elfs | Entries tagged with art

We have an phrase in the programming world, the Dark Programmer. The term comes from the analogy with dark matter: we know it exists because it exert gravitational force on our galaxy, but other than that we have no idea what it is. A dark programmer is like dark matter: we know they exist because someone keeps writing Java-based actuarial software for insurance companies, banks, hospitals, and other large institutions, but these aren't the sort of people who post to GitHub or Bitbucket, don't contribute to Stack Overflow, and generally aren't interested in advancing, or even learning much about, the state of the art. They just want to do their job for the day, go home, and not think too much about what they do.

It occurred to me, while watching the credits roll by for the movie Frozen, that there seem to be Dark Artists as well. Looking through the list of all the various artists, digital CGI, and ink-and-paint animators listed on the film, I proceeded to go through all of them to find out how many had some sort of presence on the web related to their love of their art.

About half. Almost all of them had some presence: they have LinkedIn accounts, IMDB entries, and the like. But only about half the artists had Deviant Art, Tumblr, Blogspot, or some other account where they shared process drawnings and discussed their work with other people. (Mostly Blogspot. Which I think is weird. Is there something in the TOS of Blogspot that makes it more desirable for arists than the others?) Which means that half the artists on the biggest animated film of the year just want to do the work, take their paycheck, go home, and not think too much about what they do for a living.

The programming world needs dark programmers; I wonder if the same mindset is in play for animation departments. After all, not every who went to art school came out as passionate as when they entered.

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Frozen OST, For The First Time
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1557573.html

Omaha and I volunteered to run the photo booth at SEAF, where we were to man the computers. Apparently, we were the most computer-savvy people they could rope into the deal.

It was actually a lot of fun. We had the day-shift, which wasn't terribly busy, but was fine throughout the day. We had a lot of very beautiful people come through, in all ages from their anxious mid-20s to their self-assured late 60s. The rules didn't allow for nudity, sadly, but I saw several handsome young men with their shirts off. Apparently the big events happened at night-- performance art and fashion shows, and some demonstrations of the darker leather arts.

I picked up both volumes of The Virgin Project, an incredibly sweet and yet sometimes disturbing collection of interviews with how individuals lost their virginities, all rendered in exquisitely sensitive comic form. I suspect Scott McCloud would approve. They are a perfect representative of the comics as a way of communicating memoir stories clearly.

I can understand why some of my friends who submitted didn't get in. The art reached for the status of art and often reached pretention. If it didn't aspire to communicate something other than "sex is fun," it wasn't on display. Sam Cobb's collection of oil paintings embraced being kinky even into old age and decreptitude; Brian M's photographs of an armless woman with large artifical breast implants were a defiant stab at the idea that the handicapped are nonsexual. Some artworks were accepted simply due to scale: Nancy Peach had big, bold canvasses, but her work was casually heterosexist in theme, so much so that its inclusion was almost ironic. Michael Alm's "Furries Get Together," a tableau of statuettes in fursuits, tried to imply that furries were ordinary people under their clothing, but somehow also managed to say that ordinary people under their clothing can be unpleasant to look at-- the opposite from the values mouthed by SEAF's parent organization, the Center for Sex-Positive Culture.

I did like several pieces there. Christopher Carver's piece "Stephanie" was basically a giant wall-covering poster of a close-up of a rather ordinary vulva, but if you got close to the image you could see it was done in four-color with the "pixels" being silhouettes of bunnies and kittens. Jonathan Wakuda Fischer's "Midnight's Request" appealed to my crotch well, a woodcut rope bondage scene with an animesque feel to it done in woodcuts and paint. And Emily Steadman's oil paintings were sweet and wonderful outdoor love scenes without a touch of irony of desperation.

The best pieces there were the beds, constructions of wrought iron, one made of Gieger-like spines; another of beautiful stainless steel, technological but not gridded, not rigid, a nice place to have sex; and a third in dark steel, gorgeous machine-cut silhouettes of oak trees.

