June 2011

"Rhodes Notes" + response to reader

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"Rhodes Notes" [mp3 removed]

Some scratch sounds that I granularized a couple of years ago and forgot about. These riffs are supplemented with live synth blorts and a collection of Fender Rhodes loops that sort of tie everything together. Am actually pretty excited about this piece's mix of moods and gear changes.
An angry reader went off on me today, criticizing my blog, my writing, my person, and every fiber of my being as a complete sinkhole of poisonous corruption and the unkindest cut of all was that I constantly post...incomplete music!!
Sir, please, please unsubscribe from this blog feed. I've already blocked you on Twitter, for your own good--what were you thinking, following Satan like that?

Update: Reposted the song with tweaks to the gain and panning of the LFO'd "blorts." Those analog sounds are kind of horrible but I think they are critical to the piece.

GIF fights

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Another day, another rancorous discussion of animated GIFs. This topic brings out the worst in people, possibly because livelihoods are threatened. If everyone can do web design, who needs to hire designers? The cross-posted comment below is out of context but responds to several topics on the thread. The first refers to AFC intern Will Brand's leading questions about "GIF partisanship":

Paddy, Will designed the web page for you that has links to many of my (and others') writings on the subject of "why artists use GIFs": http://www.artfagcity.com/gif/links.php
He knows my answers to his questions, he is being needlessly confrontational here.

As I said in one of the posts linked to on that page: "Have said before that I'm not married to the animated GIF for 'artistic expression' on the web. If at some point only of 40% of browsers, mobile devices, etc read them then it will be time to use something else."

Michael Manning is correct that we use GIFs because they're still the best for what they do--quick easily loaded animations that read on the most browsers. He's also right that the big companies are phasing them out without offering a better alternative. Some of us like the "GIF aesthetic" of reduced frame rates, compression, etc, but that's mainly a stylistic choice.

In light of "cinemagraphs" Reddit has a discussion on "successors to the animated GIF": http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/i23fk/why_there_is_no_successor_of_animated_gif_format/ (hat tip Andrej)

That thread reiterates some of what has been said here but doesn't mention CSS.

I wish in these shouting matches we could agree on some basic post-GIF nomenclature. I originally referred to Google's Martha Graham animation as "html5 or canvas." Will called it "CSS sprites and JavaScript to animate them"; then Tim Whidden went back to calling it HTML5. According to Wikipedia "A common misconception is that HTML5 can provide animation within web pages, which is untrue. Either JavaScript or CSS3 is necessary for animating HTML elements. Animation is also possible using JavaScript and HTML."

I assume that Google's animation was a combination of CSS and JavaScript--that isn't automatically HTML5. Either way, our current GIF alternative seems to boil down to, as Michael Manning says about Tumult Hype, a "bad and less capable version of Flash."

Adding: the "canvas" element is a tag that can be added to HTML5 pages. It's not for animation per se. The main advantage of canvas seems to be interactivity--you can draw in it. In any case it's not in wide use and isn't really being proffered as a GIF substitute--please correct me if I'm wrong about this.

query 2

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Q. Outside of that, a more general question, which you're free to answer here or on your blog or not at all: why does football matter to people? Does it matter? Is this football partisanship a social project, or does it have some cognitive or ethical value? Specifically, I'm looking for an answer that isn't equally applicable to every other form of human activity.

A. [Grunts... cursing... sound of beer bottle breaking]

query

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Q. Outside of that, a more general question, which you're free to answer here or on your blog or not at all: why does YouTube matter to artists? Does it matter? Is this YouTube partisanship a social project, or is it relevant to the working methods of net artists today? Specifically, I'm looking for an answer that isn't equally applicable to another format.

A. Well, first of all, I don't really know what you mean by net artist. Aren't all artists just artists, using various tools? I guess we use YouTube because we like the unpredictability of never knowing what's going to happen once you submit your material to their resizing algorithms. Will your piece look good? Like crap? But despite those vagaries, it's nice to be in the warm embrace of a large company that owns your data and can remove it at a whim. "Social project" is a bit condescending to people who take their work seriously, but, yeah, YouTube is very social. Commenters say whatever pops in their heads, and it's fun to read those.