Speed Noise Movement

Twitter for Mac’s hidden API console

I recently learned about a really useful easter-egg/hidden feature in Twitter for Mac: a full-featured API console. Here’s how to enable it:

1. Open up preferences.

2. Switch to the Developer tab
   

3. Check the checkbox

4. (Optional) Follow the directions and go the Twitter site to register an app. You only need this if you need to use authenticated methods, though.

5. Note the new “Develop” menu in the menu bar. The only option is console, and that’s what you want.
   

6. Make some calls! You can see select a method from the list on the sidebar and fill out parameters in the little inspector below. Making the call itself is kind of fiddly (sometimes it does nothing, sometimes it opens Safari?), but in the end there will be a nice glob of JSON for you to do whatever horrible thing you’re going to do to Twitter.
   

So what horrible things am I going to do to Twitter? Stay tuned.

Seven on Seven livetweets

On Saturday, I was lucky enough to attend Rhizome’s annual Seven on Seven Conference at the New Museum. Seven on Seven pairs artists with “technologists”¹ and gives them 24 hours to conceive and maybe start to implement a project from scratch.

I’m still in the process of synthesizing and writing up my thoughts, but in the meantime, I’ve created a Storify of my livetweets from the event.

New Aesthetic roundup

Adam Harvey’s “CV Dazzle”

This past week, the corners of the Internet that I frequent have been unable to shut up about the “New Aesthetic”, and I’ve been reading it all with great interest. Maybe you’ve seen the term pop up in your Twitter stream recently and are now thinking: “Fantastic, someone’s finally going to define this for me!” No such luck¹, but instead I can point you towards about an hour (give or take) worth of reading that will have you well beyond up-to-date at the water cooler tomorrow.

First things first: the New Aesthetic as a concept was coined by a guy named James Bridle, who first started talking about it last May and runs a Tumblr that serves as a crude definition if you prefer Gestalts of images to strings of words for your definitions. James gave a talk called “Waving at the Machines” at Webdirections South (that link is video, transcript here) that expanded on some of the ideas.

The beginning of the ongoing flurry began with a SXSW panel, which Bridle wrote about, as did the rest of the participants (Joanne McNeil, Ben Terrett, Aaron Strauss Cope, Russel Davies). This prompted a really long, meandering piece from Bruce Sterling in Wired which is really the centerpiece of this whole conversation and should be the one thing you read if you are not really reading all of these. A lot of people didn’t really follow Bruce 100% of the way (disclosure: some of those people were me), but there’s a lot of meat on those bones, which everyone proceeded to pick at immediately.

Among these:

• The Creator’s Project solicits reactions from six interested parties (journalists, technologists, artists, things inbetween): Marius Watz, Kyle Chayka, Jonathan Minard, Greg Borenstein, James George, Kyle McDonald.
• Dan Catt writes about the technical achievement gap between computer graphics and computer vision
• In response, Greg Borenstein and Kyle McDonald gather images of as many different “CV markers” as they can find.
• Joel Johnson says “New Aesthetic fashion is Playstation”, building off a Pinterest board curated by Chris Heathcote, who explained his motivation a few days before the storm hit.

Gareth Pugh’s Pugh Prism via the New Aesthetic fashion Pinterest board.

And there’s a lot more kicking around that you will inevitably discover while reading the rest of these.

While a lot of the rhetoric here is distressingly sprinkled with Continental “theory” and many points, especially those having to do with AI², are off-base in a major way, I’m thrilled that we’re finally having this conversation, which has been bubbling under the surface for years, as Bridle is quick to admit.

Keyboard shortcuts everywhere

I went to an iOS developer meetup the other day. One of the speakers was Stamped’s Andy Bonventre, who gave a quick talk about debugging. He had a tip that’s useful for everyone who does a lot of work on the Mac, not just iOS devs, and it’s saved me a ton of time already. Here it is:

You can add a keyboard shortcut for any menu item in any Mac program!

To do it, go to System Preferences > Keyboard and pick the “Keyboard Shortcuts” tab. In the box on the left, choose “Application Shortcuts.” Press the “+” icon, and select the app you want. If your app isn’t in the Applications folder, you can choose “Other…” and get a file picker.¹ Type in the exact name of the menu item (mercifully, three periods works as an ellipsis), then choose your shortcut.

A bonus tip via my colleague Orta Therox, this time, in picture form:

Artist and Computer

“Oscillion 45” - Ben F. Laposky

One of my favorite things about the Internet in 2012 is how easy it makes to crate-dig. I mean crate-digging in the general sense here, not necessarily only records, but the act that in Real Life involves colonizing the back of a thrift shop (or suburban yard sale, or obscure flea market) for too many hours and emerging, covered in dust and holding a gem.

There are some well-trod paths here (Ubuweb or Tumblr for that matter), and some not so well-trod. One of my favorites, I tracked down a while back from a mention on Tom Moody’s blog of “the Sievers Syllabus.”

The Sievers Syllabus turned out to be Beau Sievers’s syllabus for a class he taught several years back called “Irony and Utopia: History of Computer Art”. This was the gift that kept on giving: aside from an approximate ton of primary source PDFs, there was a link to Edward Zajec’s artist statement, originally published in a 1976 book called Artist and Computer and there for the reading.

Editor Ruth Leavitt asked a good-sized selection of contemporary artists whose work involved computers to answer some questions, including “How/why did you become involved with the computer (in producing art)?”, “What role does the computer play for you…simulation, tool, etc.? What is your role?” and “Could your work be done without the aid of a computer? If yes, why use the computer?” Some answered the questions, most didn’t. A lot of the themes seem archaic now, others almost too relevant to the current state of generative aesthetics, software abstraction, creative code or whatever it is that you want to call the work being done now that is descended from the work in “Artist and Computer.”

Some images:

“Claustrophobia” - Aldo Giorgini and W.C. Chen

Vicky Chaet

“HE7 gc/gf” - Jacques Palumbo

Manfred Mohr

Pivoting

As anyone who watches this space may have gathered, I am not currently working on Vetica in particular or games in general.

Since the last post here, I’ve quit school, moved to NYC, went to work at Art.sy, where we’re trying to make the fine art world accessible to everyone, and got married.

Things have settled down now, and it’s time to start writing again. So, by way of warning: up ‘til now, this has essentially been a video game dev blog. That’s changing. Though I eventually owe the world a Vetica post-mortem, and will probably have some things to say about games, what I’ll be writing here will be a more long-form approach to the kinds of topics I tend to tweet about.

The Interactive ‘Interaction of Color’

Yesterday, I soft launched The Interactive ‘Interaction of Color’. It’s a bunch of (eventually, almost all of) the exercises in Josef Albers’ Interaction of Color, but in pixels when they were designed for construction paper, and with some extra tricks. If you have any interest in design or color theory, check it out and let me know what you think.

Writing this was part of my own self-study of the book. Where modern design books tell you a lot and ask you do a little, Albers was at the extreme end of the opposite pole, telling you a little and asking you to do a lot. I prefer the second approach by a wide margin; my favorite hidden gem of a design book, Krome Barratt’s Logic and Design skews that way as well.

Here’s the cool thing: as Craig Mod points out in his phenomenal essay Post-Artifact Books & Publishing, EPUB3 is on track to support richer modes of interaction up to arbitrary JavaScript. Right now, that means videos embedded inside Responsive Web Design, which is awesome in itself, but not too far in the future, exercises like this can be part of the actual book. I think that’s really exciting, and I’m really happy to be around to watch the shift (and maybe even participate in it!)

Previews of the two new Vetica weapons

Just a quick tease.