Various dumpers were playing around with Kim Asendorf's wendypaint.com website, created for The Wrong digital biennale. It's a pixel-y art platform where you can "make brushes" out of images or icons and drag them around to leave MSPaint-like trails. It reminded me about canvas painter, which I hadn't used in a while.
A dumper called canvas painter "excessively free software" in that you can download the javascript and make art in your browser from your home device, without any need to register and give your email and (uggh) real name, as Asendorf is requiring you to do. Also, you have to make your own screenshots (as in my painting above).
With wendypaint, Asendorf adds the all-important social dimension in that a community develops of wendypainters all sharing and archiving their drawings. This increases the likelihood of coverage on the "art and technology" websites, and of Asendorf being praised for circulationism, dispersion, and all the rest of that social utilitarian rhetoric.
The modest little canvas painter, while more "open source" than Asendorf's project, nevertheless lacks "social," bringing it closer to the dreaded hermeticism, that bugbear of new media prognosticators. Years ago I said Nasty Nets wasn't really social, because people just posted stuff and didn't talk about it all that much, which drew the ire of Marisa Olson, who informed me that all manner of back channel discussion was happening about Nasty Nets posts via chat and email (that implicitly, I had been excluded from -- nice).
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