The theme of this SEAF was evocative of other emotions using the erotic as a vehicle, and not necessarily erotic works by themselves. It was certainly not the kind of bondage reportage photography that has been prevalent in the past. Some of it was good, and there was a lot of very skilled talent on display, especially in the constructions and installations.

One thing still blows my mind though: Norwescon was a sponsor (although their name was spelled wrong on one of the flyers, it's correct on the website). Okay, there's a lot of crossover between the pagan, kink, and SF communities in Seattle, but that much seems confessional and a bit over the top.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Bruce Dickinson, Navigating the Seas of the Sun

Eggcellent

You know, eggs really are a difficult medium. But they're fun, and they keep me out of trouble. Here's the two I did for the kids this week.

Current Mood: giggly

Seattle Skyline

As I mentioned earlier, brown is a really freakin' hard color to work with in web design. It's a passive color, one we recognize mostly by the light it doesn't reflect, and therefore not very easy to replicate even on the best monitors. Still, I decided to try and make it work, using my huge panorama shot of Seattle as my reference. It came out pretty good, I think, and I'm happy with the results.

Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Tetsu Inoue, Ambient Otaku: Magnetic Fields

Scrotum

Perhaps I shouldn't mock public art, but I paid for it and if this is the best entertainment value I can get for my tax dollar, then I should do what I can to enhance the experience.

Seattle recently built a complete light rail system from the airport to downtown. It's a lovely system, and I have some photos of it to show you later, but first I want to discuss the Tukwila Station, a huge thing of concrete, steel and glass that looms over the freeway like the home of some well-meaning but clueless Jedi overlord. It has three pieces of public art, and this one to the left amuses me first. You can see it through the glass when you drive past the station and I swear, it looks like nothing less than an uncomfortable scrotum.

Lute Statue

This isn't so bad, as public art goes. But you know that post I made awhile back about how certain wavelengths of light give me headaches? See that blue crack running up the length of the lute? Yeah, that's a neon bulb, and it's exactly at that spot. I avoid the station at night if I can.

Molecule Statue

And finally, there's this thing: a ten-foot high, six-foot in diameter dangling tinkertoy or molecule, each node of which is cut off at some facing to reveal a polished steel flat panel with something "profound" written on it.

The thing is, the quotes are all about the city of Tukwila. Tukwila was probably a nice farming community fifty years ago, but since 1947 the city of Tukwila has been little more than support infrastructure for Seattle International Airport. There's also The Southcenter Shopping District, and aside from those two hubs there's just nothing "there" to Tukwila. It's a wholly artificial city that has become a municipal service arm for the sprawling service corridor around the airport and the low-rent flight-path apartment complexes that have sprung up nearby. It's hard to imagine a more dreary borough. Art about how wonderful it is now is ridiculous.

I remember when I arrived in Tukwila, too. I passed through it to get to where I wanted to go.

Current Mood: giggly

Robot Women!

I know my audience. Sometimes too well.

Current Mood: giggly

Anatomically Correct

Okay, childish sniggering aside (see previous post), this statue is the one causing the most controversy in my home town. News crews have been out to film it (from the shoulders up), local tongues are wagging over it, local prudes are demanding it be removed saying, "If she were alive she'd be arrested!" and on and on and on.

My two cents: it's lovely. Nudity never harmed anyone. She looks like a woman in her mid to late 40's ought to look, pendulous breasts and anatomically correct crotch and all.

Apparently, she's "creepy." I suspect those who believe so have never seen a woman older and less photoshopped than Jannah Burnham. (p.s.: totally NSFW) And while I happen to like Jannah Burnham, I appreciate that most women are not going to look like they just walked out of a slightly pornographic fairy tale.

