Class 23 was mostly a work class. We looked at some more Dreamweaver techniques, inlcuding embedding video and using image rollovers to create buttons. We also looked at using the Behaviors palette to add more complex JavaScript interactions to your website, such as using a mouse rollover on one element to change an image elsewhere on the page. Here’s a tutorial about this technique if you’d like to go over it again. Finally, we looked at combining imagemaps and image rollovers to create an image that changes when you move the mouse over different parts of it.

Chris Ashley - HTML Drawings

Chris Ashley is a painter who also uses HTML code to make digital drawings. You can see more recent examples at chrisashley.net, and some older work is archived on his weblog.

I call these images drawings because drawing seems to me to be a medium more open to varieties of approach and material, whereas paintings seem to me to be physical object and require paint! However, it’s fine with me if other people look at and refer to them as painting. Clearly, as can be seen in some of the gallery views I’ve concocted, I’ve imagined many of these as paintings, too. It doesn’t matter that much; what does matter is that I draw everyday.

I started using HTML because I wanted to make images for the web, and the idea of an image made with code embedded in a web page struck me as elegant, novel, and efficient. The weblog as a writing environment encouraged me to avoid graphic images. I didn’t want to have to use a graphics program, and save, upload, and organize jpegs and gifs. I liked the idea that the browser would read the code on a web page which would contain all of the information the browser needed to display the drawing.

- from Chris Ashley’s artist statement

In today’s class we’ll look at some Dreamweaver CS3 tutorials available on the web. The Adobe Video Workshop tutorials are particularly helpful:

• Adobe Video Workshop
• Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 LiveDocs
• thesitewizard.com – Dreamweaver Tutorial Part 1
• Vinyard Designs – Dreamweaver CS3 Tutorial

For our final project, Assignment 6, we’ll use Dreamweaver to make a website which presents some of the work you’ve done during this class. Today we looked at some examples of effective artists’ websites:

• Dominic Wilcox
• Phillip Toledano
• Anna Boggon
• Casey Reas
• Peter Schuyff
• Jen Stark
• Josh Greene
• Panya Clark Espinal
• Antony Crossfield
• Marius Roosendaal
• Jesse Willmon
• Digital Mash (Rob Morris)

We also reviewed some things in Dreamweaver, including setting up a new site and starting a new HTML page (you should save the page right away, so Dreamweaver knows where to put associated images). When naming files, remember that it is a good idea not to use spaces or other special characters in filenames that will be used on the web.

We reviewed how to use “divs”, which are HTML elements that are basically invisible boxes. To create a simple page layout, the best way is to create one main div with the id “page”, giving it a fixed width of between 500 and 1000 pixels, setting the position to “relative” and the left and right margins to “auto” (to center it). This will create a centered box whose width will stay the same no matter what the user’s window size is. Inside this box, you can put the content of your site, including text, images, and videos. To help you position your content, you can create “AP” (absolutely positioned) divs which can be positioned wherever you want by dragging the corner.

We also reviewed how to edit page properties such as fonts and backgrounds, and how to add images. You can add images by creating an image element (which is best if you want the image to have some interactivity such as a rollover effect or imagemap), or by creating divs and giving them background images (which is best if you want other content to appear on top of the image, or a repeating background). We also reviewed creating image maps and e-mail links, and the basics of using CSS.

In this class we took a look at everyone’s video projects. Excellent work! It was great to see all the different approaches to making video art.

From the "Time Lapse of Computer Hardware in Plain English" video.

Since a few of you are interested in stop-motion video, I thought you might enjoy the In Plain English series of educational videos. They’re a funny and well-made series of educational videos with a distinctive papercraft style, produced by a company called Common Craft. Check out The World Wide Web, Blogs, BitTorrent, Augmented Reality, or even Zombies In Plain English. Computer Hardware and Computer Software are also interesting. Here’s a time lapse of the making of the Computer Hardware video.

John Graham visited us this class to talk about his Move film project. We also took a look at Welcome to Pine Point, and went over how to create a menu and burn a DVD with iDVD.

