehappiness.ilikenicethings.com/?p=911
http://doublehappiness.ilikenicethings.com/?p=1307#comments
http://www.sweetgifs.com/?pg=1
http://nastynets.com/?p=470
http://nastynets.com/?p=566#comments
http://doublehappiness.ilikenicethings.com/?p=53
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/?31122(space bloom)
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/sallymckay/ovvlvverk/pageback/42653/
I'm raising the bar ever so slightly as each class goes on.
I'll repeat that the collection assignment will be one of two final assignments.
minimum 25, max 50.
Lists of things that are invested with meaning or interest for you. Must be compelling for you or it won’t be for me.
You can go as low brow or high brow as you want . (No kitteh animations with earphones. That's the only rule. All other kittehs are acceptable.) You will have to find an interesting way to place this collection on an html page, a way that is somehow works with what you're showing us.
Another search method for your collection assignment:
Go to an on-line language translator, http://babelfish.yahoo.com/translate_txt, get translations for your keyword in several languages and try all of those languages with a Google image search. http://images.google.ca/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi the results will always be different. Try other search engines, for example http://www.dogpile.com/ is an aggregate of a bunch of diferent search engines. Every engine has its own search algorithm that is going to yield different results.
Last class I meant to talk more about tables. you've probably discovered them already on that three schools tutorial page: http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_examples.asp. They are totally counter intuitive, a major pain and one of the main reasons why Dreamweaver exists. However, Dreamweaver doesn't give us enough control as artists, that's why we've been hand-scripting stuff in this class
One row and three columns:
<table border="1">
<tr>
<td>100</td>
<td>200</td>
<td>300</td>
</tr>
</table>
| 100 | 200 | 300 |
so here's an example of an artist clearly using tables (yes back to Chris Ashley because he always surprises me with something wonderful) http://looksee.chrisashley.net/archives/756
If we strip the images we have this underlying structure (I added a border and left spaces between the coloured cells into show it better, but it only seems to work in IE):
As I mentioned in a previous class, go to the three schools link, find the tables tutorials and insert your own images in, you'll start to get an intuitive understanding of how you can make them work for you.
Now we can look at a seemingly more cacophonous page: http://jpegmess.org/1.html. by an artist from Chicago named Robert Wodzinski. Mess is deceptive, this is very sophisticated work, and for those who love "more is more" there's a lot you can learn from looking at what he's doing. Remember we are talking about 2D pictorial space, you learned about composition in your foundation year.
I'd make the same point about the surf club double happiness that many of you have already seen in other sample links: http://doublehappiness.ilikenicethings.com/
These artists are all well aware of how they're placing their posts within the framing device that they all agreed on. They're currently in a show at vertexList http://www.vertexlist.net/ in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Tom moody posted some images from the installation: http://www.tommoody.us/archives/2008/09/13/double-happiness-at-vertexlist/
I partially agree with Tom's assertion:"Taste and restraint are concepts they have no use for, making them the most lifelike of the surf clubs."
But I think they show an incredible amount of taste in their choices for the installation. (They aren't throwing shit in a pile)
It also reminds me of fastwürms' Donkey@Ninja@Witch that some of you may have seen last year at the AGYU.
Now lets get to the insanely fun stuff. GIFs: Graphics Interchange Format you can read about the technical history here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF
from Moody's post at artfagcity (http://www.artfagcity.com/) - http://www.artfagcity.com/2008/08/05/img-mgmt-psychotronic-gifs/#comments
"Animated GIFs have evolved over the last several years into a kind of ubiquitous “mini-cinema,” entirely native to the personal computer and the World Wide Web. Almost anyone can make one and almost every browser will read them. (From Wikipedia: “the Graphics Interchange Format is an 8-bit-per-pixel bitmap image format that was introduced by CompuServe in 1987 and has since come into widespread usage on the World Wide Web due to its wide support and portability.”)
In other words, no YouTube compression, no wait time, no subscriptions or proprietary formats to view, and they can be made in the most elementary and cheap imaging programs (free if you search for open source). GIFs are the purest expression of the democratic web and along with JPEGs and PNGs comprise its most authentic visual language.
As an artist I am attracted to this medium and have been making and posting GIFs for several years. This mini-cinema can be “scaled up” for galleries and film festivals but it’s equally fun to surrender it to the big pool of home-made creations that circulates on the Web. It’s gratifying to find GIFs you made yourself circulating on the pages of strangers months or years later. I don’t consider this “mail art”–it is too chaotic and lacks that practice’s genre rules. At the same time I do consider it a legit and underexamined form of post-studio art."
This is the gif I first saw On Tom Moody's blog that indicated to me that there was some wonderful stuff going on created by people were weren't neccessarily thinking of themselves as artists.
(this one's pretty great too. Can't remember where I found it)
Her too.
Below are animations by Sally McKay that got me excited about making them myself:
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We made so much fun of this one: http://www.digitalmediatree.com/sallymckay/comment/37805/
For more graphic based animations, Tom Moody's archive is a good reference for you: http://www.tommoody.us/archives/category/animation-others/
Today we are going to download a simple gif animator program (If Paul wasn't able to get to it): http://www.blumentals.net/download/
then right click this wankerman animation and save it to your hard drive:
Simple is deceptive there is a lot you can do with this program.
animation by Petra Cortright
(can't remember where I got these, so I don't have an artists' credit)
