Cinemagraphs, deposed

I haven't talked much about "cinemagraphs" on the blog. They're GIFs similar to what most people think of when they think of GIFs: appearing to stem from a film or TV show. The "high art" cinemagraph, however, does one other thing specifically (for some reason) that most GIFs do not: the cinemagraph reduces movement in a scene down to a few localized areas, such as a person's eyes, hair, or a scarf blowing in the breeze. It thinks very much of itself.

Stage (we are familiar) has produced, in retaliation, a series of faux-cinemagraphs that reverse the localized movement: twitchy, wobbly eyes and uncanny jaw movements turn what appear to be normal humans into uncanny-valley monsters. Watch and enjoy.

DUMP HAX

I am very excited to release a new interactive website called DUMP HAX! For those of you who are not very familiar with dump.fm, the chatroom's moderators have the unique ability to use HTML and JavaScript in their posts. When I became a mod in late 2010, I began collecting popular HTML hacks (hax) in a text document, then a Google Docs file. Later on, I opened up the document to other mods, so we could rewrite each other's code and share ideas.

Though I no longer frequent dump, the mods continue to use and add to this document today - kudos to them for their work and expertise. I announced my plans in November to turn the hax file into a website that allows for working with the code in realtime, and as of this morning I figured out a way to do so. Yes, it's a bit of a hack in some ways, like the current iframe setup, but I think it's better to share than not, and isn't that the point anyway?

Recommended Reading

I'm reading and re-reading Jennifer Chan's recent essay "The Commodification of Net Art" (PDF download) right now, and I'd love to discuss it with anyone interested. Chan makes some incredibly lucid points about what happens to net art when "commodified," i.e. turned into a physical object. So far, the two main insights I've taken away from the article are:

• Web-based artwork has a "digital aura," a quality which informs the viewer of its origin. This aura is easily lost outside of the context of the browser because display methods (such as a screen or a sheet of paper) ultimately complicate the reading of the work in a designated physical space.
• "Non-discursive" art blogs encourage insular image critique, marginalizing the artwork as "hipster capital." Chan gives the example of Sterling Crispin's Greek New Media Shit tumblr as a site which demonstrates how in-jokes can reduce actual critique to shorthand aesthetic conventions. Hipster capital in this case refers to the trading of images and references within a scene, only comprehensible by those in the know.

Initial thoughts on these points so far: I still think it's fascinating to see the attempts people make to commodify net art. Maybe it's because I enjoy accumulating hipster capital. I would love to see an exhibition predicated on the "fruitlessness" of the commodification process.

Chan's insight on in-scene feedback loops is probably the most astonishing part of the article in my opinion; online aesthetic shorthand, " Internet memes," are often discussed as inevitably ballooning in popularity like a fad. However - and I know this sounds dubious - from personal experience, for every LOLcat that makes it big there are 100 images that are just as [useful/shareable/funny] that remain in-scene as modes of "discourse." Of course, as Chan points out, is a readymade meme a useful form of discourse after all, or does it actually restrict your audience, not to mention your thoughts?

Create your own art movement!

I've made a website where you can directly contribute to the next big art movement! Click here to add your input. We'll regroup in a week or two to discuss the results!

New site - brushes

 

I wasn't feeling great today, so I stayed home from work and finished up a recent project: brushes. brushes is a webpage where you can use images from URLs as paintbrushes. You paste a URL into the top left field, then start doodling on the page, stretching copies of the image as you go.* The site lets you output the placement of the images as HTML/CSS once you're done, so you can use brushes to draft compositions for your own sites.  Here is an example output (also in the screenshot above). It's a real hack of a tool, but it's definitely way more open-ended than some of my other compositional sites. Major props once again to timb for bon.gs, the definitive compositional website.**

*PROTIP: broken URLs are fun.

**sorry framit fans

Edit: another example pic. 3

Tonight and Tomorrow: Notes on a New Nature

I have a piece in an exhibition tonight by Nicholas O'Brien entitled "Notes on a New Nature." The theme of the exhibition is the effect of the Internet on contemporary depictions of landscapes. You can read more here, and Mr. O'Brien will be giving a streaming walkthrough at 3PM EST tomorrow here.I hope you take a look!

UPDATE: O'Brien recorded a Notes on a New Nature virtual "hike" through the exhibition at 319 Scholes: click here to watch. I had only seen a couple of these works before, was totally bowled over by the video and show overall.

