The Painter Goblin: Becoming Corporeal
When you move country you have to be prepared to change quite a lot about your life. Back at the end of 2020, apart from literally everything else going on my partner and I also moved from Canada to Germany.
For me, this was my fifth or so international move (including shorter temporary stays) in as many years.
Being able to pick up sticks and move like that means living a drastically minimized life. Most of the things you have fit in a suitcase. Most of the things you have are small, and largely not overly whimsical. Sure, you can fit a few treasures into your bag, but you learn to value small ones, not things you might otherwise use to decorate an entire apartment!!
So, what do you do when you do have an apartment to decorate?
You ask the best known painter in your family to conjure some magic, The Painter Goblin!
The Painter Goblin
As we have covered in this blog many times now, the Painter Goblin was a Twitter Bot that existed for a short period of time when Twitter was a nice place to be (at least, nicer).
The Painter Goblin painted new derivative, remixed works of art from open access images that could be found on Wikidata. Tweeting many times a day for over four years, there was a lot to choose from and while I had some favorite pieces that were output by the bot it was all very heterogeneous and because of the different palettes employed, looks even more disparate from one another. It was difficult to curate a coherent set of objects to decorate a room.
I would keep track of The Painter Goblin’s Tweets and I noticed one collection in-particular would come up very often, that of scanned newspaper pages featuring the work of the French painter and caricaturist Honoré Daumier, see this Twitter Search (sign-in required).
I had noticed a curious property of the caricatures that had often been digitized at The National Gallery in Washington DC.
Thinking about writing a showcase blog on the increasing series of #Daumier caricatures from @ngadc – love the original vs. the bleed through captured by @paintergoblin
🖌️ https://t.co/4UWaeswtYE#Caricature #Print #PainterGoblin #RemixArt #Digitization #CreativeCommons pic.twitter.com/DtKl3DgFdZ
— 💾💜 #Digital ⚓️ #Vagabond 💜💾 (@beet_keeper) February 16, 2021
The process of remixing the content revealed text bleed-through — that is text from the other side of the scan was visible on the side that was scanned because the paper was not thick enough and so it was partially transparent.
I thought it was interesting that you could make out words and stories from the day of publication at the same time as viewing these drawings, even if the bleed-through was entirely accidental. I enjoyed the fact that The Painter Goblin was designed to create new art, and that this bleed-through combined these two properties of the scanned image to do just that.
And so, the idea of taking a curated set Daumier’s like these and creating a salon like display for the new room was too tantalizing. It provided a consistent set of images to decorate with that wouldn’t be too noisy when in conversation with the Painter Goblin’s color palettes.
The Painter Goblin Becomes Corporeal
I looked through the Daumier paintings already output by the bot to see what might work well with the room’s color scheme. I also searched for new ones and ran as many as I needed through the Painter Goblin’s remix algorithm to find the best ones and came up with a list of eight pieces to make real.
Printed onto canvases, we soon had a collection of newly embodied Daumier artworks.
The final layout worked well with the light that would often come through the west-facing window.
Having moved to Leipzig since, The Painter Goblin Salon is now in my office.
In some ways, sitting in the office the prints don’t benefit from the same beautiful environmental factors of the original space, but they are now something I can look at every day as I work (don’t worry, there’s better art in the main rooms of the apartment).
Daumier and The Painter Goblin Side-by-Side
I don’t have a lot of commentary about the canvases we created, but I did want to show them side by side with the originals. I feel in each of them, the bleed-through is successfully integrated into the new print, and with the new color palettes, the images become unique and interesting derivatives.
To help you see the work up close, I have placed the original next to the new images below. I have also provided the text that would have been output by the Twitter bot, along with information about the color palettes that were used.
The salon
1. The actor and a street urchin, from ‘Dramatic sketches,’ published in Le Charivari, April 18, 1864, Honoré Daumier, @metmuseum http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q97772138 #wikidata #digitalart (Palette: #Cybercats) 🖌🎨
2. A la minute, Honoré Daumier, @ngadc http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q77014593 (Palette: #Gameboy) 🖌🎨
3. Parisiens surpris par la marée montante, from Émotions de Voyage, published in Le Charivari, October 8, 1857, Honoré Daumier, @metmuseum http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q97768175 #wikidata #digitalart (Palette: #KeithHaring) 🖌🎨
4. La Dot…vous connaissez la fortune…, Honoré Daumier, @ngadc http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q77013981 #wikidata #digitalart (Palette: #MarieAntoinette) 🖌🎨
5. Oui c’est bien feue ma femme! …, Honoré Daumier, @ngadc http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q77009172 #wikidata #digitalart (Palette: #Frozen) 🖌🎨
6. Tiens … vous m’aviez dit …, Honoré Daumier, @ngadc http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q77010966 #wikidata #digitalart (Palette: #LollyRocket) 🖌🎨
7. Un léger coup de vent, Honoré Daumier, @ngadc http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q77014255 #wikidata #digitalart (Palette: #MagentaConverse) 🖌🎨
8. Pardon, Mr Le Maire! … pourriez-vous …, Honoré Daumier, @ngadc http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q77014745 #wikidata #digitalart (Palette: #MagentaConverse) 🖌🎨
OK is good enough
I wanted to point out the importance of commodity printing techniques here. I can’t recall the canvas company I got these Painter Goblin prints made but there are a few if you search — these were done at a more commercial shop. I have also used local printers in the past to support their efforts (let me shout out Eva’s print shop Toronto here) as well as enlisted the help of people on sites like Etsy. The ink stamps you will see later on in this blog came from Modern Art Stamps.
