Category: Digital and Interactive Art

Eddo Stern at AGO – N. Post June 19/04 is an article on the show currently on at the Art Gallery of Ontario on recent work by Eddo Stern. Stern’s work, like Fort Paladin: America’s Army, 2003, combines modified computers and projections from computer games. Fort Paladin has a castle built around a screen and tower system unit. There is a keyboard with actuators controlled by another computer typing away beneath the screen (or castle gateway) showing a violent first person shooter (is the game projected controlled by the keyboard?) To quote from the pamphlet in the exhibit room,

Keywords: Tolkien, Christ, Your Empire and Your Desktop
Fort Paladin is a medieval computer castle automaton trained to kill and master the US Army’s inforamous recruitment/training game, America’s Army, using electro-mechanics and a custom-written expert system.

Continue reading Eddo Stern at the AGO

Having just been unfair about Manovich I should mention that his web site, Lev Manovich has a great little archive of images from the book The Language of New Media (follow “Visuals for the Book” link). He also makes his essays available under a creative commons license – neat.

Lisbeth Klastrup:†Paradigms of interaction: conceptions and misconceptions of the field today is an good overview of the literature on interactivity.

I found the link for this from a blog by Jason Rhody at the University of Maryland who has a category archive on the interactive.

23¢ stories is a delightful Flash site where you chose a postcard and can read or write a short story for that postcard. Its theme is New York and the stories provoked by pictures of the city.

vademecum de l’art numÈrique is a set of precepts for the critique of digital art from GRATIN (or Groupe de Recherches en Art et Technologies Interactives et/ou NumÈriques.)

In the TAPoR project we are trying to figure out how to have virtual meetings on a regular basis (following the Extreme Programming model). James Chartrand has been using MSN and voice over IP to work with programmers at Ottawa. We are going to try The Virtual Lightbox that Matt Kirschenbaum and colleagues at MITH have developed. This should give us a visual space for back of a napkin drawings.

Does anyone else have experience in what works?

In the February 2004 issue of the Harvard Business Review there is a short article on “The MFA Is the New MBA” by Daniel H. Pink. (Pages 21-22). He argues that it is harder to get into good art schools and that businesses are hiring MFAs to get creative talent.

An arts degree is now perhaps the hottest credential in the worlds of business. Corporate recruiters have begun visiting the top arts grad schools … in search of talent. … McKinsey says other disciplines are just as valuable in helping new hires perform well at the firm. With other arts grads occupying key corporate positions, the master of fine arts is becoming the new business degree. (p. 21)

Why is this?
Continue reading MFA as the new MBA

The MOCA Digital Gallery has a number of interactive art works. MOCA is the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, not to be confused with MASS MoCA which is in Massachusetts.
MASS MoCA has some neat interactive installations in their kids area. They also had a neat exhibit on games called Game Show. (Note: my uncle’s work was part of this show.)

HumanDescent is a site with images that morph together animals (including humans) into believable hybrids. The mixing of species using Photoshop creates believable mutants straight out of H. G. Wells’, The Island of Dr Moreau.

So we were discussing whether the PNG (pronounced “ping”) graphics format included vectors. I thought it did since Fireworks lets you draw vectors and uses PNG as its native format. Turns out I was wrong. Fireworks extends the PGN format to include chunks for features others than bitmaps. See PNG feature support in Fireworks.
On a related note – PNG (Portable Network Graphics) was developed as a networked graphics format that was unemcumbered by patents the way GIF was until GIF Liberation Day (June 2002) when the patents expired. Now JPG is having problems as Forgent sues over JPG patent.
Continue reading PNG and GIF