For now on, instead of relative pathnames to local folders, I want you to use absolute pathnames in your HTML files. Anther thing to note about a lot of free image hosts is that they have a storage limit. I want you to start thinking about how to compress files that you've created in Photoshop or EasyGif Animator. Remember when you post stuff, the end user has to wait for it to load in their browser. All good artists take limitations and make them look like they were on purpose.
Today we stay with photoshop and EasyGif animator. So lets look at what some artists have done with paint programs (On Thursday we start with Flash.)
I realize that my definition the other day really sucked so I looked it up on wikipedia and got this: "Dither is an intentionally applied form of noise, used to randomize quantization error, thereby preventing large-scale patterns such as contouring that are more objectionable than uncorrelated noise."
Is that not perfectly clear?
How about this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floyd-Steinberg_dithering
Does this one help? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_diffusion
My sucky explanation is begining to sound pretty good now. (though I don't really remember what I said)
Open up the file in Photoshop and make two layer copies,
In the lessons folder copy the photoshop file log_3.psd and look at how the layers have been altered. Use your brains and do it to your chosen image
When that's done, copy and open up the ani.psd file
Now select edit in imageReady and prepare to listen to my curses because this is a most awkward tool and you'll find flash a bit easier to animate in, but it also doesn't have the wonderful filter potential that Photoshop has, so you will have to witness my battle with this program, I will fight to the death and take you all with me.
FUCKSOCKS! (that means watch and listen)
The little trick I discovered with the animation window is to select the animation frame first, then look at your layers window. You'll see the visible layers that make up your animation frame, at this point it's safe to turn layers on and off. When you want to make the next frame, select the animation frame first, not a layers frame.
Miklos Legrady informs me that he was working with stereo imagery on-line in 1992 http://cprr.org/Museum/technical.html
He wrote these technical notes to help people freeview 2x stereo images that are shown on the Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum.
He also sent me paper of terrific research that he did on iconoclastic art that included this:
Please tear down this poster as soon as you see it !
2000? - On Stuart Brisley's website you can select one small field of a big picture. The selected field is sent to you by e-mail and it is - permanently - deleted on the original. The accompanying e-mail says:
Hi. - Here's your Image::copy 32x32 artwork that you chose. Keep it safe, it's the only copy that exists, as the spot you chose on the image has now been blacked out. Feel free to come back and get some more free art. http://www.ordure.org/ - Regards, Rosse.
found image with the file name: my-memes-2.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme (HA HA This is a University and I'm not ashamed to use wikipedia HA HA.)
You'll probably recall this post and thread that I showed you in the intro class (there was a waiting list, so I thought I'd try to weed some of you out, but you little pervs stuck around). There's more!
This is all a hilarious riff on a shock site called goatse, some info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goatseand if you absolutely must see the source image , they are stored everywhere now, but here is the site: http://goatse.cz/ (note my warning ...and then the wedding ring). A little side note, according to this blog, it would be prohibited by US law to post the original image. We are not even going to discuss or look at bathtub girl.
-what I like about this is the variety of stuff that people come up with in response to an intentionally provocative and gross image.
- some stuff can collapse with inner-laughter (to paraphrase Joseph Beuys).
- like I've mentioned before, it's not a formula for every provocation you'll see on-line, because sometimes you do stumble onto truly awful soul rotting crap that you can't un-see once you've looked.
- an anatomy of viral imagres and techniques or how these riffs get rolling with anyone welcome on for the ride
Onwards, today we look at cheap tricks and formulas that spread like wildfire, because they are easy and the results appeal to us. And ultimately we'll continue to weasel our way around presets and formats (something we'll look at at a later class are artists who have thought about this in a more formal way, but this is a studio class and we are greedy)
I found this nudie on some guys site, he's defined his whole damn photographic practise with this stuff. This one is called "Moist and Dry" and I think that title could be the most delightful combination of earnest cluelessness and slimy sexual innuendo that you will ever encounter
don't dismiss it, I found this one really compelling.
