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Art thoughts

Vincent van Wylick — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 08:16:22 +0000

I’m a little sick with the flu, hence a few days off blogging, but I just wanted to share this with you (the video from vbs.tv does not seem to show up in the rss-feed).

It’s the story of Carlos Amorales, a Mexican visual artist, who does some pretty interesting things, including: graphic design, installations, performance art, and co-founding a record-label. If you don’t have time to watch the whole thing (it’s only 14 min.!), worth checking out is:

01:15, when he shows how me makes his illustrations by keeping a digital database of images in different shapes. All in black, though he occasionally uses red. If you think these simplistic, then look at some of his installations (next point), and you see that these are just the beginning, really.
04:40, when he shows some of his installations and talks about how they give the audience the ability to enter the work. It made me think about how creative developers/artist can use the new technology of “augmented reality” to create layers above art-installations that take you more into the experience. Any museum I go to these days, I always get the audio-tour as it adds to my understanding of what I’m seeing. The same could apply to pointing your mobile camera at it and seeing a visual augmentation. Of course, this is where those infernal copyright laws come in; I think this is something that should be done first with certain avant garde / independent artist, to show-case the potential…
09:20, when he talks about his record label, Nuevos Ricos (turn down your speakers before clicking this link), for which they created a manifesto, which included giving all the music away for free. Instead the focus was on performance, on entertainment. I mean, well it’s completely ridiculous and you can see that it’s more of an experiment to understand youth culture. At the same time, it is something that many anti-copyright people (including me) have argued for, that music should be about the performance, not about making money from a shiny disc / digital file. But in the end, maybe music/art should be about self-expression and we all express ourselves in different ways. Some, like the clowns in the video, who have very little musical talent, will prefer showcasing themselves. Others will prefer to just make music and make a living from that. We live in a very nuanced world, after all…

End thoughts, hope to be back this Monday.

Vincent

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What would an Always-On Device look like? Do we even want it?

Vincent van Wylick — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 03:18:47 +0000

It’s funny how our thoughts evolve from one day to the next. Which reminds me that we need to adapt our About page to reflect that a little more, as it’s about 2 years old. My thinking about Always-On Devices comes from a simple pain that I feel when I miss “a moment.” Sometimes I wish that I could… well Andy Warhol in Miraclemen phrases it much better than me.

In Alan Moore’s & Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel, Warhol’s existence is not painted in a very colourful light (pun intended). He has been resurrected as a machine into a society where money no longer plays a role and is very depressed. So his ability to record everything is really not very meaningful to him. Having only read this part of the comic last night, already my sentiments about Always-On are changing towards… and what would it accomplish?

I recently visited an Art Exhibition of independent artists in Maastricht and tested out a little what an Always-On Device would look like to me. I used my camera, a Canon 870 IS, as a recording device, which I held in front of me while walking through the crowd.

I managed to capture the people experiencing an exhibition, a piano player who was adding atmosphere to a room full of art, just hypnotically playing a few notes over and over. What actually intrigued me the most, I captured maybe two dozen miniature sets for the Maastricht Opera house. It was very surreal, the sets which were made out of cardboard and wood mostly, were 3-dimensional, and I was floating with my camera device around it and through it even, capturing it all at angles never deemed possible to me before. As if I was my own film-director.

Of course, apart from the disappointing battery-life on my camera, clearly not designed for video-recording, and the occasionally funny looks that I got, the real challenge is to make that data actionable—a big priority in everything I do. It is a matter of transforming the raw footage into a tight package that can be consumed by others, and the question is really, should this be the responsibility of the creator or of the consumer…?

With us having reached and surpassed the age of the mashup, it makes less and less sense to continue to try and re-invent the wheel, rather delegating that task across far more… interested people (in the area of video-editing at least), of which there is no shortage, as long as the tools and the specific community exists. Clearly, that kind of methodology requires a lax attitude about copyright.