A film I have mentioned a couple of times in class is Tarnation, by Jonathan Caouette. It’s an autobiographical documentary that is composed mostly of home videos, answering machine messages, and other material Caouette collected and saved during his childhood. The film documents Caouette’s tumultuous adolescence, focussing on his relationship with his mother, Renee, who is mentally ill, and his homosexuality. The use of old video (Super 8 and VHS) and audio gives the movie a unique and charming aesthetic, even though the video and audio sources are often of low quality. The soundtrack also includes songs from musicians such as The Magnetic Fields and Mark Kozelek. The film was made for an initial budget of just $218 – but the film distributor later spent $400000 on music clearances to get the film into theatres!

Caouette made Tarnation using iMovie, and the film is an interesting demonstration of iMovie’s strengths and weaknesses. As the movie was entirely conceived and edited by one individual, it has a strong and consistent style and visual integrity. Caouette makes extensive use of iMovie transitions, effects, and titles – the rain effect, the “old film” effect applied to still images, even the lightning and “fairy dust” effects. While these are occasionally overused, they are mostly effective and are sometimes used in innovative ways, such as super slowed-down transitions, or using multiple effects at once. Still images are used frequently, and Photoshop has been used in a few places, such as a scene at the start where a person disappears. Overall, it’s a complex and fascinating documentary. We did not have time to watch this in class during the video project, but I’ll try to fit it in soon. Here is the trailer:

In this class we visited Grenfell Art Gallery for the March Hare reading with Don McKay, Daniel Payne, and Carmelita McGrath. Afterwards we returned to the Mac Lab, where I took a look at what everyone is working on for the video project. I did a quick iMovie demo to show you how to copy clips in the library (hold the Option key and drag a clip) and split a clip into two (click the clip to edit it, position the playhead, and then click Split in the Edit menu).

A still from "Welcome to Pine Point" by The Goggles

I thought I’d add a link here to a really great interactive storytelling project I came across recently. Welcome to Pine Point tells the story of Pine Point, a mining town in Northwest Territories that was not only abandoned but completely demolished when the mine closed (see Pine Point, Northwest Territories). It was created by Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons, who collaborative under the name The Goggles.

Created with Adobe Flash and with a soundtrack by The Besnard Lakes, Welcome to Pine Point has been described as a “web documentary”. It was produced by The National Film Board, and the NFB.ca blog has a great interview with The Goggles about how their background in book design influenced the development of the work.

How do you describe the project when friends or family ask what you’ve been working on?

Mike Simons: It’s a bit tricky. We’re not really able to compare Pine Point to anything else out there, because we’re not seeing other projects like it. It’s a new form of storytelling, really, so in conversations with people, I don’t know how to call it. It’s not a website, it’s not an interactive doc… what is it? Coming from print, part of the process for us was minimizing the interactivity to only those elements that serve to forward the narrative. We’re in a bit of uncharted territory here.

Bodypaint Shoe (Makeup by John Maurad and Jenai Chin, Photo by Tom Schierlitz)

(This post is for a presentation I’m giving to the first year class.)

Here are a few artists who use walking in their work:

• Richard Long
• Francis Alys – Railings, The Collector, Sometimes Doing Something Poetic Can Become Political and Sometimes Doing Something Political Can Become Poetic
• Marina Abramovic – Shoes for Departure
• David Hockney – Sitting in the Rock Garden, Walking in the Zen Garden
• Eadweard Muybridge
• Marlene Creates – A Virtual Walk of The Boreal Poetry Garden
• Michel de Broin – Shared Propulsion Car
• Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller

In this class I introduced iMovie, including getting clips into iMovie by dragging them into the clip library, and putting clips into your video by dragging them from the library onto the timeline. We also went over editing clips, adding audio and still images, and using the Editing tab to add titles, transitions, and video and audio effects.

