general

A friend is talking about organizing a "glitch" show in an out-of-town art space. Had an idea of making the above GIF into a DVD. Lord, so much work for something so simple.

1. The GIF above is something Travis Hallenbeck found and posted a while back, minus the color and a keyframe. (It's a rotating smiley.)

2. Wanted it centered, which this isn't. Screen captured the moving GIF while it was running on Firefox.

3. Trimmed the capture timewise so it rotated a few times with seamless loop points. Didn't want to do a long capture because of the possibility of undesirable time lag (from some hidden Windows process revving up in mid-grab). Couldn't do the trimming via batch processing using my primitive software so had to hand trim about ten versions and put them in a timeline to get a 2 minute mega-loop.

4, Saved the 2 minute loop as an .avi file, uncompressed. Enlarging the image to 720 x 480 for video caused some blurring of the nice sharp edges. The alternative, hand resizing 35 frames, would take too long--for some reason the extracted GIF frames I initially tried to work with were all different sizes, and getting them to line up via "canvas enlargement" would be a nightmare (there is some "GIF codec" issue with Camtasia Studio caused by a Microsoft "security update"--that might be the reason for the fragmented frames).*

5. Reinstalled Adobe Encore, a horrible wasteful product that I only use for one thing--burning DVDs that will autoplay and autoloop. It took some crashes before it meshed with my DVD-RW drive.

6. Encore won't accept an .avi that isn't 29.97 frames per second, so had to change the frame rate in VirtualDub and save the .avi again. (And then Encore renders it again--transcoding as an .mpg for burning.)

7. Kept my settings from an older DVD-burning project so loaded the .avi, reacquainted myself with the horrible Adobe workspace and burned three DVDs. It looks pretty good for all the transformation, especially on a small cheap CRT television screen. It would probably be OK projected, too.

*Update: Some additional explanation of this: the GIF above is missing a keyframe, which is why it is gimpy. When you extract its frames, saving them as individual .GIF files, they are odd sizes, making them difficult to batch-enlarge to 720 x 480. Sometimes capturing it in motion results in frames that are a uniform size. That did not happen here: the capture frames were the same odd sizes as the original. I've never figured out settings to control this.

Uodate 2: The Camtasia/Microsoft "GIF codec" issue has nothing to do with the irregular frame sizes. (I know because I removed the Windows Update in question, restoring normal functionality to Camtasia.) The frame sizes are a feature, not a bug, having to do with eliminating redundancy and keeping GIFs smaller. I've just never understood why when you open some GIFs the frames have uniform dimensions, making them easy to resize, or how to control this on the production side. A little research probably wouldn't hurt.

Sentences that might cause a frisson depending on the art:

"This music was made entirely by a computer, using automatic composing software."

"This music is played entirely by hand, no software was used."

"The score was by written by hand, one note at a time, without the aid of a computer."

"These paintings were made with a painting program that simulates gestural movements against a variety of paint surfaces, based on physical models."

"The string quartet is performed with software and sampled instruments."

"These intricate drawings were made by hand, with a tiny brush; no computer or mechanical device was employed in the process."

(Could keep going; perhaps the message here is "death to the wow factor." When words "make" a piece it's time to STFU. Dogma-like thesis in progress: anything that smacks of trompe-l'oeil, whether the hand imitating a machine or vice versa, such that it has to be explained, is an inferior impulse in art. The complete cyborging of art, music, and film is presumed, talking about it is yesterday.)

BBC documentary about the reclusive creator of Spider-Man (oops, co-creator) and Doctor Strange.
7-part YouTube starts here.
Ditko's '70s creation "Mr. A" (an Ayn Randian vigilante) was the inspiration for Alan Moore's Rorschach (never knew that--but wow). Moore is interviewed extensively in the documentary and shares a great story and poem about Mr. A.

Ha, whoops, the initially published, pre-edited version of a post here about the blog Post Internet was picked up from my RSS by a spam blog and appeared in Post Internet's trackback (with a weird picture of a kid looking at a futuristic heads-up display). PI revised its Travis Hallenbeck post, splitting it into two, a discussion of the YouTube middle frame and a discussion of Hallenbeck's Tinypic thumbnail book. PI has also added an afterward to the post referencing "internet aware art." Just to pound on this a little more, the Rhizome editors' and PI's interpretation of Guthrie Lonergan's phrase "internet aware art" wasn't more reductive than what Lonergan intended, it wasn't even the same concept. PI says it is no longer interested in defining internet aware art--too bad, because the interplay between the two definitions can be fertile territory.

In the previous post was joking about the OptiDisc sightings being "post internet." (Referring to the collection of screenshots of pages where internet users hotlinked a GIF of mine for their MySpace pages, etc). They are post- "a moment of the Internet," the MySpace moment, when social media content was open to search engines and not hidden by subscription walls a la Facebook.

I found the pages by looking at my stats, which shows referring sites where people were using my GIF. Lately I haven't been able to trace the pages without signing up for something. So I'm thinking of my collection of as an archived moment when the web was still open and intermingling rather than a Balkanized group of cliques. It wasn't just MySpace but LiveJournal, Blogger, Jappy, dozens of individual web pages, and sources I can't remember.

They are "Internet Unaware Art" because most of the users have no idea that the GIFs they find on Google and put on their pages are loading from someone else's server, or who pays for the bandwidth. When I showed the screenshots at a panel a couple of years ago, a man in the audience complimented me for "finding a way to monetize the theft by others from my site [through offering fine art prints of the screenshots for sale]." I accepted the compliment but in retrospect should have made clear that I am more interested in the aesthetics of the project than revenge. I find the wall sized aggregation of all the pages, unified by the presence of a target somewhere in each rectangle, very pleasing.

A NY dealer in the audience said she saw "nothing new here," that it was just the "found object and the collage." In defense of the project, one of the things that intrigues me about it is that I didn't have to email 60 people and ask them to post an image of mine on their pages so I could document it, which is how most new media projects work. This was a spontaneous moment that happened beyond my control. The collection is what Calvino might call an "invisible city," where most of the participants were unaware they were part of a community--the community of the dumb flashing target.