Slideshow from my visiting artist stay at Small Craft Advisory Press at Florida State University

I recently came back from a one-week visiting artist stay at Florida State University, more specifically at tbe Small Craft Advisory Press. SCAP publishes artist books in low editions, usually by working with visiting artists. I had the pleasure of being invited by Denise Bookwalter and Meg Mitchell, excellent hosts both.

The goal of my stay was to start work on an artist book of my work, using laser cutting to engrave woodblocks for printing. Initial tests were promising, although the laser cutter has some limitations in reproducing smaller vector details. Rasterization tends to smooth out certain features and limits graphic complexity at smaller print sizes.

Modular printing system

My original idea was a modular system with circular print blocks that could be rotated for every run so that each book would be unique. This would mean a lot of work for the printers, however, so we agreed on a small print size of 4×4″. We did extensive tests with promising results, but in the end I decided that the small size just didn’t work. To adjust for the small size I had to reduce complexity to a point where it no longer had the qualities I was looking for.

The revised game plan is to do a book of 8×8″ single-color prints (in an edition of 50). The larger format allows for a much higher complexity, while the reduced color palette emphasises the computational geometry. Four alternating colors will provide variation through the book, and 24 pages should give me plenty of space for experimentation.

The book will be printed over the next few months, I can’t wait to dig into the printing process in more detail. My thanks again to Meg and Denise for the invitation!

Video: Prime Hex

My solo show Extrusion opened at ROM for Kunst og Arkitektur in Oslo last Friday. I’ll be posting some of the pieces here over the next few days.

Prime Hex, 2011. Light installation w/ 12 fluorescent light tubes controlled via DMX using Processing. 300 x 270 cm. Behavior is dictated by prime number relationships, each element having a given time period where the light is on and off in equal measure.

Prime Hex is a variation of “Prime”, a 2010 public commission for Bybanen light rail tunnel, Bergen. It uses Henri David’s Processing library dmxP512 for lighting control.

SinSurf, CNC-milled Corian panel, produced from STL files generated with Processing.

I just got an email with images from Lenny at HyperWerk, turns out my first foray into the world of CNC milling is done. And it looks better than I had ever expected, which is great news for me since I can now use it for my upcoming ElectroPlastiques solo show in Akron, Ohio next week.

The radial milling paths really make the piece come alive, of course it doesn’t hurt that Corian is such a beautiful material to begin with. I’ll definitely have to explore CNC more as a possible output medium, it provides some of the fine detail of rapid prototyping while allowing for much larger pieces. And the organic quality provided by the milling paths is very appealing, especially considering the digital origin of the form.

See my Flickr stream for more images. My thanks to Andreas and Lenny for their help with milling and photos!

So here’s my current list of annoyances about my favorite web service:

• Flickr Uploadr 3.0 is a very buggy piece of software. In fact, it’s so bad it probably should never have been released. In particular, it should not have been released just before a big holiday when development teams would not be on hand to fix it. I’ve downgraded to Uploadr 2.5. It might be clunky, but at least it uploads your pictures.
• There is still no way to hide non-public images from yourself so that you could navigate the photostream the way other people see it. About 3000 pictures in my account are private, being either high-res backups or of a personal nature (not that personal, though…) Wading through them often becomes a chore, since I typically upload batches of 30-100 images for backup at a time. I’m almost considering opening a separate Flickr account just for backups, but that would become frustrating quite quickly.
• When you add photos to an existing set using the Organizr, the sets are listed in the order you’ve arranged them in for viewers. When you have 50 sets, it gets annoying to find one that might be number 20 on the list. The option to switch to alphabetical listing would have been very useful.
• The SafeSearch / NIPSA issue is still around, although Flickr seems less aggressive about enforcing it at the moment

On a more positive note, the new Flickr stats work just fine. I’ve been able to observe some interesting trends in how my photos are being viewed, including a better idea of what constitutes my “greatest hits” on Flickr. Great work indeed.

Flickr now has statistics. See original size for a detailed view.

Flickr has introduced statistics as part of the feature set for Pro account holders. Like many bloggers, I suffer from obsessive-compulsive tendencies regarding stats, so this is probably the feature I missed the most on Flickr. Well, no longer will I pine for a detailed breakdown of my Flickr views.

Interestingly Flickr Stats looks and feels a bit like Google Analytics. The good side of that is that the analysis goes deep, as in breakdowns of referrers etc. which is probably more information than most people want to know. Still, it helps to explain why some of your pictures suddenly get a gazillion hits because they got Dugg or Stumbled.

Along with stats, Flickr has also released Uploadr 3.0, which adds some welcome new features such as being able to add new batches while you’re already uploading. Unfortunately, the new Uploadr seems to have quite a few bugs, so unless you’re desperate you might find it wiser to stick with the old 2.5 version until they’ve ironed out the kinks.