Keep in mind that the computers in the Mac Lab use iMovie HD 6. If you have a newer Mac, you may have a more recent version of iMovie which works a little differently.

We also looked at some examples of video art – the first few are from the first issue of Wholphin, a DVD magazine:

• Miranda July – Are You the Favorite Person of Anybody?
• Brian Dewan – Grimm’s Tales 2: Death of the Hen
• Jeroen Offerman – The Stairway at St. Paul’s
• PES‘s whimsical stop-motion videos.

Jeroen Offerman - The Stairway at St. Paul's (still)

“My parents are Jehovah’s Witnesses and so I had a very strict Christian upbringing. There was a suspicion of rock and pop music, and some music, Led Zeppelin in particular, was branded downright evil. The rumor was that if you played “Stairway to Heaven” in reverse you could hear messages that would urge you to follow the devil’s path. Supposedly even if you listened to the music in a normal manner you would subconsciously pick up these messages and act accordingly. In my early teens, I destroyed some music that I thought I shouldn’t listen to or have at home. “Stairway to Heaven” was a difficult one for my friends and me. We thought the song and the lyrics were so utterly beautiful and yet we couldn’t listen to it out of fear of what could happen to us if we did. That’s the tension I felt by listening to this record: a teenage attraction to something dangerously beautiful. I am still intrigued how these myths are created and the effect they can have. So I started to learn to sing the song and its lyrics in reverse. After three months the job was done. I went up to the steps outside Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London and performed it for an audience of confused passers-by, pigeons, and a video camera. Back home I reversed the tape and put a karaoke track underneath.” – Jeroen Offerman

Sir John Tenniel's famous illustrations for Alice in Wonderland are available on Project Gutenberg.

Here are some sources of audio, video, and other media that is either public domain or Creative Commons licensed. Please check that you are crediting people appropriately if using Creative Commons licensed work in your project.

• Internet Archive (a huge archive of public domain and Creative Commons-licensed audio, video, and other material)
• Public Domain Movie Database
• Public Domain Movie Torrents
• Freesound Project (Creative Commons-licensed sound library)
• PDSounds (public domain sound library)
• Librivox (public domain audio books)
• Project Gutenberg (public domain texts and audio books)

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization and movement dedicated to expanding the range of creative works available for people to legally share and build upon. Creative Commons licenses allow creators to communicate how they want to allow their work to be used by others. Before Creative Commons, there was no easy way to specify how a creative work could be used by others, other than “All rights reserved” (copyrighted) or “No rights reserved” (public domain). Creative Commons allows creative people the flexibility of “Some rights reserved” licenses.

The Creative Commons website, creativecommons.org, offers plenty of useful information about the Creative Commons project, including numerous introductory videos. You can also visit creativecommons.ca for information specific to Canadians. If you are interested in using a Creative Commons license for your own work, be sure to read About the Licenses and Before Licensing.

The Creative Commons icon

• Wikipedia (free encyclopedia)
• Hazel Dooney (a visual artist who has blogged about why she uses Creative Commons)
• Stephan Schulz (visual artist)
• DJ Spooky (experimental electronic and hip-hop musician)
• MIT OpenCourseware (free course materials)
• ccMixter (music remixing)
• OpenStreetMap (collaborative cartography)
• Flickr (photo sharing site, allows users to specify CC licenses)
• XKCD (a webcomic)
• Other notable users of Creative Commons

An exhibition of Cory Arcangel's work at The Museum of Contemporary Art Miami.

In Class 16, we discussed everyone’s responses to Assignment 4 (writing about digital art). We talked a lot about things that make digital art different than other types of art, how the internet is used by artists, web memes, and other things. We also started Assignment 5, which will involve making a video artwork.

Cory Arcangel is a digital artist who has come up a couple of times in class – we looked at his Super Mario Clouds earlier in the semester. Here is a brief interview with Arcangel, discussing video art and his work Drei Klavierstücke, op. 11 (in which he recreated a Schoenberg composition by editing together video clips of cats walking on piano keys). Rhizome.org has a more in-depth interview with Arcangel focussing on the role of comedy in his work.

