March 2011

More GIF Complaining (for Wizardishungry)

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Brad Troemel throws a weak punch at devotees of "the artistic GIF" by trying to distinguish them from the ideologically correct image dispersers in an e-flux essay titled "Poor Image." (The latter is worth a read.)

The nut of Troemel's argument is GIFs are too perfect in their collapse of motion into image to have any complexity, and somehow do not partake of the copy-recopy-distribute-redistribute culture of jpegs and YouTubes described in the "Poor Image" essay. This rather ignores the rich culture of glitching, breaking, and otherwise dismantling GIFs to show what makes them tick described on pages he conveniently doesn't link to (his sources re: the "artistic GIF" are Slate and Motherboard, go figure). Also, he neglects to mention that (i) "giffing" is a widespread, popular practice of converting YouTubes and other vids into GIFs, (ii) GIFs themselves are heavily remixed, losing quality each time, and (iii) GIFs are often strung together in sequences to make videos, which can in turn be regiffed. All of which is done by Da People, not just elitist artists. This makes them "poor images" even if the author of the poor image essay has never heard of GIFs.

The real message behind Troemel's parsing of the "poor image" by filetype seems to be I love my crowdsourced phenomena but not your crowdsourced phenomena.

windows 7 mspaint - the horror, the horror

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mspaintW7annot

Friends and longtime blog-glancers know I like the old, early '90s version of Microsoft Paint called Paintbrush (originally made by a company called Z-Soft that Bill Gates bought) and only tolerate the supposed improved version, called Paint or MSPaint. Now it's been improved again in Windows 7, meaning they tried to make it more like Photoshop. A few quick notes:

1. The "spraycan" tool still looks like a miserable bee-swarm.
2. You can still do the MSPaint secrets Travis found, such as holding the shift key while dragging a pasted area to make a quasi-brush. I can't verify whether fattening lines and selected areas can still be done using [Ctrl and Numpad +] because my netbook with W7 has no number pad.
3. Some new mostly useless polygon shapes are available.
4. A limited palette of hideous Photoshop filter-like textures is now included, such as this "crayon shading" or whatever it's supposed to be.
5. A new selection of brushes that imitate watercolor strokes has been added. These automatically anti-alias when you release the click, so they look nice and smooth at the edges. Unfortunately when you use a fill color the anti-aliased area shows up as white! Nice going, guys.
6. Some transparency is available in the new "soft" brushes." This might be useful but all subtle gradations are lost unless you save to .png.
7. The old pencil tool can still be used to outline and fill, to prevent the problem described in #5 above. The pencil now has more line widths, as seen in the example. Still need to test if this can be fattened further using [Ctrl and Numpad +].
8. Even if the washy effect of transparent brushstrokes is lost on saving to GIF or BMP, having the ability to "bleach" existing colors might be good--need to play with it more.

All in all, still a crap tool, now with features lifted from the king of crap toolmakers, Adobe.

go, daddy (barbara kruger online)

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barbarakrugerdotcom

Found here on Feb 17, 2011.

Best known for her layering of ironic red and white captions in Future Bold Oblique font over black and white stock photos when she virtually defined the art world of the 1980s, Barbara Kruger has somewhat dramatically shifted her style in the Net Era. Her recent work imitates the lowbrow styles of parked domains and pharmaceutical ads, exposing the masculinist codes of current web design: for example, employing a "babelicious" female in a traditionally macho profession such as race car driving to serve as a spokesmodel. For Kruger online discourse is a Freudian joke, as seen in the above piece titled "Go Daddy" (2009), which mimics an expired Barbara Kruger domain.