Category: Digital and Interactive Art

A project I worked on with Multimedia students and colleagues (see previous post Virtual Cities) won a prize from Ontario Association of Art Galleries. See the
McMaster Daily News story. We got a varnished stick with “Good for you!” on it! Not sure what we will do with that?

The Fondation Daniel Langlois has a very cool Flash web site. Everything launches little windows that let you switch from French to English, resize the window, and get a unique URL if you are trying to reference a specific item. This is useful given that the interface is in Flash.

In particular check out Eisensteins Early Drawings (go to the parent block and open the interactive sketchbook). They have an interactive interface for the pages of the sketchbook which is compelling.

Woogle – Words in pictures is a art project that takes a phrase and builds it from Google retrieved images.

Toogle Image Search takes a word, finds an image from Google and then converts it to a text version of the image/word where the word is repeated in different colours to make up the image.

Both are neat art toys that nicely play on Google by C6.org and Gu Jian. I’m not clear as to who C6 is – an art collective in the UK? – but they have a number of clean and irreverant projects. Thanks to Robert for pointing this out to me.

Oh vanity! I finally get quoted in something associated with Wired. See the end of this news story on Wired News: Street Art Goes Global, Online. Its a story about the Wooster Collective which I blogged. (Which probably why I got asked for a professorial opinion.)

From a spam e-mail – this is a screen capture. Rather bizarre effect.

Manga by Paul Gavett is a large format illustrated introduction to manga – Japanese comics. The two characters in Man-ga can be translated “irresponsible pictures”, but has come to mean a particular Japanese form of comics often consumed in thick books full of serialized stories. Gavett does a good job of surveying the history of manga from Osamu Tezuka to the nouvelle manga “movement” of Boilet. (See the previous blog entry on Nouvelle Manga Digitale.)
Gravett occaisionally tries too hard to present a view that manga is not just “tits’n tentacles” or sexist eye-candy for boys. He is best when documenting manga for girls (think Sailor Moon) and the cultural context of manga in Japan. (Think about how hard it is to translate comics into English when the order of the panels is right-to-left.) The real value of the book are the illustrations that give you a feel for the variety and graphic inventiveness of Japanese manga. I can see how manga, an enourmous almost entirely domestic business, is a vast reservoir of plots, visual ideas, and characters for animation (which does translate easier), games, toys and cards. One could argue that the Japanese incredible everyday consumption of manga buttresses other industries so that they can compete internationally. We don’t see the manga, but we see the animations, the kids toys, and the computer games.
Continue reading Paul Gravett: Manga

Yellowbacks.1 by FREDBOOT.COM Fred Boot is a digital Shockwave manga. It adapts the enigmatic adult comic to an interactive short that is not an animation. It is one in a series of nouvelle manga digitale and is based on the work of a Kan Takahama.
See Boilet’s Nouvelle Manga Manifesto for some of the background on the Nouvelle Manga.

Dan Zen sent me links to two neat sites put together from the work of his students in the Interactive Multimedia program. The first is a series of tutorials for Flash, Sheridan Interactive Multimedia Flash Tutorials. The second is a Flash work that gathers screen shots and short reviews of other neat Flash sites. See FlashDeck – Sheridan Interactive Multimedia Cool Flash Sites.

Jared Tarbell and colleagues at Levitated do some very cool Flash “toys”. One neat project that shows how Flash can be used to create multiuser spaces is Public Structure | a collaborative computational environment. Some of their work has been exhibited, including the I’Ching Poetry Generator, a Levitated exhibition. I find his/their work achingly beautiful.

stock.xchng is a site with free photos that can be searched. By and large they are fairly good “office” quality – suitable for illustrating points in PowerPoint. I just went through grabbing images to put together an essay for students on working in groups in the workplace. The semiotics of stock images is interesting – search for “office” and ask yourself about the images available. Can you tell the difference between different office cultures? Do offices really look like that? Why are there so many images of simple office supplies like pencils and so few of messy desks? This link came from Audrey.