prosthetic knowledge

25 Internet Artists You Need to Know

Complex has produced a list of 25 online artists worth checking out - a good primer for newcomers:

Whether you believe that art imitates life or that life imitates art (or both), there’s one thing we can all agree on—the advent of the Internet has changed the process of art-making and art’s reception forever. In many cases, artists use their work to critique the aesthetic and impact of the digital age, using screenshots, collage, and an extreme combination of mediums to comment on the way we relate to the Internet. While many are skeptical about the place of this art beyond the world wide web, it’s undoubtedly an important new lane in art history. Make sure you remember these 25 Internet Artists You Need to Know and their work next time you’re thinking about your own Internet consumption.

See the whole list here

GIFPaint

Simple online browser-based image editor to create your own hand drawn GIF animations, which can be posted directly to your Tumblr blog:

A simple HTML5 animation application inspired by MacPaint, Deluxe Paint and MSPaint.

Created by James Hicks, if you have any feedback or bugs you can get in touch on Twitter or info (at symbol) gifpaint.com.

I’d also love to see any cool GIFs you make using GIFPaint and will reblog them to the GIFPaint Tumblog

Try it out for yourself here

DUNE II in HTML 5 

Dune II was a real-time strategy game developed by Westwood Studios in the 16-Bit gaming era, and a forerunner to the following Command and Conquer games.

While the controls don’t live up to modern RTS intuition, the game has been successfully ported to play on line, which you can here

Sketchfab 

Free online service which can display your uploaded 3D files within your browser with WebGL, interactive and embeddable:

Sketchfab is a web service to publish interactive 3D content online in real-time without plugin. The world we live in is in 3D, but the web is still in 2D, and we want to change that. We think your 3D models deserve something better than screenshots or “showreel” videos. That’s why we created Sketchfab. We understand 3D and bring it to the web.

As well as displaying items in a webpage, they are also embeddable - here are a couple of examples below:

You can find out more and try Sketchlab out here

Screenshot-proof images via temporal dithering 

Proof-of-concept code to protect images online - by persistant.info:

Snapchat’s (and now Facebook Poke’s) main claim to fame is that it lets you send “self-destructing” image messages. Setting aside the debate about the uses of this beyond sexting, the key vulnerability in both apps is the built-in ability to take screenshots. Both take a reactive approach, where you’re notified if the recipient took a screenshot, but can’t really do anything about it.

I was thinking about ways of mitigating this issue, and figured that perhaps turning the image into an animation where individual frames are not (or at least less) recognizable would be the right path. This is a variant of temporal dithering, except we’re intentionally pretending like each frame has a limited amount of precision, and only when averaged together is the original image re-created.

I’ve created a proof of concept (source) of this. It loads the image into a <canvas> and generates a “positive” and “negative” frame out of it. The positive frame has a random offset added to each pixel’s RGB components, while the negative one has it subtracted. When displayed in quick sequence (requestAnimationFrame is used to do this every time the screen refreshes) the two offsets should cancel out, and the resulting image should re-appear.

The GIF above doesn’t really demonstrate the idea well, you can get a better idea of how it works in this online demo here, and more info can be found here.

Google BBS Terminal

What Google would have looked like in the 80’s, put together by masswerk

Try it out here

Wikigifs 

GIFs from Wikipedia randomly picked out for display, refreshed when you press the space bar - by Joel Franusic.

Try it out here

Animated GIF in 3D 

Webtoy plays any animated GIF in 3D space in your browser, playing each frame spatially and sequentially from each other. You can use the mouse to move around and change the perspective of the animation.

The first animation above is an example used within the project. Using a GIF made from many images of a human body cross-section, the animation displayed is created from the sequence of the images - it is not a 3D model in itself, more a stack of animated frames next to each other.

You can use any GIF you have on your desktop - not all GIFs will be successful, but I tried out one of Max Capacity’s pieces which works well with the pixellated image - the effect is not too far off like a lenticular postcard.

Put together by thespite, you can try it out here

Metropole Tweetphony 

Compose a simple musical score in a tweet, which can be saved on your account and replayed.

