shardcore

Sam and I have installed some of the paintings from MASS into the Tin Drum, in Kemptown, Brighton. It’s interesting to see how well [or not] they work in a different space, and hopefully a few more Brightonians will get to enjoy them.

Filed by shardcore at 12:52 pm under MASS, exhibitions, painting
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Once upon a time the term ‘geek’ or ‘nerd’ was used as an insult, it’s a testament to how far we have come that now we can comfortably talk of ‘geek chic’, and those who were once the oppressed have now become the champions. This painting is of my friend Richard, someone who is proud to be a geek, and has no shame in it.

UPDATE Wow, first Boing-Boing then Gizmodo decided to blog about the painting, welcome strangers, please take your time to look around.

Acrylic on canvas 600mm x 600mm

I’ve painted him in a server room, since that is one of his natural habitats, and in this room we find Marvin, the Paranoid Android from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.



Marvin is apparently ‘doing his bidding’ and bringing him that icon of British geekery, a 48k ZX Spectrum. Is this the geekiest painting ever painted?

Upon seeing the painting, Sacha asked whether Marvin was ‘enjoying’ the spectrum in a not entirely natural manner. Perhaps Marvin is trying to alleviate his depression.

Filed by shardcore at 10:38 am under video, painting
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As a diversion from the usual visual artworks I here present a piece of ‘generative art’.

We live in a period of obsession with ‘celebrity’. Whether this is a function of the expansion of media sources requiring content, or some other shift in human behaviour is unclear. However, the fact remains that sites like Perez Hilton can command audiences in the millions, by providing nothing more than idle gossip. In the fast moving world of the ‘blog-o-sphere’ a tremendous quantity of information is generated, yet frequently the same ’story’ will be found at multiple sources, the only differentiating factor is the style and quality of writing. A cursory glance at these gossip sites reveals that the tone and structure of the language used is quite different to more traditional approaches to reportage. This experiment attempts to capture the tone of these texts automatically and simultaneously generate content consistent with ‘the latest celebrity gossip’.

‘The truth’ is a software application which periodically scrapes content from perezhilton, gawker and holymoly and performs a basic word-pair analysis on the resulting text. This analysis is then used to auto-generate ‘valid’ sentences from the source using a simple Markov chain procedure. In the spirit of web 2.0, these sentences are broadcast via Twitter. If you yourself are a twitterer, you can follow ‘the truth’ here: http://www.twitter.com/the__truth.

Why is it called ‘the truth’? It is, of course, a reference to our old friend Wittgenstein and his contention that there is no absolute truth beyond a functional agreement in word meaning between users of a language.

The ‘manufactured authenticity’ produced by this software is perhaps a glimpse into our near future where much of the text we read may be generated by machine. Of course in this case the text is ‘nonsense’ in the truest sense, since there is no semantic comprehension involved - yet somehow that doesn’t seem to matter when the words produced are ‘celebrity gossip’…

Below you should see the last ten generated ‘tweets’:

Filed by shardcore at 8:29 pm under words
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After the intensive period of painting activity leading up to MASS I took a break away from the canvas for a few days. However, I couldn’t keep away for long, and ended up painting ‘the beast’ himself, the occultist Aleister Crowley. I’ve never had much personal interest in magick, however I find the life of Crowley fascinating. Imagine becoming a tabloid hate figure in the early part of the 20th Century, when he was declared “The Wickedest Man in the World”. His behaviour was completely at odds with the reserve of post-Victorian Britain, and he evidently relished the fear and scandal that he was able to inspire, purely through his writings and the mysteries of his philosophy.

The painting features his most famous aphorism: “Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”. Update My friend centrifuge tells me that Crowley ‘lifted’ the phrase from French Renaissance writer Rabelais.

I’ve given him some twinkling red eyes which looked positively delightful when set amongst the rest of the MASS congregation. You can see them in action at the end of the timelapse recording below.

Filed by shardcore at 6:48 pm under MASS, video, painting
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It was with a heavy heart that we said goodbye to our congregation of paintings after the last MASS. However Mike was on hand to entertain and illuminate us with his words.

First, a somewhat shambolic rendition of ‘All you need is Love’ by the Beatles:

Then, the sermon itself:

Filed by shardcore at 12:23 pm under MASS, video
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