I also figured out the clever way Oliver did these moving pixel portraits: http://oliverlaric.com/pixel/christophpriglinger.htm. He gridded off the original image and created a small GIF of each grid square, reassembled them in one long line of 'img src' tags and excluded any line breaks. Simple and brilliant. Once we start the photoshop instructionals you can make some of each other, and we'll see if I'm right . We're in a tiny perfect open-source universe here.
We will still discuss Olia Lialina's site at another time, so I won't include the link since we were just looking at her opening page.
I'm raising the bar ever so slightly as each class goes on.
I'll repeat that the collection assignment will be one of two final assignments.
minimum 25, max 50.
Lists of things that are invested with meaning or interest for you. Must be compelling for you or it won’t be for me.
You can go as low brow or high brow as you want . (No kitteh animations with earphones. That's the only rule. All other kittehs are acceptable.) You will have to find an interesting way to place this collection on an html page, a way that is somehow works with what you're showing us.
Another search method for your collection assignment:
Go to an on-line language translator, http://babelfish.yahoo.com/translate_txt, get translations for your keyword in several languages and try all of those languages with a Google image search. http://images.google.ca/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi the results will always be different. Try other search engines, for example http://www.dogpile.com/ is an aggregate of a bunch of diferent search engines. Every engine has its own search algorithm that is going to yield different results.
Last class I meant to talk more about tables. you've probably discovered them already on that three schools tutorial page: http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_examples.asp. They are totally counter intuitive, a major pain and one of the main reasons why Dreamweaver exists. However, Dreamweaver doesn't give us enough control as artists, that's why we've been hand-scripting stuff in this class
One row and three columns:
<table border="1">
<tr>
<td>100</td>
<td>200</td>
<td>300</td>
</tr>
</table>
100
200
300
so here's an example of an artist clearly using tables (yes back to Chris Ashley because he always surprises me with something wonderful) http://looksee.chrisashley.net/archives/756
If we strip the images we have this underlying structure (I added a border and left spaces between the coloured cells into show it better, but it only seems to work in IE):
As I mentioned in a previous class, go to the three schools link, find the tables tutorials and insert your own images in, you'll start to get an intuitive understanding of how you can make them work for you.
Now we can look at a seemingly more cacophonous page: http://jpegmess.org/1.html. by an artist from Chicago named Robert Wodzinski.
Mess is deceptive, this is very sophisticated work, and for those who love "more is more" there's a lot you can learn from looking at what he's doing. Remember we are talking about 2D pictorial space, you learned about composition in your foundation year.
These artists are all well aware of how they're placing their posts within the framing device that they all agreed on. They're currently in a show at vertexList http://www.vertexlist.net/ in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
I partially agree with Tom's assertion:"Taste and restraint are concepts they have no use for, making them the most lifelike of the surf clubs." But I think they show an incredible amount of taste in their choices for the installation. (They aren't throwing shit in a pile)
It also reminds me of fastwürms' Donkey@Ninja@Witch that some of you may have seen last year at the AGYU.
Now lets get to the insanely fun stuff. GIFs: Graphics Interchange Format you can read about the technical history here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF
"Animated GIFs have evolved over the last several years into a kind of ubiquitous “mini-cinema,” entirely native to the personal computer and the World Wide Web. Almost anyone can make one and almost every browser will read them. (From Wikipedia: “the Graphics Interchange Format is an 8-bit-per-pixel bitmap image format that was introduced by CompuServe in 1987 and has since come into widespread usage on the World Wide Web due to its wide support and portability.”)
In other words, no YouTube compression, no wait time, no subscriptions or proprietary formats to view, and they can be made in the most elementary and cheap imaging programs (free if you search for open source). GIFs are the purest expression of the democratic web and along with JPEGs and PNGs comprise its most authentic visual language.
As an artist I am attracted to this medium and have been making and posting GIFs for several years. This mini-cinema can be “scaled up” for galleries and film festivals but it’s equally fun to surrender it to the big pool of home-made creations that circulates on the Web. It’s gratifying to find GIFs you made yourself circulating on the pages of strangers months or years later. I don’t consider this “mail art”–it is too chaotic and lacks that practice’s genre rules. At the same time I do consider it a legit and underexamined form of post-studio art."
This is the gif I first saw On Tom Moody's blog that indicated to me that there was some wonderful stuff going on created by people were weren't neccessarily thinking of themselves as artists.
(this one's pretty great too. Can't remember where I found it)
Her too.
Below are animations by Sally McKay that got me excited about making them myself:
This isn't a correspondence course, stay for the whole class unless I let you go early.
Put your name on top of your html pages with this line below it, the tape thing didn't work for me last class:
The code looks like this: <HR NOSHADE WIDTH="100%">
Play with its attributes, don't see any? Try some out from other tags. I will explain right now the difference between relative and absolute values.
-a few interesting things from last class, fuck ups as opportunities. All the experiments later I tried didn't work. (I wanted to make HTML plaid, maybe I can do it with CSS)
-pushing the medium to do surprising things
-learning to use these tricks in a way that has some organic relationship to the images
a lovely restrained use of gifs: http://www.petracortright.com/
These next two links courtesy of Chris Ashley:
http://www.advancedpoetx.com/ (Siegfried Holzbauer is an Austrian visual artist often using language as a way to generate blocky HTML images- working in the Concrete Poetry vein.)
http://www.donrelyea.com/algorithmic_art.htm (Don Relyea is an artist and musician who is a real life accomplished programmer and writes his own software to create digital images from scratch or from other sources, like photos. He makes a lot of work. A couple of years ago he wrote The Reductionizer, which converts jpegs into html tables http://www.donrelyea.com/reductionizer_project.htm he says he got the idea of this by seeing some of Chris Ashley's tables that have a background image)
So we need an HTML primer here since using Dreamweaver teaches us nothing.
(For the students who know HTML: http://looksee.chrisashley.net/archives/603 Download the source and create an HTML file on your desktop, isolate the actual image and start playing with the values.)
For the rest of you:
1. Open a new plain text document
Mac users: open Text Edit, hit Command-Shift-T (or Format -> Make Plain Text)
PC users: open Notepad
2. Write the following code in the document:
<html>
<head> <title> hello, world! </title> </head>
<body>
Hello, World!
</body>
</html>
3. Save the document as index.html on your Desktop
4. In your favorite web browser, go to File -> Open File and open index.html
Check out these tags for manipulationg text:
<b>hi</b> hi
<i>hi</i> < hi
What are all these < and > things doing here? When you place a certain thing within these you are making something known as a tag. For example the <b> tag is saying to start bold text, and the </b> tag is saying to stop bold text. The tag with the slash (/) is known as the closing tag. Many opening tags require a following closing tag, but not all do. Tags make up the entire structure of an HTML document.
A more advanced tag for maipulating text:
Right click the image you want and save it to that folder.
to load your image onto your page, you use the 'img src' tag:
<img src="library/confidence.jpg"> (you don't need to close an image tag)
The "/" you see in web addresses represent folders, so if you have a jpg image called "luisvuiton.jpg" in a folder called "library" (which is a good practice..), that's why the tag reads: <img src="library/luisvuiton.jpg">
This file is stored 'locally'. "library/luisvuiton.jpg" is the pathname to the file.
On a web page, the image resides on a server so you would write the pathname so that the browser can find the image and load it. It's a 'remote' file.