March 2010

pic-see Oct 09

Using the Nasty Nets pic-see utility to view my image directory for Oct 2009: the raw material for the blog, without the tasteful resizing and including some images I never posted.
A great idea: if this script was portable, it would be how I would like to try to do my catalogue raisonné.
I have a lot of slides going back to the dawn of time that I would like to webbify. I don't necessarily want to post it all on the blog as regular posts, and would like for some images to be large-sized without clicking links.
With John Michael Boling's brilliant (hint) utility I could create directories of the old work by year, then make links to the pic-see-displayed pages on my sidebar. One thing it's missing now, though, is the ability to link to thumbnail pages--right now it's just a menu item. The October '09 group looks kind of interesting as thumbnails--with the cpb-found ink jet printer creating its own peculiar space in the grid.
If I had a catalogue raisonné then people could see my varied and prodigious output at a faster clip and possibly stop saying they can't get a handle on it. Individually the multiple styles and changes of tone seem like confusion; in the aggregate they seem like deliberate confusion on a massive scale, which is somewhat more critical. It won't help but I'll feel like I gave it my best shot.

One of the teams participating in the New Museum's one-day pairings of artists and technologists has announced their project in advance. The event takes place April 17 and was discussed at length on Paddy Johnson's blog.

Erin Brandstetter (artist) and Ben Kefauver (founder of LiveJournal) will do the following:

Kefauver will spend the day "optimizing" Brandstetter's computer. Eliminating viruses, turning off hidden Windows processes that interfere with smooth running of other software, and removing one year's worth of Windows Security Updates. This will leave Brandstetter's computer vulnerable to "exploits" but it won't matter because she won't be accessing the Internet. The last is a delicate operation: each update must be removed in reverse order from the order in which it was installed, and if anything goes wrong it could destroy her operating system. (Ticketholders with limited time that day might want to come for this part--it should offer edge-of-the-seat thrills.)

Kefauver's cleaning operation will take most of the day. As the clock is running out, Brandstetter will make an animated GIF that will then be projected. "I'm just really looking forward to working with a machine that isn't all gunked up and slowed down," Brandstetter has said. "It will inspire me to do my best work."

Kefauver has commented, "Yeah, I feel like a mechanic, but both of us agree that a day with an optimized Windows machine running third party software beats a lifetime in the closed Apple ecosystem."

A friend is talking about organizing a "glitch" show in an out-of-town art space. Had an idea of making the above GIF into a DVD. Lord, so much work for something so simple.

1. The GIF above is something Travis Hallenbeck found and posted a while back, minus the color and a keyframe. (It's a rotating smiley.)

2. Wanted it centered, which this isn't. Screen captured the moving GIF while it was running on Firefox.

3. Trimmed the capture timewise so it rotated a few times with seamless loop points. Didn't want to do a long capture because of the possibility of undesirable time lag (from some hidden Windows process revving up in mid-grab). Couldn't do the trimming via batch processing using my primitive software so had to hand trim about ten versions and put them in a timeline to get a 2 minute mega-loop.

4, Saved the 2 minute loop as an .avi file, uncompressed. Enlarging the image to 720 x 480 for video caused some blurring of the nice sharp edges. The alternative, hand resizing 35 frames, would take too long--for some reason the extracted GIF frames I initially tried to work with were all different sizes, and getting them to line up via "canvas enlargement" would be a nightmare (there is some "GIF codec" issue with Camtasia Studio caused by a Microsoft "security update"--that might be the reason for the fragmented frames).*

5. Reinstalled Adobe Encore, a horrible wasteful product that I only use for one thing--burning DVDs that will autoplay and autoloop. It took some crashes before it meshed with my DVD-RW drive.

6. Encore won't accept an .avi that isn't 29.97 frames per second, so had to change the frame rate in VirtualDub and save the .avi again. (And then Encore renders it again--transcoding as an .mpg for burning.)

7. Kept my settings from an older DVD-burning project so loaded the .avi, reacquainted myself with the horrible Adobe workspace and burned three DVDs. It looks pretty good for all the transformation, especially on a small cheap CRT television screen. It would probably be OK projected, too.

*Update: Some additional explanation of this: the GIF above is missing a keyframe, which is why it is gimpy. When you extract its frames, saving them as individual .GIF files, they are odd sizes, making them difficult to batch-enlarge to 720 x 480. Sometimes capturing it in motion results in frames that are a uniform size. That did not happen here: the capture frames were the same odd sizes as the original. I've never figured out settings to control this.

Uodate 2: The Camtasia/Microsoft "GIF codec" issue has nothing to do with the irregular frame sizes. (I know because I removed the Windows Update in question, restoring normal functionality to Camtasia.) The frame sizes are a feature, not a bug, having to do with eliminating redundancy and keeping GIFs smaller. I've just never understood why when you open some GIFs the frames have uniform dimensions, making them easy to resize, or how to control this on the production side. A little research probably wouldn't hurt.

Sentences that might cause a frisson depending on the art:

"This music was made entirely by a computer, using automatic composing software."

"This music is played entirely by hand, no software was used."

"The score was by written by hand, one note at a time, without the aid of a computer."

"These paintings were made with a painting program that simulates gestural movements against a variety of paint surfaces, based on physical models."

"The string quartet is performed with software and sampled instruments."

"These intricate drawings were made by hand, with a tiny brush; no computer or mechanical device was employed in the process."

(Could keep going; perhaps the message here is "death to the wow factor." When words "make" a piece it's time to STFU. Dogma-like thesis in progress: anything that smacks of trompe-l'oeil, whether the hand imitating a machine or vice versa, such that it has to be explained, is an inferior impulse in art. The complete cyborging of art, music, and film is presumed, talking about it is yesterday.)