(remember nothing really ever gets made unless it's desired, you don't have to be secretive about stuff you sort of love) http://www.digitalmediatree.com/sallymckay/?45133
- in a gallery context we had to adopt an ironic posture to a lot of this stuff. It would be ridiculous to expect you to use this stuff on-line without some irony, but avoid a relentlous posture of superiority, it's disingenuous and it'll make your art tedious. It's also a lot more interesting trying to understand why people like the stuff that they do.
- (you can make an argument, as an artist, for anything you choose and need to use.)
So onto some Photoshop. b/t/w you don't need photoshop some artists are doing damn nice stuff with earlier paint programs.
So here's some doileys, grab one:
or you can find or crochet your own (basically some circular detailed form, a photo source will be more interesting for you right now)
Because we are going to get spiritual and make animated mandalas with distortion filters and rotation tools and whatever else we can find as an intro to animating in photoshop and imageReady (I've changed my mind four times about how to teach this in a way that doesn't leave you thinking that the software presets and methods are the only way to make interesting work, so bear with me, I have a plan):
Open up your image in hotoshop, make sure to open your layers
Ctrl R for rulers
Use pull down guides to find the center of the image, then pull down the guides to find the center of the file we'll center stuff for now, but you don't have to since you might like wonky results. Erase the background if you want
copy your layer and select the top layer
Go to the Filters menu > distort > spherize Humour me right now. Move the slider on the spherize dialogue box You have an animation right there and we already have a tool to grab it fast. Anyone?
- I give away an oh so exciting secret right here. (that you should be able to guess anyhow)
otherwise play around with any distortion filter changing subsequent copies of layers either incrementally or exponentially.
explore the Edit menu > Transform tools too.
save for web as a gif, use any compression setting that you want to try
Open your GIF and note the speed, there are limitations to this method, prior to imageready, you'd have to import the file into a gif animator and set frame delays but now we can make stuff in imageReady with a few more tools
Open the single image Photoshop again save a new file with only one layer, (your starting layer from the old animation)
Open animation window
- tweening instruction, for spatial changes and image changes
To save that animation, you can export the animation frames as files, unoptomized and assemble them in our easyGIF animator OR you can save as optimized OR if your layers match the animation frames you can select edit in photoshop and save for web to save as a GIF (I had problems with that last option)
Note that when you go back to photoshop only the Pshop layers that you created appear.
so try saving an animation all those ways and compare the results
There's a lot more complexity in this software than we are touching upon today. We'll do several other classes in this and try to fill in the gaps - L.M. 9-25-2008 4:12 pm [link]
addendum to class 6
First of all, in the addendum to class 5, when I had used the marquee tag on a Chris Ashley HTML drawing (because I think its totally hilarious to do that to his work), the tag wouldn't close because of some CSS script I had left in there, so the upshot was that all the posts on the page below it were marqueed as well, but only in firefox, and I work in IE at home because of clients. Anyway I was very touched that two of you actually apologized for not being able to read the lessons. And so, I forgive you all for not being able to read rapidly moving marqueed text.
Next thing, I was in awe of the fact that you all worked for over two hours straight doing this exercise the hard way. I was also in awe of the fact that instead of trying to get away with the bare minimum, many of you went absolutely mental with the uneven grids, and over 300 cells. I approve of mental.
Neil came the closest to figuring out an easier way to do this when he tried to search the text in the ordinary text editor. Though it didn't quite work, I gave it some thought later, and what might work is this (and some of you had tried it and almost got your results faster):
When saving for web, save all the cells as HTML and images.
If you have changed the compression options for individual cells, for that mix and matched look, make sure to select custom settings and for the slices option, all slices, photoshop will actually remember those different compression settings for each cell.
Some of you already know that what it produced was a table in HTML, and we didn't want that, but we do now.
