ross spencer :: exponentialdecay.digipres :: blog
Digital preservation analyst, researcher, and software developer
Back in 2017, I had an abstract accepted for a chapter in the ALCTS Monograph: Digital Preservation in Libraries: Preparing for a Sustainable Future. With my author’s copy now available, I take a look at the background and its genesis below. The complete monograph is a fascinating read with some great contributors. You can find it online at the ALA Store.
When I visited the Brooklyn Museum in February they were in the middle of their Infinite Blue exhibition. Surveying the entire collection, Infinite Blue collected museum objects that prominently featured the color blue. Part of their Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism at the Brooklyn Museum.
A Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism at the Brooklyn Museum presents the history of feminism and feminist art while showcasing contemporary artistic practices and new thought leadership.
While not explicitly stated in their literature, Blue seems to have been selected by the museum’s curators for embodying core feminist values:
In cultures dating back thousands of years, blue—the color of the skies—has often been associated with the spiritual but also signifies power, status, and beauty. The spiritual and material aspects of blue combine to tell us stories about global history, cultural values, technological innovation, and international commerce.
Following a recent conversation, I wanted to write this blog to add some final pieces of context to my current interest in color palettes.
The Binary Numbers project was changed earlier this year following Trump’s inauguration. The original was inspired by simple musings on Data as Art. It was updated again in 2014 after the work had stalled due to technical reasons. I increased the complexity of the images, and incorporated Heritage Color Palettes.
But the end of last year and the beginning of this were exhausting. Two months were spent in protest:
But it seems that this alone was not able to tear the wheels off a tanker in Tienanmen Square… and so I decided on something uplifting. For myself, and for the viewer.
Cinema Palettes was a fantastic Twitter account that takes a scene (not necessarily iconic) from a film and analyses the scene’s colors, presenting back to us, the palette used.
I had been following it for a while and I became curious as to what I might be able to do with it in the configuration of my Binary Numbers.
And so from January this year I adapted the Cinema Palettes concept into this work starting with 50 new color palettes.
I’m heading to Houston for the first time this Friday, for ten-days. I can’t wait! To fill my time before I go, I thought I’d pay tribute to some of the artwork I might find there. Well, I say me, but I mean, I asked The Painter Goblin to make these pieces for me based on what it could find on wikidata.org. I like what it discovered!
Enjoy!
This week (beginning 7 August 2017) marks my second solo published peer-reviewed paper. Binary trees? Automatically identifying the links between born-digital records. I invite everyone to have a read and let me know what you think.
The paper won the Sigrid McCausland Emerging Writers Award late in 2018.
Read the paper and additional thoughts below.
Inspired by a Creative Commons (CC) blog the Painter Goblin decided to tackle the top-ten visual artworks at The Met Museum (July 2017).
The blog discusses how folks are using CC search to find works held at The Met. The Painter Goblin has been using Wikidata to similar effect – an exploration – a technique grounded in happenstance to discover and understand art held in the fantastic list of institutions that make it available on the Wikidata/Wikimedia service. With little exception, The Painter Goblin cannot replace the original works but hopes that visually interesting/stunning remixes when they appear inspire others to indulge in their own discovery and works of creation.
Let’s see what our elusive basement goblin did with the top-ten listed above…
The work on the Painter Goblin is almost complete for now. The automation of their work is pretty much ironed out with regular tweets happening every night.
A recent favorite:
I just wanted to round off this series of blogs with some remaining thoughts.
Following the previous posts, bringing this all together meant three different applications.
paintergoblin.py – creates the images, can be run standalonewikigoblin.py – retrieves data to tweet from the Wikidata SPARQL servicestwittergoblin.py – tweets for us! Either a random Wikidata image or from am existing Wikidata linkWe create Tweetable information using the wikigoblin. We perform the Tweet using twittergoblin. In between the paintergoblin has to create his art!
We’ve seen examples of the images from the original zine.
How do we turn this concept into something real, and automated?