... and then there was more

On Robert Horvitz' page about Jack Burnham, one of the articles referenced is Edward A.Shanken's The House That Jack Built... (PDF is here). In that paper, Shanken discusses the exhibition Software that Burnham curated at the Jewish Museum in 1970. The Museum has some archived past exhibits but they go back only to 1998. This site is worth exploring, especially if you can find the images that have the magnifying glass icon. There aren't many of them but the ones I saw did zooming in very well.

See, I've digressed again.

Next time, I'll follow a lead or two from the Horvitz and Shanken papers.

One thing leads to another ...

which is exactly why I never finish reading a book on computer art. I have to go off on one tangent or another, and then I find another book or article or web page. If it's online it has links that I have to follow. If I have a paper copy, then there are references which I have to search online.

The following is a case in point. I found a thesis on the history of computer art at the University of Western Australia. In the first paragraph of the introduction the author, Grant Taylor, mentions the problems caused for artists and curators by their involvement with computer art. The endnote for this point refers to Jack Burnham and an article he wrote in a book by Kathleen Woodward, titled The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture. The book is available in many libraries and if you want to follow up, then enter the title in the WorldCat search box in the side column.

I searched Google for Jack Burnham and found many links. A very good site, with more links, is Robert Horvitz' Node for Jack Burnham. More next time on what I found there.

And for the original CGW article ...

just check out the Computer Graphics World website. The url for the article is impossibly long so I'm not linking here. Besides, it's more fun to browse through the issues which go back to 1999. Directions for finding the 25 years retrospective ... article are in my September 26 entry.

Of course, finding the correctly formatted article on the magazine website sort of takes the shine off finding it through my local library, but I still think that databases of magazines and journals available through libraries are a wonderful resource.

Fibonacci animation from Computer Graphics World

I found a reference to this animation in an article entitled 25 years retrospective: from humble beginnings, computer art transcends traditional media: part 1 digital art in the January 2002 issue of Computer Graphics World (vol. 25, issue 1 (p. 18).

I had printed off the article in 2002 while I still had access to InfoTrac at my workplace (University of Saskatchewan Library). There were no graphics included when I had the article emailed to me. When I came across it again today, I decided to see if my local library had a copy on InfoTrac. Well, it did, fully accessible to library card holders, and with both PDF and text copies. The PDF is pretty awful, and the text copy has small pictures but between the two and my original text-only copy, I can figure out what text goes with what picture.

The article provides a good overview of computer art as found in Computer Graphics World. I wanted to see if I could find better copies of some of the art so I went Googling and found this animation at video.google.com. What is really neat is that it was created at a construction company.

One hundred and one shades of gray

Once upon a time (1999), John Maeda wrote a book, Design by Numbers, which was meant to assist readers in "acquiring the skills necessary to write computer programs that are themselves visual expressions". The "programming system" that he developed, DBN, is still available at Design By Numbers. It's a Java program run from a DOS window, so it starts from a .bat file, if you download it to use on your computer.

In the book, Maeda allows the reader to construct simple programs using straightforward commands. As the book progresses, the commands become more complex, involving a lot of typing if you want to follow his instructions exactly.

The first program consists of only one command - Paper 0, Paper 1, etc., up to Paper 100. Each program, when run, shows one "sheet of paper", consisting of whatever solid colour, or shade of gray, plus black and white, is requested. While the program will do this faithfully, it doesn't provide a way to show this result, except in the display area.

This animation is my attempt to show the 99 shades of gray, plus white and black, by using a program which will produce and display them more or less properly. Not as easy to do as I first thought, since I had to find a program with a colour set option for black to white, with 1-increment steps, which could then export to a video file which could handle the subtle changes of shade. I used Corel Rave 3.0, which I don’t believe is being made anymore - I got it as part of CorelDRAW Graphics Suite. Rave has a very convenient colour palette named ' percent grey' which shows all 101 shades that I wanted.

The next problem was to find a format to save in that would show all 101 shades. Flash works well but Blogger didn't like it. A .mov file doesn't show the shades. So I chose .avi, even though it is a large file, and the numbers are blurred a bit. A lot of fussing, I know, for something that is sort of 'geeky' but I like doing finicky things.

DBN wasn't developed any further than beta version 4, although I could find only version 3.01, but Processing, "an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions" sort of carries on the same idea in colour. I like the simplicity of DBN though, or I will until it gets too complicated.


This is a screen shot of the program in action. Very simple and very quick.