Go to view > source in the firefox browser menu. Save the file as a .txt
mock up of proposal for a Turner Prize entry from b3ta
If you look in the lessons folder on the server, you should see all the installers for the softwares we have downloaded up to now. These machines are wiped clean on restart so everytime you install one, it is like the first day of an evaluation period. Today we'll need alleycode installed, so do that now if I'm still loading images onto your systems. if you brought a firewire for your video cell phone, try downloading some images right now. If it's a wireless, you can get Paul to help you. (security issues)
We are going to do the instructable first today, since I don't know how long this will take you.
Photoshop/HTML showdogs:
- due to licensing costs they still have CS2 loaded on the student machines. (they might eventually just skip CS3 and wait for CS4) This doesn't matter one bit. I started you on simpler imaging tools for a reason. Software always changes, you'll never be totally up to date, but you can hone your problem solving skills and that makes it easier to update tools later
-this software was a prerequisite for this class, but in reality everyone uses a dense program in their own way. So don't worry about your skill level right now. If you like using a program, you'll get more comfortable eventually. Plus you can achieve the same results many different ways with the available tools.
- worked with a musician once who never used the contrast slider, he preferred the tools for levels because he understood them. This did not stop me from making fun of him.
- so anyway, forgive me if you know all this already, but I have to do it with you
1) open up the image of yourself in Photoshop.
2) go to view in the upper menus and change your screenmode to standard screenmode, then go to window and de-select all the windows except for layers, Navigator, options and tools. (keep your image up there too) click 'm" on your keyboard, and you won't accidentally crop or erase something right now. (while your at it click v, l, w,c, k, j, b, s, y, e, g, r, o, a, t, p, u, n, i, h, and z and look at the floating vertical tool bar) Click m again.
3) select the one layer that's named background and make a copy of it in your layers panel. Name it work
4) now save the file and it will save as a .psd.
5) just for clarity in this semi-militaristic exercise, I'll ask you to crop the image so that you don't have a huge ground behind your portrait. For images that came out of the video camera, you'll notice that there might be some interlacing lines, if you don't like them go to filter, select video and deinterlace to get rid of those lines, play with the options to see how your picture might change. you don't have to deinterlace at all, it's an aesthetic decision that you get to make. (more info in deinterlacing here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinterlacing)
6) hit b for brush, double click the foreground colour icon on the tool bar (black and white squares) and select a very sexy colour. ('cause you're worth it) Paint out your background. The results may be more interesting if we don't colour out the back ground, but you can always go back again later and play with that option. For the moment humour me. (but feel free to play with any of your brush options right now) b/t/w doesn't that navigator window suck? I can show you an easier way to magnify right now.
7) Now the picky part, and we can do it a few ways:
-Press control R to see the rulers.
-Click on the top ruler or the left ruler and drag a guides out, create a grid of guides.
-OR Choose View > New Guide. In the dialog box, select Horizontal or Vertical orientation, enter a position, and click OK. (i just copied that from the help files, this shit takes too long to write myself)
-Another way is to deselect the eyeball icons on the layers box and you should have a ready made grid background. If not go to the edit menu, then preferences, then transparency and gamut and change the size of the grid ground and eyeball the guide placement from there.
- make your grid (minimum 100 cells, those of you who are really comfortable can make a grid with 200 cells) out of guide lines, then lock the guides.(under view menu) SAVE
8) NOW Select the Slice tool,(k) and click Slices From Guides in the options bar that appears for the tool. Lock your slices. SAVE
9) (copied and edited from help files) You can view slices in Photoshop, the Photoshop Save For Web dialog box, and ImageReady.(we will ignore ImageReady today)
The following characteristics can help you identify and differentiate between slices:
-Slice lines Define the boundary of the slice. Solid lines indicate that the slice is a user slice or layer-based slice; dotted lines indicate that the slice is an auto slice.