To recap, so that it doesn’t seem like I’m entirely floating in thoughts, an Always-On Device would need:

A willing human recorder
A recording device designed for capturing experiences
A way to process that information into “usable bits”
A favourable legal environment
And a willing consumer

I’ll leave the question of “do we even want it?” for smarter people than me to decide. In the mean time, I will continue my search for point 2 and 3 on that list (more on this blog, if successful).

Until after Paris,
Vincent

Is mobile commerce disruptive or incremental?

Vincent van Wylick — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 10:34:18 +0000

Another way to phrase this is, whether mobile commerce will drastically change life as we know it or not?

Disruptive technologies, according to Christensen, lead to products that are cheaper, simpler, and, often, more convenient to use. By that definition, e-commerce could certainly be seen as a disruptive innovation over brick & mortar commerce, and to some extent, m-commerce could do the same to e-commerce. Or could it?

I look at technological disruption on three levels:

Production: will people get fired/hired/retrained? Will production-methods change? etc.?
Will technological behaviour change?
Will societal behaviour change?

As for the first, I don’t think production will change as dramatically as it did from brick & mortar. Clearly, models like Amazon and eBay wreaked some havoc on book- and second-hand stores. But production and maintenance for an m-commerce application will likely just happen on PCs and will logically be built for both platforms (with some possible exceptions in emerging economies). With the mobile versions of browsers like Safari and Opera, changes also need to be minimal. I do see there being less reliance on keyboards, (i.e. an interface-change), just based on my own clumsy fingers, but e-commerce is not exactly word-intensive.

Regarding changes in technological behaviour, this is clearly already happen and will continue to happen. Things like the Starbucks-Apple partnership for digital music-downloads are just the tip of the iceberg. Eventually, we could be seeing more use of phone’s video- and audio-recording abilities. Imagine taking a picture of your neighbour’s clothes and doing a visual search for that sweater? And of course there could be innovations in terms of mobile payment methods, mobile logistics, rfid and barcode-scanning, etc. The possibilities are endless and only constrained by traditional businesses’ lack of imagination.

Changes in societal behaviour is one I am most excited about. The way I see it, PCs have been an immobile force in our lives for many years, forcing us (in my opinion) to think and act in left-brained ways, not to mention never leave our seats out of fear we might miss something. Now, clearly the 24/7 “crackberry” isn’t exactly the answer, but I’d like the new found freedom that mobile technology enables to lead us down a new or perhaps old path, one where I can even see room for brick & mortar again. Something like:

take picture of product in store (after smelling/tasting/touching/trying it on),
send picture to warehouse,
warehouse ships home.

Removing one the most annoying component of shopping, carrying your shopping-bags home.

Two out of three… I think that qualifies as disruptive! But this is just my opinion of course, and I’m just beginning learn about the world of m-business. Tell me how you visualise mobile technology changing (y)our lives, or perhaps not?

Vincent

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Nicest new Last.fm feature

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 11:12:59 +0000

Continuing our short(!) screenshot-series on geeky innovations… Thank you, Skitch, for making it so easy!

I was really missing a collection of my Loved Tracks in Last.fm and it looks like the new version delivered. What we need next is a way for ratings in iTunes (and more specifically my iPod) to automatically register as “loved” in Last.fm, and for that to create a TheFilter-like service of creating custom playlists that I like.

*Sigh* why does interoperability of web-to-real-world-to-web have to be so complicated?

Vincent

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Museums online: interview with Alain Romang

Fidji SIMO — Mon, 05 May 2008 01:36:35 +0000

Hi, Fidji here. In the context of my thesis on the democratization of art via the Internet, I had the chance to interview Alain Romang, in charge of the online communication of Les Abattoirs, a modern and contemporary art museum based in Toulouse (France), which has developed a real Internet strategy to reach a new audience. I find really interesting to understand how the Internet, based on open access, has been used by museums, which have tried for a long time to cultivate their sacred atmosphere, whereas their mission is to make their collections as accessible as possible. Here are the most interesting pieces of the interview.

