Free as in seminar: Creative Commons talk tomorrow

Creative Commons New Zealand is hosting a free all-day seminar tomorrow (28th Oct) at the National Library in Wellington to "build understanding of the new licensing environment in the digital world." Guest speakers from Victoria University and the National Library, as well as CC International, will take you through a range of licenses which steer a middle ground between overly defensive traditional copyright, and simply giving it away. For more info on "Expanding Copyright Horizons through Creative Commons", check out the CC Aotearoa website. A webcast is said to be available tomorrow at this address, (broken for now).

Pixels to paint: Outsourcing image production

It's a bizaare image: a couple KKK members, Xzibit (of Pimp my Ride fame), and an industrial robot, all set in a forest scene. Just Another Painting restores the traditional patron relationship by commissioning a work - but then twists it, offshoring production to a painter named Jung Min and developing the montage using lo-res shots from the web. Staging the project, the anonymous patron is deliberately difficult, requesting daily work in progress shots, repositioned elements, and even new items added late in the process.


In Dafen, China, it really is just another painting. The tiny village has elevated mass production of oils and famous pieces to a $36 million dollar industry. It's estimated "60 percent of the world's cheap oil paintings" are produced within the town's 4 square kilometres. A good painter can crank out up to 30 pieces a day: Monet's, Van Goghs, or more generic scenes like nudes and military poses. One of the biggest operations, Shenzhen Artlover Ltd, state they wish to "get into the business of oil paintings the way McDonalds got into the business of fast food."

Meaningful videogames on the rise

Gamers have seen this environment before. Yet instead of a barrage of semi-automatic weaponry at their disposal, they have a Koran. Rather than side-stepping and running through the level, the player is hanging around, chatting to other detainees. Their's little else to do.

Set in the infamous detainee center, "Escape from Woomera" is a MOD (modification) of the immensely popular first person shooter, Half Life. Users can play as a variety of inmates, each with their own backstories, in a thoroughly researched recreation of the camp. "Television footage, press and radio reports, and the recollections of former detainees and employees will be used to mimic the layout and daily life in the centres, down to meal times, the way guards communicate with each other and 'episodic violence'." (SMH) Now archived at SelectParks, the game is one of a growing number of so-called "meaningful games", seeking to introduce a greater quotient of educational, political, or cultural content to an industry dominated by technically brilliant but superficial shooters.


Ian Bogost's Persuasive Games is a company founded on such a premise, with a slew of titles like FatWorld, Presidential Pong, and Food Import Folly. Popular pieces like Airport Security were created within weeks of new legislation on aviation carry-ons, as the "video game equivalent of an editorial cartoon". Reviews from the New York Times revealed some of the power of the medium to force players to experience a situation. "I’ll just say it’s somewhat stupid, and requires fast reflexes and an ability to adapt to absurd and arbitrary rules changes. Just like real airport security." Strangely Bogost doesn't see any ethical dilemmas in developing a variety of commercial games for clients like dessert chain Cold Stone, or creating "Xtreme Errands" for hulking SUV Jeep, which "challenges players to complete tasks utilizing the unique features of this vehicle."


Gonzalo Frasca's first game "Kabul Kaboom!" was entirely produced on a coast to coast flight. "I was disgusted at seeing how the most powerful country on Earth was bombing the crap out of one of the poorest, so I created this game. I wasn't expecting much when I posted it online, but after a few days it had several thousands players from all over the world and this encouraged me to keep using videogames as a form of political expression and experimentation." Frasca's game "September 12th" was a seminal work of the genre, mixing easily accessible web-based play with a controversial political message that still causes hate-mail to this day.

Sadly, designers and developers in the New Zealand Game Developers Association don't seem to stray outside the commercial box. One of the few major studios, Wellington-based Sidhe Interactive pumps out titles like "GripShift" and "Rugby League 2" as well as aligned properties like "Jackass: the video game". Straylight studios major effort has been a 2d multiplayer battleship game, Star-Tag, and Binary Star's rather traditional looking "Homeland" has been in progress for years.

For more 'meaningful' games, check out: Operation Pedopriest, Ayiti: The cost of life, The McGame, and PeaceMaker.

Oliver wins Opensource award, progresses videogame

New Zealander Julian Oliver just won the Open Source for Creativity award for SelectParks, the information-rich website and blog focusing on art-based games we've mentioned in the past. The site is built on open-source software like PHP Nuke, and allows syndication through standards such as RSS.


