:: Friday, January 30, 2004 ::

Here is a brief update on "who's afraid of blue, red, green?"

Jimpunk updated his website with all related links. I personally recommend Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue -- a brief review of Newman's work.

Also make sure to look over the updated list of artists contributing RGB projects.

:: Eduardo Navas [+] ::
...

Processing is a free software program made by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. With it you can develop interactive java applets for the net. What especially makes it tempting that it is available for the Windows, Mac OSX and Linux platform. Though not vector based as Macromedia's Flash you could somehow see it as sort of competitor, especially when you look on the creative side and want to do for example generative art.

Although Processing is still in it's alpha developing stage there are already a lot people experimenting with it, which led especially on the visual side to some stunning works. Because of it's open source character there are already a lot of demo's (+sources) available which makes the threshold to start to work with it very low. I experimented with it for about a week. Which made it clear that at the moment this software is not yet attractive for me. I use a lot of sound with my work, and if there's at the moment something still lacking it is easy and clear soundmanipulation possibilties. Another downside is that the program compiles to java applets that are always at least 100kb where a lot of similar stuff can be done in Flash in 5 or 6 kb. But this could change when the program developes further, and of course we should not forget that this program is entirely free and totally cross platform. What probably will decide over a wide acceptance is if Microsoft will still standard support java in it's Windows operating system, which is still not totally clear.
:: Peter Luining [+] ::
...

Recently Jimpunk put out his latest RGB projects, in reaction to the official Who's is Afraid of Blue, Red, and Green? competition. Here they are:

http://www.jimpunk.com/-
colorheXaequo.-/
http://www.jimpunk.com/-
colorheXaequo.-/R.G.B.html

When Jimpunk posted his material on Rhizome, other list-members responded with their own versions of RGB:

Mark River: http://tinjail.com/brg.html
Eryk Salvaggio: http://www.salsabomb.com/RGB/
Linkoln.net: http://linkoln.net/whos-afraid-of-rgb.jpg
Roberto Echen: http://www.rechen.com/rgb/
ctgr.net: http://ctgr.free.fr/blue/

What the selections above show is that the premise upon which Who's Afraid was developed -- following Barnett Newman's zip paintings -- is not very interesting when extended on to the web. Especially because Newman was trying to make the most of painting as a medium on its own. The competition is asking net artists to mimic a medium in a literal way. The accepted work will be considered directly in relation to a well established aesthetic that can, at best, become reevaluated as amusing on the screen. The projects above show that all that needed to be asked is to make works inspired by RGB, period. But then, Newman makes the proposal sound so much more important.

:: Eduardo Navas [+] ::
...

"Fo shizzle ma nizzle” are not words to be used lightly, or by everyone for that matter. Should you find yourself in need of clarification, visit Urban Dictionary before you suffer a sound thumping.

Recently featured on NPR and CNN Radio, Urban Dictionary is an online interactive slang dictionary managed by Aaron Peckham. UD offers visitors the opportunity to propose new slanguage entries, which are then debated, redefined, and voted upon by the UD community. And much like traditional online lexicons, such as Dictionary.com and Merriam-Webster OnLine, UD has audio pronunciation guides, which are supplied by its users.

However, Urban Dictionary is still more of an amusement than a cultural resource, providing a forum for more adolescent banter than dedicated descriptions. Yet, the opportunity to explore and witness the fluidity of language, as well as appreciate colloquial terms and voices could, in the long-run, prove a regular strategy for social research.

:: [+] ::
...

Here are some additions to the New Media Fix this week:

http://earphone.org/
An online audio gallery offering the ouvre of Marc-Charles McNulty.

http://www.neural.it/
An Italian based online journal featuring articles on hakctivism, e-music, and new media art.

http://incident.net
While we have reviewed several of the projects presented under this collective, the parent interface deserves a sustained look as well.

(selections will be added to the New Media Fix shortly.)

:: [+] ::
...

Though all cremaster movies already are available in DIVX format through peer to peer networks; for those of us who haven't a high speed internet connection Matthew Barney's cremaster.net is quite an interesting place to visit. Besides that it offers trailers in quicktime format of all movies, it has lot's of pictures of objects from the movies, background info, etc.


:: Peter Luining [+] ::
...