Art Archives - ross spencer :: exponentialdecay.digipres

The Painter Goblin becomes corporeal by having its prints converted from digital to canvas in real life. In this image, the Painter Goblin canvases arer bathed in sunlight provided by a west-facing window around sunset. The grid used to display the Painter Goblin in a salon style shadowed by the window frame onto the wall. The light in this image has been enhanced to increase its saturation to mirror the vibrancy of The Painter Goblin's original image.

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!

Cat's Meow from the Offner Dynograph EEG

What will you bitflip today?

I want to let you into a secret: I enjoy corruption. Corrupting digital objects leads to undefined behavior (C++’s definition is fun). And flipping bits in objects can tell us something both about the fragility, and robustness of our digital files and the applications that work with them.

I had a pull-request for bitflip accepted the other day. Bitflip is by Antoine Grondin and is a simple utility for flipping bits in digital files. I wrote in my COPTR entry for it that it reminds me of shotGun by Manfred Thaller. The utility is exceptionally easy to use (and of course update and maintain written in Golang) and has some nice features for flipping individual bits or a uniform percentage of bits across a digital file.

My pull-request was a simple one updating Goreleaser and its GitHub workflow to provide binaries for Windows and FreeBSD. I only needed to use Windows for a short amount of time thankfully, but it’s an environment I believe is prevalent for a lot of digital preservationists in corporate IT environments.

Bitflip is a useful utility to improve your testing of digital preservation systems, or simply for outreach, but let’s have a quick look at it in action.

Published: The Hedgehog Review! But not like you nor I imagined…

May 31 I woke to a surprise, an unanticipated message about one of my images from Leann Davis Alspaugh, the…

A photograph of a blue neon sign with a quote from Ludwig Wittgenstein's 'Philosophical Investigations: "276. “But don’t we at least mean something quite definite when we look at a color and name our color impression?” It is virtually as if we detached the color impression from the object, like a membrane. (This ought to arouse our suspicions.)"

Infinite Blue @ The Brooklyn Museum

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.

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.

Rendition of Mondrian: Composition with Grid 1 from the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, remixed by the Painter Goblin

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: 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:

Maria Krzymuska — Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q28727544

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 standalone
wikigoblin.py – retrieves data to tweet from the Wikidata SPARQL services
twittergoblin.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 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.

Tag: Art

The Painter Goblin: Becoming Corporeal

What will you bitflip today?

Published: The Hedgehog Review! But not like you nor I imagined…

Infinite Blue @ The Brooklyn Museum

Color Theory: What’s the deal with the palettes I’m using?

Binary Numbers

The Painter Goblin Visits The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston: Top Five

The Painter Goblin: Part 5, And Finally…

The Painter Goblin: Part 4, Putting it all together…

The Painter Goblin: Part 3, Data Sources

The Painter Goblin: Part 1, The Zine

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