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Must Should Could is the result of a collaboration between artist teachers on the Art & Design PGCE course at the Institute of Education, University College London and Freelands Foundation.

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Every four years the planet comes together to celebrate the World Cup and since white people make up a portion the world, they are not immune to the excitement.

However, before you start planning out long watching sessions with white people you should be aware of exactly why white people get so excited about the World Cup. Though you may be waiting on bated breath for your favorite sport on a global scale, white people like the World Cup because it allows them to pretend they are European for a few weeks, and more importantly, it allows them to get drunk at odd hours.

Virtually every white person you speak to about the World Cup is incapable of remembering any actual event that took place during a game but can, with near total recall, remember how they got very drunk on Sangria during a Spain-Paraguay match at five in the morning.

From reading the above paragraph, the sharper ones among you have likely noticed that clever white people also adore the World Cup because it allows them to pair countries with their respective alcoholic drink.

"England is playing Argentina? Dude we gotta get some Newcastle then like, I don't know, like some wine I guess?"

This plan will be consummated with a high five, a trip to Trader Joes, and the purchase of a soccer jersey that will be worn, on average, twice a decade.

It's also worth noting the amazing interest shown by white women in the World Cup. While they generally find most professional sporting events to be boring, the atmosphere at a World Cup match is much more amenable. Mostly because they don't have to drink light beer and there is a good chance that they might meet a European man, or, at least someone who might be planning a trip there. This is far superior to a hockey game where, at best, they might meet a Canadian. It goes without saying that for white women, the World Cup can't come soon enough.

Of course, hosting a themed party around one of the games is a sure fire way to increase your popularity with white people, but at the end of the day it does not increase your bottom line. No, during the World Cup, the most profit to be made will come from betting on the games with white people. Not only will they have plenty of disposable income, they will follow the following betting patterns:

England is good

Brazil is good

Italy is good

Teams from Africa are cute underdogs and thus always worth a bet.

When it comes to talking about the event, it goes without saying that you should probably avoid trying to talk to white people about any of the actual players in the World Cup aside from the biggest stars. Most white people cobble their soccer knowledge together from UK celebrity gossip and a few games of FIFA on the Wii.

But if you do find yourself talking to a white person who actually knows a lot about soccer you are probably talking to a European, or worse, a white guy who tries too hard.

The latter is especially dangerous, as they have likely been waiting for years to meet someone to converse with about "football" and with soccer's year round schedule, they will never leave you alone.
Photo Credit: LisaLouise

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Every four years the planet comes together to celebrate the World Cup and since white people make up a portion the world, they are not immune to the excitement. However, before you start planning out long watching sessions with white people you should be aware of exactly why white people get so excited about the World Cup.

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"We didn't need a preview." So said Twobadour, one of the players behind the purchase of the all-digital work by artist Beeple (aka Charleston-based digital artist Mike Winkelmann) at Christie's last week, when asked if he had actually looked at the lot before his company paid $69 million for it.

Despite this stomach-turning auction price, Twobadour claimed that the investment was destined to appreciate in value into the future: "This is going to be a billion-dollar piece someday."

I'll take his word for it that he knows Beeple's oeuvre so well that he didn't need to review all the images contained in Everydays: The First 5,000 Days. But does the public know what's in Beeple's opus? That's likely to determine the piece's reputation in the medium and long term, as observers and a baffled public wrestle with what the Beeple phenomenon really means.

The work is, in effect, a large, square image file (21,069 by 21,069 pixels). It's a digital mosaic composed of images that Beeple has released on the web, one a day, since May 1, 2007. This "Everydays" series is more or less the digital equivalent of a sketchbook, though what Beeple can whip up with 3D graphics gets more and more elaborate as we get closer to the present.

"By posting the results online I'm 'less' likely to throw down a big pile of ass-shit," the artist explains of the impetus behind the daily creative exercise on his website, "even though most of the time I still do because I suck ass." That tireless effort to throw down mostly ass-shit is now valued at about $14,000 per day.

You can zoom in a bit to the tiled image of Everydays on the Christie's site-but not that much. To really see the works and get a sense of Beeple's vision, you have to go to his website. I went and clicked through all 13 years of work. Going through it all took about a day.

Here's what I found. Essentially, there are four different Beeples at play in Everydays. None is likely to age well.

In reverse chronological order, the most recent, most well-known, and most successful Beeple is the digital satirist, making what amount to gross-out cartoons commenting on incipient tech dystopia and political outrages. The Christie's preview of individual images from the work all hail from this era.

But it's a surprisingly recent persona. Beeple's only been working consistently in this mode for the last few years, and it's very much a product of the climate of nonstop social media outrage that defined the Trump years.

I've said that the Trump-is-a-Poopy-Head/Cheeto Mussolini genre of art that flourished in this time period is going to have the shelf life of Taco Bell leftovers. I don't think a Beeple work like, say, Trump Dominating Covid from October 2020 is going to age that much more gracefully than Stephen Colbert's " A Very Mueller Christmas" cartoon special or any one of Saturday Night Live's many flaccid Resistance japes.

I mean, we're talking commentary that at its sharpest is Beeple dreaming up an image of Lincoln spanking a nude Baby Trump.

Long after her loss to Trump in 2016, Hillary Clinton inexplicably remains a dominating presence in Beeple's recent satire, as with this August 2019 image of a mech-suited robo-Clinton feeding Trump via a tube from her crotch.

Or this one from October 2019. As political satire, it's not exactly Daumier. I'm not sure it's even South Park.

In spirit, these "Everydays" mainly reflect the shrieking, Trump-era vitriol of cable news or Facebook comment wars, without any particular stable point of view. So, in addition to many, many gross-out Trumps, there's also this image of Biden's head awkwardly grafted to a female stripper's body coming out of a cake.

Or this one of (a very poorly rendered) Bernie Sanders as a giant mother pig in a lab being milked.

When Beeple tries to be more earnest, as with this tribute to Black Lives Matter from last summer, the digital Gothic vibe that gives a drugged-out creepshow feel to his other works makes the results come off as ghoulish.

But all this is just the most recent tranche of the Everydays. Eighty percent of the images recorded in the Christie's opus predate the advent of this recent style.

Before the political satirist Beeple, there's sci-fi illustrator Beeple. There's lots of DeviantArt-esque dreamy landscapes with big robotic structures in them or small figures gazing at portals of light or worshipping spheres. This period lasts from 2015 to 2018.

Before sci-fi illustrator Beeple, there's digital striver Beeple. This long period of abstract, semi-abstract, or awkwardly rendered images, where Beeple is just using his daily exercises to try out tools, lasts from 2011 to 2014. They have garish colors and are frenzied mishmashes of textures and patterns, with names like Synthetic Bubblegum Tittyfux.

Sometimes, there's a hint of the current-events angle that he would evolve toward, as with his mock-up of an invitation to the Royal Wedding of Kate and William in 2011, featuring the commentary "The Most Fairy Tale Part of the Wedding Night Will be When P. Willy Fucks Her Like a Common House Mule."

And then we arrive at the earliest period, from 2007 to 2011, when Winkelmann was in his late 20s and early 30s-before he even became a pixel-based artist, when he was just playing around with cartoons and uploading them to the web. (This period of work is clustered in the top left corner of the digital mosaic sold by Christie's.)

It's mildly interesting to see what Beeple's early art influences were: punk drawer Zak Smith, cartoon painter Victor Castillo, and, interestingly, Martín Ramírez, the self-taught former janitor who made most of his work while institutionalized in a California mental hospital, and developed his own private, haunting lexicon of images. Beeple dedicates an entire series of "Everydays" to redoing themes from Ramírez, whom he refers to as a "tard."

Beeple launched his drawing-a-day experiment in the build-up to the 2008 presidential elections. Whatever else has changed, the frankly misogynistic treatment of Hillary Clinton, at least, has been a consistent theme, as with this untitled "Everyday" from 2007.

There's also this picture of Hillary with a grill, put into the world during her doomed 2008 primary against Barack Obama.

A lot of Beeple's concerns in this period were the concerns of late-2000s hipster irony-bro culture: cartoons, porno, and the intersection between cartoons and porno. Thus, the "Everydays" have a lot of images like this.

And many more like this.

Or this.

Or this.

Plenty more are just cartoons with a directionless loutishness, like this drawing of a gender-swapped Captain Crunch rebranded as "Cap'n Bitch." This very much does not read as something that was meant to be put in a museum and last forever.

I'm not 100 percent sure what this "Everyday" starring the Dalai Lama comments upon. I will say that having the caption definitely affects the meaning.

In case you were wondering if this immortal bit of commentary made it into the Christie's lot, here it is, in the top edge.

There are also works like this one. I mean, can you imagine Christie's hanging an IRL version of this in their sales galleries?

Here it is in the mosaic.

Along similar lines, there's this.

Here's where it is located, right next to a drawing of Babar the elephant with his penis out.

Oh and then there's this quaint Beeple "Everyday" from August 23, 2007.

There it is, immortalized in the $69 million opus.

When Twobadour, whose company bought the Beeple, talked to my colleague Eileen Kinsella, he said proudly that the plan was to create "a massive monument for this particular work of art which exists only in the virtual world." In this online cathedral, web surfers from all over will be able to come to "experience the grandeur of this work."

We've passed through a racial uprising and a reckoning with sexism, and the cultural project of the moment is... innovating new ways to worship decade-old, BroBible-level brain farts? During a time of immiseration, investors are competing to throw tens of millions of dollars... at this?

These are the questions that go through my head. But that's probably just "fancy-dancy elite art homo" thinking, right?

Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward.

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I Looked Through All 5,000 Images in Beeple's $69 Million Magnum Opus. What I Found Isn't So Pretty | Artnet News

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"We didn't need a preview." So said Twobadour, one of the players behind the purchase of the all-digital work by artist Beeple (aka Charleston-based digital artist Mike Winkelmann) at Christie's last week, when asked if he had actually looked at the lot before his company paid $69 million for it.

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Caroline Vang's 3D masses are defined by lifelike texture

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Danish 3D artist Caroline Vang believes texture is the key to realism. The digital masses she creates are alien in form and shape, but seem to be made from real-world materials

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⊂(◉ ‿ ◉)つ hi, my name is nick briz. i'm an Internet artist / educator / organizer. i make work with, but also about, the technology that has come to define the present era.

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Pose estimation is the task of using an ML model to estimate the pose of a person from an image or a video by estimating the spatial locations of key body joints (keypoints).

Get started

If you are new to TensorFlow Lite and are working with Android or iOS, explore the following example applications that can help you get started.

Android example iOS example

If you are familiar with the TensorFlow Lite APIs, download the starter PoseNet model and supporting files.
Download starter model
If you want to try pose estimation on a web browser, check out the TensorFlow JS GitHub repository.

Model description

How it works

Pose estimation refers to computer vision techniques that detect human figures in images and videos, so that one could determine, for example, where someone's elbow shows up in an image. It is important to be aware of the fact that pose estimation merely estimates where key body joints are and does not recognize who is in an image or video.

The PoseNet model takes a processed camera image as the input and outputs information about keypoints. The keypoints detected are indexed by a part ID, with a confidence score between 0.0 and 1.0. The confidence score indicates the probability that a keypoint exists in that position.

The various body joints detected by the PoseNet model are tabulated below:

An example output is shown below:

Performance benchmarks

Performance varies based on your device and output stride (heatmaps and offset vectors). The PoseNet model is image size invariant, which means it can predict pose positions in the same scale as the original image regardless of whether the image is downscaled. This means that you configure the model to have a higher accuracy at the expense of performance.

The output stride determines how much the output is scaled down relative to the input image size. It affects the size of the layers and the model outputs.

The higher the output stride, the smaller the resolution of layers in the network and the outputs, and correspondingly their accuracy. In this implementation, the output stride can have values of 8, 16, or 32. In other words, an output stride of 32 will result in the fastest performance but lowest accuracy, while 8 will result in the highest accuracy but slowest performance. The recommended starting value is 16.

The following image shows how the output stride determines how much the output is scaled down relative to the input image size. A higher output stride is faster but results in lower accuracy.

Performance benchmark numbers are generated with the tool described here.

* 4 threads used.

** 2 threads used on iPhone for the best performance result.

Further reading and resources

Check out this blog post to learn more about pose estimation using TensorFlow Lite.

Check out this blog post to learn more about pose estimation using TensorFlow JS.

Read the PoseNet paper here

Also, check out these use cases of pose estimation.

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Pose estimation is the task of using an ML model to estimate the pose of a person from an image or a video by estimating the spatial locations of key body joints (keypoints). If you are new to TensorFlow Lite and are working with Android or iOS, explore the following example applications that can help you get started.

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With no prospect of a physical meet-ups and having never collaborated virtually before, the Digital Maker Collective (DMC) who normally held physical meet-ups in Camberwell, London needed to find a more creative virtual space to meet. In September 2020 DMC started to explore the 'Immersive Web' together.

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Overview

MediaPipe Face Detection is an ultrafast face detection solution that comes with 6 landmarks and multi-face support. It is based on BlazeFace, a lightweight and well-performing face detector tailored for mobile GPU inference. The detector's super-realtime performance enables it to be applied to any live viewfinder experience that requires an accurate facial region of interest as an input for other task-specific models, such as 3D facial keypoint or geometry estimation (e.g., MediaPipe Face Mesh), facial features or expression classification, and face region segmentation. BlazeFace uses a lightweight feature extraction network inspired by, but distinct from MobileNetV1/V2, a GPU-friendly anchor scheme modified from Single Shot MultiBox Detector (SSD), and an improved tie resolution strategy alternative to non-maximum suppression. For more information about BlazeFace, please see the Resources section.

Example Apps

Please first see general instructions for Android, iOS and desktop on how to build MediaPipe examples.

Note: To visualize a graph, copy the graph and paste it into MediaPipe Visualizer. For more information on how to visualize its associated subgraphs, please see visualizer documentation.

Mobile

GPU Pipeline

CPU Pipeline

This is very similar to the GPU pipeline except that at the beginning and the end of the pipeline it performs GPU-to-CPU and CPU-to-GPU image transfer respectively. As a result, the rest of graph, which shares the same configuration as the GPU pipeline, runs entirely on CPU.

Desktop

Web

Please refer to these instructions.

Coral

Please refer to these instructions to cross-compile and run MediaPipe examples on the Coral Dev Board.

Resources

© 2020 GOOGLE LLC | PRIVACY POLICY | TERMS OF SERVICE

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MediaPipe Face Detection is an ultrafast face detection solution that comes with 6 landmarks and multi-face support. It is based on BlazeFace, a lightweight and well-performing face detector tailored for mobile GPU inference.

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The Digital Innovation Season is an exciting and challenging programme of skills workshops, events and critical talks and discussions focused on the cutting edge of digital practice in art, design and performance. Central Saint Martins, in partnership with Three, has launched this season to explore both the theory and practice of techno-digital futures. The season runs across a series of hand-on workshops for Central Saint Martins students, and a public programme of Hybrid Futures talks with leading-edge practitioners and thinkers.

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The Digital Innovation Season is an exciting and challenging programme of skills workshops, events and critical talks and discussions focused on the cutting edge of digital practice in art, design and performance. Central Saint Martins, in partnership with Three, has launched this season to explore both the theory and practice of techno-digital futures.

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ABOUT THE RESIDENCY

Ender Gallery and the MacKenzie Art Gallery are partnering for an exciting new online initiative curated by Sarah Friend, Cat Bluemke, and Jonathan Carroll, existing entirely in Minecraft. We have four residencies planned for 2021. Each residency will be 2 months long, followed by a two month exhibition period and will pay an artist fee of $1,600 CAD.

Available residency periods are Mar-Apr, May-Jun, Jul-Aug, and Sept-Oct. Each resident will create an artwork/installation during that residency period that will be hosted on our server in a two-month public exhibition. Each exhibition will have one hosted opening, but can optionally include other events during other performances or exhibition tours.

The emergent possibilities within Minecraft are arguably as rich as some game engines, making it an exciting yet underexplored artistic medium. The possibilities include creating custom textures, shaders, maps, mods, minigames, live performance, and video works. While we encourage applicants to research these possibilities prior to submitting their proposal, the residency is open to applicants from outside the existing game community. The Ender gallery curatorial team will be available during the residency period to provide technical support and virtual studio visits.

While we love beautiful builds, we are interested especially in proposals that extend the possibilities of play, that bring elements from outside the game world to bear, or that consider the game as an expressive medium. The call is open to video, media, game, and performance artists who are interested in pushing the medium's potential. For this residency tranche, we are particularly interested in proposals exploring Indigenous sovereignty, storytelling, simulation, colonialism, alternative economies, materiality, fandom, and digital ontologies - but we look forward to being surprised.

Ender Gallery and the MacKenzie Art Gallery are committed to maintaining an inclusive community that welcomes applications from persons of all genders, races, ages, and abilities. We are excited to read your proposals!

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Ender Gallery: Minecraft Residency - MacKenzie Art Gallery

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Ender Gallery and the MacKenzie Art Gallery are partnering for an exciting new online initiative curated by Sarah Friend, Cat Bluemke, and Jonathan Carroll, existing entirely in Minecraft. We have four residencies planned for 2021. Each residency will be 2 months long, followed by a two month exhibition period and will pay an artist fee of $1,600 CAD.

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A powerful desktop app for creating responsive websites using the Bootstrap framework.

Run Browser Demo

Bootstrap Studio is a powerful desktop app for designing and prototyping websites.

It comes with a large number of built-in components, which you can drag and drop to assemble responsive web pages. The app is built on top of the hugely popular Bootstrap framework, and exports clean and semantic HTML.

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Bootstrap Studio has a beautiful and powerful interface, which is built around the simplicity of drag and drop. This makes it the perfect tool for prototyping and designing web pages and apps.

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The app comes with a number of premium, fully responsive templates that you can customize. Each template consists of multiple pages and widgets you can pick-and-match into the perfect website.

Beautiful Components

Bootstrap Studio comes with a large number of pretty components for building responsive pages. We've got headers, footers, galleries, slideshows and even basic elements like spans and divs. See some of them below.

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If you need a component which doesn't exist in our library, just click the Online tab in the Component Panel. There you will find thousands of components built and shared by the community. You can also upload your own.

