Search Results for: protocol

Olia Lialina has also questioned the accuracy of PBS's Off Book documentary on animated GIFs:

The historical part in the beginning is a disaster. The first few seconds of the video already mention "the Web 1.0 of the 70's, 80's and 90's". Come on ... I mean you don't need to know web history and GIF history to make GIFs and to admire them, but if you put yourself in front of the camera to talk about "the birth of the medium" check at least some basic facts. There was no web in the 70's and the 80's. The web started in 1993. If you like you can also count from 1989 when Tim Berners-Lee invented the HTTP protocol. I never do, but in this context it would be at least catchy. This way you could say that animated GIFs and the WWW are of the same age. After all animated GIFs as we know them now started with version number 89a.

On what Ryder Ripps has called "some weird Google docs comment thread" (set up by Paddy Johnson to fact-check PBS), the person who talked about the "Web 1.0 of the '70s, '80s and '90s" in the Off Book program, Patrick Davison, says he mis-spoke.

Update: Responding on Facebook to Lialina's post, Ripps also says discussing GIFs is "retarded" (and he's not talking about the slow frame rate), likening it to painters arguing about "how fucking paint is made and how to pronounce gesso." We've been down this road, with Ripps insisting GIFs are "just another format for animation." Right, because you can put a YouTube on your blog and set it for infinite loop and it'll just boot right up the way you want it to, and it'll be easy for others to save to their drives, edit, and share!

Update 2: My original paraphrase of Ripps' gesso quip was inaccurate so I changed the language to his exact words. I'm not a Facebook member or I'd link to his comments on Lialina's article so you could read them yourselves. The reason we're talking about a file format is because PBS did a show on a file format. Ripps, from his position on the sidelines, thinks we should be talking on the Google doc about "the people or culture behind" web animation. I'm sorry if my comments on the doc don't sufficiently recapitulate 10 years of blog writing - I thought I made a few good points.

Update 3: Michael Manning sent a link [removed, see below], thanks - if you're logged in to Facebook you should be able to read this. I got it all secondhand, via screenshot.

Update 4: Instead of a link to Facebook, here is the screenshot Ripps asked to have sent to me, where he also expresses surprise that Olia Lialina would expect PBS (a network on which he has appeared) to be "honest or accurate or give a shit."

Update 5: PBS or PBS contractor.

In March of 2010, Facebook was being described as having 400 million users.

By July of 2010 that year the number had increased to 500 million, according one expert named Mark Zuckerberg.

By July of 2011 the LA Times was reporting that the company had 600 million active monthly users. (Source: Facebook)

These are some nice round numbers!

Today, six months after the last count, an infographic appears claiming the number is now 800 million users! "One in ten humans on the planet" now use Facebook, we're told.

Everyone loves a good story. Also, the price of housing only goes up.

One of dump.fm's prominent chatters, a film student, frequently complains about "net artists," as in "I don't like it when net artists..."
What does he think a net artist is, exactly?
Here are some possibilities for what a net artist might be:

1. Someone with a BFA or MFA in net art (future nonexistent degrees)
2. Someone who self-consciously makes art involving web-based technology or protocols
3. Someone with a degree in studio art who posts self-identified artwork that can be found/indexed by search engines
4. Someone with no art degree who posts self-identified artwork etc
5. Someone with or without an art degree who posts any kind of visual expression, leaving it for others to identify it as art
6. Someone with/without an art degree who uses the internet for performance or agitprop, either self-identified or other-identified as art
7. Someone with/without an art degree who posts any kind of visual expression or does anything performative online, without caring whether it is called art or not
8. A shamanic presence who is doing something disturbing and art-like on the internet
9. Someone who has had online expression covered by a prominent "art and technology" website
10. Someone who works primarily offline, e.g. a painter showing in galleries, who creates a digital presence through exhaustive documentation
11. Someone who spends 20 hours a day in the social media blog-mills and believes this is a new kind of art
12. Someone in the social media blog-mills who finds collective or group validation of an art-like activity that may or may not be institutionally identified as art
13. A film or video student whose own personal greatness has yet to be recognized by any "art and technology" website

See Cracking Facebook's Dominance: New Cross-Network Commenting Protocol Could Be a Game Changer.

Am all for cracking dominance, Facebook's or otherwise. It is mindboggling that 400 million people needed a new version of AOL to enjoy the web. From that article, this sounds so weak:

Simply put, if you could leave Facebook and still communicate with people using Facebook (you can't today) then leaving Facebook would be a lot easier, and more social networks would have reason to invest in building a compelling service for you to use. If there was more than one meaningful option, those services would compete to build the best social network they possibly could. And Facebook would have more reason to be careful when considering dramatic changes in things like its privacy policy. Today, where else are you going to go without losing touch with all your friends?

You can pretty much find anyone with a few seconds' diligent googling. Why is being in instant, annoyingly close "poke" range of everyone you ever knew from the date of your birth to the present so important to people? I don't get it. (Obviously I am not on Facebook.)

Over at Paddy Johnson's blog, the second installment of a summer series called IMG MGMT (do we need to spell it out?) merits a look. Artists can be obsessive picture collectors and computer archiving and web distribution have advanced this formerly secondary practice to the forefront of many careers.

The eye-as-sponge approach prevails in Claudia Wieser's enjoyable dump of art, architecture, and found photo jpegs. The viewer threads connections among curvilinear (and occasionally hard-edged) utopian modernism in many guises, from not-so-famous buildings to random street views.

One of Petra Cortright's trademark ascii-meets-new-age-crystal explosions inspires until about halfway down the page, when she begins including famous artists' work on a "rainbow" theme. The New Museum's execrable "Hell Yes" logo breaks the fourth wall, but not in a good way.

Other artists have taken narrative approaches. Michaela Melián's post isn't a collection per se but a fairly focused art-and-photo essay on Hedy Lamarr, whose career ran the remarkable gamut from glamorous film actress to inventor of a patented "frequency hopping" communications protocol with both military and civilian applications. This technique, developed with avant garde composer George Antheil (Ballet Mécanique), is a rare instance of art-for-art's-sake contributing to the world of advanced technology. By interspersing her own techno-flavored paintings and collages on a Lamarr theme, Melián brings this secular story back to the realm of art.

Jon Rafman's gathering of images from Google Street Views isn't really collecting at all but solid, groundbreaking journalism. Obviously untold hours were spent perusing this recent-but-everyday tool for images in very specific, focused categories. Photos that look like art photos, photos of mishaps, photos showing the success and failure of Google's face-blurring software, photos that show class issues in a supposedly "universal" product (the down and out are more likely to be photographed unsympathetically than the up and in). As much as one hates to see more attention paid to the monopoly that aspires to put the happy face on Big Brother, this is worthwhile, thoughtful research.