art as criticism
self aware organism
digital remake of hand drawing by Clint Fulkerson found via Data Is Nature
Fulkerson writes, about his original drawing (not depicted here except as altered):
I create my artwork through the slow application of decisive marks. As I draw, I follow a loose formula based on what I’ve already drawn, filling areas of the picture plane gradually, without making initial layout sketches. This makes the final product somewhat unexpected and emergent.
This is also called doodling. Data is Nature writes, however:
In this sense the drawing could be seen to be a system in action whereby local agents (drawing marks) define successive marks to create global structures of complexity that are often unaware of their ongoing mutating configurations. This emergent behaviour has been noted in morphological systems and biological colonies...
True, but humans are not bacteria, so the thumbnail from Data Is Nature was flipped horizontally and vertically, pasted into the "nucleus" of the original drawing and Voila, double reverse recursion! As Jasper Johns said, "take something, do something to it, do something else to it," a simple wisdom that seems to escape many artists in the "generative" ghetto. Sorry to be rude and unauthorized but there is so much unfinished work on the web.
Wow, Now I Can Zoom an Entire Page!
Don't really expect anyone to share my sense of tragedy about being forced to live in a smooth, anti-aliased Steve Jobs kind of world while surfing the web. But you can't stop the complaints from this page.
Sorry, there is a difference between Zen-like acceptance of conditions as they are ("a million computers interpreting things a million ways, man") and letting some Adobe-addled web designer shove his or her bad ideas up your crack. And having that be the *only* choice.
Case in point, let's consider what said web designer did to Charles Westerman's enlarged GIF [update, 2016: reposted here].
Viewed in Firefox 2, it's as seductive as an Ellsworth Kelly painting. [screen shot of moving image - a fleet, fast-loading 23 KB .png!]
Viewed in Firefox 3 (or on a Mac) it looks like a student just discovered the blur effect in Photoshop (and did nothing else to the image). [screen shot of moving image - a bloated 388 KB .png because it now has those "tasteful" interpolated gradients!]
If that's just random chance, fine. But it's a decision made by humans (to give your browser "zoom" capability for entire pages including images and not just text) and it's the taste of humans and that is not a force of nature. It can be ridiculed!
This isn't just a plea for designers to respect web artists' pet "lo fi" projects. There is a difference between rendering photos and rendering graphics. Making photography the default norm for the web is wasteful and unecological and part of our corporate masters' project to turn the web into TV so they can sell us more shit (and still fail in business).