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Bootstrap Studio has a powerful feature called Preview. With it, you can open your design in multiple web browsers and devices, and every change you make within the app will be shown instantaneously everywhere.

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Learn What's Coming Next

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The Revolutionary Web Design Tool.

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Bootstrap Studio - The Revolutionary Web Design Tool

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A powerful web design tool for creating responsive websites using the Bootstrap framework.

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The Loaf Zone was my graduation film. It received a Vimeo Staff Pick and Best of the Month for May of 2018. It was also featured on a number of animation publications including Cartoon Brew and .

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Microsoft Co-founder

Nobel Peace prize nominee

What is Bitcoin?

With the Bitcoin price so volatile everyone is curious. Bitcoin, the category creator of blockchain technology, is the World Wide Ledger yet extremely complicated and no one definition fully encapsulates it. By analogy it is like being able to send a gold coin via email. It is a consensus network that enables a new payment system and a completely digital money.

It is the first decentralized peer-to-peer payment network that is powered by its users with no central authority or middlemen. Bitcoin was the first practical implementation and is currently the most prominent triple entry bookkeeping system in existence.

Beware of the confusingly similar Bcash, BCH, Bitcoin Cash project.

Visualize and Download High-Resolution Infographic

Who created Bitcoin?

The first Bitcoin specification and proof of concept was published in 2009 by an unknown individual under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto who revealed little about himself and left the project in late 2010. The Bitcoin community has since grown exponentially.

Satoshi's anonymity often raises unjustified concerns because of a misunderstanding of Bitcoin's open-source nature. Everyone has access to all of the source code all of the time and any developer can review or modify the software code. As such, the identity of Bitcoin's inventor is probably as relevant today as the identity of the person who invented paper.

Who is involved in Bitcoin?

Over $1B of investment into Bitcoin and blockchain companies has taken place resulting in thousands of companies and hundreds of thousands of individuals involved from around the world.

What is the Blockchain?

Who controls the Bitcoin network?

Nobody owns the Bitcoin network much like no one owns the technology behind email or the Internet. Bitcoin transactions are verified by Bitcoin miners which has an entire industry and Bitcoin cloud mining options. While developers are improving the software they cannot force a change in the Bitcoin protocol because all users are free to choose what software and version they use.

In order to stay compatible with each other, all users need to use software complying with the same rules. Bitcoin can only work correctly with a complete consensus among all users. Therefore, all users and developers have a strong incentive to protect this consensus.

How does Bitcoin work?

From a user perspective, Bitcoin is nothing more than a mobile app or computer program that provides a personal Bitcoin wallet and enables a user to send and receive bitcoins.

Behind the scenes, the Bitcoin network is sharing a massive public ledger called the "block chain". This ledger contains every transaction ever processed which enables a user's computer to verify the validity of each transaction. The authenticity of each transaction is protected by digital signatures corresponding to the sending addresses therefore allowing all users to have full control over sending bitcoins.

Thus, there is no fraud, no chargebacks and no identifying information that could be compromised resulting in identity theft. To learn more about Bitcoin, you can consult the original Bitcoin whitepaper, read through the extremely thorough Frequently Asked Questions, listen to a Bitcoin podcast or read the latest Bitcoin news.

Sponsors for free Bitcoins

Many people new to Bitcoin are curious about how to get some. Bitcoin faucets, places where bitcoins are given away for free, have been a part of spreading Bitcoin since the earliest days. But one problem is running out of bitcoins to give! That is why we have figured out a sustainable way to give away free bitcoins with sponsors.

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What is Bitcoin? Introductory video and current Bitcoin price.

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Microsoft Co-founder Nobel Peace prize nominee With the Bitcoin price so volatile everyone is curious. Bitcoin, the category creator of blockchain technology, is the World Wide Ledger yet extremely complicated and no one definition fully encapsulates it. By analogy it is like being able to send a gold coin via email.

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A web editor for p5.js, a JavaScript library with the goal of making coding accessible to artists, designers, educators, and beginners.

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The following films are presented for educational and non-commercial use only. All copyrights belong to the artists.

About UbuWeb Film & Video

UbuWeb is pleased to present thousands of avant-garde films & videos for your viewing pleasure. However, it is important to us that you realize that what you will see is in no way comparable to the experience of seeing these gems as they were intended to be seen: in a dark room, on a large screen, with a good sound system and, most importantly, with a roomful of warm, like-minded bodies.

However, we realize that the real thing isn't very easy to get to. Most of us don't live anywhere near theatres that show this kind of fare and very few of us can afford the hefty rental fees, not to mention the cumbersome equipment, to show these films. Thankfully, there is the internet which allows you to get a whiff of these films regardless of your geographical location.

We realize that the films we are presenting are of poor quality. It's not a bad thing; in fact, the best thing that can happen is that seeing a crummy shockwave file will make you want to make a trip to New York to the Anthology Film Archives or the Lux Cinema in London (or other places around the world showing similar fare). Next best case scenario will be that you will be enticed to purchase a high quality DVD from the noble folks trying to get these works out into the world. Believe me, they're not doing it for the money.

UbuWeb

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The following films are presented for educational and non-commercial use only. All copyrights belong to the artists. About UbuWeb Film & Video UbuWeb is pleased to present thousands of avant-garde films & videos for your viewing pleasure.

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Sometimes it catches when the fumes rise up
among the throbbing lights of cars, or as
you look away to dodge eye-contact with
your own reflection in the carriage-glass;
or in a waiting-room a face reminds you
that the colour supplements have lied
and some have pleasure and some pay the price.

Then all the small securities you built
about your house, your desk, your calendar
are blown like straws; and momentarily,
as if a scent of ivy or the earth
had opened up a childhood door, you pause,
to take the measure of what might have been
against the kind of life you settled for.

Stuart Henson
Stuart Henson's website.

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The Price Sometimes it catches when the fumes rise up among the throbbing lights of cars, or as you look away to dodge eye-contact with your own reflection in the carriage-glass; or in a waiting-room a face reminds you that the colour supplements have lied and some have pleasure and some pay the price.

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2020/12/30: Playstation 2: James Bond 007: From Russia With Love

2020/12/24: Sega 32X: Spider-Man: Web of Fire

2020/12/21: Saturn: Double Switch

2020/12/18: Dreamcast: Arcade Racing Legends

2020/12/12: Jaguar: Fast Food 64: Holiday Snacks (CD)

2020/12/2: Neo Geo: Samurai Shodown, Samurai Shodown 2, Samurai Shodown 3

2020/11/30: Super Nintendo: Addams Family: Pugsley's Scavenger Hunt, The

2020/11/21: Playstation 4: Blair Witch

2020/11/18: Wii: I Spy Spooky Mansion

2020/11/15: Atari 5200: Berzerk

2020/11/13: Nintendo DS: Backyard Sports: Rookie Rush

2020/11/10: Playstation 4: The Bunker

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Video Game Reviews by the Video Game Critic

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2020/12/30: Playstation 2: James Bond 007: From Russia With Love 2020/12/24: Sega 32X: Spider-Man: Web of Fire 2020/12/21: Saturn: Double Switch 2020/12/18: Dreamcast: Arcade Racing Legends 2020/12/12: Jaguar: Fast Food 64: Holiday Snacks (CD) 2020/12/2: Neo Geo: Samurai Shodown, Samurai Shodown 2, Samurai Shodown 3 2020/11/30: Super Nintendo: Addams Family: Pugsley's Scavenger Hunt, The 2020/11/21: Playstation 4: Blair Witch 2020/11/18: Wii: I Spy Spooky Mansion 2020/11/15: Atari 5200: Berzerk 2020/11/13: Nintendo DS: Backyard Sports: Rookie Rush 2020/11/10: Playstation 4: The Bunker

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OWW | Occupy White Walls Video Game and Art Platform

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Occupy White Walls: To say it’s a PC sandbox-building, AI-driven MMO where people play with Art, developed by folks who are really into architecture and abstract characters… would be a bit of a mouthful. Build a gallery.

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Online work published by artist Elizabeth Peyton.

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Future Fashion Factory is a £5.4 million R&D partnership exploring and developing new digital and advanced textile technologies to boost the design of high-value creative products.

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Future Fashion Factory is a £5.4 million R&D partnership exploring and developing new digital and advanced textile technologies to boost the design of high-value creative products.

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Virtual + Augmented Reality

The Size of a Virus is a response to Covid-19, developed as part of the Cannes XR incubation programme; a one month program to foster the development of innovative entertainment projects that propose new forms of audience engagement with emerging technologies.

The Size of a Virus is both a podcast and a VR experience, which shrinks the audience down to the microscopic level, to experience stories and essays at a tier of life that we rarely think about.

The project is an interdisciplinary collaboration between writers, artists and microbiologists.

For more details and to see a short concept video (edited by the brilliant Ronit Meranda) see The Size of a Virus

Virtual Love Islands
This room scale, interactive experience is aimed at teenagers and twenty-somethings. It explores themes of love, intimacy, body image, vulnerability, consent and objectification in VR.

It takes as a starting point, the idea that we all see hundreds of mediated bodies every day but rarely get the chance to experience the honesty of 'real' bodies that haven't been polished and photoshopped.

We are also repeatedly told a story about love and attraction that helps to sell beauty products, screen time and plastic surgery but doesn't help humans connect.

Using Leap Motion technology and life size scans created using Brekel Kinect 3D scanners, you are invited to experience the naked truth of real people in love.

All couples involved hold the rights to their scans in perpetuity.

What if rhinos, lemurs and sea turtles only existed as digital museum exhibits?

Set in the year 2500, Sanctuary imagines a future in which the natural world as we know it has been lost.

A handful of digital fragments showing creatures from before 'The Fall' have been found and are being exhibited to a select few remaining citizens via resurrected augmented reality technology.

But why now? And why you?

Created in collaboration with Josh Pawlowski, a graduate of Natural History Photography at Falmouth University, Sanctuary asks participants to consider what life might be like, after we have lost a significant number of Earth's species.

James and the Giant Apple

Set in Millennium Square, Bristol (the gateway to the cider-drinking south-west) on Apple day, this augmented reality documentary uses photogrammetry and plays with scale to create the illusion that you are stepping inside an overgrown version of the quintessential British fruit.

As you enter the enormous apple, the magic of geo-location triggers a voice (James), who relates all sorts of fascinating tales and facts about apples. Did you know that Britain has more varieties of apple than anywhere else in the world?

The average apple contains double the amount of sugar it did 50 years ago, while levels of iron, magnesium and other important minerals have plummeted.

The story of the apple is the story of modern food, which is the story of the supermarket's preference for regularity, reliability, shelf-life, cheapness, speed, sweetness and size. Though this path has taken us away from depth, diversity and integrity, there is a recent revival in apple detectives who track down knobbly old heritage varieties and remind us to sing their praises again

Using 6DOF 360 video, binaural sound and haptics, this immersive installation encourages contemplation on the themes of home, survival, modernity, loss and acceptance. It is an attempt to recreate the pace of life on a remote Hebridean island off the west coast of Scotland 100 years ago.

The experience is an island itself - a lull found in the midst of the city. It tells the story of a community that no longer exists; a people forced to abandon their home and way of life.

The length of the experience is dictated by the participant, which means it may last for 2 minutes or 2 hours. If you enjoy a particular location, you may decide to stay and listen to the waves and watch lichen settle on the old schoolhouse walls.

Whether you are on a dark sea under the stars, or in a field of wildflowers and sunshine, you remain in the fishing boat that carries you safely between chapters. The oars are your 'ruby slippers'; three strokes move the narrative on.

The history of the island, the weather, the bird colonies, the old practises of fishing, crofting, fowling and cutting peat, are introduced through narration, archive recordings, folk songs and sound design.

Row your little boat back a hundred years to a beach covered in sea birds where no one can take a selfie.

It's closer than you think.

The Home Advantage - for the English Institute of Sport

Developed by students of MA Virtual Reality at UWE Bristol, Benjamin Walbrook, Christina Constantinou and Ellie Richold in partnership with the English Institute of Sport, this virtual reality experience supports elite athletes as they compete on a global stage.

Using a 'totem' object to create a connection between physical and virtual spaces, participants are invited to visit a virtual version of a familiar space, experiencing the sights and sounds of home wherever they are in the world.

We were tasked with giving British Athletes 'the home advantage' when competing overseas and offered a selection of responses to the brief which fell into two camps:

1. Use immersive technology to familiarise athletes with locations ahead of travelling,
2. Use immersive technology to enable athletes to take some of the familiarity of home with them to Tokyo.

The EIS chose the latter and we created a prototype which involved a colourful 'grounding' object - a small box representing home (see image above, right) that could pass between the physical and virtual worlds, as a reminder of home in the physical and as a controller in VR.

Interacting with the box allows participants to move between a selection of 360 videos of prerecorded familiar places - eg the garden, living room, gym or pub back home. The 9 hour time difference between Tokyo and the UK means it is not always possible for athletes to stay in touch with family members - especially young children.

Our test case athlete said he that he used it "mostly in the evenings when not able to see the family before I go to sleep" and that he found it "...energising to see my family".

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Virtual / Augmented Reality - Ellie Richold

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The Size of a Virus is a response to Covid-19, developed as part of the Cannes XR incubation programme; a one month program to foster the development of innovative entertainment projects that propose new forms of audience engagement with emerging technologies.

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Episode 1 - Making Immersive Stories: What is the future of storytelling?
In our first episode, we delve into what the opportunities are for immersive storytelling. We speak to Becky Gregory-Clarke, Head of Immersive at StoryFutures Academy about the potential of this relatively new industry, and hear from Professor James Bennett, Director, StoryFutures and Co-Director, StoryFutures Academy about their mission and where he thinks the future is going. In addition we're joined by Darren Emerson from East City Films who talks about his recent VR experience, Common Ground, set in the Aylesbury Estate in South London.

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StoryFutures Academy Podcast - StoryFutures

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Episode 1 - Making Immersive Stories: What is the future of storytelling? In our first episode, we delve into what the opportunities are for immersive storytelling. We speak to Becky Gregory-Clarke, Head of Immersive at StoryFutures Academy about the potential of this relatively new industry, and hear from Professor James Bennett, Director, StoryFutures and Co-Director, StoryFutures Academy about their mission and where he thinks the future is going.

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Art Licks is an essential platform & voice to support artists, curators & project spaces in the UK. We produce a printed magazine, projects and festival.

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Patatap is a portable animation and sound kit. With the touch of a finger create melodies charged with moving shapes. Warning: contains flashing images.

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In the first article of the module, we explored the basic CSS features available for styling fonts and text. In this article we will go further, exploring web fonts in detail - these allow you to download custom fonts along with your web page, to allow for more varied, custom text styling.

Font families recap

As we looked at in Fundamental text and font styling, the fonts applied to your HTML can be controlled using the font-family property. This takes one or more font family names, and the browser travels down the list until it finds a font it has available on the system it is running on:

p {
  font-family: Helvetica, "Trebuchet MS", Verdana, sans-serif;
}

This system works well, but traditionally web developers' font choices were limited. There are only a handful of fonts that you can guarantee to be available across all common systems - the so-called Web-safe fonts. You can use the font stack to specify preferable fonts, followed by web-safe alternatives, followed by the default system font, but this adds overhead in terms of testing to make sure that your designs look ok with each font, etc.

Web fonts

But there is an alternative, which works very well, right back to IE version 6. Web fonts are a CSS feature that allows you to specify font files to be downloaded along with your website as it is accessed, meaning that any browser that supports web fonts can have exactly the fonts you specify available to it. Amazing! The syntax required looks something like this:

First of all, you have a block at the start of the CSS, which specifies the font file(s) to download:

@font-face {
  font-family: "myFont";
  src: url("myFont.woff");
}

Below this you can then use the font family name specified inside @font-face to apply your custom font to anything you like, as normal:

html {
  font-family: "myFont", "Bitstream Vera Serif", serif;
}

The syntax does get a bit more complex than this; we'll go into more detail below.

There are two important things to bear in mind about web fonts:

1. Browsers support different font formats, so you'll need multiple font formats for decent cross-browser support. For example, most modern browsers support WOFF/WOFF2 (Web Open Font Format versions 1 and 2), the most efficient format around, but older versions of IE only support EOT (Embedded Open Type) fonts, and you might need to include an SVG version of the font to support older versions of iPhone and Android browsers. We'll show you below how to generate the required code.

2. Fonts generally aren't free to use. You have to pay for them, and/or follow other license conditions such as crediting the font creator in the code (or on your site). You shouldn't steal fonts and use them without giving proper credit.

Note: Web fonts as a technology have been supported in Internet Explorer since version 4!

You can use the Firefox Font Editor to investigate and manipulate the fonts in use on your page, whether they are web fonts or not. This video provides a nice walkthrough:

Active learning: A web font example

With this in mind, let's build up a basic web font example from first principles. It is difficult to demonstrate this using an embedded live example, so instead, we would like you to follow the steps detailed in the below sections, to get an idea of the process.

You should use the web-font-start.html and web-font-start.css files as a starting point to add your code to (see the live example). Make a copy of these files in a new directory on your computer now. In the web-font-start.css file, you'll find some minimal CSS to deal with the basic layout and typesetting of the example.

Finding fonts

For this example, we'll use two web fonts, one for the headings, and one for the body text. To start with, we need to find the font files that contain the fonts. Fonts are created by font foundries and are stored in different file formats. There are generally three types of sites where you can obtain fonts:

A free font distributor: This is a site that makes free fonts available for download (there may still be some license conditions, such as crediting the font creator). Examples include Font Squirrel, dafont, and Everything Fonts.

A paid font distributor: This is a site that makes fonts available for a charge, such as fonts.com or myfonts.com. You can also buy fonts directly from font foundries, for example Linotype, Monotype, or Exljbris.

An online font service: This is a site that stores and serves the fonts for you, making the whole process easier. See the Using an online font service section for more details.

Let's find some fonts! Go to Font Squirrel and choose two fonts - a nice interesting font for the headings (maybe a nice display or slab serif font), and slightly less flashy and more readable font for the paragraphs. When you find each font, press on the download button, and save the file inside the same directory as the HTML and CSS files you saved earlier. It doesn't matter whether they are TTF (True Type Fonts) or OTF (Open Type Fonts).

