Fracture is an iPhone application that allows you to paint cubist style portraits using your own photos. Aesthetics employed by abstract masters such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque have been studied and recreated in this fun creative app. Simply use your camera or search your image gallery for 1 or more photos, adjust the settings to your specification and you are ready to start painting

jamesalliban.wordpress.com/2010/08/30/fracture-cubist-iphone-app/

[via creative applications]

Historypin is a like a digital time machine that allows people to view and share their personal history in a totally new way. It uses Google Maps and Street View technology and hopes to become the largest user-generated archive of the world’s historical images and stories.
Historypin asks the public to dig out, upload and pin their own old photos, as well as the stories behind them, onto the  map.

http://www.historypin.com

Composition with Javascript is an interactive work by Kostya Loginov and Vlad Yakovlev, made using HTML, CSS, Javascript and jQuery, based on Piet Mondrian’s “Composition with Yellow, Red, Black, Blue and Grey” (1920). It allows everybody deconstruct the original painting and form it again in whatever he or she wants. Lines are shiftable (just drag it with your mouse) and colours changeable (click on it). Texture of the painting was preserved for authentic look. One can play with composition, forms and colours, alter the harmony of the piece or even destroy it and compose something pictorial.

http://www.compositionwithjavascript.com

This film, named Vol Libre, was presented by Loren Carpenter at the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference in 1980. It is the world’s first fractal movie and utilizes 8-10 different fractal generating algorithms. After that presentation, the author was hired by Lucasfilms and used an antialiased version of the same software to create the fractal planet in the Genesis Sequence of Star Trek 2, the Wrath of Khan.

Longer article at kottke.org
Loren Carpenter on Wikipedia

In this 1971 film, using one frame of film for each page of the thirtytwo-volume set, conceptual artist John Latham (1921-2006) transforms Encyclopedia Britannica, often considered the embodiment of human knowledge, into an accelerating stream of images.

A review of the work

Computer Baroque is an online exhibition, curated by Richard Wright and hosted by Animate Projects. The show includes a selection of defining works in the history of artists’ digital moving image (featuring pioneers Karl Sims, Yoichiro Kawaguchi, William Latham, Beriou, John Tonkin, Chris Landreth, Peter Callas, Simon Biggs, Ruth Lingford, James Duesing, Paul Garrin, Shelley Lake, The Butler Brothers and Jason White & Richard Wright). Rarely seen, they represent a period – the eighties and early nineties – in which computer animation was the focus for the most audacious and exuberant experiments across all areas of new media, art and technology.

Why characterise this period as ‘Baroque’? I think it was the sense that by the late 1980s we had at last reached a stage where more than just a handful of insiders were able to harness the power of computers. Artists wanted to push the computer as far as it would go, to create visual transformations that defied previous traditions, to blend image and music and text, to apply scientific ideas as new sources of inspiration. It created a strident kind of image that insisted on the fact of its own realisation, fleeting paeans to the artificial. Yet equally present was a nagging anxiety, that this artifice was an illusion that disguised totalizing control, paranoia and catastrophe. (Richard Wright)

http://www.animateprojects.org

In this amazing video, Andy Warhol paints Debbie Harry on an Amiga at the Commodore product launch press conference in 1985. Later on, in January 1986 the US magazine “Amigaworld” brought an interview with the artist about his relationship with computers (pdf available).

http://www.artnode.org (pdf)

[ITALIAN BELOW]

Joseph Beuys è uno degli artisti contemporanei più amati. Un po’ per la sua rarissima capacità di coniugare forma e contenuto, politica e poetica, un po’ per il fascino indubbio del personaggio. Molte le citazioni e gli omaggi, che fioccano anche in rete.
D’altra parte, il noto concetto di “scultura sociale”, coniato dall’artista tedesco negli anni Settanta, è un serbatoio di spunti per la più giovane arte dei network che, specie agli esordi, lavorò proprio sulla costruzione di relazioni, più che sulla realizzazione di prodotti artistici in senso stretto. Lo stesso Wolfgang Stahele, fondatore di The Thing, lo citò in alcune interviste come fonte di ispirazione per il suo pionieristico network artistico.
Lo scorso anno MTAA mise in rete uno scaricatissimo filmato (Beastie Beuys) in cui Joseph Beuys si esibiva come cantante in un’improbabile pop band degli anni Ottanta, cantando un testo estremamente politico come Sonne statt Reagan. Il net artista francese Jimpunk ha invece lanciato ieri un ascii remix sonoro di una delle tracce più famose dell’artista tedesco, la dadaista ja ja ja ja ja nee nee nee nee nee. E’ il visitatore che può assemblare i suoni, cliccando qua e là sull’inconfondibile sagoma di Beuys, tratteggiata con poche righe parallele.

http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/artist/beuys/biography
http://www.jimpunk.com/Joseph.Beuys/
http://www.mteww.com/mtaaRR/news/twhid/beastie_beuys.html

www.mediaarthistory.org
www.banffcentre.ca
www.medienkunstnetz.de

(domenico quaranta)

www.numeral.com

(domenico quaranta)

http://www.nomemory.org/webpaint

http://www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/intelligence