By
Ceci Moss on
Wednesday, September 1st, 2010 at
10:00 am
16777216 is a new online work by Richard S. Mitchell, a San Francisco-based artist with a background in video. 16777216 is viewable through the Jancar Jones Gallery's website from August 28th until September 4th, click here to see it. The work consists of over 16.7 million frames, each a color in the RGB color model, displayed at 25 frames per a second. Colors are displayed when the web browser synchronizes with the server, where the colors slowly move from black towards white.
Your project 16777216 launches on the Jancar Jones Gallery's website this week - can you talk a little more about this project - what are you trying to achieve with this work?
I've been interested in using the Web as a medium for art for a long time. By medium I mean the place, center, and means of production, and not simply as a way to distribute work produced elsewhere. One early idea was a dynamic HTML spinning beach ball, using the inherent capabilities of a Web browser to display color and change its display over time, even without interaction from a user. I didn’t follow through on the beachball because I felt it was too much a one-liner, not multi-dimensional.
Issues surrounding sequencing, series, and serialization have been a major point in my video work for several years now: including numbers, text, and colors (from color sample sheets, etc.). Obviously, the RGB system is a numbered sequence of colors with many possible routes through it depending on how you map the total number of colors, a 24-bit number, to each of the 8-bit channels, which are semi-independent.
My goal with 16777216 is, on the one hand, to make tangible certain aspects of the computer’s representation of reality and, on the other, to produce a work pleasing to look at and contemplate.
By
Ceci Moss on
Monday, August 9th, 2010 at
12:00 pm
Kunst Bauen is an interactive artwork inspired by 80s video games and the Bauhaus. It lets you conjure pulsating, futuristic patterns with just your fingertips. You can stroke the screen to create smooth, swirling shapes, or tap it to make geometric patterns.
[Note: For more artworks on this platform, be sure to check Jonah Brucker-Cohen's series on iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad art "Art In Your Pocket" on Rhizome, the first installment can be found here and the second here.]
By
Jacob Gaboury on
Friday, July 23rd, 2010 at
10:00 am
[Clockwise: Virutmytob, Stormy, IRCbot, and MyDoom]
Malwarez is a series of visualization of worms, viruses, trojans and spyware code. For each piece of disassembled code, API calls, memory addresses and subroutines are tracked and analyzed. Their frequency, density and grouping are mapped to the inputs of an algorithm that grows a virtual 3D entity. Therefore the patterns and rhythms found in the data drive the configuration of the artificial organism.
By
Ceci Moss on
Thursday, July 22nd, 2010 at
1:00 pm
How did the World Wide Web look before this Internet boom, before it became a riot for star backgrounds, bouncing envelopes and under construction signs?
Well, in 1991, Tim Berners-Lee went live with the first web page TheProject.html located inside the hypertext/WWW/ folder on a computer called "nxoc01" at CERN. Neither him, nor any of his colleagues made an effort to preserve this first version. The only thing we know is the URL http://nxoc01.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html and the way the first page ever looked in november 1992. That's early enough, still half a year before the Mosaic browser would be released and people outside of CERN would start to make their pages.
It is difficult to estimate how many pages created in 1993-1994 made it into the new millennium in their primordial way. If you manage to find something that was put online that time, it would in the best case display a 1995-1996 skin, like the Russian Space Science Internet -- redesigns clearly shaped by the then-new Netspace browser.
But there is a way to find pages that live for ever in 1993. To present them to the new students I look for "Prof. Dr." in Google.
By
John Michael Boling on
Tuesday, July 20th, 2010 at
12:30 pm
H3X3N is a group of Computer Witches who have built an enchanted cube that casts magical spells on computers. This cube, called IX, is a New Media Artwork that will be shown at DEADTECH, an art and technology center and gallery in Chicago, this Saturday May 10. The IX cube casts spells on Windows, Macintosh and Linux computers, hacking and hexing these operating systems. IX combines traditional stage magic tricks and irony as elements of Hacker culture to create an Interactive Installation and Software Art project. IX has been exhibited previously at the Interactivos? exhibition at the Media Lab Madrid in Madrid, Spain.
By
Ceci Moss on
Tuesday, July 20th, 2010 at
11:30 am
Rootkit : a type of software that is designed to gain administrative-level control over a computer system without being detected. Ping : A utility used to determine whether a particular IP address is reachable online by sending out a packet of data and waiting for a response. Ping is used to test and debug a network as well as see if a user or server is online.
By
Lisa Baldini on
Thursday, June 24th, 2010 at
12:00 pm
Internationally renowned OFFF festival convenes in Paris, France, from today until the 26th at La Grande Halle De La Villette. Born from art collective/art agency Inofffensive, the festival stakes its claim as being the “vanguard of the avant-garde” for digital culture, with a simple mission – to earn “some money by doing commercial works and then spending it on crazy, commercially suicidal art projects.” In keeping this ethos, speakers/performers range: from French artist Patrick Jean, to street art bloggers Wooster Collective to former New York Times art director Steven Heller.