In each case, unzip the font package (Web fonts are usually distributed in ZIP files containing the font file(s) and licensing information). You may find multiple font files in the package - some fonts are distributed as a family with different variants available, for example thin, medium, bold, italic, thin italic, etc. For this example, we just want you to concern yourself with a single font file for each choice.

Note: Under the "Find fonts" section in the right-hand column, you can click on the different tags and classifications to filter the displayed choices.

Generating the required code

Now you'll need to generate the required code (and font formats). For each font, follow these steps:

1. Make sure you have satisfied any licensing requirement, if you are going to use this in a commercial and/or Web project.

2. Go to the Fontsquirrel Webfont Generator.

3. Upload your two font files using the Upload Fonts button.

4. Check the checkbox labeled "Yes, the fonts I'm uploading are legally eligible for web embedding."

5. Click Download your kit.

After the generator has finished processing, you should get a ZIP file to download - save it in the same directory as your HTML and CSS.

Implementing the code in your demo

At this point, unzip the webfont kit you just generated. Inside the unzipped directory you'll see three useful items:

Multiple versions of each font: (for example .ttf, .woff, .woff2, etc.; the exact fonts provided will be updated over time as browser support requirements change). As mentioned above, multiple fonts are needed for cross browser support - this is Fontsquirrel's way of making sure you've got everything you need.

A demo HTML file for each font - load these in your browser to see what the font will look like in different usage contexts.

A stylesheet.css file, which contains the generated @font-face code you'll need.

To implement these fonts in your demo, follow these steps:

1. Rename the unzipped directory to something easy and simple, like fonts.

2. Open up the stylesheet.css file and copy both the @font-face blocks contained inside into your web-font-start.css file - you need to put them at the very top, before any of your CSS, as the fonts need to be imported before you can use them on your site.

3. Each of the url() functions points to a font file that we want to import into our CSS - we need to make sure the paths to the files are correct, so add fonts/ to the start of each path (adjust as necessary).

4. Now you can use these fonts in your font stacks, just like any web safe or default system font. For example:
font-family: 'zantrokeregular', serif;

You should end up with a demo page with some nice fonts implemented on them. Because different fonts are created at different sizes, you may have to adjust the size, spacing, etc., to sort out the look and feel.

Using an online font service

Online font services generally store and serve fonts for you, so you don't have to worry about writing the @font-face code, and generally just need to insert a simple line or two of code into your site to make everything work. Examples include Adobe Fonts and Cloud.typography. Most of these services are subscription-based, with the notable exception of Google Fonts, a useful free service, especially for rapid testing work and writing demos.

Most of these services are easy to use, so we won't cover them in great detail. Let's have a quick look at Google fonts, so you can get the idea. Again, use copies of web-font-start.html and web-font-start.css as your starting point.

1. Go to Google Fonts.

2. Use the filters on the left-hand side to display the kinds of fonts you want to choose and choose a couple of fonts you like.

3. To select a font family, press the ⊕ button alongside it.

4. When you've chosen the font families, press the [Number] Families Selected bar at the bottom of the page.

5. In the resulting screen, you first need to copy the line of HTML code shown and paste it into the head of your HTML file. Put it above the existing element, so that the font is imported before you try to use it in your CSS.

6. You then need to copy the CSS declarations listed into your CSS as appropriate, to apply the custom fonts to your HTML.

@font-face in more detail

Let's explore that @font-face syntax generated for you by fontsquirrel. This is what one of the blocks looks like:

@font-face {
  font-family: 'ciclefina';
  src: url('fonts/cicle_fina-webfont.eot');
  src: url('fonts/cicle_fina-webfont.eot?#iefix') format('embedded-opentype'),
         url('fonts/cicle_fina-webfont.woff2') format('woff2'),
         url('fonts/cicle_fina-webfont.woff') format('woff'),
         url('fonts/cicle_fina-webfont.ttf') format('truetype'),
         url('fonts/cicle_fina-webfont.svg#ciclefina') format('svg');
  font-weight: normal;
  font-style: normal;
}

This is referred to as "bulletproof @font-face syntax", after a post by Paul Irish from early on when @font-face started to get popular ( Bulletproof @font-face Syntax). Let's go through it to see what it does:

font-family: This line specifies the name you want to refer to the font as. You can put this as anything you like, as long as you use it consistently throughout your CSS.

src: These lines specify the paths to the font files to be imported into your CSS (the url part), and the format of each font file (the format part). The latter part in each case is optional, but it is useful to declare it because it allows browsers to find a font they can use faster. Multiple declarations can be listed, separated by commas - the browser will search through them and use the first one it can find that it understands - it is therefore best to put newer, better formats like WOFF2 earlier on, and older, not so good formats like TTF later on. The one exception to this is the EOT fonts - they are placed first to fix a couple of bugs in older versions of IE whereby it will try to use the first thing it finds, even if it can't actually use the font.

font-weight/: These lines specify what weight the font has, and whether it is italic or not. If you are importing multiple weights of the same font, you can specify what their weight/style is and then use different values of font-weight/ to choose between them, rather than having to call all the different members of the font family different names. @font-face tip: define font-weight and font-style to keep your CSS simple by Roger Johansson shows what to do in more detail.

Note: You can also specify particular font-variant and font-stretch values for your web fonts. In newer browsers, you can also specify a unicode-range value, which is a specific range of characters you want to use out of the web font - in supporting browsers, only the specified characters will be downloaded, saving unnecessary downloading. Creating Custom Font Stacks with Unicode-Range by Drew McLellan provides some useful ideas on how to make use of this.

Variable fonts

There is a newer font technology available in browsers called variable fonts - these are fonts that allow many different variations of a typeface to be incorporated into a single file, rather than having a separate font file for every width, weight, or style. They are somewhat advanced for our beginner's course, but if you fancy stretching yourself and looking into them, read our Variable fonts guide.

Test your skills!

You've reached the end of this article, and already did some skill testing in our Active Learning sections, but can you remember the most important information going forward? You can find an assessment to verify that you've retained this information at the end of the module - see Typesetting a community school homepage.

Summary

Now that you have worked through our articles on text styling fundamentals, it is time to test your comprehension with our assessment for the module, Typesetting a community school homepage.

In this module

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In the first article of the module, we explored the basic CSS features available for styling fonts and text. In this article we will go further, exploring web fonts in detail - these allow you to download custom fonts along with your web page, to allow for more varied, custom text styling.

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Zoe Horne is a member of Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

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soundtoys.net - "Bakteria" by arcangel constantini

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Soundtoys.net is the internets leading space for the exhibition of exciting new works by of audio visual artists. The site contains areas for artist interviews, links to resources, and texts around interactive arts, audio visual synthesis, generative art.

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INFO

Soundtoys.net is the internets leading space for the exhibition of exciting new works by of audio visual artists. The site is a meeting point for this growing community of artists and its audience. In addition to the exhibition of audio visual projects, the site contains areas for artists interviews, links to resources, and texts by contributing writers for more serious and educational issues around interactive arts, audio visual synthesis, generative art, and a history of interactivity are discussed. Hopefully it is a fun and entertaining site to visit, while also providing valuable information including in our journal section for all parties. Most importantly we want you to submit your soundtoy. For more information about soundtoys read here. For recent touring and artists' exhibitons visit news

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INFO Soundtoys.net is the internets leading space for the exhibition of exciting new works by of audio visual artists. The site is a meeting point for this growing community of artists and its audience.

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require '../software/test.html'; ?>

require 'header.inc'; ?> SPYCRAFT is a new book about the history of the CIA's spy technologies. It discusses the CIA's use of Spy Numbers stations, called the One Way Voice Link (OWVL)!
Spy Numbers Stations
Underground Frequency Guide: A Directory of Unusual, Illegal, and Covert Radio Communications - by Donald W. Schimmel
Scanners & Secret Frequencies (Electronic Underground Series, Vol 3) - by Henry L. Eisenson

General Spy Agencies
Agents for Change: Intelligence Services in the 21st Century - by Harold Shukman
Brassey's International Intelligence Yearbook: 2003 Edition (Brassey's International Intelligence Yearbook (Paperback)) - by Robert D'A Henderson

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Spies and Espionage (Complete Idiot's Guide to...) - by Rodney Carlisle Ph.D.

CIA
The Complete Idiot's Guide to the CIA - by Allan A. Swenson, Michael Benson, Allen Swenson
Cuba
Secret Missions to Cuba: Fidel Castro, Bernardo Benes, and Cuban Miami - by Robert M. Levine
France
Inside France's Dgse: The General Directorate for External Security (Inside the World's Most Famous Intelligence Agencies) - by Patti Polisar
KGB
The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB - by Christopher Andrew
MI6
MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service - by Stephen Dorril Inside Britain's Mi6: Military Intelligence 6 (Inside the World's Most Famous Intelligence Agencies,) - by Shaun McCormack
MOSSAD
By Way of Deception - by Victor Ostrovsky. The # 1 "New York Times" best seller the Israeli foreign intelligence agency The Mossad tried to ban. The making of a Mossad officer is the true story of an officer in Israel's most secret agency. See all Editorial Reviews
Gideon's Spies : The Secret History of the Mossad (Updated Edition) - by Gordon Thomas

Israel's Secret Wars: A History of Israel's Intelligence Services - by Ian Black

The Other Side of Deception: A Rogue Agent Exposes the Mossad's Secret Agenda - by Victor Ostrovsky.

Inside Israel's Mossad: The Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks (Inside the World's Most Famous Intelligence Agencies)

Mossad - by Dennis Eisenberg

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Books Related to Spy Numbers Stations and Spying

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require '../software/test.html'; ?> require 'header.inc'; ?> SPYCRAFT is a new book about the history of the CIA's spy technologies. It discusses the CIA's use of Spy Numbers stations, called the One Way Voice Link (OWVL)! Underground Frequency Guide: A Directory of Unusual, Illegal, and Covert Radio Communications - by Donald W.

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INTRODUCTION

Welcome to our Net Pirate Number Station.
If you are a drug dealer or the agent of a national security group or of some kind of watchdog group or human rights organization or if you are a practicing socialist/communist spy, you are in the wrong place. You will be disappointed and should leave now.
Otherwise, if you are just a plain person, welcome. We are happy to have you here.
This "Introduction" page will be your guide to our site. We know you have questions. Everyone has questions. Whenever we invite someone to listen to our station, the questions start pretty fast. So let's get to them now. Q: What's a Prototype #44, Net Pirate Number Station?
A: Basically, it is like a shortwave radio number station -on the internet- that broadcasts numbers.
Q: Where do the numbers come from?
Good question. We get our numbers from websites-any and all websites-big ones like cnn.com and little ones like that one you made in your room. Porno too! And gambling and sports. We go to all the websites to get our numbers. It's a very simple process. We have some software that takes us to these websites, grabs some text, converts it into numbers, filters the numbers and then transmits them to you using a prerecorded video host personality.
Q: How long can I listen to your number station? Is there a schedule?
A: There is a schedule, sort of. You see, we now have three different prerecorded video hosts. And each one has their own schedule. So sometimes you may come to our station and your favorite prerecorded host might be "off transmission." This will be sad for you. But don't worry--because your favorite host will be back soon! And in the meanwhile, the other prerecorded hosts will probably be working. So you will get to hear some numbers. There will always be numbers to hear because there are, in theory, endless webpages, more every minute. So you may enjoy our station forever, if you like.
Q: Why do you believe that this will be entertaining?
This is a question that you will have to answer for yourself.
Q: The constant stream of data being fed into your station makes me feel sad--and the droning of the video hosts is eerie, and they stutter a lot too -are you trying to hurt us?
A: No, not at all.
Q: Are there already enough net art websites offering data-related content? Does yours "mean" anything?
These are more questions that you will have to answer by yourself. Ultimately, we can only say that we hope you, the user, will look for meaning where there may not seem to be meaning. Like the medieval man before you who ate moldy bread that was full of witch juice and got messed up, we want you to see the world in a new way. We understand that it was probably easier to see the world in a new way a long time ago. But still, did you ever fall asleep on the subway? And when you woke up you had missed your stop but everything felt so good that you wanted to go back to sleep again? That's kind of like what we are going for here with our number station. Instead of just riding the subway like everybody else, we want you to be a different person. Does that make sense?
Q: Is there a "paranoid" thing going on here?
A: We have heard about a lot of so-called "internet conspiracies" and we think things have gone a little too far, maybe, but we are not ourselves paranoid. We like calming and trancelike stuff, not crazy stuff. Still, if you think there is too much mind-vomit on the internet, you have a friend at our station!
Q: Are you angry about something?
A: We don't want to talk about this. It's private.

Now for some other good questions that we like to answer.
Q: This seems a little confusing. Is it for "everybody"?
A: Yes! It is for anybody who likes the hypnotic sounds of the prerecorded host voices. That means everybody!
Q: Big picture question: Who thinks that there is an almost overwhelming amount of data on the internet and that anyone trying to find meaning in it is facing a hopeless task?
Everyone thinks this.

The "Introduction" page is now over. You are ready to have some fun at our station. Go click on the "Enter" button now.

-----

More Information About Number Stations.
http://www.spynumbers.com/
http://www.salon.com/people/feature/1999/09/16/numbers/index.html http://www.btinternet.com/~simon.mason/page32.html
http://www.irdial.com/conet.htm
http://www.rnw.nl/realradio/features/html/990920spies.html
http://www.dxing.com/numbers.htm
http://www.npr.org/programs/lnfsound/stories/000526.stories.html

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Prototype #44: Net Pirate Number Station

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INTRODUCTION Welcome to our Net Pirate Number Station. If you are a drug dealer or the agent of a national security group or of some kind of watchdog group or human rights organization or if you are a practicing socialist/communist spy, you are in the wrong place.

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"59372 98324 19043 78903 95320...". The mechanized female voice drones on and on... What have you stumbled on to? Instructions to spies? Messages exchanged between drug dealers? Deliberate attempts at deception and mis-information?

Chances are, all of the above! What you've tuned in to is called a "Spy Numbers Station". They've been on the air for several decades, and only recently have the mysteries started to unfold. But there's still much we don't know about these mysterious stations. With the information on these pages, you'll discover the little that we do know about these stations, what we're still trying to learn, and how you too can tune in to the spies.

The summer spy blockbuster Numbers Station, starring John Cusack and Malin Akerman, is a riveting action thriller, but what is a "Numbers Station" anyway? In this article we look at their use, history and technical and cultural history
SPYCRAFT is a new book about the history of the CIA's spy technologies. It discusses the CIA's use of Spy Numbers stations, called the One Way Voice Link (OWVL)!

View loggings of recent spy numbers tranmsissions on the HF Underground Spy Numbers Message Board

Be sure to visit our listing of books related to spy numbers stations. Click here!

Database

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"59372 98324 19043 78903 95320...". The mechanized female voice drones on and on... What have you stumbled on to? Instructions to spies? Messages exchanged between drug dealers? Deliberate attempts at deception and mis-information? Chances are, all of the above! What you've tuned in to is called a "Spy Numbers Station".

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Description

Five vats of tomatoes were ripened for 10 days in the Tomato Quintet exhibition. Greg calls it a "New Media Still Life." During the ripening process music was generated in real time by computer algorithms influenced by CO2, temperature and light readings from sensors in each vat. After the ripening, time was sped up and new music created at different time scales. A stand-alone computer music piece, "Tomato Music," captures the spirit of the whole thing. At dinner time, a (human) trio accompanied one of the movements during the closing pasta-fest. Recent versions with salsa feed at the closing and salsa music by Jacob Wittenberg.

Movements
Tomato Music
Tomato Music (10′)

(2007) Chris Chafe

computer-generated sound made with the Hydroponic Hydraulis

Premiered at CCRMA 19-Nov-2007

Tomato Music is a concert piece to be played apart from the Tomato Quintet sound art installation. It can be performed as a purely loudspeaker work in stereo or up to 15 channels.

The music is a sonification at high speed of the ripening of tomatoes grown in my backyard. Picked early and displayed in an installation at the Machine Project Gallery (LA) they produced a week of music before being cooked for the exhibition's closing reception. Artist Greg Niemeyer monitored environmental conditions including carbon dioxide output of the ripening process, right up to the point where they hit the sauce pot. The first movement uses four days worth of the data scanning it 600 times faster. The musical instrument is a software simulation of the ancient Greek hydraulis, or hydraulic organ. Both the simulation and the use of tomato data to play it belong to a fantasy in the spirit of the gallery exhibition. While neither is properly scientific, the two are combined to draw the listener into "a world where if you've ever sat in a forest or a garden and sensed the plants breathing, you'll appreciate how the exhibit heightens and celebrates this sensation." [Susan LaTempa, LA Times]
Speed Ripening
Speed Ripening, closing music from the Tomato Quintet (45′)

(2007) Chris Chafe

computer-generated sound

Premiered at Machine Project Gallery 31-Aug-2007

This is the music that was played in the gallery to an audience at the close of the Tomato Quintet exhibition. The ripened tomatoes were cooked into a sauce and served over pasta. During the meal the diners were treated to a symphony of sound from a fast scan through the previous days of the installation. Time was sped up to compress 10 days worth of data into about 45 minutes. The voicings here are exactly the same as the real-time ambient voicings during the 10 days.
Dinner Trio
Dinner Trio

(2007) Chris Chafe

Percussion, Viola, Bass Clarinet

Premiered at Machine Project Gallery 31-Aug-2007

At the close of the Tomato Quintet exhibition, ripened tomatoes were cooked into a sauce and served to the audience. During the meal, the diners were treated to a symphony of sounds derived from the previous days of the installation. A trio of musicians accompanied the sonification in a semi-scored improvisation. On the recording:

Lewis Keller - Percussion

Cat Lamb - Viola

Arrington de Dionyso - bass clarinet
Still Life
Still Life

(2007) Chris Chafe

ambient computer-generated sounds from the Tomato Quintet installation

Premiered at Machine Project Gallery 20-Aug-2007

Still Life plays back sounds recorded in the gallery during the exhibition.

Five vats of tomatoes were ripened for 10 days in the Tomato Quintet exhibition. Greg calls it a "New Media Still Life." During the ripening process music was generated in real time by computer algorithms influenced by CO2, temperature and light readings from sensors in each vat. After the ripening, time was sped up and new music created at different time scales. A stand-alone computer music piece, "Tomato Music," captures the spirit of the whole thing. At dinner time, a (human) trio accompanied one of the movements during the closing pasta-fest. Recent versions with salsa feed at the closing and salsa music by Jacob Wittenberg.