Surely you are familiar with lolcats? If not, check out Know Your Meme.

In 2008, artist Marianne Goldin and icanhascheezburger.com put together a lolcat-themed art show. The website for the show no longer exists, but here is a video documenting the show:

What Relational Aesthetics Can Learn From 4chan is an interesting article about how web communities like 4chan relate to contemporary art movements such as relational aesthetics. If you aren’t familiar with it, 4chan is a notorious web forum known for popularizing web memes like lolcats and rickrolling. Please note that the article and some of the links contain derogatory images (for the purposes of discussing 4chan) and are NSFW (Not Safe For Work!).

Here is a summary of the article – I initially wrote this during a discussion about the article on MetaFilter.

Nicolas Bourriaud, a French curator and critic, wrote a book called Relational Aesthetics in 1998. Bourriaud noticed a lot of contemporary artists who were making work which relied on social exchanges, in which human interaction and relationships were intended as art. For example, Rirkrit Tiravanija reorganized an art gallery as a kitchen, cooking and sharing meals with gallery visitors. One of the jobs of curators and critics is to explain what artists are doing, so Bourriaud wrote Relational Aesthetics to present his theory about this kind of artmaking and why it was becoming important.

Since it was published in English in 2002, Relational Aesthetics has become quite influential, and is seen as the defining text of a kind of artmaking also called Relational Art, which has become more widely practised in recent years.

The IMG MGMT article examines 4chan in the context of Relational Aesthetics. The writer’s premise is that if we look beyond what is conventionally labelled as “art”, we find that a lot of web-based collaboration (such as the “raids” organized by /b/) is similar to the work that Bourriaud described as Relational Aesthetics.

This similarity is explored with various examples. For example, the writer compares the way that memes develop on 4chan to the way that trends and terminology develop in the contemporary art world, suggesting that artists could learn a thing or two from 4chan about how to use the web effectively.

Finally, the writer uses 4chan to demonstrate that some of Bourriaud’s thoughts might be a little outdated. In particular, looking at anonymous collaborative online interactions as Relational Aesthetics, rather than focussing on social exchanges constructed by individual artists in art institutions, might actually help to reinforce Bourriaud’s ideas.

Clement Valla - A Sequence of Lines Traced by Five Hundred Individuals

Lucie Chan sent a link to a collaborative drawing project that I thought I would share with you. A Sequence of Lines Traced by Five Hundred Individuals is a project by Clement Valla in which the artist asked five hundred people to trace a line, one after the other. Small differences in the way that individuals traced the line meant that the initial vertical line gradually evolved into something much different. The resulting artwork is presented as a video and a print, and is an interesting study into how small details can result in huge differences when magnified over time. Clement Valla’s website contains some related work – check out Seed Drawings.

To organize this collaborative project, Valla used Amazon Mechanical Turk. Mechanical Turk is a service which allows anyone with an account to work on HITS, or Human Intelligence Tasks – small jobs that are difficult for computers but which people can do quickly. Most HITs pay just a few cents each, but payment can be higher depending on the difficulty and time required. It bills itself as “Artificial Artificial Intelligence”. Some typical examples of HITs are identifying the subject of a photo, transcribing audio, or validating the phone number for a business. Developers can tap into Amazon Mechanical Turk as a way to get thousands of these small jobs done quickly and efficiently, helping them build large-scale web projects and services. Artists have also explored ways in which Mechanical Turk can be used to make collaborative artwork with hundreds or thousands of participants.

Aaron Koblin’s The Sheep Market is another example of an artist making use of Mechanical Turk. Koblin paid 10000 anonymous workers 2 cents each to “draw a sheep facing left”. The resulting drawings are presenting on a website as well as in a gallery installation. You can read more about the project on aaronkoblin.com.

Aaron Koblin - The Sheep Market (detail)

In class 14, we finished critiquing the work from Assignment 3. We also had a visiting artist, Lucie Chan, who talked about her animation works and invited us to participate in an animation project she is working on.