Current Mood: creative

Crotch Shot

Robo Booty

Hand

A few months ago, I described the new statues in our public square here in Burien, WA as "Lumpen Decepticon Zombie Art, and I still feel that way about them. They do kinda grow on you, not enough for me to want to keep them, but hey, at least I can take more pictures, ne, and try to get a feel for them.

Whoever made the female statue clearly has a feel for roboglueteus maximus, and I do mean maximus. Do we really think that robots will have the same integral design as humans? Do we hope so? The artist clearly does.

Current Mood: giggly

Giant Zombies!

My city has been undergoing a renaissance of sorts, rebuilding its public square and replacing its late 60's-era rambler City Hall with a modern, four-storey construction of glass with a back that faces the city's main retail drag, curving along the curb, and a front that faces the city's largest open parking lot. (The satellite view is apparently after the tear-down, but before reconstruction began.) Being a modern, left-coast city, it commissioned some public art to decorate their front entrance.

This monstrosity is what they got. Called "mother and child," this 10-meter tall pair of lumpen zombie Decepticons striding across the parking lot is just the sort of thing to discourage any parent from taking young children to the city hall. The "mother" statue is especially disturbing, with her Barbie proportions, rasta-like dreads and menacing claws.

The city has recently announced that the statue is "temporary." Huh. I wonder why they might want to put a deadline on just how long this eyesore has to stay in sight.

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: NPR, Morning Edition

So, I spoke with my manager earlier this week. Isilon is growing and we're implementing a formal education reimbursement plan and all that goes with it. I have a very strong grasp of the entire stack of C/Python/Ruby/Perl/Appservers/Webservers/Databases on the server side side and HTML/DOM/ECMA(Javascript)/CSS on the client side. But I told him that I was never quite happy with my grasp of visual design. I can do it, but mostly without much inspiration. It's not something that comes naturally to me, and it takes a lot of practice to wake it up. He thought my graphic design sensibilities were fine for the industrial applications I wrote for Isilon (and F5, and Carbonwave, and all the contracts I did for CompuServe), but agreed that if I thought that was a skill I need to improve then, by all means, I should take a class and submit expenses and all that.

I am an idiot because today, while I was playing with my wacom pad, I figured out what layers are for.

I mean, if you're a graphic designer, let that sink in. I've been doing this for ten years and only today did I figure out just how useful layers could be. I've always done all my prototyping on paper and then just scribbled it into photoshop all at once.

Bleah. All that wasted time.

Current Mood: annoyed

Current Mood: amused

JWZ was one of the first people to originally mention the Orangina octopus somewhere where I could see it, although I didn't find the video until PZ Meyers pointed it out to me.

JWZ then issued a challenge to turn the squirting octopus scene into an LJ icon. I have, uh, attempted to rise to the challenge, and my contribution is visible there on the right. If you go to JWZ's LJ you'll see many worthy variations, although right now I'm holding out for

dossy's as the best so far.

To make this, I first cut it out with mplayer:

mplayer -vo png -ss 00:52 -endpos 00:56

Then created a common map with netpbm:

for i in *.png ; do pngtopnm $i > $i.pnm ; done pnmcat -lr 0*.pnm | pnmcolormap 48 > map48.pnm

Then created a collection of cut, scaled, and remapped gifs (I determined the dimensions of my cut with GIMP):

for i in *.png ; do pngtopnm $i | pnmcut -l 93 -t 34 -w 243 -h 243 | \
  pnmscale -xy 100 100 | pnmremap -mapfile=map48.pnm | \
 ppmtogif > ../$i.gif ; echo $i ; done

And then assembled them together with gifsicle:

gifsicle -d 24 --loop=forever -D bg -O2 *.gif > anim.gif

I did some judicious removal of frames with rm (I could always rerun the script to regenerate them) and it took a little tweaking, but comes in at 38,410 bytes. Because there are so many dropped frames, I slowed it down a little, from 160ms to 240ms. I think the frame jerkiness suggests watching something in slo-mo, and tweaking the speed emphasizes that, so the experienced viewer won't be annoyed by the painfully low frame rate.

