tom moody

Zack Friedman interviews the organizers of "Telefone Sem Fio - Word-Things of Augusto De Campos Revisited" in BOMBLOG.
My GIF remixing a De Campos piece is included in the post.

My posts about the show, which ran in Nov-Dec 2011.

See also:
Telephone journal
Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts

Continuing the conversation with Beau Sievers about "bit depth" and "sampling rate" in animated GIFs. I had asked: "What would sampling rate be in GIF terms?" and proposed "number of frames." (We're comparing imaging technology to music technology so the metaphors are going to be fuzzy at some point.*) Sievers reminds us that sampling is already part of GIF-making in these three tweets:

GIFs, bit depth and sampling rate —- spatial resolution is also sampling rate. Which is why smoothing is bad and zooming is powerful. @tommoody

Smoothing is a kind of destructive upsampling technique; it, uh, disrupts the integrity of the picture plane. @tommoody @clementgreenberg

Zooming pulls an image out of the sampling rate-/resolution-space of the desktop or browser window, smoothing re-absorbs it. @tommoody

Zooming here is used more broadly here than just "the movement of a zoom lens" and includes simple one-step GIF-enlargement, say, from tiny pixel size to huge, as Nullsleep was demonstrating. Some people have been using that for artistic effect - a "change in scale" a la Claes Oldenburg making a giant toilet or pencil eraser. You could redraw the image but most people use a sampling algorithm. The two main kinds are "bicubic" and "nearest neighbor" and it's with bicubic, the Photoshop default, that you get the "destructive upsampling" Sievers mentions, particularly noticeable when enlarging a GIF with hard edges (due to low bit depth). The algorithm literally adds information, light-to-dark gradients to smooth seams, which are not in the sampled GIF. (Destruction by addition of "polluting" data.)

This topic started with a GIF that was likely not resized (and therefore not sampled) but rather generated from scratch, using various parameters. It imitated shallow bit depth without having a reason, such as a pre-existing full color GIF that had been converted to black and white in order to save bandwidth. If that unique GIF (which we were arguing was mainly an exercise in style) were enlarged you would use "nearest neighbor" if you wanted to keep it looking all "1-bit."

I was using "number of frames" to refer to sampling not of space but of movement: a sample of a musical waveform takes a series of snapshots of the wave and in image motion capture you literally take stills of the action. You can reduce the sample rate by removing sample points and you can reduce a GIF by taking out frames: in both cases you end up with a smaller and more "instantaneous" file.

*Per Wikipedia, in computer graphics, bit depth is the "number of bits used to represent the color of a single pixel in a bitmapped image or video frame buffer." In digital audio, bit depth describes the "number of bits of information recorded for each sample" (basically everything except pitch, which is determined by the sampling rate). GIF-wise, by "frame rate" in the prior post on this topic I meant the playback rate, which has no effect on the size of the file. If the GIF was taken from a video of movement, the initial capture rate would of course impact the number of frames. GIFs themselves, however, do not record, they only compile or transcode other visual data.

Update: On the subject of GIF playback rate, please see Nullsleep's Animated GIF Minimum Frame Delay Browser Compatibility Study

Bullet points from my Ustream talk in connection with Art Micro-Patronage's "10,000 Pixels" exhibit.

1. Pixel art is a web genre separate from gaming. You can find discussion boards dedicated solely to the publication and critique of pixel art.

2. Artists working in the gallery/art school tradition are attracted to pixel art because of the low level control it gives you over art-making. Some don't feel they are completely in control until they get down into the code telling this part of the screen to flash green and this part blue.

3. Every image on a modern browser is now "smoothed" as if it were a photo enhanced to hide grain. Pixel art flouts this trend and celebrates the artificial.

An area not specifically covered is the political or ecological argument. Products such as Siri suck enormous bandwidth and motivate needless "buildout" (more batteries, more cell towers...). The choice to work small is the web's equivalent of locavore dining.

In response to the post Invasion of the Giant One Bit GIFs, Beau Sievers adds that

bit-depth can't be understood without sampling rate. Just saying a work is "1-bit" is saying close to nothing.

Hadn't thought of it that way but that's interesting. What would sampling rate be in GIF terms? Not the frame rate, because slowing it down or speeding it up doesn't change the size of the GIF. Rather, it's the number of frames. You can reduce the GIF size by (i) decreasing the bit depth from millions of colors to sixteen colors, or to black and white, and (ii) removing frames so that the basic motion is still there without a lot of unnecessary transitions. The GIF we were talking about has the look of a severely-reduced palette but has 360 frames. There is no "original" GIF with full colors that was reduced down to a still rather huge 2.7 megabyte GIF. So (let's pile on here), it's just about simulating Kool 8-B1t Stylezz with no other valid artistic purpose.

1. Brian Droutcour explained what poetry was going to be in a "new media" context. The web has many outlets for literati -- the equivalent of small press publishing -- as well as online versions of established academic journals that continue a tradition of writing and evaluating poetry. So what was an "art and technology" website going to bring to the table in terms of redefining or recontextualizing the poetic narrative impulse? In a cogent essay, Droitcour traced the origins of "new media poetry" back to the early 20th Century avant gardes, in particular experiments in cross-mediation by Cocteau, Gertrude Stein, and others, and then forward through the '50s and '60s with the visually-oriented concrete poets and verbally-oriented conceptual art movement, to more recent blurrings of media in '90s net art. Building on these foundations, Droitcour championed a group of verbovocovisual poets working in electronic media today, such as Erik Stinson.