Try it out here

[PS - The example in the above GIF isn’t anything good, just there to demonstrate]

Silk 

Two highly-polished generative drawing web toys by Yuri Vishnevsky.

New Silk is symmetrical drawing - simple, yet the results are satisfying.

Silk turns your input into a beautiful flow that travels to the side.

More about the work can be found here - scroll down and you will see info and a link to an iOS app of this project.

GIF 3D Gallery 

Fun experimental web project by akihiko taniguchi where you can place an animated GIF onto a 3D plinth in a virtual gallery room which you can move around (controls are the same as a PC FPS, but controls are available - see picture 2 above).

You will need the URL of the GIF to be able to view it here (you cannot upload a file, but there are plenty around Tumblr and the web to try out)

The above examples are Max Capacity (you can try it out here) and V5MT (here)
[… and yes, the third image is a gif of a gif of a gif in a gif gallery …]

Try it out for yourself here - discovered via Triangulation Blog

Eye Beam Generator 

Fun web toy using facial recognition adds laser beams fired out of eyes to uploaded images.

You can either use an image URL or upload one - site is in Japanese, but it should be straightforward to find what you want to use.

Try it out here

Colourful Spiderweb Sculptures

Reblog from deepbreathsanddeath:

Anthony Michael Simon doesn’t produce his own art, instead he lets spiders do the work for him.

About the work:

Chicago native Anthony Michael Simon first discovered the artistry of the silk-producing arachnids while trekking through a forest in Korea, where he is currently based, looking for a location for his next sculptural art installation. He came across a huge spiderweb and it somehow clicked in his mind that he could catch spiders and have them naturally spin their webs in his studio.

More Here

(via loveyourchaos)

London Data 

Two pieces from the Digital Urban blog which caught my eye, a projection of London data on a London-shaped table, and a dashboard website managing various feeds.

On The London Data Table:

Created in the shape of Greater London, the table had various visualisations projected onto its surface; from live aircraft positions, live traffic and bike hire usage to movies of public transport over 24 hours. 

You can see how it was put together step-by-step at Big Data Toolkit here

On Citydashboard.org:

Here at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London, we have just made live our latest in a series of services examining live data feeds - CityDashBoard. The system pulls in data from a variety feeds, developing our view that the next trend in OpenData is towards a live view of the city and live data feeds.

With the cities of Birmingham, Cardiff, Edinburgh,  Glasgow, Leeds, London, Manchester and Newcastle included, it is London with the largets amount of live feeds at the moment. As Duncan Geere noted in the write up of CityDashboard in Wired -  the dashboard for the city pulls in TfL data, RSS feeds from BBC London news, geographical information from OpenStreetMap, weather data from Google, trends from Twitter, traffic cameras and water levels along the Thames. It also includes data from UCL’s radiation detector.

You can visit CityDashboard live at http://www.citydashboard.org/

The Trojan Room Coffee Pot Machine 

The Trojan Room Coffee Machine was the worlds first webcam, used to monitor remotely the available ready coffee for addicted academics. 

Several people have asked about the origins of the Trojan Room coffee pot. It started back in the dark days of 1991, when the World Wide Web was little more than a glint in CERN’s eye. I was working on ATM networks in a part of the Computer Lab known as the Trojan Room, (a name which, perhaps, causes some amusement to American readers). There were about fifteen of us involved in related research and, being poor, impoverished academics, we only had one coffee filter machine between us, which lived in the corridor just outside the Trojan Room. However, being highly dedicated and hard-working academics, we got through a lot of coffee, and when a fresh pot was brewed, it often didn’t last long.

Some members of the ‘coffee club’ lived in other parts of the building and had to navigate several flights of stairs to get to the coffee pot; a trip which often proved fruitless if the all-night hackers of the Trojan Room had got there first. This disruption to the progress of Computer Science research obviously caused us some distress, and so XCoffee was born.

The second image above is the last image it ever recorded.

The Trojan Room Coffee machine was finally switched off at 0954 UTC on Wednesday 22nd August 2001.

More about the project can be read here (via thenextweb / mentalflossr)