What is the purpose of the online communication of the museum? Attract different people on the website, or in the museum, or is it essentially a loyalty tool?

The first objective was to give some elements of information on opening hours, driving directions… to an audience that starts all its searches on the Internet. Our stats prove that most of the site visits are related to the planning of a visit to the museum. But what we appreciate is that the Internet is also a way of preparing people to the visit of the museum by giving some background on the artist, so that they really can make the most of the exhibition. We can also follow-up after the visit by providing tools to go deeper into the understanding of a particular piece. In terms of finding a new audience thanks to our online initiatives, it is clearly one of our objectives but we haven’t done any survey to prove that it is working yet. Let’s say that we strongly suppose the correlation between the increase in number of visits on our site and the increase in number of visits of our museum.

You offer the possibility of accessing 2000 pieces of art virtually: do you think that it is possible to feel a real artistic emotion on the screen of a computer?

It is almost a philosophical question, but yes, I sincerely believe it, at least if we believe that there are several types of artistic emotions. In the physical museum, there is a relation to the architecture, to a particular atmosphere, and also the intervention of simpler things such as the reaction of other visitors, that you obviously don’t have online. Which is why you really need to use the most appropriate tools online to compensate this, and some virtual exhibitions have clearly manage to achieve this goal.

Do you think that there is a risk of cannibalization of the offline by the online, if most of the collections are accessible online?

I think that the contrary is more likely. I feel that a certain audience, who is not used to visiting museums (for geographical, cultural or sociological reasons) will be more likely to plan a visit to a museum if it had the opportunity of discovering some pieces online. I believe that both experiences are interesting: the Internet is for example much more appropriate for educative purposes since we can put more information online. The two experiences feed each other but there is no cannibalization.*

What are the different objectives of the tools that you use: video, blog of the museum, Facebook page?

The blog allows a better reactivity. We have created it to talk about news of the museum, events or marginal subjects with a more original view that don’t fit within the website. The possibility of commenting is also interesting, since it is, at least for most museums, a new kind of interaction with the audience. And obviously it improves our referencing on search engines thanks to more content and key words.

Concerning pictures and videos on Flickr/Youtube, it is part of the mission of archiving of the museum, but also allows new interactions: Flickr announced the creation of « pools », which will allow visitors to post their own pictures of the museum directly in Les Abattoirs’ Flickr space.

Facebook is more of an experiment so far. Of course the idea of federating a community around the museum is really interesting, but so far we’ve been there only because it is a tool with an amazing growth and I didn’t want to be “late” on such a tool. And thanks to all the new apps, we find new useful modules to add every day, so it forces us to keep being innovative.

What are the next steps to be sure that your museum will remain on top of the new Internet initiatives?

So far we are focused on improving the current tools: redesigning the blog, feeding Flickr and Youtube, expanding our Facebook network. We also want to develop podcasting, targeted to specific exhibitions. Finally, there is the debate on the presence on Second Life: we have done a simple ROI calculation and it seems that at this stage, the time spent to create Les Abattoirs in Second Life is not justified by the frequentation. Of course it creates some media exposure, but we don’t want to do that only to appear in blogs and newspapers. We want to launch this initiative only when we will have more visibility on our return on that, especially since the hype around Second Life is already declining. But we are watching it closely.

* A survey realized by the Institute of Museum and Library Services proves Alain’s point: it shows that people connected to the Internet go to museums 2.6 times more than people without any access. Among the respondents, 45% have visited both a virtual and offline museum, 50% a real museum only and 5% a virtual museum only.

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An additional view to “Copyright or the Right-to-eat”

Fidji SIMO — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 08:22:22 +0000

I was just commenting on Vince’s last article Copyright or the Right-to-Eat and realized that my comment was getting so long that I should better write an article on the subject. This actually funny because I was about to write a piece on exactly the same subject, and for most of it with the same opinion, because I attended on Friday a conference called “New Media Artists and The Law” organized by California Lawyers for the Arts and I wanted to share the thoughts of this conference on this blog. It gathered Emily A. Berger, Intellectual Property Fellow with Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mike Linksvayer, Vice President of Creative Commons, and Joel Slayton, Director of the CADRE Laboratory for New Media, and exploring the ways copyright laws are implicated in new media art and the challenges artists face in this evolving area of the law.

