Larsen Feedback

This is a composition by Maxime Merion involving a slightly psychedelic series of images, taken directly off a television screen. It's a little bit like what I would like to achieve and is reminiscent of Telegiffer in some ways. It is, however, a bit more considered and worked on.



Maniax Memori weblog

I like how this piece seems to have originated from the feedback generated from a microphone. Pretty cool.

Teletext is dead.

ASCII Art - links

• Canonical smileys list. Interesting how a combination of a few ascii characters can express an opinion or an emotion. Even though there are multiple meanings for each (for example, :-) can mean 'smiling' or 'user is an orator' amongst other things), there is a certain amount of shared knowledge amongst Internet users.

• The Wikipedia Emoticons entry mentions that certain smileys have been copyrighted in Finland (!)
• Japanese two byte emoticons are usually vertical rather than horizontal. For example "(；_ :)" means "feeling sad".
• An article on the smiley's 25th birthday:"The critics of emoticons maintain that it has destroyed the fabric of proper writing, believing a functioning literary mind should be able to express emotion without the use of a direct symbol explaining to the reader exactly how he or she should feel. But to answer these critics, is it really that serious of a debate? A simple :-) here or a :-( there is a simple way to avoid an unintentional row, and that's something everyone can :-) about." -- ITPRO
• A Tour of ASCII and ANSI art from the 80s and 90s.
  

Interview with Dirk Paesmans

Some very interesting extracts from an interview with Dirk Paesmans of jodi.org. Warning, the translation is a bit ropey in places.

"We, I especially, did a lot of writing and mailing into mailing lists, but that was all unreadable stuff. Sometimes cut and paste from the text and with a lot of graphic stuff in between. Sometimes they looked as that if you would start to read them, most of the time they were not ascii drawings, they were ascii texts. I did hundreds of them, a lot a lot alot. I also tried to do it in the serious mailing lists. That time rhizome, I bombarded it."

"Anything media tries for their own explanations, like all these type of festivals like this, is actually more a warning for me as an artist to take care that don’t ever become like that, because it’s so general, everything can be replaced by something else and you won’t notice it. I want to feel a personality of the maker, of the person within this group that has a vision that will be real or strong."

On My Desktop:

"But then you have the ways when you do it in a very technically advanced way that you create a friendly virus, then you have to do it very constructive. And you demonstrate so bad amateur behaviour that it almost has the same effect, I mean you can’t imagine that someone is doing something so stupid or so different from the normal rules. For example multiplying folders, opening them at the same time, then throwing them to the trashcan and trying to delete it. A virus would do it a really advanced virus could do it, but you could also do it yourself when you were in the state of a five year old, let’s say, a five year old child for example would do it for fun, because it would like it, it makes sound and talalla, they think it’s great. It’s like a ball is not made for playing football only you can also just play with it on the walls, I mean it’s not just to be played eleven players against eleven players."

Source text

Artists/artworks and their relevance

Might be good to get these into a physical format such as index cards or post it notes in order to organise them. May be the case of building these in Illustrator and printing them off.

Relevance to Teletext?

Started documenting this in a text document complete with screenshots. The index card system will allow me to organise information into sections and under headings etc. This, I feel, will be an important aspect of the project - experimentation with different arrangements will hopefully produce some ideas for outcomes. I will concentrate on this aspect for the next week or so to make sure I have some kind of organisation of the information I have collected.

Above right - example of some data that could go on the cards - artist name, artist's relevant works, screenshot.

Office art

One could conceivably create an artwork out of any office item imaginable - pencils, paperclips, staples etc. but it seems the most popular is the post-it note. This photoset on Flickr demonstrates the point in hand, the square shape of the post-it in this case being a substitute for a pixel with the iconic images of an enemy from the popular arcade game Space Invaders and The Mona Lisa being given the 'office art treatment'.

As a couple of small project these are pleasing on the eye, maybe due to their novelty and almost definitely because of the flourescent hues. They have an appealing spontaneous quality in that these were probably created one lunch break when the boss wasn't there.

Aside from this it's a basic idea but it works. This is often the best formula for success.