• The space you get is small. 5 GB for $5/month is not a lot. They have a bigger plan at 15 GB at $15/month (== $180/year), which hardly seems like a bargain.
• The interface looks great, but is sometimes a little tricky for complex file operations such as moving lots of files around. It’s got a great search function though.
• Most importantly: Uploading can sometimes be painful, requiring the use of either a popup applet or a built-in Flash tool. Navigating the file structure from these tools seems like it’s harder than it should be, with slow GUI response times.

Essentially, I’ve been wanting a file browser-like interface for uploading, with immediate folder navigation. Box.net has promised for a long time that they would release an uploading app that works outside the web browser, but has not delivered so far. I like their service and I’m not looking to switch, but I just wish it’d be easier to use…

To the rescue: Fire Uploader, a Firefox extension that supports FTP-style uploading to Box.net, Flickr, Picasa and YouTube. Browsing my Box.net account, creating a new folder and uploading a bunch of images was a snap. It supports downloading as well, but unfortunately not moving files.

It remains to be seen how stable Fire Uploader is in dealing with huge files and broken uploads, but so far it’s looking really good. Upcoming versions might add site-specific functions such as setting permissions, as well as new services to upload to. If it supported moving files it could almost be a complete Box.net GUI replacement.

For Flickr uploading, Fireflix is useful, but a little clunky. For FTP transfers, I like FireFTP, another great Firefox extension. It allowed me to finally do away with clunky FTP software, and do it all inside the browser. I love that that the browser becomes an environment for getting things done.

It would seem this move is related to local standards for obscenity and censorship of information, but honestly it still makes no sense. The censorship aspect is far worse than the simple blocking of non-photographic images, striking at the core of the service as a community. Sascha Pohflepp has a capsule review of the situation, for more detail see the new Against Censorship Flickr group.

For now, the best policy for Flickr users whose accounts have been reviewed as safe would be to leave all images marked as photography. Anything else will put your images in the middle of this controversy.

Now, being “reviewed as safe” sounds like good a good thing, so I thought I’d go one step further and mark all my non-photographic images as such. Flickr calls this “moderating your photostream”. One of the side effects seems to be that all my non-photographic images are no longer available in public searches. You can observe it by searching for the title "Randbox". It won’t show any results, meaning that my RandBox images are now NIPSA’ed. They can still be found via my photostream, but not through searching. Any non-photo images that were in Flickr's Explore are no longer there.

For artists and designers using Flickr to document and share their work, this development means that their non-photographic images are now second-class citizens. If Flickr goes any further in censoring non-photographic images, it would make Flickr unattractive for sharing anything beyond holiday snaps. I honestly don’t understand what they are hoping to gain by this strategy, as non-photographic images don’t present any problems unless there is a copyright violation. Nor do I understand why screenshots or CGI images would be unsuitable for a public audience.

If you have a Flickr account, you can see your review status for yourself. Individual users can set their “SafeSearch” setting to include non-photographic images, but by default it is set to exclude them. The setting is so obscure that I doubt any non-experts will ever see it.

Flickr: Watz vs. Rishaug at Lovebytes

I just did some new live visuals for a performance with Alexander Rishaug. Alexander’s music tends towards the ambient, with rich textures and large soundscapes that develop slowly in time. Check out his Myspace for sound samples and bio. Alexander was the producer of the Generator.x concert tour for Rikskonsertene and was also responsible for hooking me up with Phonophani, so we have some good history together.

Our first gig was last weekend at an event called Algorithm, part of the Lovebytes festival in Sheffield. The event was in an intimate white cube space, and the audience responded very well to our set. The other acts were Senking, Aoki Takamasa and Pixel – all great people to play along with. My thanks to Mark Fell and Mat Steel for organizing a great event.

The visuals were built with Processing, using Sonia and my own SoniaHelper for sound input and analysis. My laptop lost its ability to output to an external monitor before the show, which added an extra bit of tension but allowed me to experiment with running Windows on a Mac. Someone lent me a MacBook running Bootcamp and Windows XP, and it turned out that simply exporting my files using Fat Jar and copying them over to the MacBook was all it took to migrate.

There was no noticeable performance hit, but I did have trouble with the ATI graphics card that made the image flicker when background() was not being used (see video below). This is an issue I have seen in the past with ATI cards, so it was not a problem with the MacBook. I chose to take the Microsoft approach: It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

Check out the Lovebytes Flickr set for more images or see the YouTube video below for an impression. Sadly, the video was recorded at an angle that makes it hard to see the visuals, but it still gives an idea of the atmosphere.