-Slice colors Differentiate user slices and layer-based slices from auto slices. By default, user slices and layer-based slices have blue symbols, and auto slices have gray symbols. (ignore for our purposes)
-In addition, ImageReady and the Photoshop Save For Web dialog box use color adjustments to dim unselected slices. These adjustments are for display purposes only and do not affect the color of the final image. By default, the color adjustment for auto slices is twice the amount of that for user slices.(really really ignore for today)
-Slice numbers Slices are numbered from left to right and top to bottom, beginning in the upper left corner of the image. If you change the arrangement or total number of slices, slice numbers are updated to reflect the new order.(nope, we won't do that today)
-Slice badges The Web Content palette uses a number of badges, or icons, to indicate certain conditions, and these icons also appear in the document itself. (check out the help files for the icon list)
10) Slices are a pretty powerful feature and they allow us to save the individual slices and will also create a table in HTML for them (we don't care about that feature today, because we do not want a table)
11) Now we can select our slices and save them as over 100 individual GIFS:
Do the last thing of the following: (again this comes from the photoshop help files, so I wanted you to see the options that we aren't using)
-Select the Slice Select tool and click the slice in the image. When working with overlapping slices, click the visible section of an underlying slice to select it.
-Select the Slice Select tool, and Shift-click to add slices to the selection.
-Select the Slice Select tool, and click in an auto slice or outside the image area, and drag across the slices you want to select. (Clicking in a user slice and dragging moves the slice.)
- Choose File > Save For Web. In the dialog box, use the Slice tool to select a slice.
12) This is where it gets fun, because you get to choose from a lot compression options that will effect the final product.
-check out all the presets for gif files. You have options to compress the number of colours, and change the dithering.
You can use the slice tool in this window to select all the gifs and apply the same presets to them, when you save, the program will generate the gif filenames with the grid numbers.
-the more fun thing to do is to select different clusters and apply different compression and dithering presets to them. When you save, just save the selected. Unfortunately the program will take you out of the web save screen, so for multiple and varying grid selections, you have to go back from the file menu.
Do it.
When everyone's ready we'll go to these next steps
13) Take your folder full of images to the deskstop just so we don't have to deal with dozens of pathnames.
14) Open up alleycode and a new HTML file. (delete the preset scripts that it opens with, we don't need them right now)
15)save the new file to your desktop, and not in your images folder, remember all the pathname stuff I taught you.
16) use the image tag and fill in your pathname info like I did for my local version <img src="/myimages/bats_01.gif">
17) now copy and paste that script several times on the same line change the numbers on the file names that photoshop generated for you:
<img src="/myimages/bats_01.gif"><img src="/myimages/bats_02.gif"><img src="/myimages/bats_03.gif"><img src="/myimages/bats_04.gif">> (and so on)
See what is starting to happen? Without the <br> we don't have a line break only a wrap (same as a word wrap in a text program) Make sure that there are no spaces between the image tags too
18) open the completed file in your browser, play with the window size and congrats, we just de-mystified another tech trick from a smart artist. http://oliverlaric.com/b.htm (if you screwed up, it might be interesting, so save that alleycode file and copy the scripts to a new file and check for line breaks and spaces between tags.) (note that Laric might have divided up his initial image pixel by pixel, or else pixelated the image before he gridded it to give that appearance, figure it out for yourselves. Doesn't matter. What a freak.)
You might even hate him now after we just picked his work apart with all this tedious procedure, that's what Universities do best and I'm happy to help.
But I doubt you've damaged the medium or my own admiration for his practise in any way, because good artists have been leaping through all these tricks using them when needed, exploiting their screw-ups, looking at each other's source codes
During the work period try it again with an irregular grid, smaller or larger cells, play with compression and dithering, spaces between the tags in your HTML, try different sorts of images, you might bring something new to what everyone else might think of as 'the last word.'