During our chat with Lucie we talked a little bit about the work of William Kentridge, a South African artist who creates evocative animated films using a meticulous process of drawing and erasing every frame on the same sheet of paper (for example, Automatic Writing). Here is the work Lucie mentioned, where he creates a drawing using scraps of torn paper as part of a video artwork:

Pbs.org has a full-length documentary about Kentridge you can watch online: William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible.

Heidi Cody - American Alphabet (2000)

For this assignment, write between 800 and 1000 words on the topic “Digital Art”. Some questions you might want to consider while writing: How is working with digital media different than working with traditional media? How is it similar? How does the internet affect how artists work and communicate? Present your finished text as a web page.

Here are some examples of creative approaches to a similar writing assignment, from a couple of years ago:

• Mandi Coates wrote her text on an actual computer.
• Gabby Hughes made her text invisible.

You can see more work from previous years of this class on the VART 2600 website.

From wwwwwwwww.jodi.org. The website presents blinking green text on a black background, which is revealed to contain hidden diagrams.

During the critique we talked a little bit about the work of Jodi, an art collective often identified with their website, jodi.org. The artists, Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, are interested in manipulating technology to make art, often by modifying software or making use of glitches and hacks. They have been creating net art since the mid 1990s. One of their best known works is located at wwwwwwwww.jodi.org – the website is full of what seems like nonsense code, but if you use your web browser’s View Source option, the underlying HTML is revealed to contain diagrams of the construction of an atomic bomb.

Google Art Project

Google Art Project is an ambitious project recently launched by Google in a collaboration with some of the world’s most popular art museums. It allows you to virtually browse the collections of several museums using a Street View-like interface to navigate from room to room. In some cases you can even walk out the front door of a gallery into a Street View of the street outside!

What’s particularly interesting about the project is the extremely high resolution images of some very famous artworks – try zooming in on The Birth of Venus or The Starry Night. Most of the artworks do not have such high resolutions, though. Also note that some of the museums have restricted which works can be viewed, so there are instances where works have been blurred out. Still, the project is an interesting adaptation of the museum-going experience to a web interface, and in terms of museums making their collections more accessible, it’s a great start.

A screenshot from the website of Sagmeister, Inc.

In Class 12, we took a look at some websites which are quite innovative and interesting despite being not very technically complex. These are good examples of what you can do with just a little bit of web design knowledge.

• Miranda July is not a web designer, but created a website to promote her book No One Belongs Here More Than You using a permanent marker, her kitchen, and a digital camera.
• The website of actor Jeff Bridges is composed mostly of his sketches and handwriting. There are some great photos from the making of True Grit in the Photography section.
• Olia Lialina’s Pages in the Middle of Nowhere is the home of her net art projects, including the Animated GIF Models we looked at as examples of loop artworks. By creating a web page which is larger than the screen both horizontally and vertically, the page becomes a large explorable area.
• Similarly the Solar System Scale Model uses an extraordinarily long horizontally-scrolling web page to create a vast virtual space, giving the viewer a sense of the scale of our solar system.

Finally, we looked at the website for Sagmeister Inc., a design firm which uses a live webcam of their New York office as their website – the website interface is painted on the office floor.

This class also included a demonstration of how to create seamless backgrounds in Photoshop (using the Offset filter), and a quick review of adjusting page properties and adding image rollovers in Dreamweaver.

In our last class we looked at some websites where you can find out about art-related opportunities. Whether you’re interested in calls for submission, jobs, grants, internships, or exhibition announcements, here are some websites that should be on your radar:

• Akimbo is a great resource for Canadian art calls for submission and job postings.
• Instant Coffee is an artist’s collective that publishes very useful weekly e-mail listings, organized by geographic area. The Halifax list is the one closest to Newfoundland, and tends to cover all Atlantic provinces.
• Rhizome is a portal into the world of new media and internet art, and their Announcements feed covers international new media opportunities, events, jobs, and deadlines.
• Canada Arts Connect has a blog and useful information for contemporary artists.
• Emerging Arts Professional is “an online career resource and community network for arts professionals across Canada.”
• Artist-Run Centres and Collectives Conference is a Canadian organization that represents artist-run centres and collectives across the country.