In direct connection with Vince’s article, Mike Linksvayer, VP of Creative Commons defended the idea that there are plenty of ways to make a living while giving one’s art for free. But I had the same issue as Vince’s about the status of the artist in our society: what does this reveal if people are not willing to pay for art anymore? I personally believe that the Internet and the culture of gratuity and open access is an opportunity for unknown artists because giving their art away for free allows them to get some market traction and then, be able to sell some “derivatives” of their art, and make money that they wouldn’t have made without this strategy. So for this specific kind of people, I would say that it shouldn’t be an ethical problem to make money on things that are not the product of their art itself, because the product of their art itself wouldn’t have generated any money otherwise. But of course there is the other portion, which can have an opportunity of making money from its art directly, but which will start feeling a certain pressure to give this art for free. I was kind of shocked during this conference to hear artists in the audience speaking about offering their art on the Internet as a fatality, a trend they were obliged to follow, as if the “Myspace success story” was the only hope left. But as Emily A. Berger mentioned during the conference, referring to Chris Anderson’s article “Free”, you will always have free to compete with you: so either you try to make it better than what is offered for free, or you try to tackle the niche of people having more money than time (the iTunes niche, which, with the right pricing, is actually not a niche anymore), or you make it free and find ways to make money otherwise. An excellent article from Kevin Kelly called “1000 True Fans” argues that an artist only needs 1000 True Fans to make a decent living, since a True Fan, that you can “recruit” via the free offering, will after that be ready to pay for anything related to you. And he also mentions that the Internet allows you to reach this number more easily than traditional channels and therefore find a middle way between the long tail and the superstar.

But while all this talk is perfectly understandable in the case of the music industry which is a market based on volume, it is a totally different story when it comes to visual arts. Which is why I have trouble understanding a copyright law which seems to tackle all the artists as if they were a unified world facing the same challenges. And this is also why I welcome initiatives like Creative Commons which allows people to give away some of their rights when they feel that the copyright law doesn’t answer their needs and that these new licenses can benefit them, as long as (and this is a major risk) it doesn’t put any pressure on other people in the industry to do the same. But how do you adapt these notions of derivatives in the case of visual arts? It is way harder for a painter to get True Fans, and even if he manages to get some, I am not convinced at all that a person falling in love with the image of a painting will be ready to buy a T-shirt with this same image: it is just not the same feeling. The visual art market has somewhat been already confronted to the same kind of problem outside the Internet, like how to monetize a happening or short-lived works of art. When Christo decided to wrap the Reichstag in Berlin and the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris, he had to find ways of monetizing a work of art that was offered for free to the inhabitants of these cities, and therefore he sold some pictures of the different stages of the experiment. But, to go back to Vince’s point, this is Christo, and a lot of people are interested in those pictures, whereas an unknown visual artist doesn’t have the traction.

Actually, the major paradox is that only artists who would manage to sell their art directly are able to sell derivatives in a significant amount, whereas the starving artists who would be ready to give their art for free and make a living by selling derivatives don’t have the market traction to generate enough interest around their derivatives, especially in visual arts. And after all, even if Emily A. Gerber said “get your art out there by any means, get market traction and after that you’ll see”, a thousand fans is a pretty large number don’t you think?

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Visual Thinking : a conference with Dan Roam

Fidji SIMO — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 06:48:26 +0000

Hello, Fidji here. I remember that, for one of my first articles on Tech It Easy, I spoke about it with Jeremy and he told me “that’s interesting, but there is no way you are going to make your point if you don’t draw something to show it”. And I didn’t, because I couldn’t find a way of summarizing it all in a simple picture. I thought it was better with words only, but truly it wasn’t. That’s the point that Dan Roam is trying to make in his book “The back of the napkin”.

