Leaves

Leaves animated

New website

dotAtelier has a new website featuring animations which are also hosted at blip.tv and YouTube as well as higher quality versions of recent animations as shockwave films in large format.
Nature music, an interactive java programme for composing music from nature sounds is also hosted here.
Images can be browsed on the new site.

Leaves

Mini solar collectors provide shade from the power of the sun and convert its energy into wood, water vapour and oxygen. In the process they support a wide range of flowers, nuts and fruit. As they reach the end of their life cycle they display radiant colours and fall to the earth. On the ground leaves regenerate the soil as they degrade and provide cover for insects and worms as well as small reptiles such as legless lizards. Leaves are a wonder of nature.

However they are disrespected in human perception and practice. On the ground they are called ‘leaf litter’ akin to rubbish. Gardeners and landscapers do not recognise their value but blow them onto ‘waste’ land, public land or neighbouring properties using priceless fossil fuels, wasting unique energy to remove the valuable agents of renewable energy production. In other places leaves are piled up and burned wasting their composing potential and adding to the pollution and heating of the atmosphere we depend on.

Elsewhere the potential of leaves to protect human skin against solar rays is overlooked as trees are removed from human habitats and their surrounds, increasing solar exposure and the temperature levels in already overheated places.

Leaves are not seen as objects of great beauty but as obstacles to easy mobility catching in dysfunctional shoes as one stumbles towards the nearest fossil fool transport.
As one of the main contributors to human survival, providing the oxygen we breathe, feeding the wood we consume, giving the shade we need, easing our eyes with green colour and supporting the animals we share the planet with, leaves deserve respect, should be lovingly collected and used in confluence with their function on our Earth or enjoyed as they blow around in the wind adding character to the urban and rural landscapes.

Animations on YouTube

I have been working on the settings to render Flash videos for YouTube and the quality of them has greatly improved as a result. There are now new versions of Kosmos on a G-string, Flowers and Ocean, which can be viewed in normal resolution but look even clearer in HQ.

Authors of new media

The romantic pre-industrial ideal saw artists as creators from nothing. (p 125)They began work with a blank canvas and added detail until an existence had been created, a world of their making. Artists were seen as the subjects of this process. (although much of their skill in object representation was learnt from their predecessors). Although many artists in modern times continue to see themselves through this model as originators of unique works, in the industrial and post-industrial eras this has long been superseded.

What Barthes called the “death of the author” refers to the definite sourcing of works in other places than the artist, of collaborative social texts. Art becomes industrialised, a mass product constructed out of elements collected elsewhere from diverse origins.

New media continue to reflect this diversity of origins of its products. The objects created are made from reuseable objects from software libraries, framed in the products of various designers and artists, programmers and project managers. Development environments such as Flash or Photoshop allow the transformation of imported visual objects or locally created objects using the tools developed by teams of software developers for visual effects.
Lev Manovich sees this process as a finite realisation of a subset of the possibilities which are contained in the concepts of the software designers. “If a complete work is the sum of all possible paths through its elements, then the user following a particular path accesses only a part of this whole. In other words the user is activating only a part of the total work that already exists.”(p 128)
With bitmap manipulation however the process becomes infinite, just as language is infinite in its capacity to generate new expressions. As with language new words emerge constantly which combine with existing word combinations and structure. It is an open system. Imported bitmaps whose uniqueness is constructed outside of the image manipulation programme offer reuseable software tools new material to transform in infinitely new ways.

Nature music will be deleted soon

As of 30 September 2009, some dotAtelier websites including the interactive nature music programme and exibitions will be deleted by the Australian web hoster BigPond.
Their explanation for discontinuing this service to their paying customers are given here.
It is very unfortunate that this web hosting is to terminate and the sites destroyed after many years. The hosting was acquired as part of commercial arrangements with the expectation of continuity. Various web sites have linked to it as is usual and these links will break after September. Broken links are common enough due to bankruptcy or death, but are not usually to be expected from large organisations providing web services.
A new hosting arrangement for these resources will be established soon using a hopefully more reliable provider.

YooouuuTuuube

YooouuuTuuube is an application which reprocesses YouTube videos into a multi image screen. With well-selected films as its source this effect works very well. In some cases it is an improvement on the YouTube version.
I tried it with the dotAtelier film “Ocean” which has no black edges so the original colours fill the whole screen without unwanted stripes.
The result actually looks better than the version on YouTube. The low-quality rendering of this film on YouTube is inferior to one available on Blip.tv because of the reprocessing that YouTube does and the high-quality version there buffers constantly. YooouuuTuuube takes the low quality option and reduces its size greatly while simultaneously mirroring it into an array of several rows and columns.

Variability

Variability is a defining criterion of new media. Like words in natural language, new media objects exist in proximity to other objects in a system which gives them meaning. They are like words which do not depend on internal definitions for their meaning but have shifting meanings as they are reinterpreted and reshaped in different contexts (Ludwig Wittgenstein).
They make themselves available in new interactive environments.
A new media object is designed to enter a network of objects - images, texts, programmes - which can extend it and further develop it as a cultural expression. They are conceived to become ever more complex objects in collaboration with others.
The old media artwork on the wall depends on its one-off definition of itself and is invariable. It just hangs there.
Old media are also context dependent. If a brand-name artwork is found at a flea market stall it has a different meaning than if it is hanging on a gallery wall.
The difference is that new media objects exist in a creative collective medium in which they are constantly fluxing as they are picked up and reworked by aggregators, programmers, film makers, writers into new objects which modify and recombine them into new forms of creativity. They are input for the work of others in the creative community.
New media is essentially on creative common ground. Old copyright restrictions on the further development of objects contradict the variable character of the medium.

Convert audio from midi (mac)

How to convert audio files from midi to other formats using mac applications.
There may be some simple ways to do this with free or commercial software, but they have always eluded me so here is one way using only mac software.
I use a Treo680 to record sounds in spontaneous situations. I always have it with me. It records in midi format in very good quality. To convert it for use in GarageBand or in Adobe Creative Suite where midis are not supported formats, do the following:

• Beam the midi to your mac with bluetooth.
• Open iMovie.
• Drag the Midi into the iMovie timeline. Do several in a sequence on the timeline if required.
• Export the movie as a QuickTime movie of web quality.
• Open GarageBand. Drag the ready movie into the timeline.
• Delete the video track.
• Edit the sound track and export to iTunes or to file.

The recording is now in a format which can be recognised by Adobe Creative Suite as well as being recognisable by GarageBand for further editing / mashing up.

New media objects

Lev Manovich prefers the term new media object to new media artwork (p 14, The Language of New Media).
Object is more in keeping with computer technology, a more general and inclusive term for new media works. New media objects link in with the object-oriented programming surrounding them.
For Manovich this also calls up connotations of the avant-garde artists of 1920s Russia who referred to their creations as objects rather than artworks. In this they are connected to the Bauhaus movement where objects are part of industrial society rather than fine arts to be hung in galleries and private collections. Analogous to design for industrial purposes, new media objects exist in a relationship to the productive system of worldwide information technology and communication. The boundary between art and design becomes fuzzy.

New media objects are in this way distinguished from traditional artworks, which may seek to be accommodated as new media art by being digitalised in a new form but have no integral relationship to the digital medium. New media objects have an essential relationship to their medium. They may take many forms, but are conceived in relation to the processes they exist in. This is what makes them new.

They are “a disruption of physical space and matter, a process that privileges interchangeable and mobile signs over original objects and relations...Different physical locations...now meet within a single electronic screen.” p xxii). “Synthetic computer-generated imagery is not an inferior representation of our reality, but a realistic representation of a different reality.” (p xxiii)