Please put a copy of today's exercise in your folder on the server
b/t/w: http://www.artfagcity.com/2008/09/22/the-five-principles-of-new-media/#comments, fun post and exchange here. Seems like at least one commenter would not agree with me and many others about compression, artifacts and energetic opportunism. And to that, sometimes, the only appropriate response is: I hate the way you make art too.
Part 2 just links, I'll flesh some of this stuff out later when I clean up these pages.
some more about collections:
- many collections can elevate items that might be weak on their own.
- apply this to http://www.vvork.com/ and you begin to see the problems that some people have with their project.
- on the upside, collections of great work magnify each other's qualities.
I find everyone's work to be more alive in the surf club, probably because even though a surf club is still a controlled context, it seems truer to the web than most pristinely designed individual artists' sites. I also noticed that surf clubs don't function that differently than the traditional artists' exhibiting collectives that we like so much here. Unmoderated by curators, and a variety of other gatekeepers and the artists end up driving it themselves, to mixed results, but when it's good, it's very good.
Marisa Olson's recent essay on surf clubs & found photography: http://www.wordswithoutpictures.org/main.html?id=276 (more on her work for another class) You'll already be familiar with some of her links, and this essay is a very good read.
-I have often pondered the question of how lost does something have to be before it's found
Now for your sexy surf club:
Joe McKay cooked up the official masthead GIF. But he lost it when he emailed it to me but then I found it in an email, so now I'm claiming at least 50% authorship
- I'll mail you the final URL this week, the page will be public, but we won't post the URL anywhere right now, so that you can get comfortable.
- Login required to post, not to view (set up a google account if you haven' already. Pick a screen name for your account, because it will be public.)
- no censorship, unless something gets libelous and legally actionable, any other problem posts will be converted with http://lolinator.com:80/ Because kitteh speak always takes the sting out of death threats.
- this is actually a slightly unfair set-up for you, you should be able to choose your own collaborators just like the big smart kids in NYC. With 70 posters this is going to look more like an image board than a surf club, but Joe likes the "we are making art" stance that a surf club gives, so what the hell
- might add a lolinator flag so that you get to decide what posts will be converted to kitteh. (No we won't because you'll be converting all of them, what were we even thinking)
- you need to get an image host, since the University's servers aren't set up for barbarians like you.
- Laura Britt Greig is putting the finishing touches to the software.
- if we have any issues with uninvited posting, Laura can set up password protection, but we'll avoid it for now.
- if you are successful at the end of this experiment no one will want to be in a surf club ever again. Surf clubs will be so over. You have the chance to spoil it for everyone on the web.
"[...] subject-based content is distinct from artistic subjectivity. The Bechers don't own "water towers" any more than Jeff Wall owns "light boxes." Subject without subjectivity is meaningless on its own. Take the recent chess works; chess is a subject -- shared template -- that many different subjectivities are worked out in relation to. But many of those subjectivities begin from aesthetic positions that don't bear any relationship to each other, outside of the nominally similar forms. Curators who organize shows about subjects (hot rod art, garden art, red art) instead of subjectivities are mailin' it in."
OK, now carry on with the important work of putting a marquee tag around everything we see.
07th Aug 2008
Sirmione
Sirmione (Lago di Garda), 20080807, HTML, 350 x 390 pixels
Class #5 when we will finally destroy art once and for all.
After blithering on last class about how these seemingly cacophonous artists sites are really sophisticated design products. Not designed in the commercial sense, but designed in the sense that images are placed with intention, I have to swallow my words because of the best art site in universe: http://yvettesbridalformal.com/index.htm (via artfagcity) especially since it's not an art site, it really is a bridal wear site. Perhaps proving that everyone can make something that looks like art at least once. Perhaps also showing how close web-based art can ride with everything else on-line.
- This institution has tech and IT staff protecting their systems, but you don't. We will discuss how to protect your own systems from a web-based part practise.
- don't download exe files you don't understand, Google to find out exactly what something is from one of hundreds of tech communities who see this sort of crap and warn each other about it all the time.