Oliver's also progressed that Escheresque augmented reality game we blogged about a few months ago. Still in alpha stage, the latest version, titled levelHead is starting to take shape. A simple block with painted identifying marks on each side is placed in front of a camera, which reads these and projects the correct view of the game world. Tilting the block directs the tiny avatar up stairs, through doorways and eventually to an exit in a delightfully simple, practical use of AR.

Online artists tackle "AER" quality through exhibition

Belching through the city of Aachen in Germany on huge Mercedes-Benz flatbeds, Eve Andrée Laramée's "Parks on Trucks" is just one of the works shown in the "AER Project", an exhibition curated and released today by Andrea Pollie at Hunter College in New York.


Other standouts include Translator II: Grower, by Sabrina Raaf, a Mars-like rover with a much more down to earth mission, to monitor and visualise levels of CO2 in a room. Raaf balances what could be a patronising, overly-scientific piece with her execution - the robot draws grass along the walls with childlike glee, each blade corresponding to current carbon dioxide amounts.


My favourite was SuperGas by SuperFlex, a "simple, portable biogas unit that can produce sufficient gas for the cooking and lighting needs of an African family." Visually strong, the huge orange blog resembles a giant Claes Oldenberg piece. But more interesting was the stance towards the "art", shifting the traditional concept from representation to tool, a practical object that invites participation and heavy use - deriving as much from the fields of engineering, science, and agriculture as contemporary art. Currently SuperGas is being tested in the field in Cheing Mai, Thailand.


Unfortunately after very tangible pieces like SuperGas and Parks on Trucks, works like Amy Balkin's Public Smog appear overly conceptual at best, pretentious and ineffectual at worst. And while the project's page disclaims that "Public Smog is no substitute for direct action", the piece requires too much suspension of reality to even work as an exercise in raising awareness.

Aesthetics in code: Screens from programmers

Bill Brown says "Has anyone noticed that Andale Mono (8pt) in the Flex Builder 2 Beta is not as small as it is in the Dreamweaver or Flash 8 IDEs? Does anyone know why or how to fix it? I need my code density!"

For a profession usually not associated with the visual, coders treat their editing typefaces seriously. Legibility and monospaced fonts are highly prized, but in the end personal choice and background play a part: "oldskool" Courier users, mac fans swearing by Andale Mono, and less pedantic users trying new faces like Microsoft's Consolas. Forums posts get heated, "Everytime I see Courier as a source editing font I get skin rash".



Syntax highlighting, a feature used to colour different types of commands to make skimming code easier, has taken on a more personal touch. TextMates theme page, where users can submit their own colouring schemes, lists dozens of choices. From "Dawn", to "Overcast", "Spectacular" to "GlitterBomb". "Argonaut" by David Lee even comes complete with mantra: "No code poet should be without their paper nautilus".

Shown are screens from CSS/PHP programmer Mike Harding, with more screens from Luke Duncalfe next week. Like to share your setup? Email screenshots to luke dot munn at gmail dot com.



Update: As promised, here's a screen from programmer Luke Duncalfe, showing a suitably busy collection of windows, from Ruby on Rails in the foreground to some XML rendered terminal style - white text on black background - and Javascript being debugged in the background (as with most images on window.org.nz, click for larger version).

Artists give it away with new distribution models

I'm moving down the form mechanically, name, email, credit card details. It's your standard online order form. Almost. Next to "price" is a blank field and a ? mark. Clicking it reveals a message "It's up to you", and clicking again reiterates, as if it reassure the awestruck digital consumer, "No really. It's up to you."

The work is Radiohead's latest independently released album, "In Rainbows". Following the completion of their 5 deal contract with UK based Parlophone, the band known for innovation is finally matching their model with their music, throwing down the gauntlent to a recording industry which has been defensive and slow.

Pay What you Want isn't giving it away or donation, a model which bloggers and digital service owners frequently use, asking visitors to "consider" giving via PayPal or other means. By stepping punters through standard credit card forms before they get the goods, Radioheads organisation WASTE sets up an expectation and a context of exchange, however little.