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Description Five vats of tomatoes were ripened for 10 days in the Tomato Quintet exhibition. Greg calls it a "New Media Still Life." During the ripening process music was generated in real time by computer algorithms influenced by CO2, temperature and light readings from sensors in each vat.

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Getting Started with GoPro Webcam for Mac
Step 1: Update your HERO8 or HERO9 Black to the most current firmware.

Update your camera via the GoPro App or by a manual update.

Step 2: Install and launch the GoPro Webcam app

1. Download GoPro Webcam desktop utility and install the software on your computer.

2. In the Status bar, you will now see a GoPro icon.

Step 3: Connect your camera

1. Power on your camera and connect it to your computer via USB cable.

2. In the status bar, the GoPro icon will display a blue dot to indicate a successful connection.

3. The camera is now in USB mode.

Preview Webcam

1. Click on the GoPro icon in the status bar and select "Show Preview". This gives you the ability to understand your Wide field of view prior to going live.

2. You will now see the camera preview. You can switch between "mirror" and "flip".

Camera Orientation

If you rotate your camera to a portrait orientation, the streamed image will rotate automatically.

Using the GoPro Webcam in your program

1. Open your webcam application and select GoPro Camera as your preferred camera ( see below for supported programs). Heads Up... If the app is already open, you might need to quit and restart that application for the GoPro Camera option to be visible.

Example in Zoom:

2. The camera will go into GoPro Webcam mode as shown below.

3. In the status bar, the GoPro icon displays a red dot to indicate that the camera is recording.

Adjust resolution

1. To change your resolution, click on the GoPro icon in the status bar and select [Preferences].

2. Here you can choose between 1080p (default) or 720p.

Adjusting the Digital Lens to affect the Field of View (FOV)

Once your camera is connected and broadcasting (showing the red dot), you can select a different Digital Lens to change your FOV. This change takes a couple of moments.

Here are some popular tools that support GoPro Webcam on Mac

Frequently Asked Questions

I'm having trouble connecting the GoPro. What steps can I take to fix this?

1. Close the platform/app you are using and then unplug the camera.

2. Turn your GoPro off and then back on again.

3. Reconnect the GoPro to your computer. If possible, try using a different USB port on your computer.

4. Reopen your platform/app.

5. If you still don't have success, do the same steps above using a different USB cable.

My camera isn't being recognized.

1. Unplug your camera from the computer

2. Ensure that you have the correct setting applied in [Preferences] > [Connections] > [USB Connection]

Select [MTP] if you want to use file transfer

Select [GoPro Connect] to use GoPro Webcam

Can I use a different GoPro model as a webcam?
Using a GoPro as a webcam is only offered through the HERO9 Black and HERO8 Black at this time.
Can I connect my camera wirelessly?
Wireless connections are not supported for the webcam function at this time. You will need to use a USB cable to connect the camera to your computer.
Can I change my camera orientation (portrait vs. landscape) and still have the image appear right-side up?
The GoPro must be in an upright, horizontal position.
Can I have the Webcam firmware and the GoPro Labs firmware installed on my GoPro at the same time?

At this time, you can only have one version of the firmware installed at a time.

More FAQs and troubleshooting can be found here. Step 1: Update your HERO8 Black or HERO9 Black to the latest firmware.

Update your camera via the GoPro App or by a manual update.

Step 2: Install and launch the GoPro Webcam app

1. Join the Facebook group called GoPro Webcam Beta (Facebook account required).

2. Download the GoPro Webcam desktop utility and install the software on your computer.

Step 3: Connect your camera
Power on your camera and connect it to your computer using a USB cable. The camera will go into USB mode.

Getting Started with GoPro Webcam for Windows (Beta)

Preview Webcam

To preview your webcam setup, right-click on the GoPro icon in the status bar and select [Show Preview]. This will give you the ability to understand your Wide field of view prior to going live.

Using the GoPro Webcam in your program

1. Open your webcam application and select [GoPro Camera] as your preferred camera ( see below for supported programs)

Example in Zoom:

Heads Up... If the app is already open, you might need to quit and restart that application for the GoPro Camera option to be visible.

2. The camera will then go into GoPro Webcam mode

3. In the status bar, the GoPro icon displays a red dot to indicate that the camera is recording:

Adjusting the Digital Lens to affect the Field of View (FOV)

Once your camera is connected and broadcasting (showing the red dot), you can select a different Digital Lens to change your FOV.
1. Right click on the GoPro Icon and the options will appear.
2. Hover over Digital Lens and your Lens options will show. The FOV change takes a couple of moments.

Here are some popular tools that support GoPro Webcam Beta for Windows

Heads Up... For Chrome support, click the Chrome's menu button (top-right corner), then select [Settings] > [Privacy and Security] > [Site Settings] > [Camera].

Frequently Asked Questions

I'm having trouble connecting the GoPro. What steps can I take to fix this?

1. Close the platform/app you are using and then unplug the camera.

2. Turn your GoPro off and then back on again.

3. Reconnect the GoPro to your computer. If possible, try using a different USB port on your computer.

4. Reopen your platform/app.

5. If you still don't have success, do the same steps above using a different USB cable.

My camera isn't being recognized.

1. Unplug your camera from the computer

2. Ensure that you have the correct setting applied in [Preferences] > [Connections] > [USB Connection]

Select [MTP] if you want to use file transfer

Select [GoPro Connect] to use GoPro Webcam

Can I use a different GoPro model as a webcam?
Using a GoPro as a webcam is only offered through the HERO9 Black and HERO8 Black at this time.
Can I connect my camera wirelessly?
Wireless connections are not supported for the webcam function at this time. You will need to use a USB cable to connect the camera to your computer.
Can I change my camera orientation (portrait vs. landscape) and still have the image appear right-side up?
The GoPro must be in an upright, horizontal position.
Can I have the Webcam firmware and the GoPro Labs firmware installed on my GoPro at the same time?

At this time, you can only have one version of the firmware installed at a time.

More FAQs and troubleshooting can be found here.

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Instructions for Mac Users Preview Webcam Camera Orientation Using the GoPro Webcam in your program Adjust Resolution Adjusting the Digital Lens Popular Tools that Support GoPro Webcam FAQ Instructions for Windows Users (Beta) Preview Webcam Using the GoPro Webcam in your program Adjusting the Dig...

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We can all remember paintings or stories or plays we made when we were kids, but what about Live Art?

In 2016 Sibylle Peters undertook a LADA Study Room research residency exploring Live Art practices and methodologies in working with children and young people as part of Restock, Rethink, Reflect Four, a project on the ways in which Live Art has developed new forms of access, knowledge, agency, and inclusion in relation to the disempowered constituencies of the young, the old, the displaced, and those excluded through social and economic barriers.

As part of her research Sibylle was interested in artist's first ever artworks. My Very First Piece of Live Art invited artists to remember what their first Live Art work might have been. On the evening of 16 December 2016 the artists Anne Bean, Richard DeDomenici, Cara Davies, Joshua Sofaer, Peter Kennedy, Andy Field, and Ansuman, Oshin and Uma Biswas gathered at the Live Art Development Agency to share their memories, which can be viewed at the top of this page.

The Study Room Guide and toolkit of methodologies created by Sibylle from her research residency can be found on the LADA website.

Eight Feelings I Found in Live Art a Second Time

An introduction to My Very First Piece of Live Art

by Sibylle Peters
1.
When I was three years old my parents showed me how to send a message in a bottle. As I couldn't write a message at the time, I filled the bottle with interesting pieces of wood I had found. This picture actually captures one of my first memories. The moment before we threw the bottle in the creek and saw it disappear. The excitement of sending something out there. The infinite promise of throwing something into an ocean of coincidence. Something that might make a connection to the unknown.
2.
At the time we lived in an old villa in the countryside for rent. The house was huge and falling apart. It was completely overgrown with wine, had two cellars, one attic and 11 rooms. To heat it in winter costed a fortune. Six of the 11 rooms were left empty and cold. So I made it a habit to move to another room once in a while. It always started with using one of the empty rooms for play, creating a new setup in there, a witch's hut for example, just for the afternoon, just for the night. And eventually I brought all of my stuff over to the new room to immerse myself in that new setup and then I went slowly from the fiction of living in that room to the reality of living in that room. And when finally the feeling of makebelief wore of completely, I knew that, pretty soon, it was time to move again.
3.
For one year after nappies my brother refused to use a toilet, if it wasn't black and white. It had to be a white toilet with a black seat or he would shit his pants. My parents obliged. Before we entered a restaurant my mother would make sure, they had the right toilets. Otherwise we moved on. When travelling my brother refused to sleep if he couldn't have this huge old book with the maps of the world as his pillow. It had a linnen cover, was about two feet high and weighed a ton. When we travelled we had to take that book with us. I remember that I admired the ability of my little brother to make my parents do these foolish things, I envied how he was creating a weird reality around radical decisions simply by sticking to them.
4.
When I was six years old my parents split up, my mother moved to another town and my brother and I stayed with my father. I remember how we were standing there, my father, my brother and me, in front of our house in the countryside, watching how my mother drove away in her Volkswagen Beatle. And how suddenly everything lying ahead of me seemed to be scary. For a while nobody said a word. Then my father took an empty bottle and put it down on the pavement. He said: "I'm going to spin the bottle now and the direction it will point to in the end, will be the way, we go. We will keep going, always straight ahead, come what may. Put on your jackets and boots. And then we go. And if there is a fence, we will climb over it and if there is a trench, we will walk through it and if there is a field of bulls, we will also find a way." And my brother and I fetched our jackets and boots, and still everything seemed scary and unknown and maybe even forbidden, but also - exciting.
5.
After that my father decided to spend one hour each day with my brother and me, the hour after Sesame Street and before dinner. Before my mother left, he didn't bother much with us children. So, when that hour came for the first time it felt kind of awkward. None of us knew how to deal with it. My father said, now we can do anything you want, for one hour. What do you want to do? Anything? Anything. So, my brother and I decided, that we wanted to be driven around in the trunk of the car. It was a classical closed trunk, no chance for communication between us in the trunk and my father driving. Perfect to transport victims of abduction. My father hesitated for a moment, but then he did it. For several evenings we travelled in the complete darkness of the trunk. When the hour came, we already waited in front of the garage. We loved our father for doing that and I understood that however awkward a situation, if you find that one thing to do, that is just weird enough, you can still find bliss and peace.
6.
Once I invented a game together with a bunch of peers at my kindergarten. To play this game we undressed and put only our woollen tights back on. Then we made the tights expand beyond our feet and tied the endings in a knot. Sitting on the floor in a circle with all of our tights connected in one knot, but still holding them up to our wastes with our hands, we started pulling. The last one in the room with their tights still on was the winner.
7.
One summer when I was about seven I dragged all kinds of rusty farming equipment out of the old barn and arranged it on the lawn in the form of a fun fair. There were several rollercoasters there, which did need a bit of imagination to take a ride on them. There was also a bar where I intended to sell apple juice and cookies. I wrote three invitations to the public on three pieces of paper to make known, that the fair would open that same day at 3 pm. I took my bike to put the invitations on the wall next to the three shops in the village. I came back home, got the apple juice and the cookies ready and waited. It was the strangest kind of eternity. This hope and this fear, that people might come. This hope and this fear, that people might not come. This completely different perspective on the setup that I suddenly had, while I was there waiting and wondering, what people might make of it, if they actually showed up, not knowing on which side of reality or fiction I'd eventually end up. I ate all the cookies and drank all the applejuice. Nobody came. Only recently, my father told me, that he went after me with his car, and took the invitations of the walls. He didn't dare to tell me back then.
8.
When I grew older I heard people talk a lot about their journeys to other places like Spain, Italy, France or Denmark. They all said the same: The friendliness and hospitality in all of these other countries was just amazing. Beware, people did actually talk to you in those countries. When you keep hearing those things it makes you think you know. There comes a point when you connect the dots and find that apparently you live in the coldest place on the planet socially. And it's true, you know, in a sense. Where I come from people don't speak much, not with each other, at least. Really not. But when it came to fires in the fields they knew what they were doing. Do you even know, that there has to be a fire in the fields on friday before easter? Yes, there has to be one. It is an old thing and it still exists. Today it is all about the food stalls. But when I was young it was just about the fire. It was a monster of a fire, huge like a house with several trees from the woods, all of our christmas trees, old furniture and all the things the neighbours really wanted to get rid of. And lots and lots of gasoline. All the neighbours were standing around the fire. There was no talking there, not even gossip. No, we kept our mouths shut, tried to take the heat and get as close to the flames as possible.

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We can all remember paintings or stories or plays we made when we were kids, but what about Live Art?

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Save Time

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Save Time Unlike waiting for delivery when working with voice actors, you can instantly create audio with Play.ht Commercial Rights The audio you create is yours, and yours alone. We give you full Commercial Rights with no extra fees. Broadcast Rights Just like you have full Commercial Rights, you also full Broadcast Rights.

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London art gallery & home of the Zabludowicz Collection. Dedicated to championing & supporting emerging artists & arts organisations

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Yikii & Dasychira are releasing EP Bubble Wrap Armor via New York's UNSEELIE on July 12, with preview track 'Faerie Circus Waltz' premiering on AQNB today. The respective South African and Chinese producers struck up a long-distance friendship about a year ago, collaborating musically between their Brooklyn and Changchun bases online, while sending each other sculptures and jewellery via post.

The resulting record title came from the masses of bubble wrap used in protecting these physical tokens, while also inspiring the EPs theme of healing from feelings of isolation. Featuring tracks like 'Future Tell', 'Laser Star' and one with Baltimore producer Sentinel called 'Doll's Library', the EP combines the eerie melancholy of Yikii's atmospheric production with the tactile, shadowy emboss of Dasychira's own approach. 'Faerie Circus Waltz' is the most creepy-dazzling of the three, with Yikii's breathy vocal sighing the words of a poem over off-kilter polyrhythms and carnivalesque melodies.**
Yikii & Dasychira's Bubble Wrap Armor EP is out via New York's Unseelie on July 12, 2019.

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Yikii & Dasychira introduce their cross-continental collaboration with the creepy-dazzling carnival of 'Faerie Circus Waltz'

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Yikii & Dasychira are releasing EP Bubble Wrap Armor via New York's UNSEELIE on July 12, with preview track 'Faerie Circus Waltz' premiering on AQNB today. The respective South African and Chinese producers struck up a long-distance friendship about a year ago, collaborating musically between their Brooklyn and Changchun bases online, while sending each other sculptures and jewellery via post.

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Science in the Arts English Falling Walls Winners Sessions

LIVE: The 10 winners in the category Science in the Arts present their breakthrough work

Over the past months, over 900 nominees from 111 countries have made the journey to become the Science Breakthrough of the Year in their respective category. In this session, the TOP 10 WINNERS in the category Science in the Arts present their breakthrough work which sheds light on societal issues, natural phenomena or simply the wonder of scientific discoveries.

A must-see for everyone interested in the unique relationship between these apparently opposite but often highly complementary disciplines.

We are delighted to announce the ten winners in the category Science in the Arts:

REFIK ANADOL - UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES (UCLA)

Breaking The Wall To Immersive AI Art

Refik Anadol's groundbreaking audio-visual art turns Kraftwerk Berlin into an ecosystem of synesthetic interactions by utilizing a cutting-edge deep learning algorithm.

NORA AL-BADRI - ECOLE POLYTECHNIQUE FÉDÉRALE DE LAUSANNE (EPFL)

Breaking the Wall to Ancestral Sculptures

Nora Al-Badri's unique work joining art, AI, and cultural heritage uses advanced technology to generate new synthetic Babylonian objects based on ancestral ones, taking back and re-possessing cultural datasets from colonial Western museum collections.

STEFEN CHOW & HUIYI LIN

Breaking The Wall Of Poverty Line

Stefen Chow & Huiyi Lin's 'Poverty Line' visually documents different standards and quality of life around the world, highlighting how economy regulates life.

SOUGWEN CHUNG - MIT MEDIA LAB

Breaking The Wall Between Art and Research

Sougwen Chung's work explores the mark-made-by-hand and the mark-made-by-machine as an approach to understanding the dynamics of humans and systems.

BRANDON CLIFFORD - MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

Breaking The Wall To Contemporary Thought

Brandon Clifford identifies contemporary blind-spots by mining ancient knowledge that holds resonance with topics of today and holds possible solutions to our most pressing problems.

ALEXANDRA DAISY GINSBERG

Breaking the Wall to Machine Auguries

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg examines our fraught relationships with nature and technology by using emerging technologies in dialogue with scientists and experts.

CHARLOTTE JARVIS - ROYAL COLLEGE OF ART

Breaking The Wall To Female Semen

Charlotte Jarvis uses art and science to disrupt patriarchy by making semen from "female" cells, and aims to rewrite a cultural narrative in which semen has been revered as magical substance.

OLGA KISSALEVA

Breaking The Wall Between Ethics, Durability, Ecology and Nature

Olga Kissaleva approaches her work as a scientist, exploring the hypotheses that plants can communicate amongst themselves.

ANDREA LING - GINKGO BIOWORKS

Breaking The Wall To Decay By Design

Andrea Ling's work revolves around designing responsive skins informed by material ecology-centered design research.

HARRY YEFF (REEPS ONE) - R100 STUDIOS

Breaking The Wall Between The Human Voice and Technology

Harry Yeff (Reeps One) works at the intersection of voice, technology and performance and highlights the fundamental role of human voice: not only as a tool for communication, but also for our connection with technology and the world.

This is a digital event. Shortly before the event starts, the stream will be made available on this site. Add the event to your schedule and receive a reminder.

Komische Oper Berlin, Schering Stiftung | Martin Seel, Jonathan Jeschke

Diese Veranstaltung wurde abgesagt.

Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften

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Falling Walls Winners Session: Science in the Arts | Falling Walls

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Science in the Arts English Falling Walls Winners Sessions LIVE: The 10 winners in the category Science in the Arts present their breakthrough work Over the past months, over 900 nominees from 111 countries have made the journey to become the Science Breakthrough of the Year in their respective category.

