Robot self-portrait #1 (Tallahassee)
Year: 2011
Freedom for Our Files: Canvas starter (Facebook) app
I’m happy to share the code from a Facebook app I created for a workshop earlier this year.
This simple Facebook canvas application was originally demoed during the Freedom for Our Files workshop at the 2011 Art Meets Radical Openness festival in Linz, Austria. You can view and download the source code on github
The application is very simple; it creates a Facebook object, performs calls to get data belonging to the current user, then prints the data exactly as it is returned. It has examples of basic Facebook Graph API calls as well as an example of FQL (Facebook Query Language).
Stop SOPA Blackout
You might notice my site and blog looks a little, well, opaque this week. Here’s a screenshot.
I’m running a script on my site that censors all the content in order to bring attention to a law being pushed through congress right now. The SOPA (“Stop Online Piracy Act”) is a terrible piece of legislation that gives broad powers for the courts to take down sites by claims from “infringed” users. If SOPA passes as-is, it could devastate the artistic expression and livelihood of many artists, hackers, and entrepreneurs.
More information at fightforthefuture.org
You can protest the SOPA bill and install the blackout code on your site to let your visitors know what they could miss out if SOPA does pass.
Paste this code into your Tumblr themes, website, and more…
<script type="text/javascript">
var FATLAB_Stop_SOPA = {
color : '#000000',
promote : true
};
document.write('<scr'+'ipt src="http://fffff.at/stop_sopa/blackout.js?v=1&e83a2c"></scr'+'ipt>');
</script>
New line plotter prints of I Am Unable to Fulfill Your Wish
Here are some images Ryan Boatright of Atelier Boba made while he was printing one of my network visualizations from the I Am Unable to Fulfill Your Wish series on their new line plotter. The prints arrived last week from their location in Paris and are great to see in person. The line plotter repeated so many of the lines it actually polished the surface of the paper causing the print to reflect light.
Give Me My Data! FSU Digital Scholars group
I am speaking about Give Me My Data at Florida State University’s Digital Scholars group, which is coordinated by Paul Fyfe, Assistant Professor of English, History of Text Technologies hott.fsu.edu
Give Me My Data!
Thursday, December 1, 1:00-2:00 pm
Williams Building 013 (bottom floor), aka the English Common Room
*please note different location*Please join us for a presentation by Owen Mundy: artist, software designer, and scholar of surveillance cultures from the Stasi to contemporary social networking platforms. Professor Mundy will quickly tour us through his recent research and related project “Give Me My Data,” an application “that helps users export their data out of Facebook for reuse in visualizations, archives, or any possible method of digital storytelling” (http://givememydata.com/). Join us for a stimulating presentation and discussion to follow!
“The Influence of Non-places in the Concept of Latin America” by Eduardo Navas
Curator and theorist, Eduardo Navas, has published an essay he wrote to accompany the Transitio_MX 2009 exhibition which included Anemophilous Formula for Computer Art by Joelle Dietrick and myself. The essay, “La Influencia de los No-Lugares en el concepto de America Latina.” (English “The Influence of Non-places in the Concept of Latin America”), was published in Spanish in Errata #3, Cultura digital y creación Dec 2010.
Here’s an excerpt of the essay in English. You can read more about (in English) on Eduardo’s blog or the full text is available in Spanish here.
Airplane travel and airports, which have been a key reference in the theory of non-places by both Augé and Ibelings finds direct commentary in Anemophilous Formula for Computer Art. This time-based work consists of a photograph of the Tallahassee Airport Check-in area, which hosts a wall sized reproduction of McClay Gardens Park. In front of the wallpaper image we find: on the left hand side a plant in a pot and on the right a portable fan, next to three airportline-dividing-poles which are connected with a dividing strip, and a dolly cart at the far end. The photograph of the actual lobby is projected on the wall along with a series of numbers, located at the bottom of the screen’s frame, complemented with an algorithmic simulation of Tree Pollen falling surrealistically, while a sound track of birds plays in a loop. In essence the airport check in lounge is turned into a staged moment where the reproduction of a natural environment is treated as a mere decoration.
Anemophilous Formula for Computer Art (2007) by Owen Mundy and Joelle Dietrick
In Anemophilous Formula for Computer Art the airport as a non-place is taken apart. The image is not only commenting on how parks are careful orchestrations of nature to fit human ideals, but also exposes how this aesthetic has entered the airport, a space of transition, in order to make people feel comfortable upon their arrival or departure. If one tries to believe that what one is looking at is real nature, or even a meta recording of nature, one only needs to notice that the pollen is falling just a bit too perfectly, executing an algorithm meant to appear naturally, magically. This orderliness, this pristine aesthetic, as in the other four selections has a direct link to the control that is inherent in supermodernism: “This boundless space is no dangerous wilderness or frightening emptiness, but rather a controlled vacuum, for if there is one thing that characterizes this age it is total control. The undefined space is not an emptiness but a safe container, a flexible shell.” Anemophilous Formula for Computer Art exposes the type of activity that more privileged migrants perform—those unlikely to work in maquiladoras or any other blue-collar job. Therefore, the wall projection is a commentary on the growing supermodern aesthetic of glocalization, and thus a critical commentary on a specific activity that is ingrained as much in Latin America as well as other regions. Viewers can project themselves into the computerized image, and feel comfortable in the virtual airport lobby; whether the viewer may potentially be in Japan or Mexico is irrelevant because the language of non-places has transcended space in this sense. And therefore makes the conceptualization of a constant migration an issue of class rather than identity.