Dan was today’s speaker at the eBay Speaker Series conference, so I had the chance to enjoy hearing him explain his theory. He is convinced that any business problem can be solved by a simple picture, that anybody has the ability to draw. But we often believe that we are not able to draw anything because the current educational system doesn’t give us many opportunities to use our visual thinking – even if it is an innate form of thinking as a child.

He shared a funny anecdote with us: he was advising Microsoft on a UI type of problem, and to foster the discussion, he showed them some handmade drawings. The people in the room were enthusiastic about this new support for their discussion, and at the end of the meeting some exec went to see Dan and asked him: “what software did you use to make the UI seem as if it is handmade?”.

And I definitely agree with Dan when he says that some software help and stimulate our thinking whereas others (and a lot of them) just block us: as a strategic analyst, I personally thinks about a problem only in terms of “what is it possible to show about it in a PowerPoint?”. I know it sounds kind of pathetic, but it is clear that my brain is now used to think about solutions in terms of slides.

So Dan’s solution (which can of course be summarized in a picture drawn on a napkin as you can see in this article) is to use the swiss knife of visual thinking:

Use our built-in tools: eyes, mind, hands.
Use the “look, see, imagine, show” process when approaching a problem, like we would do in poker game (we look at the cards, we see the patterns, we imagine what we could have, whe show our cards).
When you arrive at the “show” step, use the SQVID framework: try to understand wether you need, for your audience to understand, to make you picture Simple or elaborate, Qualitative or quantitative, to focus on the Vision or the execution, to adopt an Individual or a comparative view, and finally to show your problem as a Delta (change) or as a status quo.
Match your picture with one of the way we see the world: to answer a What? question, draw a portrait; to answer a How many? question, draw a chart; to answer a Where? question, draw a map, to answer a When? question, draw a timeline, to answer a How? question, draw a flow chart, and finally to answer the Why? question, draw a multidimensional picture, often a combination of the previous questions.

What I also find interesting is his classification of people into 3 categories regarding visual thinking: the black pen guys, who are the ones that can’t help jumping from their chair during a meeting and drawing things everywhere on the white board; the yellow pen guys, who are the ones good at highlighting the important areas in a picture and improving what’s be drawn; and the red pen guys, who hate drawing but who usually think that what the black pen guys are writing is bullshit and feel so exasperated that they end up amending the whole thing. I took Dan’s test and it happens that I fall into the second bucket; and I’m really curious to know where you think you fit the most to see if it confirms the repartition that we had within the eBay audience!

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Bloatware, the case of Flickr Uploadr 3

Kari Silvennoinen — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 09:13:25 +0000

Recently, Flickr released a new version of their own uploading-tool, Flickr Uploadr. The new version has some nice new features, like reordering the photos and working offline.

Flickr Uploadr is surprisingly good tool, as it is dead easy to chain it with Adobe Lightroom’s Export actions. On Mac, you only need to make a shortcut of Uplodr to ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Export Actions and you can it as Post-processor in your Export presets. Of course, you can use it in your Automator scripts in similar way, too. Other major benefit is that it is dead simple. The only downside is that I’ve not figured out how to pass titles and descriptions to Uploadr (like from iPhoto to FlickrExport).

I was interested in the reordering feature, so I downloaded the new version for my PowerBook G4 (some might guess how this worked out). The new version has a completely new interface, which seems to be HTML-based since the tool is based on Mozilla’s XUL Runtime. This means that the simple uploading tool is now 40 MB when installed. I guess one reason for this is that the tool is crossplatform and therefore should be less resource-intensive to develop. Anyway, the previous version of the tool, 2.3 (Mac) is around 1 megabyte in size. Okay, hard drives are quite large these days so that doesn’t matter that much, but it makes you wonder if someone just felt the need to rewrite the whole thing for the sake of making it more “web 2.0”.