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Art should be accessible to all. With this in mind, LAS is committed to commissioning and presenting engaging experiences that are relevant to our communities and our times. Light is a leitmotif for the programme that features contemporary, pioneering and emerging artists involved in a variety of events, exhibitions, publications and digital projects. The open and interdisciplinary platform fosters a future-led approach that challenges our perception of the present and stimulates future imaginaries. As the Foundation grows, LAS looks to build a new institutional model that plays a role in shaping our future and which will be grounded in a permanent home in Berlin.

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Art should be accessible to all. With this in mind, LAS is committed to commissioning and presenting engaging experiences that are relevant to our communities and our times. Light is a leitmotif for the programme that features contemporary, pioneering and emerging artists involved in a variety of events, exhibitions, publications and digital projects.

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Combining automated deployment, instant hosting & collaborative editing, Glitch gets you straight to coding so you can build full-stack web apps, fast

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A publication created by Collective Creativity, which came out of a workshop and lecture at Nottingham Contemporary; discussing race and pol... See More

A publication created by Collective Creativity, which came out of a workshop and lecture at Nottingham Contemporary; discussing race and pol... See More

Connecting content to people.

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Surviving Art School: An Artist of Colour Tool Kit

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A publication created by Collective Creativity, which came out of a workshop and lecture at Nottingham Contemporary; discussing race and politics in art schools today.

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The Liquid Time Series explores how the concept of 'point of view' is predicated on embodied existence. Initially, the piece was an attempt to create an interactive installation where users' physical positions in the gallery (tracked by an overhead camera) controlled different 'perspectives' in a collage-like projection. The result of this exploration, however, is a series of pieces in which imagery of time, as well as space, is disrupted by users' motions.

In the Liquid Time Series installation, a participant's physical motion in the installation space fragments time in a pre-recorded video clip. As the participant moves closer to the projection screen they push deeper into time-but only in the area of the screen directly in front of them. Beautiful and startling disruptions are created as people move through the installation space. As viewers move away, the fragmented image heals in their wake-like a pond returning to stillness. The interface of one's body-which can only exist in one place, at one time-becomes the means to create a space in which multiple times and perspectives coexist. The resulting imagery can be described as video cubism. To create this imagery Utterback's software deconstructs the video frame as the unit of playback. This piece destabilizes a basic premise of time based media-that the unit of recording is also the unit of playback.

The current Liquid Time Series consists of two distinct pieces, Liquid Time-Tokyo, and Liquid Time-New York. In each piece, participants interact with images from sites in these cities where humans, data, or other physical matter are transferred or in transit. Participants' movement back and forth in front of the screen both echoes and controls the movements of busy pedestrians. People on screen are set in motion by motions off screen-shimmering in and out of existence. The composition in each video clip is anchored by static elements that become stable armatures in the chaos of fragmentation-street signs, trash cans, a person standing oddly still. The unexpected permanence of certain elements (and the transience of others) hint at how both personal and cultural memory have a physical component subject to the unpredictable nature of decay.

Collections:
Hewlett Packard Company, Liquid Time series - New York and Tokyo, Executive Briefing Center, Houston, TX Exhibition History:
Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, TN. 2013(Liquid Time Series - New York)
Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, TN. 2013(Liquid Time Series - Tokyo)
Contemporary Art Center of Virginia, Virginia Beach, VA. 2009(Liquid Time Series - Tokyo)
Skive Kunstmuseum, Skive, Denmark. 2009(Liquid Time Series - New York)
The Valencia Institute of Modern Art, Valencia, Spain. 2007(Liquid Time Series - Tokyo)
The Exploratorium, San Francisco, CA. 2004(Liquid Time Series - Tokyo)
The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA. 2003(Liquid Time Series - Tokyo)
The American Museum of The Moving Image, Queens, NY. 2003(Liquid Time Series - New York)
The Kitchen, New York, NY. 2002(Liquid Time Series - New York)
The Art Interactive, Cambridge, MA. 2002(Liquid Time Series - Tokyo)
Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA. 2002(Liquid Time Series - Tokyo)
Netherlands Institute for Media Art, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. 2002(Liquid Time Series - Tokyo)
IAMAS "Interactions '01", Ogaki City, Japan. 2001(Liquid Time Series - Tokyo)
New York University, New York, NY. 1999(prototype)</font">

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The Liquid Time Series explores how the concept of 'point of view' is predicated on embodied existence. Initially, the piece was an attempt to create an interactive installation where users' physical positions in the gallery (tracked by an overhead camera) controlled different 'perspectives' in a collage-like projection.

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Immersive presentations and meetings - right from the browser.

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'Planetary Tears' by Patricia Domínguez at Yeh Art Gallery, New York

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Karen Barad: Troubling Time/s, Undoing the Future

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Artist Residency - Villa Lena Foundation

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Application to the Villa Lena Foundation Artist Residency program is via the online application form, which requests examples of work and CV information, as well inviting applicants to detail what they hope to achieve while at Villa Lena if successful. Promising applicants are interviewed by the foundation following which a shortlist is compiled.

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Version française CORE RESIDENCY PROGRAM
Our Open Call 2023 for a 13-week long research and experimentation residency at Triangle-Astérides, is now closed.

This year, we received 841 applications. In addition to the artistic work, we were also attentive to arranging a mixed group in terms of age, gender, training and scenes.

The selection took nearly a month and a half starting with a close reading of all applications by two independent curators, Marilou Thiébault and Fiona Vilmer, assisted by Triangle-Astérides's team. This first step was followed by the final jury meeting which lasted two days. This year the jury was composed of Géraldine Gourbe, philosopher and curator, Jean-Charles de Quillacq, artist, Veronica Valentini, curator and a member of Triangle-Astérides' team.

Session #1: January 5 - April 6, 2023
Angélique Aubrit & Ludovic Beillard (FR)
Fanny Lallart (FR)
Minne Kersten (NL)

Session #2: April 17 - July 21, 2023
Louise Gholam (FR/LB)
Mouhawalat (MA)

Session #3: September 11 - December 15, 2023
Ellinor Aurora Aasgaard & Zayne Armstrong (NO/US/UK)
Kobby Adi (UK)

See you next year to meet the artists in residence, and for our next call for applications. For any appointment or additional information, please write to: contact(at)trianglefrance.org

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Version française CORE RESIDENCY PROGRAM Our Open Call 2023 for a 13-week long research and experimentation residency at Triangle-Astérides, is now closed. This year, we received 841 applications. In addition to the artistic work, we were also attentive to arranging a mixed group in terms of age, gender, training and scenes.

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The following is a selected list of artist residencies in , and international . If you know of a residency option that is not listed here, please share the information: info[at]berlinartlink.com .

Be sure to also check out our other Berlin Resource Listings: Studio & Housing Rentals , , , Project Spaces , Art Supply and Book Shops .

Berlin

Germany

International

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Artist Residency Listing | Berlin Art Link

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The following is a selected list of artist residencies in , and international . If you know of a residency option that is not listed here, please share the information: info[at]berlinartlink.com . Be sure to also check out our other Berlin Resource Listings: Studio & Housing Rentals , , , Project Spaces , Art Supply and Book Shops .

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Welcome to Berlin Berlin is one of the most exciting and vibrant art centers of the world. The German capital appears to be a magnet in contemporary art. The city attracts artists, galleries, curators, critics, and collectors be it for a few weeks or months, for a few years or forever.

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The London Creative Network (LCN) Programme at Cockpit Arts is a professional development programme designed to help medium to established craft makers enhance their ability to advance their business regardless of whether they have a studio at Cockpit Arts. We provide creative business and professional development support to craft makers who have the aspiration and talent to do what they do professionally. We cater for all types of craft practices; from batch producers to artist-makers.

The current round is now open for applications - see below for how to apply.
Deadline: 25 October.

Our fully-funded programme is a bespoke offer of information-led, practical workshops which is complemented by one to one coaching. These are all delivered by the Business Incubation Team at Cockpit Arts sharing our unique craft sector knowledge to build core skills in our maker community.

The London Creative Network Programme has been running since 2016. We are now entering the final stages of the programme which is due to end in September 2021.

About The Programme Eligibility Criteria

Are you looking for professional support to grow your craft business? Whatever stage your stage in business, this programme will help you hone your skills and your plan so that you can grow.

We've taken the best of what we know works for our makers at Cockpit Arts and have developed a set of intensive workshops which will give you the confidence and skills needed to take action and implement the changes needed to develop your business and practice.

Through our workshops and coaching we will work with you to build the skills to refine your practice and enhance your awareness of your business and set direction and strategy.

Our Programme

In 2020/21 we will be delivering the LCN programme as an intensive online course over 5 weeks. During these workshops we will work closely with you to build on the core skills you need to develop a more sustainable practice.

We will be running the LCN course four times with start dates in November 2020, February 2021, April 2021 and June 2021. Below you will see the confirmed dates for the course starting in November

Each course will consist of three themed blocks, with two or three 1.5-hour workshops making up each block. There may also be some brief homework tasks between sessions.

NOTE: During this phase of the programme, we will be delivering our support online. Workshops will take place via Zoom and will run from 11.00 - 12.30 on the dates listed.

If you are accepted on to the LCN programme you are expected to join all the sessions in each of the three blocks.

This two-part workshop will create the space and guidance to plan and develop your business. You will:

- Review your strengths and successes.
- Create Plan A and Plan B goals for the coming year.
- Consider opportunities for growth.
- Set the context of the bigger picture beyond.

You'll come away with a realistic draft plan for the year, plus some actions and tools to get you started.

Dates: 17 and 19 November.

It is easy to make assumptions about your competitors, customers, and market. Once you've connected with your customers you need to win their hearts and minds. This three-part workshop will:

- Show you how to use market research to inform your decisions - whether that's evidencing demand, finding more of the same opportunities, or branching out to find new ones.
- Help you find the right words to convey the essence of your brand so you can represent yourself authentically.
- Show you how to use your research and understanding to develop the right strategies and marketing.

Dates: 1/ 2/ 3 December.

This final block of three workshops looks at your financials and business model from the ground up. These workshops will cover:

- Recording and organising your financial information clearly.
- Using data to inform your decision making and business planning.
- Getting your pricing right. This is not only critical to success but a key element of your marketing and sales strategy.

Lastly, we'll revisit what you have learnt through the workshop series and show you how to join it all up to move your business forward.

Dates: 15/16/17 December.

You will also receive two one-hour coaching sessions. These will help you make the most of your time on the programme and help focus how to apply what you learn after completing the course.

In addition to these set workshops we also run events, talks and seminars. Once you are enrolled on the London Creative Network these are open for you to attend and offer another great opportunity to meet those taking part in the programme, as well as industry experts.

Eligibility criteria

To qualify for the London Creative Network programme, you must:
Selection Criteria
- Be based in London (any one of the 32 London boroughs or the City of London)
- Be registered with HMRC
- Commit to engaging in 12 hours of support (workshops and one-to-one meetings)

Beyond the eligibility criteria we would like to you to:

- Have a body of work that demonstrates excellence and quality of craft skill, originality in use of materials.
- Have craft as your full time living, or a substantial part of your income. Or be actively engaged in trying to achieve this.
- Have a broad vision and sense of direction for what you want to do and be able to identify the goals to work on.
- Be committed to growth in your chosen market and to developing your products and services. And an understanding of the processes and commitment required do this.
- Demonstrate a sales track record or evidence of testing the market and an existing customer base.
- Be able to articulate your strengths and weaknesses in achieving your goals, including where your business needs to change to reach the next level.
- Have knowledge of the context that you are working in, for example knowledge of key organisations or relevant role models in craft or your wider market.

How to apply

Apply now by completing the application form below. The deadline for applications is 25 October.

If you have any questions about the programme or the application form, please email Emma Sims, emma@cockpitarts.com

Case studies

Read more about how LCN works and what our makers think of the programme in our series of news posts here >> Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part6

Read more about some of our LCN participants here >> Anne Laure Cano, Bea Larkin, Clarice Serra, David Marques, Forest and Found, Jiyun Lapthorn, Jo Davies, Judith Peterhoff, Rob Brain, Sophie Stamp and Tessa Eastman

Read the LCN Evaluation Report here

The LCN Partners

LCN is delivered by four partner organisations across London (SPACE, Cockpit Arts, Four Corners and Photofusion) and will run from autumn 2016 to autumn 2018. Each LCN partner is running a different version of the LCN programme, tailored to their own industry and each has varying delivery time frames.

Read more about our partners here.

ERDF

The London Creative Network project is part-financed by the European Regional Development Fund Programme, 2014 to 2020. The Department for Communities and Local Government is the managing authority for the European Regional Development Fund Programme, which is one of the funds established by the European Commission to help local areas stimulate their economic development by investing in projects which will support local businesses and create jobs. London Creative Network follows the very successful New Creative Markets (NCM) programme, which supported almost 600 London-based freelancers and small creative companies from 2012 to 2015. Learn more about NCM here.

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The London Creative Network (LCN) Programme at Cockpit Arts is a professional development programme designed to help medium to established craft makers enhance their ability to advance their business regardless of whether they have a studio at Cockpit Arts.

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One of the most common things people want to do with three.js is to load and display 3D models. A common format is the .OBJ 3D format so let's try loading one.

Searching the net I found this CC-BY-NC 3.0 windmill 3D model by ahedov.

I downloaded the .blend file from that site, loaded it into Blender and exported it as an .OBJ file.

Note: If you've never used Blender you might be in for a surprise in that Blender does things differently than just about every other program you've ever used. Just be aware you might need to set aside some time to read some basic UI navigation for Blender.

Let me also add that 3D programs in general are giant beasts with 1000s of features. They are some of the most complicated software there is. When I first learned 3D Studio Max in 1996 I read through 70% of the 600 page manual spending a few hours a day for around 3 weeks. That paid off in that when I learned Maya a few years later some of the lessons learned before were applicable to Maya. So, just be aware that if you really want to be able to use 3D software to either build 3D assets or to modify existing ones put it on your schedule and clear sometime to really go through some lessons.

In any case I used these export options

Let's try to display it!

I started with the directional lighting example from the lights article and I combined it with the hemispherical lighting example so I ended up with one HemisphereLight and one DirectionalLight. I also removed all the GUI stuff related to adjusting the lights. I also removed the cube and sphere that were being added to the scene.

From that the first thing we need to do is include the OBJLoader2 loader in our script.

import {OBJLoader2} from './resources/threejs/r122/examples/jsm/loaders/OBJLoader2.js';

Then to load the .OBJ file we create an instance of OBJLoader2, pass it the URL of our .OBJ file, and pass in a callback that adds the loaded model to our scene.

{ const objLoader = new OBJLoader2(); objLoader.load('resources/models/windmill/windmill.obj', (root) => { scene.add(root); }); }

If we run that what happens?

Well it's close but we're getting errors about materials since we haven't given the scene any materials and .OBJ files don't have material parameters.

The .OBJ loader can be passed an object of name / material pairs. When it loads the .OBJ file, any material name it finds it will look for the corresponding material in the map of materials set on the loader. If it finds a material that matches by name it will use that material. If not it will use the loader's default material.

Sometimes .OBJ files come with a .MTL file that defines materials. In our case the exporter also created a .MTL file. .MTL format is plain ASCII so it's easy to look at. Looking at it here

# Blender MTL File: 'windmill_001.blend' # Material Count: 2 newmtl Material Ns 0.000000 Ka 1.000000 1.000000 1.000000 Kd 0.800000 0.800000 0.800000 Ks 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 Ke 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 Ni 1.000000 d 1.000000 illum 1 map_Kd windmill_001_lopatky_COL.jpg map_Bump windmill_001_lopatky_NOR.jpg newmtl windmill Ns 0.000000 Ka 1.000000 1.000000 1.000000 Kd 0.800000 0.800000 0.800000 Ks 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 Ke 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 Ni 1.000000 d 1.000000 illum 1 map_Kd windmill_001_base_COL.jpg map_Bump windmill_001_base_NOR.jpg map_Ns windmill_001_base_SPEC.jpg

We can see there are 2 materials referencing 5 jpg textures but where are the texture files?

All we got was an .OBJ file and an .MTL file.

At least for this model it turns out the textures are embedded in the .blend file we downloaded. We can ask blender to export those files to by picking File->External Data->Unpack All Into Files

and then choosing Write Files to Current Directory

This ends up writing the files in the same folder as the .blend file in a sub folder called textures.

I copied those textures into the same folder I exported the .OBJ file to.

Now that we have the textures available we can load the .MTL file.

First we need to include the MTLLoader and the MtlObjBridge;

import * as THREE from './resources/three/r122/build/three.module.js'; import {OrbitControls} from './resources/threejs/r122/examples/jsm/controls/OrbitControls.js'; import {OBJLoader2} from './resources/threejs/r122/examples/jsm/loaders/OBJLoader2.js'; +import {MTLLoader} from './resources/threejs/r122/examples/jsm/loaders/MTLLoader.js'; +import {MtlObjBridge} from './resources/threejs/r122/examples/jsm/loaders/obj2/bridge/MtlObjBridge.js';

Then we first load the .MTL file. When it's finished loading we add the just loaded materials on to the OBJLoader2 itself via the MtlObjBridge and then load the .OBJ file.

{ + const mtlLoader = new MTLLoader(); + mtlLoader.load('resources/models/windmill/windmill.mtl', (mtlParseResult) => { + const materials = MtlObjBridge.addMaterialsFromMtlLoader(mtlParseResult); + objLoader.addMaterials(materials); objLoader.load('resources/models/windmill/windmill.obj', (root) => { scene.add(root); }); + }); }

And if we try that...

Note that if we spin the model around you'll see the windmill cloth disappears

We need the material on the blades to be double sided, something we went over in the article on materials. There is no easy way to fix this in the .MTL file. Off the top of my head I can think of 3 ways to fix this.

1. Loop over all the materials after loading them and set them all to double sided.

 const mtlLoader = new MTLLoader(); mtlLoader.load('resources/models/windmill/windmill.mtl', (mtlParseResult) => { const materials = MtlObjBridge.addMaterialsFromMtlLoader(mtlParseResult); for (const material of Object.values(materials)) { material.side = THREE.DoubleSide; } ...

This solution works but ideally we only want materials that need to be double sided to be double sided because drawing double sided is slower than single sided.