Not that giving it away is pointless. The net is full of success stories of artists working the sharing, viral nature of the medium to their advantage. When Bloc Party played their first series of shows in New York, they were amazed to find fans singing along to song that weren't even released - but that had been leaked months before. OK Go are the treadmilling poster boys for this model, rising from obscurity to fame almost overnight through their innovative music video, which has received 23,282,615 views on YouTube.


Free Culture at NYU ran a Creative Commons art show giving rights to viewers, a model which New Zealander Adam Hyde regularly propounds through initiatives like FLOSS Manuals ("free manuals for free software") and streaming radio workshops. Also locally, we're talking with Annie Bradley about a screensaver work which could be distributed at a Window opening. Picking up on the office theme of the piece, visitors could potentially have it downloaded onto a USB key drive or iPod or burnt to a blank CD.

Quick Take: Stephen Foster at MIC

A spotlight appears on a screen to the left as a suited figure with Indian head dress steps into the frame, a clear reference to the iconic Bond opening sequences. Delayed by a few seconds, the right screen lights up as a second shooter strides across. The crack of gunshots sound as firearms on the left and right are drawn and triggered. The work, entitled Gunfight, is one of a series by Canadian artist Stephen Foster, currently showing at MIC.

What's interesting about the work is the tension deriving from the timing - it's not immediately clear who will shoot first. As writer Monika Gagnon elaborates, "The loops end, and replay endlessly, cowboy or Indian drawing first, depending on how the two digital videos align themselves to each other on each screening."

Unfortunately I found Gunfight to be the strongest piece in the show. Foster employs a number of graphic techniques consistently, resulting in compositions of high-resolution digital objects with glowing effects and obvious scan lines. The resulting style Gagnon describes as "hyper-real", a fitting aesthetic in some ways for work which deals with posturing and power struggles, historical and contemporary authenticity. But while it's an apt commentary for it's subject, the staged aesthetic asphyxiates it's medium as well, leaving behind a series of artificially slick digital compositions which ultimately fail to move or compel.

Quick Take: Virtual Pay? Virtual Strike

During negotiations with IBM, the union representing workers for the Italian branch of the computer giant asked for a salary increase. The request was denied, and the usual "performance bonus" incentives canceled. In response, the Italian union, together with Union Network International, have planned a virtual strike to occur in Second Life next week.

Interested residents can teleport to Commonwealth Island, where they're armed with a strike kit: from a UNI t-shirt, to signs stating "Our demand was...." and even giant animated fish which can be carried like balloons.

Gimmicky? Sure. Virtually useless? Not at all. What UNI understands is that the virtual can swing the physical - global media will ignore a local computer branch in Italy, but a strike via the transnational Second Life is both bizaare and compelling. From Information Week to The Register, ABC Spain to Radio Canada, UNI received the awareness which is so vital for activism.

Putting the old back into new media

Alessandro Ludovico is no stranger to technology - he worked with a group on the controversial Amazon Noir project. Scripts repeatedly mined the booksellers "Look Inside this book" feature, piecing back the hundreds of random pages into complete novels, then redistributing them via P2P (Peer to Peer) filesharing software. Together with Paolo Cirio, he also staged "Google Will Eat Itself" a couple years ago, filtering funds received from Google AdWords to purchase stock in the global search giant. So at the "still/open" artists workshop in Melbourne last week, as Janine Randerson reports, his topic was very surprising. Paper.


Ludovico's talk, the Persistence of Paper deconstructed the hailed 'paperless office', and elaborated on the strength of the humble book as an historical record amidst a very transient web, an autonomous lo-tech solution which is "reliable and not dependent on the lack of tcp/ip waves or electricity". He moves on to suggesting "just in time" publishing - newspapers or magazines that are feverishly updated until a few moments before cheap offline production onto paper.

Helmut Smitt's "Pamphlet" work riffs on this new ease of publishing, allowing visitors to type in a message and have a printer spit out a brochure from the 10th floor of a tower block. Services like online publisher lulu.com make significantly bigger works possible - send a PDF, choose distribution methods, and even get an ISBN. Gmail announced it's "Paper Gmail" feature, allowing printouts of archived mails, as an April Fools Day joke. But users, and reporters fell for it, some even requesting it after they uncovered the prank.