Current Mood: amused

So, I had an opportunity recently to spend an evening at the Seattle Art Museum. I'm afraid I'm only a little bit happier with the SAM than I am with the Olympic Sculpture Park, which I visited earlier this month. The new space is quite beautiful, and the lighting is much better, but I miss the majesty of the old marble steps with the Middle Eastern lions watching as you ascended into the space.

It is less crowded and they do have room for more. Unfortunately, I find their idea of "more" to be somewhat wanting. First, there's the huge art piece which consist of nine Ford Taurus's suspended from the ceiling with lit cables come out of them, called Inopportune: Stage One, which is free to anyone who walks into the lobby. Nifty, in a way, but hardly communicative: it looks like the sort of thing one takes on for the mere technical challenge. "Look, I can hang cars from the ceiling!" There's the piece Some/One, which is impressive for the amount of effort that goes into it, and it's nice to see it have enough floorspace.

There's a big new section on Pop Art, which is kinda fun if you're into that thing. It has Warhols, and the different galleries as you walk through them try to explain the evolution of modern art, with sections on impressionism, abstraction, surrealism. They've got a few Rothko's, which are important pieces for their day, but the Warhols just leave me cold. There's the flat anime-inspired Red Eyed Tribe by Chiho Aoshima (who's other work, A Divine Gas, I think is gorgeous and hilarious all at the same time), which was interesting but begs the question: is a photoshop-drawn mural that can be printed anywhere, anytime, really a fitting piece for a museum?

SAM really is a "thing you'll like if you like that sort of thing" place. I guess I wasn't muchly inspired by it. Then again, given the reasons I was there, I was distracted and not much in the mood to be inspired.

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Wolverine, Again?

Oh, my.... Spock! Totally and completely NSFW!

Current Mood: giggly

I'm addicted to Drawn!, a beautiful website that brings me daily lovely art from around the world, highlights great and important illustrators, and generally makes me want to cry with envy at the talent that's out there. Drawn yesterday brought me Jen Wang's beautiful Dance of the Flight Attendant (SFW). The latest addition to my art addiction is Ping!, an English-language magazine published in Japan.

I mention these two because Drawn several months ago brought me Gez Fry, a manga-style illustrator who prior to 2002 had never thought of himself as an artist or illustrator. This month Ping! (why does that name remind me of the robot ("I'm a non-H model, dammit!") from Megatokyo?) brought me an interview with Fry in which he revealed that he went from being unable to draw to being one of the hottest illustrators on the planet right now-- in two years.

To me, that speaks to the real intersection between talent and expertise. Innate ability is nothing: practice is everything. Fry analyzed each and every drawing he did and asked himself how he could make it better. And that's really all there was too it.

Oh, yeah. Speaking of dedication, 752 words this morning. Not a great start, but at least the really big orgy scene is done. Whew! I definitely broke many of the rules: "One exclamation point per chapter." Broken. "Don't have characters shout 'I'm coming!'" Broken. "Don't write the way porn movies speak." Broken. All by Zia Tau because she (and the upcoming Ash & Arwen) are characters from the pornoverse who just happen to have dropped into the Journal Entries, and nobody's quite the wiser for it. I haven't written something that long and involved in a long time. I wanted to get back to my roots as a pornographer. Unfortunately, the writer in me is getting in the way, demanding that I tell a story about these characters, who they are and what they want. This is definitely gonna call for some rewriting. But it was nice to write something with the kind of relentless, careless pace that defines much of the writing on ASSM.

Current Mood: envious
Current Music: God Module, Resurrection

Every once in a while I stumble across a howto and a new artist and I just sigh, knowing that unless I win the lottery to have the time and find the motivation, I'll never draw one-tenth as well as that guy. I had that feeling last night when I came across Kazu Kibuishi's Copper tutorial.

That's just lovely work.

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Julia W. Howe, The Battle Hymn of the Republic