2. Manually set a specific material

Looking in the .MTL file there are 2 materials. One called "windmill" and the other called"Material". Through trial and error I figured out the blades use the material called"Material" so we could set that one specifically

 const mtlLoader = new MTLLoader(); mtlLoader.load('resources/models/windmill/windmill.mtl', (mtlParseResult) => { const materials = MtlObjBridge.addMaterialsFromMtlLoader(mtlParseResult); materials.Material.side = THREE.DoubleSide; ...

3. Realizing that the .MTL file is limited we could just not use it and instead create materials ourselves

 const materials = { Material: new THREE.MeshPhongMaterial({...}), windmill: new THREE.MeshPhongMaterial({...}), }; objLoader.setMaterials(materials);

Which one you pick is up to you. 1 is easiest. 3 is most flexible. 2 somewhere in between. For now I'll pick 2.

And with that change you should still see the cloth on the blades when looking from behind but there's one more issue. If we zoom in close we see things are turning blocky.

What's going on?

Looking at the textures there are 2 textures labelled NOR for NORmal map. And looking at them they look like normal maps. Normal maps are generally purple where as bump maps are black and white. Normal maps represent the direction of the surface where as bump maps represent the height of the surface.

Looking at the source for the MTLLoader it expects the keyword norm for normal maps so let's edit the .MTL file

# Blender MTL File: 'windmill_001.blend' # Material Count: 2 newmtl Material Ns 0.000000 Ka 1.000000 1.000000 1.000000 Kd 0.800000 0.800000 0.800000 Ks 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 Ke 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 Ni 1.000000 d 1.000000 illum 1 map_Kd windmill_001_lopatky_COL.jpg -map_Bump windmill_001_lopatky_NOR.jpg +norm windmill_001_lopatky_NOR.jpg newmtl windmill Ns 0.000000 Ka 1.000000 1.000000 1.000000 Kd 0.800000 0.800000 0.800000 Ks 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 Ke 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 Ni 1.000000 d 1.000000 illum 1 map_Kd windmill_001_base_COL.jpg -map_Bump windmill_001_base_NOR.jpg +norm windmill_001_base_NOR.jpg map_Ns windmill_001_base_SPEC.jpg

and now when we load it it will be using the normal maps as normal maps and we can see the back of the blades.

Let's load a different file.

Searching the net I found this CC-BY-NC windmill 3D model made by Roger Gerzner / GERIZ.3D Art.

It had a .OBJ version already available. Let's load it up (note I removed the .MTL loader for now)

- objLoader.load('resources/models/windmill/windmill.obj', ... + objLoader.load('resources/models/windmill-2/windmill.obj', ...

Hmmm, nothing appears. What's the problem? I wonder what size the model is? We can ask THREE.js what size the model is and try to set our camera automatically.

First off we can ask THREE.js to compute a box that contains the scene we just loaded and ask for its size and center

objLoader.load('resources/models/windmill_2/windmill.obj', (root) => { scene.add(root); + const box = new THREE.Box3().setFromObject(root); + const boxSize = box.getSize(new THREE.Vector3()).length(); + const boxCenter = box.getCenter(new THREE.Vector3()); + console.log(boxSize); + console.log(boxCenter);

Looking in the JavaScript console I see

size 2123.6499788469982 center p {x: -0.00006103515625, y: 770.0909731090069, z: -3.313507080078125}

Our camera is currently only showing about 100 units with near at 0.1 and far at 100. Our ground plane is only 40 units across so basically this windmill model is so big, 2000 units, that it's surrounding our camera and all parts of it our outside our frustum.

We could manually fix that but we could also make the camera auto frame our scene. Let's try that. We can then use the box we just computed adjust the camera settings to view the entire scene. Note that there is no right answer on where to put the camera. We could be facing the scene from any direction at any altitude so we'll just have to pick something.

As we went over in the article on cameras the camera defines a frustum. That frustum is defined by the field of view ( fov) and the near and far settings. We want to know given whatever field of view the camera currently has, how far away does the camera need to be so the box containing the scene fits inside the frustum assuming the frustum extended forever. In other words let's assume near is 0.00000001 and far is infinity.

Since we know the size of the box and we know the field of view we have this triangle

You can see on the left is the camera and the blue frustum is projecting out in front of it. We just computed the box that contains the the windmill. We need to compute how far way the camera should be from the box so that the box appears inside the frustum.

Using basic right triangle trigonometry and SOHCAHTOA, given we know the field of view for the frustum and we know the size of the box we can compute the distance.

Based on that diagram the formula for computing distance is

distance = halfSizeToFitOnScreen / tangent(halfFovY)

Let's translate that to code. First let's make a function that will compute distance and then move the camera that distance units from the center of the box. We'll then point the camera at the center of the box.

function frameArea(sizeToFitOnScreen, boxSize, boxCenter, camera) { const halfSizeToFitOnScreen = sizeToFitOnScreen * 0.5; const halfFovY = THREE.MathUtils.degToRad(camera.fov * .5); const distance = halfSizeToFitOnScreen / Math.tan(halfFovY); // compute a unit vector that points in the direction the camera is now // from the center of the box const direction = (new THREE.Vector3()).subVectors(camera.position, boxCenter).normalize(); // move the camera to a position distance units way from the center // in whatever direction the camera was from the center already camera.position.copy(direction.multiplyScalar(distance).add(boxCenter)); // pick some near and far values for the frustum that // will contain the box. camera.near = boxSize / 100; camera.far = boxSize * 100; camera.updateProjectionMatrix(); // point the camera to look at the center of the box camera.lookAt(boxCenter.x, boxCenter.y, boxCenter.z); }

We pass in 2 sizes. The boxSize and the sizeToFitOnScreen. If we just passed in boxSize and used that as sizeToFitOnScreen then the math would make the box fit perfectly inside the frustum. We want a little extra space above and below so we'll pass in a slightly larger size.

{ const objLoader = new OBJLoader2(); objLoader.load('resources/models/windmill_2/windmill.obj', (root) => { scene.add(root); + // compute the box that contains all the stuff + // from root and below + const box = new THREE.Box3().setFromObject(root); + + const boxSize = box.getSize(new THREE.Vector3()).length(); + const boxCenter = box.getCenter(new THREE.Vector3()); + + // set the camera to frame the box + frameArea(boxSize * 1.2, boxSize, boxCenter, camera); + + // update the Trackball controls to handle the new size + controls.maxDistance = boxSize * 10; + controls.target.copy(boxCenter); + controls.update(); }); }

You can see above we pass in boxSize * 1.2 to give us 20% more space above and below the box when trying to fit it inside the frustum. We also updated the OrbitControls so the camera will orbit the center of the scene.

Now if we try that we get...

This almost works. Use the mouse to rotate the camera and you should see the windmill. The problem is the windmill is large and the box's center is at about (0, 770, 0). So, when we move the camera from where it starts (0, 10, 20) to distance units way from the center in the direction the camera is relative to the center that's moving the camera almost straight down below the windmill.

Let's change it to move sideways from the center of the box to in whatever direction the camera is from the center. All we need to do to do that is zero out the y component of the vector from the box to the camera. Then, when we normalize that vector it will become a vector parallel to the XZ plane. In other words parallel to the ground.

-// compute a unit vector that points in the direction the camera is now -// from the center of the box -const direction = (new THREE.Vector3()).subVectors(camera.position, boxCenter).normalize(); +// compute a unit vector that points in the direction the camera is now +// in the xz plane from the center of the box +const direction = (new THREE.Vector3()) + .subVectors(camera.position, boxCenter) + .multiply(new THREE.Vector3(1, 0, 1)) + .normalize();

If you look at the bottom of the windmill you'll see a small square. That is our ground plane.

It's only 40x40 units and so is way too small relative to the windmill. Since the windmill is over 2000 units big let's change the size of the ground plane to something more fitting. We also need to adjust the repeat otherwise our checkerboard will be so fine we won't even be able to see it unless we zoom way way in.

-const planeSize = 40; +const planeSize = 4000; const loader = new THREE.TextureLoader(); const texture = loader.load('resources/images/checker.png'); texture.wrapS = THREE.RepeatWrapping; texture.wrapT = THREE.RepeatWrapping; texture.magFilter = THREE.NearestFilter; -const repeats = planeSize / 2; +const repeats = planeSize / 200; texture.repeat.set(repeats, repeats);

and now we can see this windmill

Let's add the materials back. Like before there is a .MTL file that references some textures but looking at the files I quickly see an issue.

 $ ls -l windmill    1 gregg staff 299 May 20 2009 windmill.mtl   1 gregg staff 142989 May 20 2009 windmill.obj   1 gregg staff 12582956 Apr 19 2009 windmill_diffuse.tga   1 gregg staff 12582956 Apr 20 2009 windmill_normal.tga   1 gregg staff 12582956 Apr 19 2009 windmill_spec.tga

There are TARGA (.tga) files and they are giant!

THREE.js actually has a TGA loader but it's arguably wrong to use it for most use cases. If you're making a viewer where you want to allow users to view random 3D files they find on the net then maybe, just maybe, you might want to load TGA files. (*)

One problem with TGA files are they can't be compressed well at all. TGA only supports very simple compression and looking above we can see the files are not compressed at all as the odds of them being all exactly the same size are extremely low. Further they are 12 megabytes each!!! If we used those files the user would have to download 36meg to see the windmill.

Another issue with TGA is the browser itself has no support for them so loading them is likely going to be slower than loading supported formats like .JPG and .PNG

I'm pretty sure for our purposes converting them to .JPG will be the best option. Looking inside I see they are 3 channels each, RGB, there is no alpha channel. JPG only supports 3 channels so that's a good fit. JPG also supports lossy compression so we can make the files much smaller to download

Loading the files up they were each 2048x2048. That seemed like a waste to me but of course it depends on your use case. I made them each 1024x1024 and saved them at a 50% quality setting in Photoshop. Getting a file listing

 $ ls -l ../threejsfundamentals.org/threejs/resources/models/windmill    1 gregg staff 299 May 20 2009 windmill.mtl   1 gregg staff 142989 May 20 2009 windmill.obj   1 gregg staff 259927 Nov 7 18:37 windmill_diffuse.jpg   1 gregg staff 98013 Nov 7 18:38 windmill_normal.jpg   1 gregg staff 191864 Nov 7 18:39 windmill_spec.jpg

We went from 36meg to 0.55meg! Of course the artist might not be pleased with this compression so be sure to consult with them to discuss the tradeoffs.

Now, to use the .MTL file we need to edit it to reference the .JPG files instead of the .TGA files. Fortunately it's a simple text file so it's easy to edit

newmtl blinn1SG Ka 0.10 0.10 0.10 Kd 0.00 0.00 0.00 Ks 0.00 0.00 0.00 Ke 0.00 0.00 0.00 Ns 0.060000 Ni 1.500000 d 1.000000 Tr 0.000000 Tf 1.000000 1.000000 1.000000 illum 2 -map_Kd windmill_diffuse.tga +map_Kd windmill_diffuse.jpg -map_Ks windmill_spec.tga +map_Ks windmill_spec.jpg -map_bump windmill_normal.tga -bump windmill_normal.tga +map_bump windmill_normal.jpg +bump windmill_normal.jpg

Now that the .MTL file points to some reasonable size textures we need to load it so we'll just do like we did above, first load the materials and then set them on the OBJLoader2

{ + const mtlLoader = new MTLLoader(); + mtlLoader.load('resources/models/windmill_2/windmill-fixed.mtl', (mtlParseResult) => { + const objLoader = new OBJLoader2(); + const materials = MtlObjBridge.addMaterialsFromMtlLoader(mtlParseResult); + objLoader.addMaterials(materials); objLoader.load('resources/models/windmill/windmill.obj', (root) => { root.updateMatrixWorld(); scene.add(root); // compute the box that contains all the stuff // from root and below const box = new THREE.Box3().setFromObject(root); const boxSize = box.getSize(new THREE.Vector3()).length(); const boxCenter = box.getCenter(new THREE.Vector3()); // set the camera to frame the box frameArea(boxSize * 1.2, boxSize, boxCenter, camera); // update the Trackball controls to handle the new size controls.maxDistance = boxSize * 10; controls.target.copy(boxCenter); controls.update(); }); + }); }

Before we actually try it out I ran into some issues that rather than show a failure I'm just going to go over them.

Issue #1: The three MTLLoader creates materials that multiply the material's diffuse color by the diffuse texture map.

That's a useful feature but looking a the .MTL file above the line

Kd 0.00 0.00 0.00

sets the diffuse color to 0. Texture map * 0 = black! It's possible the modeling tool used to make the windmill did not multiply the diffuse texture map by the diffuse color. That's why it worked for the artists that made this windmill.

To fix this we can change the line to

Kd 1.00 1.00 1.00

since Texture Map * 1 = Texture Map.

Issue #2: The specular color is also black

The line that starts with Ks specifies the specular color. It's likely the modeling software used to make the windmill did something similar as it did with diffuse maps in that it used the specular map's color for specular highlights. Three.js uses only the red channel of a specular map as input to how much of the specular color to reflect but three still needs a specular color set.

Like above we can fix that by editing the .MTL file like this.

-Ks 0.00 0.00 0.00 +Ks 1.00 1.00 1.00

Issue #3: The windmill_normal.jpg is a normal map not a bump map.

Just like above we just need to edit the .MTL file

-map_bump windmill_normal.jpg -bump windmill_normal.jpg +norm windmill_normal.jpg

Given all that if we now try it out it should load up with materials.

Loading models often runs into these kinds of issues. Common issues include:

Needing to know the size

Above we made the camera try to frame the scene but that's not always the appropriate thing to do. Generally the most appropriate thing to do is to make your own models or download the models, load them up in some 3D software and look at their scale and adjust if need be.

Orientation Wrong

THREE.js is generally Y = up. Some modeling packages default to Z = up, some Y = up. Some are settable. If you run into this case where you load a model and it's on its side. You can either hack your code to rotate the model after loading (not recommended), or you can load the model into your favorite modeling package or use some command line tools to rotate the object in the orientation you need it to be just like you'd edit an image for your website rather than download it and apply code to adjust it. Blender even has options when you export to change the orientation.

No .MTL file or wrong materials or incompatible parameters

Above we used a .MTL file above which helped us load materials but there were issues. We manually edited the .MTL file to fix. It's also common to look inside the .OBJ file to see what materials there are, or to load the .OBJ file in THREE.js and walk the scene and print out all the materials. Then, go modify the code to make custom materials and assign them where appropriate either by making a name/material pair object to pass to the loader instead of loading the .MTL file, OR, after the scene has loaded, walking the scene and fixing things.

Textures too large

Most 3D models are made for either architecture, movies and commercials, or games. For architecture and movies no one really cares about the size of the textures since. For games people care because games have limited memory but most games run locally. Webpages though you want to load as fast as possible and so you need to look at the textures and try to make them as small as possible and still look good. In fact the first windmill we should arguably done something about the textures. They are currently a total of 10meg!!!

Also remember like we mentioned in the article on textures that textures take memory so a 50k JPG that expands to 4096x4096 will download fast but still take a ton of memory.

The last thing I wanted to show is spinning the windmills. Unfortunately, .OBJ files have no hierarchy. That means all parts of each windmill are basically considered 1 single mesh. You can't spin the blades of the mill as they aren't separated from the rest of the building.

This is one of the main reasons why .OBJ is not really a good format. If I was to guess, the reason it's more common than other formats is because it's simple and doesn't support many features it works more often than not. Especially if you're making something still like an architectural image and there's no need to animate anything it's not a bad way to get static props into a scene.

Next up we'll try loading a gLTF scene. The gLTF format supports many more features.

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One of the most common things people want to do with three.js is to load and display 3D models. A common format is the .OBJ 3D format so let's try loading one. Searching the net I found this CC-BY-NC 3.0 windmill 3D model by ahedov.

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no-longer-being-able-to-be-able began from an urge to think about a shared unease in an over-saturated contemporary life. The limitless productivity and growth encouraged by neoliberal ideology have redefined people as labourers who have to continue to able to work and consume in order to be able to be.

The title of the project refers to Byung-Chul Han's The Burnout Society (2010), which interrogates contemporary life's immanent excessive positivity and information. In such a society, everybody becomes an entrepreneur fully responsible for the outcomes of their 'individual' lives. In order to be responsible in this sense, people are so busy proving they are able to work, compete, consume and survive. It becomes hard to hold on and ask why we should be able to be able, and for the sake of whom.

The predominating fantasies of unlimited growth have rendered feelings of tiredness, anxiety and disorientation daunting and negative. They become symptoms of being fragile, defective and incompetent. These 'negativities' have promoted the contemporary myths of health, care, safety and protection. The pandemic, once seen as a chance to suspend and contest these myths, is instead fuel for the continuation of 'the normal' in both the art field and wider society.

In response to the neoliberal norm of being-able-to-be-able, no-longer-being-able-to-be-able explores the unease in excessive everyday life from the perspective of labourer, consumer, woman, Queer individual, ethnic minority, teenager, internet user, art worker and an exhausted 'regular person'. By unpacking the culture of abundance and expansion, this project questions the meaning of be and being able that are underpinned by particular ideologies, powerholders and histories. The works presented in the project aim to explore the possible ways of recognition, articulation and interrogation amid overloaded, oversaturated, and overdrawn beings.

Artists:
Babeworld (Ashleigh Williams), Meech Boakye, Joshua Citarella, DANK Collective (Grant Bingham, Tori Carr, James D. Hopkins, Ian Williamson, and Zen Khalid), DIRD (Zijing Zhao and Rui Shi), Emma Finn, Anna Frijstein, Max Grau, Mina Heydari-Waite, Sae Yeoun Hwang, Judit Kis, Simona Me., Donatella Della Ratta, Frankie Roberts, Geraldine Snell

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this island and its buildings is our private paradise

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no-longer-being-able-to-be-able began from an urge to think about a shared unease in an over-saturated contemporary life. The limitless productivity and growth encouraged by neoliberal ideology have redefined people as labourers who have to continue to able to work and consume in order to be able to be.

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Discord - A New Way to Chat with Friends & Communities

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Discord is the easiest way to communicate over voice, video, and text. Chat, hang out, and stay close with your friends and communities.

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A-Frame provides components for loading glTF and OBJ. We recommend using glTF if possible as glTF gains adoption as the standard for transmitting 3D models over the Web. Components can be written to handle any file format, specifically any format that has a three.js loader. We can also try to find components in the ecosystem that have already been written to handle other formats (e.g., PLY, FBX, JSON, three.js).