When the site is ready for The Royal Society of Intertubes, our Surf club that we are doing with Joe McKay's class in California, you will have to log in with your email address, get yourself a yahoo, gmail or hotmail account specifically for that (and for spam whenever you give it away for anything on-line).
And while we are at Spirit Surfers, check out this marquee animation, http://www.spiritsurfers.net/monastery/?p=427. they don't have to run at the speed of light to be interesting. The attributes for setting the speed are here: http://www.html-reference.com/MARQUEE.htm. I remind you of this since it appears that you will use that damn tag for everything until the day you die.
We are going to play with a screen capture tool today.
Now lets rip some youtubes, and later produce some of our own video clips.
What you have now is an FLV file, without an flv player you can't view it, and you probably won't be able to edit it in any of the video editors on your machine. So now go to http://www.ripzor.com/flvconverter.html to download an FLV converter. We want to change this youtube flash video to an .avi file that we can dick around with. If the original downloaded file does not have an extension .flv, add it.
Open the converter software, and select your file and select .avi in output options. Save the new file to your desktop. Now you should have an avi that you can open and edit in windows video editor or any editing software. I hope that you're happy now. we can easily make some GIFS from this by selecting frames saving them as bitmaps, converting the bitmaps to gif in an image editing software and importing them to a GIF editor or else Photoshop, but I don't want to start on an intense animation with Photoshop class until lesson 6. (when you'll also try to make digital pogs: http://mikesdigitalpogpage.com/)
Now for a screen capture utility, we're going to try out Camtasia. Also today, pass my video camera around, those with cell phones can try to download their videos or images with a firewire connection. Lots of problem solving for all of us.
I also figured out the clever way Oliver did these moving pixel portraits: http://oliverlaric.com/pixel/christophpriglinger.htm. He gridded off the original image and created a small GIF of each grid square, reassembled them in one long line of 'img src' tags and excluded any line breaks. Simple and brilliant. Once we start the photoshop instructionals you can make some of each other, and we'll see if I'm right . We're in a tiny perfect open-source universe here.
We will still discuss Olia Lialina's site at another time, so I won't include the link since we were just looking at her opening page.
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.
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.
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
"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:
This isn't a correspondence course, stay for the whole class unless I let you go early.
Put your name on top of your html pages with this line below it, the tape thing didn't work for me last class:
The code looks like this: <HR NOSHADE WIDTH="100%">
Play with its attributes, don't see any? Try some out from other tags. I will explain right now the difference between relative and absolute values.
-a few interesting things from last class, fuck ups as opportunities. All the experiments later I tried didn't work. (I wanted to make HTML plaid, maybe I can do it with CSS)
-pushing the medium to do surprising things
-learning to use these tricks in a way that has some organic relationship to the images
a lovely restrained use of gifs: http://www.petracortright.com/
These next two links courtesy of Chris Ashley:
http://www.advancedpoetx.com/ (Siegfried Holzbauer is an Austrian visual artist often using language as a way to generate blocky HTML images- working in the Concrete Poetry vein.)
http://www.donrelyea.com/algorithmic_art.htm (Don Relyea is an artist and musician who is a real life accomplished programmer and writes his own software to create digital images from scratch or from other sources, like photos. He makes a lot of work. A couple of years ago he wrote The Reductionizer, which converts jpegs into html tables http://www.donrelyea.com/reductionizer_project.htm he says he got the idea of this by seeing some of Chris Ashley's tables that have a background image)
So we need an HTML primer here since using Dreamweaver teaches us nothing.
(For the students who know HTML: http://looksee.chrisashley.net/archives/603 Download the source and create an HTML file on your desktop, isolate the actual image and start playing with the values.)
For the rest of you:
1. Open a new plain text document
Mac users: open Text Edit, hit Command-Shift-T (or Format -> Make Plain Text)
PC users: open Notepad
2. Write the following code in the document:
<html>
<head> <title> hello, world! </title> </head>
<body>
Hello, World!
