This is a diagram I’ve made that shows the distribution of letters in Scrabble across 27 languages. The area of each tile corresponds to the number of occurrences of the letter on the tile - in English, E occurs 12 times so the area of the E tile here is 12 times the area of Z which appears just once.

Art On The Hill is a new arts trail for Windmill Hill and Victoria Park in Bristol. Despite the relatively small area, we’ve got over 70 artists exhibiting.

I’ve been working on the website - www.artonthehill.org.uk - as well as the publicity material (logo/flyers/posters). I’m also going to be exhibiting some work - mostly paintings of the local area, but some other odd stuff too.

Gallery - Kita Usagi (ギャラリー・北うさぎ)

Stonefridge, Sante Fe, New Mexico

GoogleMap satellite view, nicoalesce’s Flickr set, absentsignified’s Flickr set

The Codex Seraphinianus looks like an encyclopædia for a parallel world. Luigi Serafini wrote (in an indecipherable language) and illustrated the book around the late 70’s/early 80’s. I’d love to have a copy but it’s rare and therefore expensive. Luckily it’s available on Flickr for nowt.

Also on Flickr is the Voynich Manuscript.

Further to this post, I’ve created a little exhibition of 4-bit art. Click below to load (~1MB).

I’ve been reading ‘New Media Art’ by Mark Tribe and Reena Jana (Taschen). The term New Media Art is a rather specific subset of a wider orbit that includes Digital Art, Multimedia Art and Interactive Art. New Media Art is concerned with the use of emerging technologies and with the cultural and political impacts of these technologies. The roots of New Media Art can be traced to Dada and Pop Art. Dada’s cynicism, randomness and its political focus are key themes. Pop Art’s appropriation of cultural iconography is evident in New Media Art. The awkward term ‘hacktivism’ (a mix of hacking and political activism - the manipulation of code to promote political ideologies) is commonly used. New Media Art seems to choose politics over aesthetics.

I sense that mash-ups (or can we call them ‘mups’ - mash up of the words ‘mash’ and ‘up’?) fit nicely into this movement. How about a GPS-enabled version of one of Richard Long’s line walks mapped onto Google Maps?

Some examples from the book:

Cory Arcangel - Super Mario Clouds

This is a hacked version of Super Mario Brothers where he’s removed everything from the game except from the clouds. I like the playfulness of this but on a deeper level perhaps the lo-fi graphics hint at abstraction.

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy - Horror Chase

This is a video installation consisting of a series of chase sequences, inspired by ‘Evil Dead II’. Jennifer McCoy says: “We were thinking about Mannerism in the sense of a highly (over)developed form… We chose the height of the horror genre, which is the chase, the epitome of horror, and then used software to hang up the narrative.”

Mark Napier - Shredder 1.0

Shredder uses a Perl script to remix a webpage. This picture is the shredding of this page. You can’t shred the shredder.

Olia Lialina - My Boyfriend Came Back From The War

This is a narrative piece that uses links the tell the story. With a choice of links at each turn, the way the story unfolds depends on which links are chosen. This reminds me of the early proto-hypertext Fighting Fantasy novels.

Radioqualia - Free Radio Linux

“Free Radio Linux is an online and on-air radio station. The sound transmission consists of a computerized reading of the code used to create the operating system, Linux.” If you wanted listen to the whole thing, it would take 593.89 days. An open source operating system encoded into an open source audio stream.

Found via the Radioqualia site is Radio-Astronomy - a project which broadcasts sounds intercepted from space live on the internet and on the airwaves. It’s been my soundtrack this morning. No wow signals yet.

During a bout of nostalgia the other day, I thought back to when computers had very limited graphics cards. One of the first PCs I used had a graphics card that could support 256 colours and I remember my amazement when I first saw an image in 16-bit colour - wow, just wow - it’s so real! Now we have 24-bit - 16,777,216 colours - and that seems plenty.

If you ask someone to describe a colour, you’re not likely to get a precise answer. Most people’s “linguistic resolution” is quite limited.

“Erm.. bluey-green”
“It’s an orangey-pinkish colour”
“Light brown”

Obviously the eye can detect more subtle differences in colour that we can adequately describe linguistically - but what if this wasn’t the case? What if the human eye could only see in 4-bit colour?

Here is Paul Cézanne’s ‘Still Life with a Skull’ in 4-bit colour:

How does the impact of a painting change when the colour depth is lowered?
Can you get a better feel of the composition of a painting if you are less distracted by the colour?