...more recent posts
Class #23
Remember when Paul showed you how to upload to the school server through Dreamweaver and then remember how you all forgot, and then remember how you asked me how to do it and then remember how I didn't know because I really wasn't really listening to Paul in the first place? Remember? Well Paul's reign of terror is over now and he's moved to another job at the University so we are now working with Matt. And he couldn't care less about learning dreamweaver so that he can explain this all to us again. So we will use an easier (and FREE) FTP client to get your flash files to the university server. (compliments of Madeline who loves Firefox)
File Transfer Protocol (FTP): (this links to a definition of FTP that you will of course ignore, but humour me so that you can nod your head when someone tells you to upload a file to their ftp server)
1) open Firefox>Tools menu> Add-ons> Get Extensions (takes you to the Firefox Add-ons page)
2) in the search box enter FireFTP and install it on your system. (then close and open firefox again)
3) open fireFTP and create your account:
4) Fucksocks!
5) Connect > select file from your hard drive and click the arrow to upload it to your directory on the university server. For your img and embed tags use the url: www.uoguelph.ca/~yourname/whatevs.gif (or jpeg or swf)
to embed the Flash SWF file called flashthingie.swf (that you just uploaded) in your HTML:
<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,0,0" width="550" height="400" id="flashthingie" align="middle">
<param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain" />
<param name="movie" value="http://www.uoguelph.ca/~yourName/flashthingie.swf" />
<param name="quality" value="high" />
<param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff" />
<param src="http://www.uoguelph.ca/~yourName/flashthingie.swf"quality="high" bgcolor="#ffffff" width="550" height="400" name="flashthingie" align="middle" allowScriptAccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" />
</object>
(before you go copying and pasting this, remember that your movie parameters will be a bit different, you can always generate an HTML file with your .swf when you export and lift that code, just remember to change the pathnames to your space on the school server)
more links:
http://abigaillloyd.blogspot.com/
http://www.losamigosdelaimagen.com.ar/index.html
http://www.achievershvac.com/ac-unit.swf (basically this class is all about anything that moves)
http://www.c3.hu/collection/form/ (or anything we can make move)
http://www.songsofthehumpbackwhale.com/projects/areyousureyourenotacomputer.html
http://www.once-upon-a-forest.com/
http://www.songsofthehumpbackwhale.com/lines_on_a_page.html (anything that moves, we will watch in this class)
http://www.onequestioninterview.com/search/label/OLIVER%20LARIC
Class #22
A small addendum to the previous class about copyright and how we are all headed for jail (where you can enroll in my prison crafts course and learn how to make wallets from cigarette packages). One of my blogging friends posted this definition of copyleft.
Also in recent pirate news from the CBC:
"A Calgary man is believed to be the first person convicted in Canada under new movie pirating legislation when he pleaded guilty to the unauthorized recording of the Johnny Depp movie Sweeney Todd.
Richard Lissaman was arrested in a northeast Calgary theatre last Dec. 21 making an illegal copy of the movie.
The 21-year-old pleaded guilty on Friday, was fined $1,495 and banned from movie cinemas for a year.
Other stipulations for his one-year probation include being banned from purchasing, owning or possessing any video recording equipment, including one on a cellphone.
"We would have liked to see jail ... however, this is a good start," said Virginia Jones of the Canadian Motion Picture Distributors Association."
The article goes on to tell us that a rep from Paramount Pictures in Hollywood came to the Calgary courtroom to read a victim impact statement. (Perhaps he wept.)
Anyhoo, onwards:
In case you were wondering why I didn't show you much early net art, it's because MOST OF THE LINKS ARE DEAD. (with the exception of the awesome Olia Lialina, who always keeps her links alive). Also Potatoland who we looked at last class: http://potatoland.com/landfill/ And this link is alive and kicking in more ways than one: http://www.easylife.org/netart/catalogue.html
Further onwards:
Brilliant use of 3D graphic glitches: http://maxpaynecheatsonly.jodi.org/index.html
and: http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/
http://www.tgad.com/tgad2001/gb/gb-index.html
http://dura.cell.free.fr/home/swf/arms12.swf
http://tex-server.org/
http://jonrafman.com/
http://www.blownupblowup.com/
IMPORTANT INFO ON ASSIGNMENTS:
Tuesday the 25th is my last class with you, not the 27th as we assumed earlier. On the 27th there will be another class in the lab so some of you won't have access to a computer.
I am told that the lab will be opened on Friday the 28th from 8:30 until 4:30 for students who need to complete work. (the new tech guy who's name is not-Paul will be there)
You can email your final projects (browser pages) to me on or before November 29. Because you are sending them to me, TEST THEM OUT ON YOUR FELLOW STUDENTS. That means email your browser pages to a friend's system and make sure that the page opens and appears as you intended.
For the rest of the class period, check out the puppycam WHILE YOU WORK
Class #21
Today while you WORK I will chatter on about copyright, fair use and gleeful brazen theft.
(image downloaded from YTMD created from oodles of copyrighted material)
Internet larceny makes the rocking web world go round.
A current thread about fair use issues here:http://www.artfagcity.com/2008/11/10/afc-receives-cease-and-desist-from-the-estate-of-helmut-newton/
A good site for info on all those cease and desist letters that you will receive after taking this class:http://www.chillingeffects.org/
Tom Moody's Optidiscs:
And their travels all over the web:
From http://artmovingprojects.blogspot.com/2008/05/tom-moodys-optidisc-online-installation.html
Now as we joyfully trip across the web grabbing what ever we need, keep in mind that someone could also grab your web art and slap swastikas on it. (I was going to say: use it in a porn production, but you little pervs would probably be delighted)
A terrific source for info on current Canadian copyright issues, is Michael Geist:
Dr. Michael Geist is a law professor at the University of Ottawa where he holds the Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-commerce Law. He has obtained a Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.)degree from Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, Master of Laws (LL.M.) degrees from Cambridge University in the UK and Columbia Law School in New York, and a Doctorate in Law (J.S.D.) from Columbia Law School.It is Fair use to copy and paste, quote, a small section of the text from his web site to criticize it, comment upon it or teach about it.