Models come in the format of plain text files containing vertices, faces, UVs, textures, materials, and animations. They also come with images for textures, usually alongside the model file. three.js loaders parse these files to render them within a three.js scene as meshes. A-Frame model components wrap these three.js loaders.

Animating Models

We can use Don McCurdy's animation-mixer component to play a model's built-in animations. Animations usually come in the model built via animation tools or programs rather than being provided at the A-Frame level. The animation-mixer component may be merged into A-Frame's core in the future.

For starting material on creating animations, see:

Where to Find Models

Places to find 3D models include:

How to Create Models

Programs to create models include:

Hosting Models

Refer to Hosting and Publishing - Hosting Models.

Modifying Materials

To modify the material of a model, we need to wait for the model to load, and then modify the three.js meshes created from the model. What happens is an A-Frame model component requests on the network the model, parses the model, creates three.js meshes or objects, and loads them in under the <a-entity> under.getObject3D('mesh'). We can reach into that mesh and modify whatever, in this case, three.js materials.

See this live example of modifying material of a loaded model.

Troubleshooting

Before anything else, check your console for errors. Common issues related to CORS can be solved by properly hosting your models and the console will also tell you if your model needs additional files that are missing.

I Don't See My Model

If there are no errors in the console, try scaling your model down. Often times there's a mismatch in the scale when you export, and this will cause the camera to be inside the model, which means you won't be able to see it.

If this doesn't work, open the Inspector by pressing ctrl + alt + i and zoom out to verify the model is actually there.

I Don't See Textures

Sometimes textures just won't work right off the bat. This is usually because exporters use absolute paths like C:\\Path\To\Model\texture.jpg or/Path/To/Model/texture.jpg for textures, which won't work on the Web. Instead, use relative paths like texture.jpg or images/texture.jpg, relative to your model or.mtl file.

1. Open the model (or .mtl if you're doing OBJ) in a plain text editor

2. Search for the name of your texture (e.g., texture.jpg)

3. Fix the path to the texture by making it relative instead of absolute

If this didn't work, you should check your MTL file and you might notice it is trying to use TGA or some other sort of textures that aren't plain images. In this case, you need to include additional three.js loaders. However it might be easier to try converting all the TGAs to just use images like PNGs using a converter, and replace all instances of 'tga' with 'png'.

My Model Isn't Animating

The animation-mixer component, part of aframe-extras by Don McCurdy, provides controls for playing animations in three.js (.json) and glTF (.gltf) models.

My Model Looks Distorted

A common issue with models is incorrect orientation of normals. You'll know you have an issue with normals if some of the faces on your geometry are transparent, or there are "holes" in the mesh.

1. Import the model into Blender

2. Turn on backface culling in the shading section of the properties panel (n) to get a better idea of which faces are incorrect.

3. Select the object

4. Go to edit mode (<tab>)

5. Press a to select all faces

6. Press <ctrl> + n to make normals consistent. If it looks like the opposite of what you want, flip them via the toolbar (t).

Model Performance

We may notice that when we import a large file or complex model, the browser will slow to a halt or not even load. Complex models that were designed for high fidelity renders aren't ideal for real time applications. However, there're some things we can do to make them more performant while retaining their appearance.

Testing for Performance

To get an idea of how our scene is performing, enable the stats component:

Move around our scene and test different scenarios while keeping an eye on the graph and be sure to test on different hardware. A development PC will most likely have an easier time handling the scene than a smartphone. If we're noticing that we're not reaching 60 fps, try removing different elements in the scene until we find the culprit. If the performance-offending entity is a 3D model, we can try to optimize it.

Optimizing Complex Models

One of the biggest factors for scene optimization is model complexity and face count. The less geometry, the better.

A quick way to reduce the number of faces on a model is with the decimate modifier in Blender. The decimate modifier reduces the amount of geometric faces while retaining the model's UV coordinates. Nothing beats proper modeling techniques, but the decimate modifier can be a great last resort to make poorly optimized files run smoother. The settings for the modifier will be highly dependent on the model and how much detail we wish to remove.

Adjust the ratio (highlighted) to reduce the number of faces.

We may have to manually fix some of the faces at the end of the process. After we're happy with the results, save a copy, and export to our desired file type. Test it out, and adjust as needed. Note that we may have to apply the modifier before it will take effect.

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A-Frame provides components for loading glTF and OBJ. We recommend using glTF if possible as glTF gains adoption as the standard for transmitting 3D models over the Web. Components can be written to handle any file format, specifically any format that has a three.js loader.

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Join a global community where creators craft a deeper listening experience.

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Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World (2018)

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BELLINGCAT - TRUTH IN A POST-TRUTH WORLD follows the revolutionary rise of the

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Inspire. Access. Thrive.

We are a social enterprise providing career-long access, opportunities, support and training for people from under-represented groups, to make the creative industries reflect society.

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Our partners attribute their progress in DE&I to their work with us

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Providing access to jobs, opportunities and career-long support in the creative industries for people from under-represented communities.

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Dominic Harris (London, 1976) is an artist who uses technology to construct highly personal interpretations of the natural phenomena which surround us.

His reverence for nature, coupled with his fascination for code, offers a surreal and whimsical take on reality, which ultimately challenges our own perceptions of the world about us. His responses, aesthetic yet playful, conceal a carefully-observed commentary on the digitisation of our daily experiences, which plays both upon our emotions, and our relationship with the technology-fuelled 21st century Pop Culture.

As these technologies, unstoppable and fascinating, invade our lives, and intrude upon us in ever more intimate ways, Dominic Harris captures the sometimes-menacing march of the information age turning it to our advantage in an insightful and seamless blending of nature with code.

Dominic Harris is part of a small, and important, coterie of artists who are pushing the envelope of feasibility and redefining what is acceptable within the art world.

Dominic graduated from Cranbrook Kingswood School in Michigan, and returned to England to read Architecture at the Bartlett School, University College, London. He graduated with top distinctions, qualifying as an architect in 2003, and going on to work for the avant-garde architectural practice Future Systems. In 2007 Dominic founded his own studio in Notting Hill, London, where he and his team design, engineer, code and fabricate his artworks and installations.

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Dominic Harris (London, 1976) is an artist who uses technology to construct highly personal interpretations of the natural phenomena which surround us. His reverence for nature, coupled with his fascination for code, offers a surreal and whimsical take on reality, which ultimately challenges our own perceptions of the world about us.

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Press release

Elif Saydam

Gut feeling

In a world of gut feeling, proximity is a vibe. That's how in the world of 'Gut feeling', the show, a 16th century ottoman miniature is capable of collapsing into a Kreuzberg gambling hall by simultaneously hovering above it. They're vibing. The vibe, while resonating with histories of Turkish migration and the class politics of taste (to the tune of a one-armed bandit buzzing), feels casual. It's of course also a complex environment: Withering embellishment and sandy branding screen-prints here are neither just uncannily pretty nor the uncannily pretty punchline of a bro-y conceptual twist. They rather provide a cranky and all the more precise organising principle for mapping how a set of mixed feelings, crisp abstractions, sparkling stickers, and formal ideas can relate. How they can't. Sheaves of wheat, unbound from a Soviet red ribbon, will melancholically lounge with the Hand of Fatima as it's suggestively reaching for ... some grapes? Whether the obvious infestation with mild decay that is permeating this closeness is what threatens it or what makes it possible, remains part of a crucial ambivalence. It's clear that hanging out, as the things populating 'Gut feeling' so often do, in all its cuteness and necessity is dependent on infractures: the applied symbolism of gay code or just, being able to pay rent. It's a mood and it's also a mood ring mood chart - its limited options are haunting our feelings in only slightly more elaborate form. The curse of the value-form is hidden in plain sight here (in gold leaf) structuring the vibe of proximity: from day-to-day tastefulness production to housing politics. That's why when, from the other side of the painting, someone is hanging a trans flag out of the window, it could yes, just be a commodified quote the colours of which fit nicely. Precisely in nesting in this luscious vibe however, it could also be an actual sign meaningful to actual people. Plus it's just how a place like Kottbusser Tor works. Down on a possible street, an artist is on strike - rent strike? representational strike? - what kind of work is tucked into that suitcase? On the way back from the demo, the artist flaneur-ed through fragments of the Zeki Müren Denkmal onto Admiralstraße. He, uh, they took a left onto the canal, then another left onto one of the gentrification streets. It was a Friday afternoon and the sunset was forever. The neighbourhood was unreliable. Sometimes even the faintest memory of workdays and embodiment disconnected one's room from the friends that supposedly lived around the corner. Or a tattoo from a fore-arm. Where is Herr Slug when you need them the most, the artist thought to themselves, humming the trap remix of a country song famous in the world of gut feeling: 'Oh, Schufa-Auskunft of beauty. Oh, Schufa-Auskunft of a mucous membrane'. Herr Slug, gossip had it, was close.

-Maxi Wallenhorst

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Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin, established in 2008, is dedicated to developing a cross-disciplinary, trans-generational gallery programme with off-site projects, in collaboration with artists, filmmakers, critics, art historians, and curators. Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin, established in 2008, is dedicated to developing a cross-disciplinary, trans-generational gallery programme with off-site projects, in collaboration with artists, filmmakers, critics, art historians, and curators.

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multi disciplinary artist / contemporary art / located in the hague

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☞ INSTAGRAM ☺ ✎ everything@mickeyyang.nl ☎ +31619957433

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A destination for creatives, Berlin offers underground cultural movements and a unique contemporary art scene. This city has a history of pushing literal and creative boundaries. Berlin attracts the youth, the experimental, the unconventional, and the defiant.

Berlin is an edgy destination that offers art and creativity in all forms across the entire city. A unique and affordable quality of life attracts creatives from all over Europe, resulting in an experimental visual arts, design, music and club scene.

PROGRAM

HIGHLIGHTS

ELIGIBILITY

REQUIREMENTS

INTERN ​ IN BERLIN

Intern in one of the most underground artistic cities in Europe.

JOIN THE ABI NETWORK

Attend events and connect with creatives to build your professional community.

INSIDER ACCESS

Our custom city guides will keep you in the know and in the front row.

​

Recent graduates who are under 30 - ONLY FOR PASSPORT HOLDERS FROM: The E.U., United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong, South Korean, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay

ABI PROGRAM

FEE

THE PROGRAM FEE IS $2950 USD AND INCLUDES:

An internship tailored to your career goals

Mock interviews with our advisors

Workplace and internship orientation

Visa processing

Travel and health insurance arrangements

Optional housing arrangements

ABI pre-trip information package

Optional airport pick-up

Orientation upon arrival

On-site support during your stay

ABI City Guide to the local creative scene

Career development workshop

Résumé/CV coaching and review session

Portfolio review and/or industry professional coaching session

​ABI curated events including studio and company visits

Local networking opportunities in participant's field of study

ABI community gatherings

Access to our international network of alumni

Access to our network of industry professionals​

​

​

BERLIN EXPENSES (ADDITIONAL) :

​

Work Authorization costs $600 USD (for non European citizens)

OR

Working Holiday Visa costs $265 USD (for Australian and New Zealand citizens)

​Health and Travel Insurance is $65 USD per month.

​

Option of a private room within a shared apartment, private studio or 1-bedroom apartment. Housing costs in Berlin typically start from 750€ per month and are dependent upon location and size preferences.

​

Airport pick up for $58 USD from TXL and SFX airports.

​

​ABI will award selected Ambassador Scholarship of $1000 USD as well as Inclusive Scholarhips of $250 USD. Read more on our scholarship page!

​

If you have any questions about the program fee and expenses, please contact us at or schedule a call with us here.

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ArtBound Initiative | Internships in Berlin

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A destination for creatives, Berlin offers underground cultural movements and a unique contemporary art scene. This city has a history of pushing literal and creative boundaries. Berlin attracts the youth, the experimental, the unconventional, and the defiant. Berlin is an edgy destination that offers art and creativity in all forms across the entire city.

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The Jordan work week runs from Sunday to Thursday, with Fridays and Saturdays free. During the weekends, volunteers have spare time to relax or ​explore other parts of Amman and Jordan. Amman is home to many ancient ruins including the Roman Amphitheater and Citadel, as well as traditional eateries, shops and markets.

Some incredible bucket list attractions lie further afield, so make sure you set aside time to travel to the Dead Sea, Mount Nebo, Wadi Rum, and one of the New Wonders of the World; the ancient city of Petra. With so much on offer, it's a great idea to plan and book some excursions through IVHQ in advance. We can facilitate visits to some of the more popular options:
Mid and South Jordan Experience
Take an all-inclusive road trip around many of Jordan's main attractions, including Mount Nebo, Aqaba City, Madaba City, the Dead Sea, Petra and Wadi Rum.

The following options are available:

2-day experience (US$553 for 1 person, US$310 each for 2+ people)

3-day experience (US$650 for 1 person, US$400 each for 2+ people)

4-day experience (US$923 for 1 person, US$611 for 2+ people)

These are all-inclusive road trips where you'll spend time ticking off many bucket list attractions alongside a local guide.
North Jordan Experience
Experience a 1-day road trip around the incredible archaeological sites of North Jordan, including Umm Qais, Golan Heights, Ajloun Castle and Jerash.

For US$150 per person for 2+ people or US$182 for an individual, this is an all-inclusive road trip where you will learn about the geopolitical site of Golan Heights and also visit many ancient ruins alongside a local guide.

Please contact us for more information or contact your IVHQ Program Manager to secure your booking for these unique Jordan experiences.

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Arts & Music Volunteering in Jordan | IVHQ

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The Jordan work week runs from Sunday to Thursday, with Fridays and Saturdays free. During the weekends, volunteers have spare time to relax or ​explore other parts of Amman and Jordan. Amman is home to many ancient ruins including the Roman Amphitheater and Citadel, as well as traditional eateries, shops and markets.

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Art making, art therapy and training on the France-UK border at Calais

WHAT WE DO .

ARTS-BASED PSYCHOSOCIAL GROUPS

AND ART THERAPY .

In summer 2015, Médecins du Monde invited Art Refuge to join their delivery of essential psychological services in the camp. We responded by offering open art therapy groups for two days weekly until the camp closed in October 2016 and have continued to work in the area on a fortnightly basis. Art Refuge was unique in offering psychological support to all people, regardless of ethnicity, culture, gender or age, until the closure of the camp at the end of October 2016. We continue to provide this support in as cohesive and stable a manner as possible.

​

Our project currently takes place in partnership with Médecins du Monde and the charity Secours Catholique, in a refugee day centre, a safe house and alongside a mobile clinic.

Around 70 refugees taking part in our fortnightly arts-based groups. 95% of refugees who make it to the France-UK border at Calais are male, and most of our work is with unaccompanied young refugees, as well as adult men, and a small number of women and families.

​

We use maps, kites, cyanotype, photography, film, stop-frame animation, building materials, plasticine and manual typewriters; adapting these to context.​ In addition, one of our tools is The Community Table which has evolved out of practice in the day centre and safe house spaces in Calais, and can be adapted for other settings.

We have developed a particular set of skills when working with hundreds of young asylum seekers and refugees during our four and a half year programme in Calais. A small handful of these individuals have made their way to our groups in Bristol where our spaces also utilise creative, flexible, culturally attuned approaches.

​

​

PSYCHOSOCIAL TRAINING .

Alongside our art therapy work, we also provide Psychosocial Training for organisations working in northern France, thereby helping to support other workers on the ground and further our partnerships with other services in the area.

​

​

The sessions include training in:

trauma, coping and resilience

secondary trauma and self-care

working to personal strengths and limitations

working across cultures, faiths

working on borders and in hostile environments

adapting work to different settings

safeguarding

arts-based psychosocial activities

​

FEEDBACK FROM PARTICIPANTS.

'Really good course, learnt so much and reconfirmed a lot of what I do, but learnt more skills and ideas that I can use.' 'Massively reassuring and motivating.'

'Thank you for supporting the creative process and emotional stability of everyone here in Calais.'

'Really enjoyed having space to slow down, be in a new space with new people and reflect.'

'What I found the most interesting today was more in your attitude, the atmosphere you manage to create than in your words and theory. It's certainly the best way to help us to figure how it happens in your real world of therapy with the refugees.'​

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Art making, art therapy and training on the France-UK border at Calais WHAT WE DO . ARTS-BASED PSYCHOSOCIAL GROUPS AND ART THERAPY . In summer 2015, Médecins du Monde invited Art Refuge to join their delivery of essential psychological services in the camp.

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In conjunction with Boxology and Cathy Brown, The Lotus Flower Centres are launching Boxing Sisters, a new well-being programme that focuses on boxing and self-defense. Cathy Brown, a retired professional British boxer and certified Cognitive Behavior Therapist (CBT), will be traveling to the centres later this year to launch the initial pilot and train a few select women from the community who will then continue the programme for other women and girls. This will ensure that the programme is accessible to all female residents and sustainable by employing newly-certified trainers.

The Lotus Flower is committed to helping young girls whose lives have been changed by violent conflict. Many of our community members have endured horrific situations, including abduction, rape, sexual slavery, and the deaths of loved ones at the hands of ISIS. With survivors living in rudimentary refugee camps, there is little for girls to do. Women and girls in refugee camps have restricted freedom of movement due to their gender, lack of resources, and lack of protection against gender-based violence. The Lotus Flower Women's Centres provide a safe and supportive physical environment for women and girls to socialize, partake in educational courses and awareness sessions, and gain professional training.

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Boxing Sisters - The Lotus Flower Charity

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In conjunction with Boxology and Cathy Brown, The Lotus Flower Centres are launching Boxing Sisters, a new well-being programme that focuses on boxing and self-defense. Cathy Brown, a retired professional British boxer and certified Cognitive Behavior Therapist (CBT), will be traveling to the centres later this year to launch the initial pilot and train a few select women from the community who will then continue the programme for other women and girls.

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News - a-n The Artists Information Company

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Alternative insights into the visual arts, with fast-paced news, comment, debate.

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Fill PDF Forms

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Google Integrated

Open files directly from Gmail, Google Drive and Dropbox.

Document Security

256-bit SSL encryption, OAuth 2.0 authentication and redundant, encrypted storage.