Also, here are some links to nearby artist-run centres, galleries, organizations, publications, and other things:

Newfoundland:

• Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council
• VANL-CARFAC
• The Rooms (St. John’s)
• Eastern Edge (St. John’s)
• A1C Gallery (St. John’s)
• St. Michael’s Printshop (St. John’s)
• RCA (Resource Centre for the Arts) (St. John’s)
• Anna Templeton Centre (St. John’s)
• Full Tilt Creative Centre (McIvers)
• Stockpile Artists Collective (Corner Brook)
• L.A.W.N. (League of Artists of Western Newfoundland)
• Pick Me Up Artists’ Collective (St. John’s)
• Association of Cultural Industries of Newfoundland & Labrador
• Craft Council of Newfoundland & Labrador
• Riddle Fence
• Provincial Arts and Letters Awards Program

Other Atlantic provinces:

• Eyelevel Gallery (Halifax, NS)
• Centre for Art Tapes (Halifax, NS)
• Khyber ICA (Halifax, NS)
• Struts Gallery (Sackville, NB)
• Galerie Sans Nom (Moncton, NB)
• Gallery Connexion (Fredericton, NB)

A few other links from across Canada and elsewhere:

• Canada Council for the Arts
• CARFAC (Canadian Artists Representation)
• The Banff Centre
• Cultural Human Resources Council
• Canadian Museums Association – Careers
• NSCAD University Job Bank (posts jobs suitable for students or recent graduates, usually most active in the spring)
• Beltway’s List of Artist Residency Programs
• Dazibao (Montreal, QC)
• Centre des arts actuels Skol (Montreal, QC)
• Oboro (Montreal, QC)
• Centre Sagamie (Alma, QC)
• Ace Art Inc. (Winnipeg, MB)
• Platform Centre for Photographic + Digital Arts (Winnipeg, MB)
• Neutral Ground (Regina, SK)
• PAVED Arts (Saskatoon, SK)
• More: A list of galleries across Canada

Do you know of any other useful websites for artists? You can post links in the comments.

Exquisite Collaboration!

In today’s class we assembled our Exquisite Collaboration project! You can use this link to share it with your friends. Thanks for all your hard work on the animations – I think this turned out great!

I added everyone’s names to the bottom of the page. If you hover your cursor over each body part, a little tooltip will pop up to say whose work it is.

Isle of Tune (screenshot)

Isle of Tune is a beautifully designed music sequencer which uses a town map as a visual metaphor. Place roads, trees, and houses and then set cars in motion to create music loops. It’s a fun, engaging creative tool, and if you click ‘browse all islands’ you can find some amazing and clever creations.

The first part of this class was working time, as we are working on both the Exquisite Collaboration project and the Web Page In Dreamweaver (working with text as source material) project. We looked at a couple of examples of animated videos which draw on interesting source material: Rabbit by Run Wrake, and Love & Theft by Andrea Hykade.

Lucie Chan - between, and in tears (detail)

Artist Lucie Chan will be visiting our class on February 25. You can read about her work on the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia website, or at The Coast.

There was also a more in-depth introduction to Dreamweaver – we reviewed setting up a new ‘Site’ project and starting a new HTML page, and looked at the differences between Dreamweaver’s WYSIWYG interface and writing code. I demonstrated how to insert text and images into your page. Remember, your website project exists as a folder of files. When you insert an image, Dreamweaver will ask you if you’d like to copy the image file into your website folder, which you should do. When you submit your work for this project, remember to give me the entire folder of files for your website, not just the HTML file.

We also looked at how to change the properties of your web page, such as the title, background colour, and font settings, and how to preview your web page in a web browser (Safari or Firefox).