Sound as art - art as sound

Toshio Iwai stands on the stage holding a translucent digital panel rimmed in steel. Dressed all in white, with a wireless headset, he appears to have stepped from a pure, utopian future. Quickly he generates a rhythm of electronic pulses, then adds a simple melody over the top. He moves sound sources around on a grid, phasing tones in and out, building them to a resonant crescendo. As any electronic musician will tell you, his performance isn't technically difficult. Software sequencers - where the computer triggers a note or sample if a grid node is turned on - have been around for years. The difference lies in the execution and aesthetics. Instead of a performer hunched over a mysterious laptop, Iwai's Tenori On instrument moves with the player, glowing and pulsating, communicating the sound visually.



We enjoy connecting the visual and the aural: the whip crack of a snare as a drummer's stick comes in contact, the tensed face of a singer reaching for a high note. So it's fitting that recent projects seek to bring that connection to the sometimes cold black box of electronic sound. Instruments like Iwai's, visual programming software like Max or Pure Data, and Bjork's recent use of the 'reactable' instrument in her live shows try to address this lack.


A 'tangible music interface', the reactable is essentially a tabletop which senses specially tagged blocks put on top of it and overlays graphical data on them. The typically invisible tempo which lies behind a song becomes a very visible digital ripple, triggering sounds as it touches blocks. Difficult concepts like signal paths are made clear - we can see the original signal emanate out, then become squelched and agitated as it passes through a filter block.

Of course, the type of visual feedback can also take a lo-fi bent. At the last experimental sound night known as Vitamin S, dancer Christian Larsen and a fellow dancer reacting to a looped, overdriven guitar performance.

Data visualisation: What does guilt look like?

In an age of information overload, a picture carries a thousand words - or stats. From around the net, political artists, environmentally savvy companies and concerned individuals are all making a statement, without uttering a word.


Hotmapping combines thermal imaging flyovers with residential mapping to uncover the highest energy hogs in any area. They recently completed a massive, 30 sq km section for Haringey in the UK, then posted it online, shaming the homeowners of those hot red dots on the map.

Radley Balko (stats) and Lee Laslo (programming) teamed up to reveal a pattern behind the numbers. Piecing together dozens of "isolated" botched police raids, the duo pinned them on a Google Map, complete with a key detailing items like "Death of an innocent", and case-by-case stories linked to local press articles. It's a textbook example of web 2.0 connectedness used for an incisive statement - stats+mapping+news articles - putting hyped but superficial initiatives like Twitter to shame.



Brazilian artist Icaro Doria takes national flags and rethinks them, mapping the area of a certain colour to damning statistics. Burkina Faso's tiny gold star becomes the percentage of children who actually reach maturity. Columbia's dominant yellow stripe representing it's cocaine production overshadows smaller crops like coffee and bananas. At best the stats are simplified. The EU's drastic oil production/consumption ratio is the result of many factors, many of which aren't necessarily negative. At worst, they're exaggerated or false - Somalia's shocking genital mutilation statistic would be difficult to get hard figures on.


Finally, Google's default inclusion of Darfur into it's Google Earth product is an overt political statement. It's 3d engine typically used to show corporate skyscrapers or monuments visualises something much more disturbing - tall purple towers representing numbers of displaced and wounded in the african nation.

Mediating the environment

Open on a shot of a kid walking the street with a black backpack, followed with a handheld videocam. He reaches his destination and unzips the bag. Spraycans? Homemade bombs? Surprise, sliding out of the bag is a digital projector. Snaking a cord to a nearby lamppost, the kid's just created a 50 foot screen - and an audience.

Years ago you'd have to know these guys personally. With the internet they can share it with interested artists and activists from Sydney to Paris - 8 in-depth steps on Instructables, including all the gear, best locations via Google Maps, and open-source code written in C++.

What's interesting here are not the tags themselves (sometimes juvenile or straight digital translations) , or the illegal buzz associated with it. Look past that, and you'll find kids mediating their environment - 'growing' generative graphics on slick corporate hotels, talking back to patronising billboards, humanising concrete with colour and line.


In the past this took the form of physical modifications. Modernisms famous whipping boy is the story of Le Corbusiers houses for factory workers in Pessac. Almost as soon as they were built, workers added shutters, paint, and knick-knacks to personalise their 'machines for living in'. In the future, this might be more abstract - students escaping their 30 square apartments in Auckland for a simulated or gaming world which is more expansive, both conceptually and in terms of 'space'.