—Eduardo Navas
A Single Composite [vert]
Finally finding time to edit documentation from A Single Composite exhibition this summer in Berlin.
A Single Composite is a series of kinetic installations and projection apparatuses that stretch, twist, and loop film strips containing declassified and other found reconnaissance footage. Using reconstituted digital printer chassis, this cinematic enterprise is projected on walls, ceilings, and floors, to form a series of individual moments of surveillance and implied violence.
Drain Magazine – Power issue and new site
I am happy to announce the launch of the new website for Drain: Journal of Contemporary Art and Culture and the corresponding release of issue #11 POWER, which I co-organized with Avantika Bawa.
POWER, issue #11
This issue of Drain attempts to expose the cultural faciality of power, as well as manifestations of power as simulacra which obfuscate traditional inquiries into its construction. If power connects the virtual and the actual, how does cultural creativity channel or destabilize this connectivity? The corporate-academic-entertainment-military-industrial complex and its front-end, the global information machine floods us with images and images of images, to cause sensory overload, and yet, at the same time, acute sensory deprivation. Most of all, power entrenches a visual literacy that allows us to see only its style, leaving us unable to access other ways of seeing and becoming. How can we parody this visual literacy, and the speed, cadence and grammar of this power and its affects?
If the simulation of power is necessary and absolute, can creative acts and molecular politics slip through the surveillance and desensitizing of territorializing systems?
This issue of Drain presents artworks, essays, and other creative works to actualize answers to these questions and re-channel them into different connectivities, ways of becoming and conceptual production.
The Gift of Giving by Oscar Perez
We are pleased to present Ian Buchanan and Roi Kuper as our feature writer and featured artist. This issue also includes essays by Emma Cocker and Chris Revelle, as well as interviews by Alexander Stewart with artist Andy Roache and Bertha Husband with Blazo Kovacevic. In our Creative Writing section, we present works by Camille Meyer, BT Shaw & Elizabeth Lopeman, Vanessa Norton, Emma Cocker and Morgan Campbell. Art projects works by Jamie Badoud, Diana Heise, Cyrico Lopes, Bob Paris and Oscar Perez.
Processing.js – Missing Documentation
The Processing.js project is really cool. It allows you to run Processing .pde files inside (HTML5 compatible) web browsers using Javascript. You can pass data back and forth between the two programs, access the DOM with Processing, and you don’t need any plugins or Java.
Click here to run this Processing sketch in your browser
One caveat… When importing a Processing .pde file into the HTML5 canvas you must access the files on a web server or by using localhost (a server running on your computer, e.g. MAMP) because most (all modern?) web browsers don’t allow file:/// access for security reasons. Unfortunately this is not intuitive as Javascript should run in the browser regardless of file:/// access. Nor is it mentioned in any of the Processing.js Quick Start documentation. I found it by testing, and then confirmed it in their README. Darn, need to remember to read (all of) the instructions.
UPDATE: A friend pointed out that the problem accessing the .pde file could be due to the same origin policy. Though not explicitly stated on the Github page for Processing.js, they do mention that disabling same origin setting in your browser is a(n undesirable) workaround.
Some web browsers (e.g., Chrome) require secondary files to be loaded from a web server for security reasons. This means loading a web page that references a Processing.js sketch in a file via a file:/// URL vs. http:// will fail. You are particularly likely to run into this problem when you try to view your webpage directly from file, as this makes all relatively links file:/// links.
Camp La Jolla Military Park: Creative Disturbance Through Adaption of National Park Iconography
I recently published an essay, “Camp La Jolla Military Park: Creative Disturbance Through Adaption of National Park Iconography,” in the Parsons Journal for Information Mapping (PJIM) documenting my thesis work at the University of California, San Diego. Here is the abstract for the essay:
This paper details the motivation and the method behind the creation of Camp La Jolla Military Park, a fictional national park on the current site of the University of California’s San Diego campus. Camp La Jolla Military Park borrows the iconography and language from historical battlefields as designated and protected by the U.S. Congress; the use of such iconography and language allows for the investigation, as well as consideration of the campus as a site for research and development of weapons and technology for the defense industry. The website http://camplajolla.org/ is the publicly accessible collective of the research and expression behind Camp La Jolla Military Park.
The project began by developing a data-collection system in order to record the historical, geographic, and economic ties that bind the relationships of power within the complex of military, industrial, and academic institutions in Southern California. Through appropriating the vernacular language and imagery of the National Park System the research was made public and accessible to audiences both within and outside of the protected spaces of art and academia. This writing introduces the concepts and processes of the project in order to encourage the restaging of other similar creative disturbances.
You must be logged in to post a comment.