Welcome to Smithsonian Open Access, where you can download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images—right now, without asking. With new platforms and tools, you have easier access to more than 3 million 2D and 3D digital items from our collections—with many more to come. This includes images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.
What will you create?
The Standard Ebooks project is a volunteer driven, not-for-profit effort to produce a collection of high quality, carefully formatted, accessible, open source, and free public domain ebooks that meet or exceed the quality of commercially produced ebooks. The text and cover art in our ebooks is already believed to be in the public domain, and Standard Ebooks dedicates its own work to the public domain, thus releasing the entirety of each ebook file into the public domain. All the ebooks we produce are distributed free of cost and free of U.S. copyright restrictions.
The Hidden Palace is a community dedicated to the preservation of video game development media
Enter the Open Library Explorer, Cami’s new experiment for browsing more than 4 million books in the Internet Archive’s Open Library. Still in beta, Open Library Explorer is able to harness the Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress classification systems to recreate virtually the experience of browsing the bookshelves at a physical library. Open Library Explorer enables readers to scan bookshelves left to right by subject, up and down for subclassifications. Switch a filter and suddenly the bookshelves are full of juvenile books. Type in “subject: biography” and you see nothing but biographies arranged by subject matter.
Why recreate a physical library experience in your browser?
Now that classrooms and libraries are once again shuttered, families are turning online for their educational and entertainment needs. With demand for digital books at an all-time high, the Open Library team was inspired to give readers something closer to what they enjoy in the physical world. Something that puts the power of discovery back into the hands of patrons.
Escaping the Algorithmic Bubble
One problem with online platforms is the way they guide you to new content. For music, movies, or books, Spotify, Netflix and Amazon use complicated recommendation algorithms to suggest what you should encounter next. But those algorithms are driven by the media you have already consumed. They put you into a “filter bubble” where you only see books similar to those you’ve already read. Cami and his team devised the Open Library Explorer as an alternative to recommendation engines. With the Open Library Explorer, you are free to dive deeper and deeper into the stacks. Where you go is driven by you, not by an algorithm..
Zoom out to get an ever expanding view of your library
Change the setting to make your books 3D, so you can see just how thick each volume is.
Cool New Features
By clicking on the Settings gear, you can customize the look and feel of your shelves. Hit the 3D options and you can pick out the 600-page books immediately, just by the thickness of the spine. When a title catches your eye, click on the book to see whether Open Library has an edition you can preview or borrow. For more than 4 million books, borrowing a copy in your browser is just a few clicks away.
Ready to enter the library? Click here, and be sure to share feedback so the Open Library team can make it even better.
Download :https://github.com/Tw1ddle/geometrize/releases
Features
Recreate images as geometric primitives.
Start with hundreds of images with preset settings.
Export geometrized images to SVG, PNG, JPG, GIF and more.
Export geometrized images as HTML5 canvas or WebGL webpages.
Export shape data as JSON for use in custom projects and creations.
Control the algorithm at the core of Geometrize with ChaiScript scripts.The papers summarized here are mainly from 2017 onwards.
Please refer to the Survey paper(Image Aesthetic Assessment:An Experimental Survey) before 2016.
Optical illusions don’t “trick the eye” nor “fool the brain”, nor reveal that “our brain sucks”, … but are fascinating!
They also teach us about our visual perception, and its limitations. My selection emphazises beauty and interactive experiments; I also attempt explanations of the underlying visual mechanisms where possible.
Returning visitor? Check →here for History/News
»Optical illusion« sounds derogative, as if exposing a malfunction of the visual system. Rather, I view these phenomena as highlighting particular good adaptations of our visual system to its experience with standard viewing situations. These experiences are based on normal visual conditions, and thus under unusual contexts can lead to inappropriate interpretations of a visual scene (=“Bayesian interpretation of perception”).
If you are not a vision scientist, you might find my explanations too highbrow. That is not on purpose, but vision research simply is not trivial, like any science. So, if an explanation seems gibberish, simply enjoy the phenomenon 😉.