</body>
</html>
3. Save the document as index.html on your Desktop
4. In your favorite web browser, go to File -> Open File and open index.html
Check out these tags for manipulationg text:
<b>hi</b> hi
<i>hi</i> < hi
What are all these < and > things doing here? When you place a certain thing within these you are making something known as a tag. For example the <b> tag is saying to start bold text, and the </b> tag is saying to stop bold text. The tag with the slash (/) is known as the closing tag. Many opening tags require a following closing tag, but not all do. Tags make up the entire structure of an HTML document.
A more advanced tag for maipulating text:
Right click the image you want and save it to that folder.
to load your image onto your page, you use the 'img src' tag:
<img src="library/confidence.jpg"> (you don't need to close an image tag)
The "/" you see in web addresses represent folders, so if you have a jpg image called "luisvuiton.jpg" in a folder called "library" (which is a good practice..), that's why the tag reads: <img src="library/luisvuiton.jpg">
This file is stored 'locally'. "library/luisvuiton.jpg" is the pathname to the file.
On a web page, the image resides on a server so you would write the pathname so that the browser can find the image and load it. It's a 'remote' file.
As well, since 1994, I have been a professional childrens' game and software programmer, working on games initially for delivery on CD-ROM, back when CD's were going to replace all the books on earth, and currently working on games for web delivery.
I'd like to make the point that in 1993 when, well into my adulthood, I first learned to turn on a computer I felt as though I was horribly late getting to a great party. You will feel like that as well, don't worry. If someone else tries to make you feel like that, tell them to piss off. (this is important technical advice)
Dragan Espenschied quote:
From: Gravity
"The pressure to be up to date with technology appears insane to me. It doesn't bring any more beauty or pleasure. Instead it creates things that are hard to understand
and impossible to handle. So nobody can actually experience them beyond reading the artist's concept."
(quite rich considering that it comes from Rhizome) ([eta] I'm mocking Rhizome, not Dragan Espenschied)
“"Artists, too, have to compete with real world content far more captivating than anything they could come up with, which the Internet effectively gathers all in one place
(sneezing Pandas, etc). Two possible responses are (1) to continually rise above it through aesthetic and conceptual framing and posturing or (2) to disappear into it and
trust the viewer to ultimately sort out what's going on. The Web is a consumer's medium, not a producer's, so the artist is inexorably led to consumption as a "practice."
The degree of criticality can only be inferred, not implied."
Before we codify it any further-
- almost anyone can make one good piece that will pass as art,
- humbling to see what is being done by people who don’t position themselves as artists
Intro to what non-artists are doing first of all on image boards department:
- an initialism for "You're The Man Now, Dog", is an online community centered on the creation of hosted web pages (known within the community as YTMNDs
or sites)
Aleksandra Domanovic ( Kieslowski (tracking colors) from Blue White and red)
Three Colours (Polish: Trzy kolory) is the collective title of three films directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski, two made in French and one primarily in Polish: Trois couleurs:
Bleu (Three Colours: Blue) (1993), Trzy kolory: Biały (Three Colours: White) (in French: Blanc) (1994), and Trois couleurs: Rouge (Three Colours: Red) (1994).
http://aleksandradomanovic.com/Kieslowski.html
Collection assignment minimum 25, max 50.
Lists of things that are invested with meaning. Must be compelling for you or it won’t be for me.
Low brow or high brow as you want . No kitteh with earphones. I'm tired of them.
Self curating assignment a group show of jpegs where you have positioned your own work inside. (4 or more artists, can be contemporary or historical)
All assignments will be viewable on a web browser
Over all, we will be looking at a lot of dynamic artists' sites, interspersed with a few technical instructables
contingent upon your current skills. There will be very little writing required. You don't want to write it and I sure don't want to read it.
Marks will be based on a system similar to Olympic Ice-dance judging.