My main message is that you don’t need equipment, and you don’t need to know how to screen print or other techniques to turn digital artifacts into physical objects you can enjoy. Even though it might be fun to do that as well one day.
A small but fun thing I did back in the day (2006) was digitally enhance this old Java meme and took it to a digital photo printer at a drug store to get a handful of glossy prints made for a colleague’s Secret Santa. I still do that for fun today when I know someone has an image they really adore. The photographic paper with an abstract digital image incorporated is tangible but feels slightly surreal too.
Postcards
As I was putting this blog together, I remembered that my Painter Goblin canvases were not the first time this work took on a physical form. One such project that pre-dated the canvases but was somewhat short-lived around the time of the pandemic was a Painter Goblin postcard.
Seen in a video below, the idea was to create a postcard that was printed on beer-mat material that could be left randomly in venues, like pubs, that might then be picked up by people and they might send them to their friends.
I didn’t really get much opportunity in Canada to do this, the entirety of my time in the country was spent in lock-down conditions but maybe one day I can revisit it.
Fortunately, I did manage to give some of these out to family and friends.
I love postcards
Part of the lure of doing this is that I love postcards. I have one postcard pen-pal I met back in Melbourne a long time ago (2014?) and we still share postcards from our travels today.
I like the materiality of postcards. I like the way the “physical” components of a postcard are built up layer by layer, whereby you have the object which you write on, then add a stamp to, before it is postmarked on the way to its next address. Finally, during the life of the postcard, it continually gains new patina through its travels and how it is stored and looked after.
I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead — Mark Twain
I like that you don’t have a lot of space to write — maybe 320 characters? And I love that you can make a postcard out of anything! Here I used beer-mats. I have seen people upcycle biscuit packaging, empty vinyl record sleeves, an other cardboard objects into these precious compound artifacts.
Dutiful data
In a hack-a-thon I was involved in at Victoria University Wellington, the team I was on came up with the idea to remix Government OIA requests with images from DigitaNZ into postcards. You might choose to send them to people!
The code is available on GitHub. It still runs in today’s processing.org but there are a few relative links that need fixing and some only Python 2 code that needs its print statements replacing but it’s still a fun reference point for playing with government data and contrasting different contexts and content types with one another.
Post no bills
The last project I made Painter Goblin images physical was a post no bills project. In post no bills I created four sets of “bills” and pasted them around sites with Post No Bill signs. Not an original project, but fun to do with the Painter Goblin palettes.
You can see the collection on GitHub.
I have a bit more photographic evidence documenting the project but I got lucky in one instance, and the project was featured in a local newspaper (The Dominion Post) when someone took the idea further and posted the New Zealand premier at the time, Bill English, next to one of my Bill Murrays.
It even appeared in the paper itself.
I wasn’t able to reach the same heights of fame as this as I kept posting my Painter Goblins around but I did enjoy the “media coverage” and just simply posting for fun for the rest of the Painter Goblin’s run.
Limited run
Regarding the work in this blog, especially the physicality of it — I don’t often have the lifestyle security (long-term space, finances, and so on) that you might need to work on things like this more often. If I find an opportunity, I will try. And maybe even just playing around with nice things every so often can provide some small inspiration to others who are just getting through each day; maybe you’ll find some time one day, and it’ll be worth it because these projects you did three or four years ago still fuel you somewhat now.
Acknowledgements
At the time of writing these projects my biggest inspirations were very much Tim Sherratt (Australian Hacker and humanist) and Birgit Bachler (Austrian mixed media Artist) who both create such fascinating and interesting digital projects. I can’t claim to be at their level but I thank them for their inspiration and showing us what is possible.
It also felt like a different time, in general. There used to be a lot of people, projects, institutions, and so on, creating new and obscure digital objects with their data and other data. I don’t know how much of this still goes on: what projects are you following that continue to provide you with artistic or crafty inspiration?
Non-normative references
I started taking notes for this blog in 2021, and the topic was likely to be just postcards. Yet, in the end, the final push to publish was more about interior design, and here we are at the end of the blog. Since 2021, I have some additional references that I was unable to weave in, but folks might be interested in.
History pin
History pin is one of the weirdest set of postcard collections I have found. it is a collection of postcards depicting disasters and tragic incidents. Why these cards exist? I have no idea. That someone is recording their existence and scope? It gets my full approval! Check them out!
Stefan Kühn
Stefan has an amazing set of reference queries for viewing postcards on Wikidata. See those here: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Stefan_K%C3%BChn/Postcards.
Give it a whirl on the Wikidata Query Service!
Bridging physical visits with a digital online experience
Petrelli et al. of Sheffield Hallam University released this great paper titled: Tangible Data Souvenirs as a Bridge between a Physical Museum Visit and Online Digital Experience: Read that online here.
Postcards on Artbase
Even Rhizome have collections featuring postcards. See Bambozzi’s Postcards here.
And finally
Create, schedule, and send custom postcards that you have designed and uploaded via postcardgifts.com. Seriously, do it. Send something unique to your friends today, the psychic fuel it provides is endless.