Works without copyright are considered to be in the Public Domain. you can use them any way you want. (restrictions will still apply for commercial use, and academic use: Attribution everyone)
-One thing to note is that the reason the CRIA hasn't been suing your asses for all the music you download is because, currently, it's (sort of) legal in Canada, because the Canadian government taxes recordable media on the presumption that every DVD and CD is purchase in order to record copyrighted material. (we are talking about personal use here)
From The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism by Jonathan Lethem (if you haven't read his novel Motherless Brooklyn, it's stellar.)
Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one's voice isn't just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing.
[...]
It's worth noting, then, that early in the history of photography a series of judicial decisions could well have changed the course of that art: courts were asked whether the photographer, amateur or professional, required permission before he could capture and print an image. Was the photographer stealing from the person or building whose photograph he shot, pirating something of private and certifiable value? Those early decisions went in favor of the pirates. Just as Walt Disney could take inspiration from Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill, Jr., the Brothers Grimm, or the existence of real mice, the photographer should be free to capture an image without compensating the source. The world that meets our eye through the lens of a camera was judged to be, with minor exceptions, a sort of public commons, where a cat may look at a king.
Novelists may glance at the stuff of the world too, but we sometimes get called to task for it. For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside. In a graduate workshop I briefly passed through, a certain gray eminence tried to convince us that a literary story should always eschew “any feature which serves to date it” because “serious fiction must be Timeless.” When we protested that, in his own well-known work, characters moved about electrically lit rooms, drove cars, and spoke not Anglo-Saxon but postwar English—and further, that fiction he'd himself ratified as great, such as Dickens, was liberally strewn with innately topical, commercial, and timebound references—he impatiently amended his proscription to those explicit references that would date a story in the “frivolous Now.” When pressed, he said of course he meant the “trendy mass-popular-media” reference. Here, transgenerational discourse broke down.
I was born in 1964; I grew up watching Captain Kangaroo, moon landings, zillions of TV ads, the Banana Splits, M*A*S*H, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. I was born with words in my mouth—“Band-Aid,” “Q-tip,” “Xerox”—object-names as fixed and eternal in my logosphere as “taxicab” and “toothbrush.” The world is a home littered with pop-culture products and their emblems. I also came of age swamped by parodies that stood for originals yet mysterious to me—I knew Monkees before Beatles, Belmondo before Bogart, and “remember” the movie Summer of '42 from a Mad magazine satire, though I've still never seen the film itself. I'm not alone in having been born backward into an incoherent realm of texts, products, and images, the commercial and cultural environment with which we've both supplemented and blotted out our natural world. I can no more claim it as “mine” than the sidewalks and forests of the world, yet I do dwell in it, and for me to stand a chance as either artist or citizen, I'd probably better be permitted to name it.
(Myfanwy Ashmore made a similar observation to me years ago in reference to her flaunting of copyright withr the computer games she hacks into. The copyrighted property of these game producers littered her childhood.)
More from Lethem:
Artists and writers—and our advocates, our guilds and agents—too often subscribe to implicit claims of originality that do injury to these truths. And we too often, as hucksters and bean counters in the tiny enterprises of our selves, act to spite the gift portion of our privileged roles. People live differently who treat a portion of their wealth as a gift. If we devalue and obscure the gift-economy function of our art practices, we turn our works into nothing more than advertisements for themselves. We may console ourselves that our lust for subsidiary rights in virtual perpetuity is some heroic counter to rapacious corporate interests. But the truth is that with artists pulling on one side and corporations pulling on the other, the loser is the collective public imagination from which we were nourished in the first place, and whose existence as the ultimate repository of our offerings makes the work worth doing in the first place.
Class #20
http://www.as-found.net/ and http://www.moresoon.org/blog/moresoon.html from http://www.moresoon.org/
http://www.potatoland.org/ (click words > Grass)
http://www.leegte.org/ (click Internet Overexposed)
http://www.base-apex.com/
More from Justin kemp: http://www.justinkemp.com/bluesteel.html, http://www.justinkemp.com/sixpack.html (more horrifying than Goatse), http://www.justinkemp.com/hardtimez.html
http://castlemorbius.com/
http://trackingtransience.net/
Collection: http://ifoundyourphoto.blogspot.com/
GET TO WORK
b/t/w someone unhacked Madeleine's hack on The Royal Society of Intertubes site, so she has to go back and unhack the unhack. (so I can show it off a bit more)
Class #19
Joe McKay: ALH84001,0
(the animation above, an example of what he teaches his student in Foundations of American Cyber-Culture at UC Berkeley, suddenly makes this class look restrained and rigorous in comparison)
http://www.20q.net/
http://www.sketchswap.com/
http://www.trippytext.com/ (if you go on to do post-graduate studies, a thesis in Trippy text will give you that extra edge.)
Joe sent this to me with the subject line: BEST GIF IN THE WORLD
The rest of the class is a work period so that you don't show up at the end of November, bleating like baby goats about not having time to finish the final asignments.
(if we get bored I am going to play this over and over again with the speakers turned up WAY HIGH)