As an editorial and curatorial platform, HOLO explores disciplinary interstices and entangled knowledge as epicentres of critical creative practice, radical imagination, research, and activism
A showcase with creative machine learning experiments
Web scraping describes techniques for automatically downloading and processing web content, or converting online text and other media into structured data that can then be used for various purposes. In short, the user writes a program to browse and analyze the web on their behalf, rather than doing so manually. This is a common practice in silicon valley, where open html pages are transformed into private property: Facebook began as a (horny) web scraping project, as did Google and all other search engines. Web scraping is also frequently used to acquire the massive datasets needed to train machine learning models, and has become an important research tool in fields such as journalism and sociology.
I define "scrapism" as the practice of web scraping for artistic, emotional, and critical ends. It combines aspects of data journalism, conceptual art, and hoarding, and offers a methodology to make sense of a world in which everything we do is mediated by internet companies. These companies surveill us, vacuum up every trace we leave behind, exploit our experiences and interject themselves into every possible moment. But in turn they also leave their own traces online, traces which when collected, filtered, and sorted can reveal (and possibly even alter) power relations. The premise of scrapism is that everything we need to know about power is online, hiding in plain sight.
This is a work-in-progress guide to web scraping as an artistic and critical practice, created by Sam Lavigne. I will be updating it over the coming months! I'll also be doing occasional live demos either on Twitch or YoutTube.
Creative Disturbance is an international, multilingual network and podcast platform supporting collaboration among the arts, sciences, and new technologies communities.
Conceptual comics is an archive of works that are unaffiliated with the commonly accepted history of the comics medium. It is a resonating chamber for conceptual works and unconventional practices that are little known outside of our community but also a springboard for establishing the conditions for an affective lineage between similarly minded practitioners. The variety of the collected material expresses the curator’s choice for a non uniform consistency and claim instead for a perpetual becoming of the medium. Nevertheless, these works share with each other many common issues and urgencies, alternating between material self-reflexivity and critical exhaustion. They operate on the margins of distribution and reception and their unlocatedness in the medium's spectrum is more than an abstraction: artists uncomfortable with the entrenched roles invite readers, in the absence of critical discourse, to engage with the works in non-specified, at times forensic, ways of examination. I argue that this condition, more than a minor drawback of a normative industry, induces new behaviours and forms of social relationships. Each of the works that are featured in this collection explores the very substrate of its medium not as a culturally neutral site, but as a way to build alternative historiographies, replete with its own material properties and signifying potentials. They propose to examine how social and economic forces and their related sets of activities and commercial, communicative and other routines compose the media’s meaning-signifying trajectory. The rainforest of pulp production, the printer’s studio, the readers’ column and the landfill are not simply the industry's geographies but are technologies of inscription in their own right. They are the integral elements of a material language that actively shapes the medium and challenges the reader to negotiate meaning through different distributions of transparency over opacity in its products. This collection proposes to equally embrace the real, the unclaimed, the anticipated and the fictional practices, in their constant materialisation, and reflect on their specific sites of production in their potential to register meaning and organise discourse based on the inscriptions of this material language.
About Ilan Manouach
Ilan David Manouach is a researcher and a multidisciplinary artist with a specific interest in conceptual and post-digital art. He currently holds a PhD position at the Aalto University in Helsinki (adv. Craig Dworkin) where he examines the intersections of contemporary graphic literature and XXIst century’s technological disruptions. He is mostly known for Shapereader, a system for tactile storytelling specifically designed for blind and partially sighted readers/makers of comics. He is also the founder and creative director of Applied Memetic an organization that researches the political repercussions of generative art and highlights the urgency for a new media-rich internet literacy. His work has been written about in Hyperallergic, World Literature Today, Wired, Le Monde, The Comics Journal, du9, 50 Watts and Kenneth Goldsmith’s Wasting Time on the Internet. For a fuller documentation on the above projects, the Brussels-based non-profit Echo Chamber is responsible for producing, fundraising, documenting and archiving Manouach’s research on contemporary comics, that has been presented in solo exhibitions to important festivals, museums and galleries worldwide. He is an Onassis Digital Fellow and a Kone alumnus and he works as a strategy consultant for the Onassis Foundation visibility through its newly founded publishing arm.
Commonspoly is a free licensed board game which promotes cooperation and the act of commoning.
Orca is an esoteric programming language designed by @hundredrabbits to create procedural sequencers.
This playground lets you use Orca and its companion app Pilot directly in the browser and allows you to publish your creations by sharing their URL.
