It's Blog Action Day again

This year the theme of Blog Action Day is raising awareness of poverty. This means looking at not just the abstract concept of 'poverty' but realizing how it effects your neighbour - next door, down the street, on the street corner, around the world.

In the spirit of this blog, when I get around to posting, that is, I'm going to provide some links to organizations which try to put a human face on poverty.

Make Poverty History Canada addresses poverty more as a political issue, pointing to the impoverishment of people resulting from the action (or inaction) of governments.

Oxfam Canada points out a variety of issues that lead to poverty, and shows what you can do. Today, at least, and I hope on most days, the title picture on their website shows a variety of images following the theme "This is what women's rights look like". Women's rights are part and parcel of human rights, empowerment for everyone, and as the pictures show, a sense of community.

Tomorrow, October 16, is World Food Day, an event "established by FAO's Member Countries at the Organization's Twentieth General Conference in November 1979". Their 'History' page has posters going back to 1981.

I did a search on Google using World Food Day 2008 as my search term. The variety of events are quite impressive.

The Stephen Lewis Foundation "helps to ease the pain of HIV/AIDS in Africa at the grassroots level". It goes without saying that if people weren't dying with AIDS at such a high rate, if they had access to health care and food and necessary drugs, then maybe they could think about getting out of poverty.

... 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.