My first weeks at Artefactual Systems Inc.
There was a great response to my move away from the public sector into a private sector company (that’s right,…
Category: Just Code (page 3)
Color Theory: What’s the deal with the palettes I’m using?
Following a recent conversation, I wanted to write this blog to add some final pieces of context to my current interest in color palettes.
Binary Numbers
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.
The Painter Goblin Visits The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston: Top Five
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!
The Painter Goblin Visits The Met’s Top Ten
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 Painter Goblin: Part 5, And Finally…
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.
The Painter Goblin: Part 4, Putting it all together…
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 link
We 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?
The Painter Goblin: Part 3, Data Sources
One thing that held the Painter Goblin project back was finding a data source to get images from.
There are potentially hundreds of sources out there, but! The path of least resistance means that:
- Any source needs either hackable URIs** (uniform resource identifier) or a randomizing function.
- Ideally, a data source doesn’t link to yet-another-page, e.g. portal like websites to other’s collections.
- Ideally the data source links directly to an image to download.
- Data can be easily selected by category, e.g. just paintings, or posters, not just ‘art’.
** A hackable URI is a URI pattern that can be cycled through using computational techniques, even if the underlying data isn’t entirely well-known. E,g, http://example.com/image/0001, http://example.com/image/0002, for subsequent pages, for lack of a more concrete example.
I wanted to explore heritage sources such as Europeana, TROVE, DPLA. I struggled to search these effectively though, and struggled to see how I might automate using them. I recognise they have APIs. I’ll revisit them in the future as I look to expand the Painter Goblin’s corpus.
Enter Wikidata.
The Painter Goblin: Part 2, Twitter Pieces
Continuing the story of the Painter Goblin and following part one, the idea of a Twitter bot started to form earlier this year.
In part 2 I take a very brief look at what is needed to write a bot and get it publishing.
Learn more below.
The Painter Goblin: Part 1, The Zine
I wrote a new Twitter bot two weekends back: The Painter Goblin.
The Painter Goblin was inspired by a Zine I wrote in a different time, in 2015 for the Christchurch Zine festival, New Zealand.
The Zine itself was inspired by a story I had heard a few weeks earlier from someone who had seen this story on Reddit:
Every time I play the Sims, I start my family with a ‘painting goblin’.
I make him/her morbidly obese with green skin. I make sure to give him the following traits:
- Likes to be alone
- Lives art
- Hates the outdoors
The first thing I do once I have enough money, is build a small room in the basement, send him down there, and then remove the stairs. I set him up in a tiny little area with only an easel, a toilet, a refrigerator, a bed, a shower, and a trash bin.
All he does all day is paint. That’s it. He paints and paints and paints.
Eventually his paintings become very good and worth a lot of money. Every few minutes I go downstairs and sell whatever painting he has finished and then I return to playing the game.
My family always ends up feeling blessed because of their fortune, and they never find out about the horrible secret living beneath their home.
Lets take a look in more detail below.
Context Switching: Do you really need to be an archivist programmer? One perspective…
The first in what I hope will be, a series of blogs. This blog has been torn from an introduction…