Table of Contents
Creative Coding History
Modern Creative Coding Uses
Graphics Concepts
Creative Coding Environments and Libraries
Communication Protocols
Multimedia Tools
Unique Displays and Touchscreens
Hardware
Other output options
More resourcesOriginally captured as the medium for Ed Ruscha’s creative work, the more than 65,000 photographs selected from this archive present a unique view of one of Los Angeles’ quintessential streets, Sunset Boulevard, and how it has changed over the past 50 years. Ed Ruscha, with help from Getty and Stamen Design, is making this amazing collection accessible to you: explore his images of Sunset and discover your own story of Los Angeles.
Shrub is a tool for painting-and-traveling, and even for painting while moving your own body (for example to use the color of your own pants).
If you touch with two fingers, you can immediately send your drawing as an SMS message. Shrub is designed as a mobile communication tool as much as a mobile drawing tool.
More pro tips: For the best drawings, pinch with your fingers to change the brush size. Twist with your fingers to change the brush softness. And of course, tap with one finger to show and hide the viewfinder.
The TX Modular System is open source audio-visual software for modular synthesis and video generation, built with SuperCollider (https://supercollider.github.io) and openFrameworks (https://openFrameworks.cc).
It can be used to build interactive audio-visual systems such as: digital musical instruments, interactive generative compositions with real-time visuals, sound design tools, & live audio-visual processing tools.
This version has been tested on MacOS (0.10.11) and Windows (10). The audio engine should also work on Linux.
The visual engine, TXV, has only been built so far for MacOS and Windows - it is untested on Linux.
The current TXV MacOS build will only work with Mojave (10.14) or earlier (10.11, 10.12 & 10.13) - but NOT Catalina (10.15) or later.
You don't need to know how to program to use this system. But if you can program in SuperCollider, some modules allow you to edit the SuperCollider code inside - to generate or process audio, add modulation, create animations, or run SuperCollider Patterns.
Comprehensive overview of existing tools, strategies and thoughts on interacting with your data
TLDR: when I read I try to read actively, which for me mainly involves using various tools to annotate content: highlight and leave notes as I read. I've programmed data providers that parse them and provide nice interface to interact with this data from other tools. My automated scripts use them to render these annotations in human readable and searchable plaintext and generate TODOs/spaced repetition items.
In this post I'm gonna elaborate on all of that and give some motivation, review of these tools (mainly with the focus on open source thus extendable software) and my vision on how they could work in an ideal world. I won't try to convince you that my method of reading and interacting with information is superior for you: it doesn't have to be, and there are people out there more eloquent than me who do that. I assume you want this too and wondering about the practical details.
This database* is an ongoing project to aggregate tools and resources for artists, engineers, curators & researchers interested in incorporating machine learning (ML) and other forms of artificial intelligence (AI) into their practice. Resources in the database come from our partners and network; tools cover a broad spectrum of possibilities presented by the current advances in ML like enabling users to generate images from their own data, create interactive artworks, draft texts or recognise objects. Most of the tools require some coding skills, however, we’ve noted ones that don’t. Beginners are encouraged to turn to RunwayML or entries tagged as courses.
*This database isn’t comprehensive—it's a growing collection of research commissioned & collected by the Creative AI Lab. The latest tools were selected by Luba Elliott. Check back for new entries.
Via : https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TkusCE5mS4tuTYoBwaTV4aJKdSVsf9jFKsGJCx8M05c/edit
Blackout poetry is made by colouring over parts of an existing text, so that only selected words remain visible, creating a poem.
To use this tool, you can select a text from the samples, or paste your own text source into the custom text field. Your chosen text will appear in the large box to the right.
With your mouse or touchscreen, select the words from the text you want to keep, and, when you are ready, press the black out button.
If you want to save the result as an image, maybe to post to your social network of choice, scroll down and hit Render as image. You can then save the image directly to your device.
This is a list of smaller tools that might be useful in building your game/website/interactive project. Although I’ve mostly also included ‘standards’, this list has a focus on artful tools & toys that are as fun to use as they are functional.
The goal of this list is to enable making entirely outside of closed production ecosystems or walled software gardens.
Paint and Animate Live!