Share and Publish

Share documents with collaborators or the world from your personal DocHub url.

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Sign PDF documents online, request eSignatures, and send reusable PDF templates. It's a PDF editor in your browser that integrates with Google and Gmail. Sign up instantly and for free.

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Miro: the collaborative whiteboard platform for distributed teams

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Scalable, secure, cross-device and enterprise-ready team collaboration whiteboard for distributed teams. Join 9M+ users from around the world

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Part 1:
In a little white room you see a little piece of writing. You are not sure if you want to read it or not. You ask yourself if the artist wants you to read it or not, if the artist is pretentious and wants to make you feel stupid; will you read the text and feel dumb because the
artist has decided to use archaic language? Curiosity gets the best of you and all your fearful thoughts vanish. The writing is tiny and worry you might hit the wall.
"Happy is up. Sad is down."
That's all it has to say, and it will ring in your mind for the rest of the day because you don't
understand if you should leave it as it is or read more into it.
I don't get it.

Part 2:
Well it might have become time to consider myself a writer too. I keep little books with little words that have never been exposed, maybe by the occasional one or two people that I trusted, but other than that some writings have been kept a secret. I recently exposed one of these writings, a writing about nationality that belonged to me, but at the same time this piece of writing made me feel like it belonged to more than just myself. It is important and people should know. It empowered me and I have found that, for my brief existence on this world, my writing has been something I have been very close to, it briefly saved a relationship that didn't belong to me, it made a powerful speech, it brought back friendship and created lovers that have now gone. The word letter enthusiasm me. It has two meanings and both are empowering with a single letter you can do so much. This is why I plan to become an artist that does not paint or sculpt. It is a decision I have taken and from the many essays I have been reading recently this is significant. There is a purpose. Even when it comes to minor choices or accidental they have an impact on the end product, and this is why I choose to become an artist, because it is a choice, a decision and this will therefore impact my practice as much as it could potentially make a difference within the world. I know this might sound ambitious and I should probably specify which world, but I hate putting things in boxes. My choice can impact the science world if it wants to and if the science world will want it. My dear viewer, you are allowed to think, and as much as this might seem like an agonizing place to be; think more.
You'll soon understand

Part 3:
Brief explanation of one's practice:
*In this practice the artist rarely talks about their own work - explaining will ruin the work
*In this practice the viewer in the central concern, the dear viewer will explain the work
*In this practice reading is an essential, one cannot make art without culture
thank you for collaborating

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Beatrice Taylor Searle - Artist Statement

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Part 1:In a little white room you see a little piece of writing. You are not sure if you want to read it or not. You ask yourself if the artist wants you to read it or not, if the artist is pretentious and wants to make you feel stupid; will you read the text and feel dumb because theartist has decided to use archaic language?

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Giulia Bowinkel & Friedemann Banz generate scenarios of the juxtaposition of nature, texture, body and space, mass, form and substance. The artist duo generates reflective moments that shift between moving images, virtual scupltures and snapshots. Technological tools that have become an integral part of contemporary society serve as source and material - the computer becomes a tool and the interactions with it the subject of their work. The human being free in his choice and with his computer technological possibilities [as a subject and as an avatar] form again and again a reference point when generating forms in the visual (re)-construction of diversity and the digital image of what presents itself as {real}.*

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Giulia Bowinkel & Friedemann Banz generate scenarios of the juxtaposition of nature, texture, body and space, mass, form and substance. The artist duo generates reflective moments that shift between moving images, virtual scupltures and snapshots.

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"The project reads less like a photo book than it does an epistolary novel. All the timeless themes of a great work of fiction are there-humor, heartbreak, pathos, love-often wrapped up in the mundane, inelegant conversations that constitute our workaday lives." - ArtNet
"The cumulative impression is of a city filled with strange needs, that's wild at heart and weird on top" - "Mermelstein has been taking an ongoing series of photos since October 2017 documenting the bizarre messages people send to each other while out on the streets." - New York Post The Guardian
#nyc is Jeff Mermelstein's multifarious, comic and heartbreaking survey of contemporary life as learned through overseen text messages. Written in the new language of acronym and initialism, truncation and cipher wordplay, interrupted by the occasional longueur, people appear to have few inhibitions when faced only with their own reflection in a phone screen, such that they pour their heart-felt desire and lust and hate and vitriol in unfettered streams of text consciousness.
ABOUT THE SIGNED EDITION
Chaucerian in its breadth and humor, this project reveals the complex inner lives of the city's residents, and the intriguing richness of emotion that exists within the most innocuous moments of everyday life: on the train, a park bench, or in the street. Here, a short history of New York unfolds, as told directly by one resident to another.

Flexibound debossed hardcover
Printed on pre-dyed blue paper
Yellow circle denotes sticker applied to removable shrinkwrap
19 x 14.5cm, 160 pages

ISBN 978-1-912339-86-0
July 2020
€20 £20 $20

The signed edition includes a slip signed by the artist and bound into the inside back cover.

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US preorders will ship by end of July "The project reads less like a photo book than it does an epistolary novel. All the timeless themes of a great work of fiction are there-humor, heartbreak, pathos, love-often wrapped up in the mundane, inelegant conversations that constitute our workaday lives."

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Jacob Holdt: The show American Pictures - Part One "Roots of oppression"

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The slideshow Jacob Holdt toured with for 40 years in American colleges and 14 other countries - now digitalized

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A black line, a network of hidden connections, links all the sacred places on earth. If that line should be broken, calamities will ensue, and this beautiful world shall perish. Destroying a forest here, draining a swamp there might have dire consequences across the globe. The Kogi shamans cannot perform their work of maintaining the balance of nature much longer in the face of our depredations.

How are we to interpret this warning coming from the Kogi people of the Sierra Madre in Colombia, delivered through their latest film, Aluna?

Contemporary Western viewers may respond to the film with resistance and skepticism. The old guard will undoubtedly reproduce the violence of well-worn colonial discourses, dismissing the Kogi's message as primitive magico-religious thinking. For the ethnically sensitive, such a crude dismissal is passé. Today we have more sophisticated ways to deafen ourselves to what the Kogi are telling us.

The first we might call "ontological imperialism." It would be to say, "Yes, the Kogi are onto something after all. The black line is a metaphor for ecological interconnectedness. Their talk of the voice of water is code for the hydrological cycle. They are keen observers of nature and have articulated scientific truths in their own cultural language." That sounds fair enough, doesn't it? It gives them credit for being astute observers of nature. However, this view takes for granted that basal reality is that of scientific materialism, thereby disallowing the conceptual categories and causal understandings of the Kogi. It says that fundamentally, we understand the nature of reality better than they do.

If their message were merely, "We must take better care of nature," then the above understanding would be sufficient. But the Kogi are inviting us into a much deeper change than that. Do we understand the nature of reality better than they do? It once seemed so, but today the fruits of our supposed understanding-social and ecological crisis-gnaw at our surety.

A second and related way that Western viewers may resist the Kogi's message is through what Edward Said called "Orientalism"-the distortion (romanticizing, demonizing, exaggerating, reducing) of another culture to conform it to a comfortable and self-serving narrative. An Orientalist response to Aluna would seek to turn the Kogi into a kind of cultural or spiritual fetish object, subsuming them into our own cultural mythology, perhaps by making them into an academic subject and stuffing their beliefs and way of life into various ethnographic categories. In that way we make them safe, we make them ours. It is just another kind of imperialism.

We might do the same by inserting their messages into a comfortable silo called "indigenous wisdom," elevating the Kogi to superhuman status and, in the process, dehumanizing them as well. It is not true respect to worship an image-the reverse image of our own shadow-that we project onto another culture. Real respect seeks to understand someone on their own terms.

I am happy to say that Aluna avoids both traps (of imperialism and Orientalism). What makes this film remarkable is that fundamentally it is not a documentary. I have always been a little uncomfortable with documentaries about other cultures, even those that avoid the overtly patronizing tone of "look at those happy natives," because they of necessity objectify their subjects, turning them into the material of a (video) "document." By documenting others, we incorporate them into our world, into a safe educational or entertainment or inspirational frame, and into the "society of the spectacle." But this film is not a documentary.

Reversing Colonialism

Who is the filmmaker here? Ordinarily one would say it was Alan Ereira, a former BBC producer who produced it. But that's not what he says, and that's not what the Kogi say either. According to them, the Kogi noticed the accelerating degradation of the planet and contacted the outside world to deliver a message that we must stop the destruction. They did so first in the early 1990s with the BBC documentary From the Heart of the World, after which they again withdrew from contact.

Obviously, we didn't heed their message. "We must not have spoken it clearly enough," they concluded, and so they sought out Ereira again to make a sequel. Fittingly, this is not a masterly production in conventional terms. Ereira appears to be in a little over his head, guileless, uncertain, and humble. These qualities are palpable throughout and contribute to one's confidence that the Kogi and their message have not been conveniently packaged for commercialization or ecospiritual objectification. It is a raw and honest film.

The cynical observer, practiced with the tools of post-colonial analysis, might think that the assertion that "the Kogi have requested this film be made in order to convey their message" is a mere cinematic trope, or a way to preempt charges of exoticism, Orientalism, and cultural appropriation. However, that analysis is itself a kind of colonialism, based as it is on the patronizing assumption that the Kogi must be the helpless pawns of the filmmaker. It discounts the Kogi's own explicit assertion that they have called the filmmaker back in order to transmit an important message to "little brother" (the industrialized world).

Dare we take the Kogi at face value? Dare we hold them in full agency as authors not only of this film, but of a message sent to us on their initiative? To do so reverses the power relations implicit in even the most post-colonially sensitive ethnography, in which the distinction between the ethnographic subject and the ethnographer is usually preserved in some form (and institutionalized when, with all due disclaimers, it appears in academic publications). Anthropologists don't normally grant ethnographic populations agency as the originators of messages to academia.

The Kogi are not interested in being studied. They have not allowed anthropologists to live among them. They have not let their civilization become an object within ours. They, in fact, have been studying us-and with increasing alarm. "We have warned little brother," they tell us, "and little brother has not listened."

The Gift of Humility

In one telling scene, the Kogi mama (shaman) Shibulata visits an astronomical observatory in England. The astronomer is struck by the fact that Shibulata evinces no desire to learn from Western science, no curiosity about the telescope. He shows him photographs of galaxies invisible to the naked eye. The mama is not impressed. He is here to teach us, not to learn from us. Perhaps he recognizes the telescope as another manifestation of the same desire to conquer nature that has destroyed the forests and rivers and mangrove swamps near his home. He also displays an uncanny power, picking out from a large photograph the single star in it among multitudinous galaxies and other objects. Naming it, he says, "That star is not visible to our eyes."

In this film, the colonial gaze is turned back on the colonizers-sternly, imploringly, and with very great love. The Kogi tell us, "You mutilate the world because you don't remember the Great Mother. If you don't stop, the world will die." Please believe us, they say. You must stop doing this. "Do you think we say these words for the sake of talking? We are speaking the truth."

Why hasn't "little brother" listened? It has been over twenty years since the Kogi first spoke their message to the modern world. I think perhaps we have not listened because we have not yet inhabited the humility that this film embodies. We continue to try to somehow box, contain, and reduce the Kogi and their message so that it can rest comfortably in our existing Story of the World. The Kogi themselves say that thought is the scaffolding of matter; that without thought, nothing could exist. The official Aluna website describes the Kogi's view thusly: "We are not just plundering the world, we are dumbing it down, destroying both the physical structure and the thought underpinning existence." The conceptual reduction of the Kogi, and indigenous groups generally, to academic subjects, museum specimens, New Age fetish-objects, exploitable labor, or tourist spectacles is part of this dumbing down.

Thankfully, the requisite humility to truly hear the Kogi is fast upon us, born of-what else?-humiliation. As our dominant cultural mythology falls apart, we face repeated humiliation in the failure of our cherished systems of technology, politics, law, medicine, education, and more. Only with increasingly strenuous and willful ignorance can we deny that the grand project of "civilization" has failed. We see now that what we do to nature we do to ourselves; that its conquest brings our death. The utopian mirage of the technologist and the social engineer recedes ever further into the distance.

The breakdown of our categories and narratives, the breakdown of our Story of the World, gives us the gift of humility. That is the only thing that can open us to receive the teachings of the Kogi and other indigenous people-to truly receive them, and not merely insert them into some comfortable silo called "indigenous wisdom," as if they were a museum piece or a spiritual acquisition.

I am not suggesting that we adopt, part and parcel, the entire Kogi cosmology. We need not imitate their shamanic practices or learn to listen to bubbles in the water. What we must do is embrace the core understanding that motivates the attempt to listen to water in the first place: the understanding that nature is alive and intelligent, bearing certain qualities of a self that Western thought has arrogated to human beings alone. We must make it no longer an Other; we must grant to nature the same agency that this film humbly grants to the Kogi. Then we will find our own ways of listening.

What Does Nature Want?

The modern mind does not easily comprehend the idea of the intelligence of nature except through anthropomorphizing or deifying it-another attempt at conquest. That would impose upon nature the same neocolonial attitude that this film does not impose upon the Kogi, and it is contrary to their message. Living much closer to nature than we in industrialized society, the Kogi can be under no illusion that nature is always nice, fair, and pleasant. From a dualistic mindset, the putative "intelligence of nature" looks like a capricious, evil intelligence. If you or I were in charge, we'd do better, wouldn't we? We wouldn't arrange for 999 tadpoles out of a thousand never to achieve froghood. We wouldn't write so much suffering and death into nature. We would improve on nature. Such is the conceit of civilization as we know it.

To the extent we participate in modern society, "you and I" have been in charge. Look at what has happened to the world. Maybe it is time for younger brother-to see through different eyes.

Granting subjectivity and agency to nature and everything in it does not mean to grant human subjectivity and human agency, making them into storybook versions of us. It means asking, "What does the land want? What does the river want? What does the planet want?"-questions that seem crazy from the perspective of nature-as-thing.

The Kogi are not talking about a non-material, supernatural spirit to infuse consciousness into otherwise dead matter. For the Kogi, matter is not a container for thought; matter is thought made manifest, the thought of the Mother. Their beliefs are not actually supernatural, not in the sense of abstracting spirit (and all that goes with it like sacredness, consciousness, etc.) out from matter. To do so denies the inherent beingness of nature just as much as standard scientific materialism does.

Materialism, however, isn't what it used to be. Science is evolving, recognizing that nature is composed of interdependent systems within systems within systems, just as a human body is; that soil mycorrhizal networks are as complex as brain tissue; that water can carry information and structure; that the earth and even the sun maintain homeostatic balance just as a body does. We are learning that order, complexity, and organization are fundamental properties of matter, mediated through physical processes that we recognize-and perhaps by others we do not. The excluded spirit is coming back to matter, not from without but from within.

So the question, "What does nature want?" does not depend for its coherency on anything supernatural, an external intelligence. The "wanting" is an organic process, an entelechy born of relationship, a movement toward an unfolding wholeness.

A Non-Utilitarian Argument Against Ecocide

In that understanding, we can no longer cut down forests and drain swamps, dam rivers and fragment ecosystems with roads, dig pit mines and drill gas wells with impunity. The Kogi say, to do so damages the whole body of nature, just as if you cut off a person's limb or removed an organ. The well-being of all depends on the well-being of each. We cannot cut down one forest here and plant another there, assuring ourselves through the calculus of net carbon dioxide that we have done no damage. How do we know that we have not removed an organ? How do we know we have not destroyed what the Kogi call an esuana -a key node on the black thread scaffolding the natural world? How do we know we have not destroyed a sacred tree, what the Kogi call "the father of the species," upon which the whole species depends?

Until we can know it, we'd best refrain from committing further ecocide on any scale. Each intact estuary, river, forest, and wetlands that remains to us, we must treat as sacred, while restoring whatever we can. The Kogi say we are close to the dying of the world.

As the film makes clear, science is beginning to recognize what the Kogi have always known. An invisible web of causality does indeed connect every place on Earth. Building a road that cuts off the natural water flow at a key site might initiate a cascade of changes-more evaporation, salinization, vegetation die-off, flooding, drought-that have far-reaching effects. We must understand that as exemplfying a general principle of interconnectedness; furthermore, we must see the aliveness and intelligence of the world. As the Kogi say in the film, "If you knew she could feel, you would stop."

Otherwise, we are left only with the logic of instrumental utilitarianism as reason to protect nature-save the rainforest because of its value to us. But that mindset is part of the problem. We need more love, not more self-interest. We know it is wrong to exploit another person for our own gain, because another person is a full subject with her own feelings, desires, pain, and joy. If we knew that nature too were a full subject, we would stop ravaging her as well.

Aluna brings this knowing a little closer. Only by hardening our hearts can we view the film's images of filled-in swamps and bare, scarred mountains, and disbelieve that something is feeling very great pain. Only by the colonialistic dismissal of an entire culture's cosmology and ways of knowing, can we uphold our own dying mythology of nature as an insensate source of materials and repository of wastes. The sober indignation of the Kogi defies easy dismissal. It is not hard to believe that they-the largest intact civilization that has remained separate from global industrialized society-are indeed "Elder Brother." It is not hard to believe their warning. To act on it, though, might require the same courage, patience, and wisdom the film reveals in the Kogi.

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Aluna: A Message to Little Brother | Charles Eisenstein

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Only by hardening our hearts can we view the film's images of filled-in swamps and bare, scarred mountains, and disbelieve that something is feeling very great pain. Only by the colonialistic dismissal of an entire culture's cosmology and ways of knowing, can we uphold our own dying mythology of nature as an insensate source of materials and repository of wastes.

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This is a publication by CSM BA Fine Art students, published in June 2020. It contains contributions from Loti Armstrong, Yuyuan Fang, Marth... See More

This is a publication by CSM BA Fine Art students, published in June 2020. It contains contributions from Loti Armstrong, Yuyuan Fang, Marth... See More

Connecting content to people.

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Doing Nothing All Day Long by Central Saint Martins BA Fine Art students

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This is a publication by CSM BA Fine Art students, published in June 2020. It contains contributions from Loti Armstrong, Yuyuan Fang, Martha Flavin, Emily Garland, Fran Hayes, Amaani Husain, Paul Kim, Alexandra Mihalski, Joonho Park, Pete Phipps, Saorise Turner and Xueying Yao.