Befittingly, in its tenth year of inception, OFFF looks to reflect on the zeitgeist of nostalgia. Titling this year’s show “Nostalgia for a Past Future”, the festival hits upon a key problem for any designer that John Berger lays out in Ways of Seeing: the promise of the future sold by capitalizing on the longing for the past. Yet, heightened by the speed with which trend cycles move (and even more so with the speed of digital culture), for OFFF this issue is circumvented when we forgo trying to recreate narratives of the past and approach nostalgia as a tool for communication.
So, what can we expect?
In the Processing Pixels workshop, Daniel Shiffman looks to transform the treatment of pixels by reconfiguring the relationship between the coded information and its pixelated representation.
Patrick Jean will give a talk about his work in the Openroom. Inspired by the aesthetic of late 80s/early 90s video games, Jean has made a name for himself across the Internet with the video “PIXELS”.
Bleep Labs have come to the fore with its Thingamaboop instrument. Playful from inception, Thingmaboop, embedded with Arduino programming capabilities, is modulated by movement, light sensing LEDs, and is amenable to most synthesizers. In addition to a demonstration/talk, Bleep Labs will also hold a special performance.
By
Jacob Gaboury on
Thursday, June 17th, 2010 at
1:00 pm
Knitoscope Testimonies is the first web based video using "Knitoscope" software, a program that translates digital video into a knitted animation. Knitoscope is a moving image offshoot of microRevolt's freeware knitPro. Knitoscope imports streaming video, lowers the resolution, and then generates a stitch that correspondes with the pixels color. The title "Knitoscope" is based on Edison's early animation technology the kinetoscope, which was a "coin operated peep show machine…watched through a magnifying lens". The "Testimonies" in this piece are from various professionals who work against sweatshop labor.
By
Jonah Brucker-Cohen on
Wednesday, May 26th, 2010 at
10:00 am
Scott Sona Snibbe, Bubble Harp, 2010
In the summer of 2009, I wrote an article here at Rhizome about the burgeoning activities of media artists creating new works or updating versions of their older interactive screen-based projects for Apple's iPhone and iTouch mobile devices. As the article made its way throughout the blogosphere, comments surfaced ranging from criticism of the "closed world of Apple's App Store and iPhone devices" to a championing of the availability of inexpensive multi-touch technology now available to artists who had been waiting for a platform that could adequately display and allow for the type of interaction their projects demanded. A year after the article came out, the draw of these devices and their potentially expansive audience has become even more irresistible to artists enough so that several more "apps" have surfaced. The following article catalogs several new iPhone works which have emerged over the past year, works that are pioneering the next generation of portable media art.
"I've been dreaming of this opportunity since the mid-nineties, a distribution platform for screen-based digital work," explains San Francisco Bay Area based media artist Scott Sona Snibbe, "It's why I abandoned doing this work in the mid-00s, because of a lack of a distribution model. [It] seemed silly hacking apart laptops to put on the wall." This quote exemplifies the reasons why the iPhone and iPod Touch have become key instigators for driving media artists to revisit their past work and release new versions for the devices. Snibbe has since released three "Apps" for the devices, including Gravilux, which was originally written for desktop computers back in 1998 and now exists as a free app that produces a starscape from thousands of small points that can be dragged around and played with using multitouch points on the screen. Gravity can be customized using the settings as well as heat amounts, antigravity, and the total amount of stars that are displayed. Snibbe's other classic software piece, Bubbleharp (1998) is also available as an app and allows for the user to drag their finger across the screen to create cell-like bubbles on the screen that animate based on the path the user moves while creating them. This work is an organic display that resembles the natural movements of single-cell organisms squirming around a petri dish.
By
Ceci Moss on
Tuesday, May 25th, 2010 at
12:30 pm
The following interviews were sourced from netpioneers 1.0, a research initiative active from 2007 to 2009 that was devoted to early net-based art, organized by the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research. in Linz, Austria. All the interviews were conducted by Dr. Dieter Daniels.
By
Patryk Wasiak on
Friday, May 21st, 2010 at
11:30 am
Altered States by Tabo0
In 1988, a short note – titled “THE EAST IS COMING!” -- was published in well- known German cracker zine Illegal:
Have you ever heard of groups like "H.I.C." or "F.B.I."? Well, these crews are from Hungary! There is also an eastbloc-scene like in West Europe. I got demos from POLAND and U.S.S.R.
This is one of the first documentations of something like “the scene” in Eastern Europe. The Iron Curtain separated the editors of Illegal from people that were making cracks and demos in the Soviet Bloc, but this text is evidence that this barrier was not a problem for young computer nerds.
“The scene” in Eastern Europe has its origins in so-called “computer markets” in Warsaw and Budapest, where every weekend hundreds of people would sell hardware brought from the West along with pirated software. Such markets were just big copy parties. Teens with their C-64 brought in their backpacks would copy dozens of pirated games. Back then, nobody had even heard the word “copyright”. There was no need for cracks, as most games were provided with them by German and Scandinavian groups. Obviously, every game also had a cracktro, but at the beginning it was difficult to figure out what the scrollers and greetings were about. Some people even thought that Triad, Ikari and Hotline were just decent game companies.
