matt:littlemore

Magazine Work

Maff — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 15:50:02 +0000

Who Owns This?

Maff — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 11:33:25 +0000

“Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do – all of us – though not all of us know it yet. Reality cannot be copyrighted.”
Reality Hunger, David Shields, from William Gibson? In an article by Michiko Katutani, posted by me.
Texts Without Context

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/books/21mash.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Also brings to mind Lawrence Lessig’s book Code V2, a critical text re. who owns code, remixed by Wiki Collaboration.

http://codev2.cc/

The Digital Table

Maff — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 18:13:16 +0000

Election Art Imitates Art

Maff — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 17:40:56 +0000

‘When 24-year-old Jacob Quaglozzi won a contest to design a Labour election poster, he doubtless thought it was the first rung on the political ladder. But yesterday his ambitions appeared to have been nipped in the bud after his idea backfired spectacularly.’ Mail Online, April 5th 2010.
The idea was to compare David Cameron to the politically incorrect Eighties TV detective Gene Hunt, but instead this pop-media subversion (copyright issue not mentioned) was subverted by the Torys to use as their own election poster… apparently pleased with the unintentional rebranding of Cameron to make him ‘cooler, less posh’. The winning labour poster comes with a prize to visit the Saatchi & Saatchi advertising offices.
The tories have called in M&C Saatchi, notable for the 1997 Tony Blair “demon eyes” campaign, more than a decade after the ad agency last worked for the party. Saatchi & Saatchi was appointed in 2007 to devise Labour’s advertising and are no longer connected with the brothers Maurice & Charles (M&C).
How will the impact of the governments’ white paper on Digital Media affect these cases of Visual Media Mash Up and subversion of ideas/intellectual property?

Subliminal advertising?

Maff — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 13:39:15 +0000

Certainly not… but Logorama – an excellent short film directed by the French animation collective H5, François Alaux, Hervé de Crécy and Ludovic Houplain. Presented at the Cannes Film Festival 2009, it opened the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and won a 2010 academy award under the category of animated short.

Logorama from Marc Altshuler – Human Music on Vimeo.

The Digital Economy Bill

Maff — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 17:27:50 +0000

‘If, as expected, the volume of digital content will increase 10x to 100x over the next 3 to 5 years then we are on the verge of a “big bang” in the communications industry that will provide the UK with enormous economic and industrial opportunities.’
The ‘Digital Britain’ white paper will among other things give Ofcom more responsibility to detect copyright infringement in the digital age. Perhaps about time some new rules are made, still a delicate balance between the protection of intellectual property and space allowed for individuals to express and grow creatively needs to be struck.
Chapters 4 (Creative Industries in the Digital World) 6 (Research, Education and Skills) and 7 (Digital Security and Safety) will be particularly interesting, but it is well worth checking out your rights and restrictions regarding the creation of any digital content.

Info on the Digital Economy Bill

Search for www.culture.gov.uk/images/…/digitalbritain-finalreport-jun09.pdf to view the White Paper

About

Maff — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 17:12:45 +0000

Artist & Graphic Designer
I am a freelance Graphic Designer and Multimedia Artist, currently studying for an MA in Digital Media Art. I have 8 years Print Design Studio Experience, and my current work includes various New Media Disciplines including Web, Interactive, Motion Graphics, Video and Sound Art. My blog serves as a scrapbook for articles of interest and musings on the Digital World, Creative Industry, Art and Culture. Please feel free to comment and contact me if you would like my CV re. Art or Graphic Design Work.

Scores, Open Works, Mixes & Remixes

Maff — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 17:07:22 +0000

Over the last 10 centuries, ever since the nuem found in Gregorian chants, composers have constantly refined the way they notate music. One thinks of the unequivocal scores of the late 19th century, where an equation was reached between music as it had been created and music as it was performed.
All the while, popular music remained mostly unnotated, but it most certainly influenced what we used to call serious music. In the 20th century, these two trends crystallised in a strange form. First there was a yearning for evermore precision in notation from a large number of composers who wanted to leave no room to the interpreter’s initiative (the composer retaining control like a demiurge). This issue of exact interpretation came to an end with the invention of musique conrete and electronic music (where the composer is necessarily his own interpreter). In parallel, other composers – and in some cases the same ones – have imagined open works (Pousseur, Stockhausen, Cage…) in which the interpreter has control over the order of certain sequences. The complexity of the sound materials – integrating chance, electronics, or specific devices – gave birth to new forms of scores, themselves occasionally opened to interpretation. When music became tape music, it excluded interpretation altogether – it was played back following specific instructions. There may be something mortal (as in finished) in this observation: that is all it is. When the need to re-interpret became impossible to satisfy, we began to look for a way to change the unchangable. The remix was created to perform variations of the music text. When the object of modification is the sound material itself, the process results in new work, with all possible degrees of variation – the scale goes from 1 to 100 – from a light modification to a full-scale re-creation, by way of a middle point where the source is left recognisable and is combined to the mark of the remixer. That’s the most common form.
If one can constantly create new works from older works, then one can assert that there is no base work and that all branches are to be put on the same level.
So we can see that the idea od accuracy in interpretation, one of the biggest issues in previous centuries, was abandoned to a large extent once technology allowed us to work directly on the sound text.
Guy Marc Hinant

Guy-Marc Hinant is an author, editor, and Belgian filmmaker born in Charleroi. He directs the independent label Sub Rosa specializing in electronic music and avant-garde which he is the creator. He is edited An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music series. He has written several narrative fragments and notes on the aesthetic to the issues of the time, various international journals such as Leonardo Music Journal (SF), Luna-Park (Paris) and for the Magazine Lapin (the Association, Paris). Dominique Goblet comic author companion, he appears in his albums under the name “GM”.

At the beginning of the 1980s, he was a member of the Pseudo Code with Alain Neffe of Bene Gesserit and Xavier Stenmans group. In 2000, he founded OME with Dominique Lohlé, together they make a series of documentaries on the art of listening and noise.

Corporate Brochure

Maff — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 15:31:52 +0000

Brochure mock-up for Fashion PR company, bi-fold or quad-fold

Data Visualisation

Maff — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 12:42:29 +0000

There are lots of incredible generative data visualisation pieces around at the moment, and some great inspiration for the forthcoming Creative Flows project. With our group already having an idea of what we are trying to achieve, some examples on the net seemed to immediately jump out as a benchmark.

Being very much a graphic design influenced team, the visual aesthetic was discussed almost before the actual concept. Digg BigSpy feeds the most popular stories ‘Dug’ by users and is definately close to how I imagine the news feed type aesthetic for our project. I like the minimal use of colour, varying type size and immediacy of the scrolling info as it comes in.

As we will be using RSS feeds, I also note RSS voyage by Andy Biggs. It’s a really immersive way of displaying usually linear snippets of info. You can integrate your own personal RSS feeds and browse them while you zoom in and out. As we intend to create a piece which requires no interaction but generates the visualisation automatically voyage will not be so much an influence directly, but I really like the smooth 3D space.

The NBC tweet tracker is also worth pointing out, as it is employing a similar approach to our own project. Using a more obviously accesible interface the most tweeted strories appear as larger images. Our Flow project will be a more abstract (and hopefully more indicative of the frenzy of ‘chat’ around olympic stories) version of this concept.

It is also worth watching Hans Rosling’s funny and engaging talk on the importance and future of data visualisation of publicly funded information
and his website www.gapminder.org