If I were a curator

A few ideas for digital art group shows/locations:

• "Photo blankets" group show. Photo blankets are like $100-150 to have manufactured, so not a huge risk for participating artists. And you get a blanket!
• Salon-style projections of GIFs covering walls. I'm thinking something like ITP's Big Screens projects but lots of little images. Horror vacui. Who was it that said GIFs are only good in groups?
• No Computers Allowed: all physical artifacts of digital works. Artists must translate by any means necessary.
• Icon Show: Group of artists makes physical work based off of their favorite computer icons. I'm imagining big butterfly collection-type displays.
• Offline Store: Store that sells different mass-produced net art objects every month (like photo rugs, USB drives, etc.). Takes out the middleman - no need to copy the original when you can send the file to the manufacturer. Artists may not have say as to how their work is displayed.
• Net art fashion? I think there's more up this vein than just what PBS tells you. Pepper from Scannerjammer has been making some cool shirts, and I know we have a few other merch pushers waiting in the wings.
• Bigass lenticulars/holograms - one day, Joel!
• OS: operating system-themed works. I have at least two large works planned for something like this, just need a wealthy, loving patron. Reach me at hypo@hypothete.com!

Couple of new pages

Dumped Images Page 5

Dumped Images Page 6

Expansionism (resize the page)

SEPTEMBER UPDATES

New work online: let's start with Rotor 62, a scooting robot I built for the Minnesota Opera! More pics and a video here.

SUPERSTIJL - I took GIFs and still images from various sources and turned them into palette scrolling images. I then finally reduced the images to only five colors - red, yellow, blue, black and white. This is where the dumb art history reference comes in, but I liked the effect enough to group them on a page. Epileptics beware (as always).

Sliders 1 and 2. Maybe trying to be funny, maybe something about resizing algorithms? 2 holds my interest the most, but sometimes I've found myself opening 1, adjusting until I'm comfortable, and then leaving it open in a tab as I surf. Not sure what that means.

Finally, this isn't so much an art thing as a browser thing - LET'S ROLL. For bloggers or tumblr-rs that need cycling text-shadows on their non-IE-compliant pages. The code is commented.

Hypothete at Art Fag City: Ki[net]ic Reflections

  Well, I finally wrote that kinetic art post I was talking about! It's taken a few weeks and some great editing work (major kudos to Will Brand & Paddy Johnson) but now I think we're ready to start off the discussion. Take a look, and feel free to discuss over on the comments section at AFC.

Be Thoughtful

 Thanks, Google. New pages:

ENTER THE INTERNET

blobs

crystal lumia

crystal lumia 2

groovy

flag (found gifs)

hack test

pixel possibilities

I need to post some new writing soon! As those of you who follow my Twitter account might know, I recently discovered at the library some books detailing the history of kinetic art from this guy on. Seems to me that when the art world encountered the Duchamp situation in the 20s that there was some sort of schism, driving some artists towards meaning and and the object, and others toward a study of space-time. There seem to be a lot of gaps in the literature, so once I have a clearer picture I'll draft something.

no surprises here

Happy Customers

highlighter and white-out on paper

holoframe

mappings

levels

watcher of the grid

Links Roundup - 6/23/11

modernist overtones

stay relevant

divination

divination 2

seam

maleficent

Unrelated: BYOB Minneapolis info

Also: A Really Long and Intense Argument about the Martha Graham Google Doodle from Last Month (hence the Google repurposing in the first two links)

Quite a run! Feelings were hurt, names were called, straw men depilated. Shows that the scene still has passion for all the running in place that we do. I love you guys!

Rotor 34 - HyperMolecules

 Click Here

If you haven't checked out the rotors yet, you should at least look at this one. Graphics by Tom Moody, programming by yours truly - I pitched the idea to Tom of collaborating on a rotor that generated forms similar to his collages. Tom worked on the spheres and pipes, and I wrote a simple javascript loop that would assemble and reassemble them like self-constructing molecules.

Mobius Printer Challenge

CHALLENGE: Get this to work

Email me your attempts: hypo@hypothete.com
I will post the pictures sent in.
I've heard of two failed attempts by independent parties so far. (thanks frakbuddy and lolumad)
Starting to suspect that this is impossible for some reason.

Rotors - further development

Rotors Landing Page

I've been posting links to lots of these rotors lately and just wanted to elaborate a bit. I started sketching ideas for these about two months ago and keep coming up with more. They're meant to be viewed within the context of a screen and ideally as a group, hence the landing page above. Where a GIF or video can provide motion and repetition, I'm looking for more complex loops and variable interactions with the rotors. Also they all look like hell in IE.

3 pages

Rotor 2

Rotor 1

Clouds (for Luis)

A note for viewers - in most browsers you can push F11 to see a webpage in fullscreen. A lot of these HTML pages look best that way. A tip for speeding up the animation if you have an older computer is to resize the browser window to be small. I use browser size-based positioning and scaling in pretty much everything I make to accommodate the many aspect ratios and resolutions I'm sure you all are using. Of course, you can't anticipate every resolution (if you're running three 1080p monitors or reading this off of a Gameboy you're out of luck).

Goofing Around

e-summer

antenna

Page Roundup 2

http://hypothete.com/images/other/antenna.html

http://hypothete.com/images/other/blade.html

http://hypothete.com/images/forest/mufo.html

http://hypothete.com/images/magnets/index.html

http://hypothete.com/images/giant/fffforest.html