Later local crackers started replacing the cracktros of Western groups with their own to make ads for their small entrepreneurships. One of the first Polish cracking groups was named WFC – World Cracking Federation – quite a prestigious name for a few guys pushing warez on the Warsaw market. Because of strict border controls there were no computer markets in Czechoslovakia, “the scene” was very small there.
Cracktro by World Cracking Federation
Quickly Poles and Hungarians started making their own demos and sending it to addresses found in Western productions. Polonus – coder and founder of Quartet, the first Polish group - remembered: “We were surprised because we even received some responses. When we have seen the quality of Western demos we were depressed by our own prods”.
The golden age of the Polish and Hungarian C-64 and Amiga scene was the period 1990-1995. The best-known groups were Taboo and Elysium (Poland), Chromance (earlier F.B.I.) and Majic 12 (Hungary). The technical quality of demos rapidly improved in that period. In 1989 Eastern European sceners were able to code simple cracktos, but only four years later technically stunning demos like Altered States by Taboo were made.
Ray of Hope 2 by Majic 12, 1991
Correspondence with the Western scene was rare, scene life was based only on “national” parties. Because of the lack of contact with groups from abroad local sceners were not able to change their style. When Spaceballs and Melon Dezign introduced a new design-oriented style, in this region demos were still code-oriented. Filled vectors and bobs were still mixed with Frazetta and Vallejo style dragons and warriors. Only a few followed along with the new trends, for example Technological death made by the Polish group Mad Elks. A few demos like this are still considered classics, and on the demoscene websites productions of groups mentioned above, they still receive positive feedback from numerous countries.
Technological death by Mad Elks, 1993
During the second half of the 1990s, the scene seemed to be falling apart. There were less and less parties and new prods. In the 2000s, only a small group of hardcore retro computing community members remain. Since 1999 in the small Slovakian town of Trencin there is “Forever Party” – where a few dozen of the 8-bit sceners are still making annual pilgrimages to compete with their demos made on well tuned C-64, ZX Spectrum and Atari.
Patryk Wasiak, PhD (1978) - received a M.A. degree in sociology and M.A. degree in art history at Warsaw University. He has wrote his dissertation on transnational informal networks of visual artists in the Soviet Bloc (i.e. mail-art networks and Infermental videozine). He was a holder of Volkswagen Foundation and Herder Institut research fellowships. Currently he is writing a book on computerization of Poland, i.e. on Polish cracking- and demoscene.
By
Markku Reunanen on
Wednesday, May 19th, 2010 at
10:00 am
An MSX1 demo: Bold by Dvik & Joyrex
MSX was the first attempt to standardize software and hardware between different home computer vendors. With its 3.58 MHz processor, Microsoft BASIC, three-channel sound and modest graphics the MSX represented a very typical 8-bit home computer of the early 1980s. Several well-known companies such as Sony, Canon and Philips produced their own models, but their efforts were largely shadowed by the king of the hill, the Commodore 64. In spite of the tough competition, in some countries, such as The Netherlands, Spain and Brazil, the MSX line of computers was actually quite popular. A big factor in the success were the quality games produced by Konami, well-known for its numerous popular game series.
The MSX demoscene is a small but curious resident of the demo world. It could be roughly divided into two eras: the Dutch scene of the early nineties and the MSX renaissance of the late nineties. The Dutch demos ran on the advanced MSX2 computers that had improved graphics modes and often expansions such as additional memory or a sound cartridge. The effects seen in the first wave of demos were typical for the time: scrollers, colorbars, wobblers and even simple flat shaded vector graphics. Interestingly, in the Dutch scene it was considered perfectly normal to sell demos at fairs to other people, to get compensation for the hard work. In contrast, usually demos are distributed for free among the sceners and demo watchers. Many Dutch demogroups also went on to produce commercial games for the platform.
When the MSX started to disappear from the face of mainstream computing towards the mid-nineties, the Dutch scene also cooled down. It wasn't until 1997 that new demos started to appear, this time for the original old MSX1 computers from 1983. This tiny renaissance started from Finland and then slowly spread to the rest of the Europe. The new wave demos typically feature effects such as tunnels, plasmas, and character-based animations. These days a few demos are released for the platform every year. The increasing popularity of retro computing has benefited MSX too, and there are still a couple of yearly happenings such as Nijmegen (http://manuel.msxnet.org/msx/beurs/) and MSX Info Update (http://msx.fi/party/) in existence.
There are two popular high-quality MSX emulators available: the multi-platform openMSX and BlueMSX for Windows. Both of them run most of the demos and games perfectly. For a list of MSX demos with download links see the corresponding section of Pouët.net, and for MSX-related news plus discussion The MSX Resource Center.
Most demoscene music is characteristic in that it's made by hand, distributed as semi-open source, and executed in real-time. Composers adapt to the technical limitations as well as the cultural conditions, where resources were often reserved for the visual content. For these purposes, demosceners refined the tracker-software, which is essentially a text-based
step-sequencer with quick access to all sound parameters.
