Day: December 23, 2012

Annette Ekin has an article on animated-GIFs-as-art-form worth checking out (said with extreme bias since Ryder Ripps and I were interviewed).

A point from the article:

Moody sees the "recent explosion" of GIFs going from the "underground" to catching on in popular culture and mainstream media, in outlets like NBC, as the function of a "historical accident." Because almost every browser can read GIFs, and the much-touted HTML5 web takeover is yet to happen, GIFs "are a universal medium by default." “This explosion was definitely not in the computer companies' usual planned obsolescence script," Moody says. The current browser readability, he says, is "like a gift given to people who are making stuff."

GIFs never really went away or went underground but a bare couple of years ago a Google exec was interviewed saying "I can't remember the last time I saw an animated GIF." His company prefers the kind of CSS-based animations you find on their main search page but you wouldn't have all the looping Seinfeld moments you see now if people hadn't had a more hands-on way of saving and passing around animations.

On Disquiet Marc Weidenbaum has a post on Miami glitch musician Richard Devine's demo for an iPad electronic music app, or suite of apps. Devine really gets around -- besides his music he has an active career designing patches and demo-ing instruments for the top synth marketers. His Vimeo archive presents a fascinating techno-cornucopia of up-to-date gear, software, and sounds. In the comments to the Disquiet post, colab noted Devine's elevated "presence" resulting from working on many fronts and I chimed in:

Agreed about Devine’s patch-making and demo-ing being “a really interesting way to have created a presence out there.” Marc’s “clothes horse” is a funny way to put it and not really mean or inaccurate. With, for example, a Reaktor patch, you have the person who made the instrument (e.g., Sinebeats by Programchild/Studiotonne) and 8 presets by Devine with his name in them and an unmistakable “Devine sensibility” in the sound. If there is any possibility for creativity left, you have the hapless user who bought Reaktor and is trying to make music with it, ha ha.

But ultimately can't imagine wanting to make songs on a tablet:

As for making music on a touchscreen interface it seems like jumping aboard Apple’s "get’em hooked into buying our hardware" master-plan of spherical trust monopolistic insidiousness and tapping glass is about as much fun as fondling a ventriloquist’s dummy but I realize these will not be universally appreciated sentiments.

The MAC vs PC argument may be dated and dumb but whether Apple needs to be a one-stop shop for all your creative needs still seems worth questioning. You can make music on anything but if "the pros" are still using desktops with keyboards and two screens then it's only dumb consumers who are getting snookered into learning touchscreen. Thus, Richard Devine, who has any instrument at his disposal, descends from the clouds to show us plebes how we can use this sleek hardware we bought because everyone else bought one.

Update: Minor edits.