thanks neil. i had a look at the three images you've posted and read your comment to pall.
we're both writing apps that take visuals as input and produce visuals as output. your app is early net artish and mondrian is the patron saint of early net art in his abstract rectilinearity, european/usamerican background, and new york gravitation. i'll be interested to see if you can achieve any stylistic range with your app, neil. is that an ambition for it? pall finds the graphics you've produced with it beautiful. to me, they are not so much beautiful as interesting. however, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. from what i know of pall's work, he goes for the same sort of sense of beauty that you achieve in those graphics. i appreciate the rectilinear, however. it connects well with various things. with the history of computer art which, until recently was, perforce, rectilinear. with mondrian and related abstract art. with the mathematical graph. with the 'conceptual'. and with the basic abilities of code to process images (and other media). all of this makes it interesting. i share certain affinities, also, with the rectilinear. the realms of pictorial and photographic representation, for all their worlds, somehow do not usually resonate with me deeply as art experience. the same is true of photographic cinema, usually, though there are a few filmmakers i like a lot such as tarkovsky and sokurov, and david jhave johnston is doing fantastic work with his literary and programmerly videos. also, works such as the ones you showed suggest themselves as input for other programs; the abstraction into colored lines of various lengths provides a domain for a function of five parameters: for each line, which is sometimes broken in two, there is a color and a length, and the last parameter could be temporal or spatial. that function could fully describe all of the three graphics you showed. the functionality (in the math sense) of this sort of work highlights the connection of computer art with mathematics. i also am interested in that connection. it is a tricky one, though. since i've been involved in net art, i've been trying to do something different from the new york/netherlands digital mondrian rectilinear. what i am going to show you over the next weeks is where i am in that effort at this point. http://vispo.com/dbcinema/kandinsky was the first image series i made with dbCinema, a langu(im)age processor and graphic synthesizer i've been writing in director since 2005. i made the series i showed you a couple of years ago. over the next weeks, i'll show you the subsequent series in chronological order of their composition to give you a sense of how the ideas and art have developed. i've been working on it for five years but didn't make the first series until about three years into the project. here's what i was doing the first three years: http://vispo.com/dbcinema/dbc050.htm . this requires the shockwave plugin from http://vispo.com/sw . this is basically a superior google/yahoo image search client. this is more like dbSlideshow than dbCinema. you type stuff in and the app does a google/yahoo image search on what you type in and retrieves images somehow related to what you type in. and presents those images in a slideshow. but, to me, that is not interesting or beautiful as art. the interesting and beautiful as art would be in what it does with those images. and a simple slideshow just doesn't do it. so over the next weeks i'll show you how i turned it into dbCinema, beyond dbSlideshow. i posted this post earlier, but it didn't make it through, for some reason. ja http://vispo.com _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