2. Droitcour's efforts were met with skepticism, and almost no one covered his "wordworks" project for several years. The persistence of his vision eventually convinced critic Kyle Chayka, who covered Droitcour in the magazine Artinfo with a begrudgingly sympathetic analysis. "I wasn't going to just rubber stamp this," said Chayka. "It took many, many posts before I was convinced that Droitcour was onto something."

New York Times Tells Us Only Chinese Near Slave Labor Could Handle Steve Jobs’ Demands. A good critique by Yves Smith. Not just "near slave labor" but massive government handouts from the Chinese made it possible for factories to handle Jobs' constant last minute design decisions. Our own government, by contrast, asks Steve Jobs if Apple work is ever coming back to the US, Jobs says no (according to the Times' source), and our government sighs and says "it is the will of the market." Yet Steve Jobs is a hero to many.

Mutant Sounds was one of the innocent parties hurt by the Megaupload mob war (the Hollywood mob, using the feds as enforcers, vs what some might call the robin hood mob). MS was just using Megaupload to host music, no allegations of infringement were made against them. (On a side note, it could be said that MS specialized in what the US Supreme Court has called "orphan" works [pdf--see Breyer dissent], where it's too expensive or difficult to track down the original creator to obtain copyright permission. Many publishers won't touch orphaned work, the risk of an owner surfacing is too great, consigning a huge cultural legacy to the slag heap. There is no clear right and wrong here -- fair use is not evolved enough to tell us what is truly "illegal.")

Shutting down a host with thousands of non-infringing users just because of some bad eggs offends the most basic notions of fairness. Lauren Weinstein offers a couple of good analogies:

One analogy is the safe deposit boxes in a bank. There are certainly cases where the government seizes specific boxes, or states sell off the content of "abandoned" boxes (both controversial issues, I should add).

But the Megaupload case is more akin to the government seizing every safe deposit box in a bank because the bank owners (and possibly some percentage of the safe deposit box users) were simply accused -- not yet convicted -- of engaging in a crime.

What of the little old lady with her life savings in her box, or the person who needs to access important documents, all legitimate, all honest, no crimes of any sort involved.

and

You don't arrest everyone at a football game because a wanted criminal may be among the crowd. At least, not unless you're attempting to channel the old East German "Stasi" secret police sensibilities.

Everyone gets how unfair this is and the effect is a loss of any respect for Hollywood's claims to be an aggrieved party. They are a cartel, doing what they can to preserve power. We ask governments to protect us from gangsters, not help them.

Update: And if "basic fairness" isn't enough reason to rethink this, the Naked Capitalism blog also asks: Did the Feds Just Kill the Cloud Storage Model?

This GIF of rotating, intersecting planes made by Julapy using his code called "ofxDither," an add-on for openframeworks, looks "cool" but it's mostly about style, isn't it?

If there is a point to making 1-bit artwork at this late date it's to have an image that loads super-fast because it's effectively weightless: a neutrino in a web increasingly dominated by heavy elements.

1-bit GIFs in the 2.7 Megabyte range are like an Iron Butterfly. Or a Lead Zeppelin.

Glenn Greenwald, Salon:

...SOPA opponents were confused and even shocked when they learned that the very power they feared the most in that bill — the power of the U.S. Government to seize and shut down websites based solely on accusations, with no trial — is a power the U.S. Government already possesses and, obviously, is willing and able to exercise even against the world’s largest sites (they have this power thanks to the the 2008 PRO-IP Act pushed by the same industry servants in Congress behind SOPA as well as by forfeiture laws used to seize the property of accused-but-not-convicted drug dealers...

Julian Sanchez, Cato (possibly Koch-funded, sorry):

There are good reasons SOPA and PIPA attracted more attention [than PRO-IP]: Instead of “seizing” domains directly at the registry, they would have imposed blocking and filtering obligations on thousands of ISPs and search engines, creating a whole host of technological and security problems. There was also the private right of action, which seemed more susceptible to abuse by overzealous copyright owners who were able to find a friendly judge. But the central power of the government to shut down web domains is already there in PRO-IP, and has been used to seize hundreds of sites already — wrongfully in at least some cases.

Financial blogger Barry Ritholtz says this well:

Many of the web's most important and integral websites are protesting seriously flawed legislation called SOPA.* It would greatly damage the linking structure of the internet, allowing companies to close down websites on flimsiest of premises. It would criminalize even pointing to any site that itself points to a site where there is a Copyright violation.**

Over the years, the copyright cartel — this includes Disney and other major content companies — have bought themselves a Congress. They prevented works that were scheduled to enter the public domain, as envisioned in the US Constitution, from doing so.

SOPA is the latest attempt to censor the public’s access to independent information and manipulate copyright laws. The new law works to their own benefit and the public’s detriment.

*There is another bill called PIPA in the Senate that internet experts say is equally bad.
**Alleged copyright violation. Copyright is a grey area so all you have to do is claim infringement to mess with an innocent party.

"B4 and 4fter" [2.9 MB .mp3]

A slightly melancholy nursery tune. MIDI notes playing 3 hardware oscillators* tuned to make a chord - with LFO tremelo on 2 of the oscillators' VCA control voltages. Some obscure Hammond B-3 licks (taken out of context) on the fade.

*1 Doepfer triangle (low note) and 2 Gamma Wave Source