Much worse than the size, the simplicity was gone. The simple upload(e)r now looks like a full-fledged application – for rather simple operation. Why all this bloat? I don’t want to manage this files anymore, I did that already in Lightroom, now I only want to move this files to Flickr. The Uploardr 3 has been over-engineered and is a bloated piece of programming compared to Uploadr 2. Other than being cross-platform, I fail to see the benefits of making a simple uploading tool on JavaScript and XUL. Especially when it is full of bugs.

The all new version for Windows and Mac OS X makes it easy to add titles, tags and descriptions to photos, add them to sets and adjust each photo’s privacy settings.

But what was the most worrying thing was that it would not work. Yes, I could do all the above, but the photo’s themselves didn’t appear. It became later apparent that All PowerPC-based Macs had this issue. Instead of the photos, we just got Flickr’s two spinning balls.

A week later, Flickr released an update, which supposedly fixes this problem – among others. For some people, the “Upload”-button wasn’t showing up. Then again, in the above quote they don’t mention uploading as a feature…

What I need is a tool for uploading photos to Flickr after I’ve played with them in Lightroom, I do not need any further playing around. Uploadr 2 does this rather nicely, Uploadr 3 not.

This makes me wonder if this is the future that Silverlight and AIR will be bringing too - Javascript problems for desktop apps.

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Bubble or not bubble?

Jeremy Fain — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 02:19:44 +0000

That is the question…

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=pr7lDlUfw9w]

Video not available anymore, find it here.

What do you guys think?

via LittleGirl

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In Silicon Valley, enjoying

Jeremy Fain — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 08:42:15 +0000

I’m exhausted and it’s only half of the study trip, but I enjoy SO MUCH going with a great bunch of cool guys to amazing companies like OQO, Netvibes, City Council of SF, l’Atelier US, eBay, Box.net, SRI, Stanford, Meetro and tomorrow Twitter, Neocase, Microsoft, Google, Plug & Play, the Churchill Club, XOBNI – & the day after Orb Networks, Orange, SAP, PodTech, Bizanga + great VCs like Jean-Louis Gassée, Vincent Worms from Partech, Matt Lecar from Partech, Sven Strohband from MDV & Jeff Clavier from SoftTech VC + Marylène Delbourg-Delphis, who actually recruited Guy Kawasaki out of Apple & François Laugier, a prominent lawyer in Silicon Valley….that I haven’t had the energy to blog recently. At night, after 7 visits during the day, all I think about is collapsing.

We’re only half way and here’s our program (below). I’ll make sure I blog extensively as soon as I find some time – although I’ll have to blog on TechEd in Barcelona first. I’m late, I know.

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Intelligent imaging

Emmanuel Perez-Duarte — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 12:59:37 +0000

What does “photo editing” mean? Back in the old days, when coming up with a barely recognizable image was considered a feat, it probably meant nothing. Later on, for professionals and pretty skilled amateurs, it meant playing on successive stages of the chemistry process, using special gases that left particular imprints on the negatives, cutting and adjusting the latter, and so on. And then came the digital era. Nowadays, any mouse-able kid can do practically anything with a photograph: change the lighting, the colors, add a third eye to a friend’s forehead, etc. You get the gist.

But photo editing is changing once again. I came across a couple innovations in photo editing that show that efforts are being channeled towards what can be called “intelligent imaging”. To edit a photo today, you still have to understand the image: you and you alone know what is an object, what is a face, or where this object can (or cannot) realistically be; you and you alone can determine from where the photo should be taken, at what angle, with the focus on which object, etc. “Intelligent imaging” goes beyond that.

Better than a hundred words, two examples should do it:

- The first one is a video of conference by Dave Story, vice president of interactive design at Adobe. The website is in French, but the video at the end (in English) is the interesting part.

- The second one is a technology called “seam carving” (thanks Steve for the pointer), which is being developed in several universities and companies at this moment. The following video explains pretty much most of what there is to know. You can then download an open-source GUI software here if you want to try it out. For other examples and other software (including a Gimp plug-in), you can visit this Flickr group.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-SSu3tJ3ns]

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