Tagtool transforms your iPad into a visual live instrument. Paint with light, create animated graffiti or tell improvised stories.
https://www.tagtool.org/
https://bibliogram.art/u/tagtoolcrew
3d collages composed in Unity with scans collected in botanic gardens, backyards, beaches, natural parks…
Explore the inventions, technology and ideas of science fiction writers
Date Device Name (Novel Author)
1634 Weightlessness (Kepler) (from Somnium (The Dream) by Johannes Kepler)
1638 Weightlessness in Space (from The Man in the Moone by Francis Godwin)
1638 Gansas (from The Man in the Moone by Francis Godwin)
1657 Moon Machine - very early description (from A Voyage to the Moon by Cyrano de Bergerac)
1705 Cogitator (The Chair of Reflection) (from The Consolidator by Daniel Defoe)
1726 Knowledge Engine - machine-made expertise (from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift)
1726 Geometric Modeling - eighteenth century NURBS (from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift)
1726 Bio-Energy - produce electricity from organic material (from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift)
1726 Laputa - a floating island (from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift)
1727 Androide - the original (from Cyclopaedia by Ephraim Chambers)
The shutdown of public life is accompanied by a new understanding of limitation. National borders have been closed, environments have shrunk to the nearest surroundings, and a lack of information and events makes it more difficult for new ideas to emerge. At the same time, the question arises as to whether creative potential is also hidden behind personal limitation. One of the first answers to this question is celebrating its opening this week.
SHUTDOWN.gallery is the latest project of Patrik Hübner. The German designer has set himself the goal of adding a new dimension to cultural life in times of social distancing.
Since 2018 Hübner has been pushing the idea of digital space and the concept of the online gallery. In those days a little ahead of its time, the project is now coming to life in the current events. "I had to watch as museums and galleries in my area closed their doors and the experience of art came to a standstill. It felt as if the gallery had to exist right now."
SHUTDOWN.gallery is a first step towards understanding the analogue and digital world together. It is intended to add a new level to the construct of what a gallery is and to blur the boundaries between analog and digital experience.
A logical next step in developing a narrative for digital spaces that can be experienced. References to real objects and the associated spatial limitations are important to facilitate the transition into this digital space and to prepare metaphors for future reinterpretations of the gallery concept.
The digital gallery adapts to the physical situation of the viewer and is freely accessible: On mobile devices such as telephones or tablets, the visitor can view the room directly and from all perspectives by tilting the device or moving it freely in the room - the boundaries between the physical and the digital disappear suddenly and intuitively.
As a web-based project, the gallery is publicly accessible worldwide. Every week there will be a new exhibition with works that move the world of art and design, thus maintaining the fertile environment of constant change. A growing list of world-renowned designers and artists has already confirmed their participation in what is the start of a new chapter for galleries.
The gallery’s dynamic and flexible visual identity reflects this constant change and desire for collaboration and new perspectives by putting every week’s exhibition at the center of the visual campaign. The result is highly unique mix of the gallery’s space and the artist’s work which can be used across social- and physical spaces to promote and visually explore this collaboration.
Manifest
Shutdown Gallery overwrites the walls of your private space and keeps your mind in motion even though the physical world is standing still.
Growth is a fundamental aspect of human nature. We are used to increasing the space around us, to crossing borders, to thinking of and discovering unexpected grounds.
In this fertile environment of constant change, shutdown confronts us with new levels of restriction and limitation. Country borders are closed, private life reduced to a minimum and cultural life locked in silence. The question "What's new?" is increasingly left unanswered and so are the contents that used to stimulate our thoughts and conversations.
In absence of new impressions, SHUTDOWN.gallery appears as a contemporary place of visual experience that intends to reawaken cultural life beyond social distancing and to literally overwrite the walls of our private space.
Based on the idea to use limitation as a creative tool instead of declaring it as constraint, SHUTDOWN.gallery aims to rethink existing concepts and reestablish focus in a world of distraction.
Every week, there will be a new exhibition with an artist whose work moves the world of art and design and thus maintains the fertile environment of constant change.
Strike is a web-based, 1-bit paint tool, primarily for quick sketching or line-drawing.
Features
brush / eraser / fill tools with different brush shapes and sizes
16-'color' palette via dither patterns. Each pattern is treated as a separate color for fill tool
~50 step undo / redo (it's fragile, so don't rely on it too much)
import PNG and JPG files, which will be converted to 1 bit form
zoom via mouse scroll or two-finger pinch
basic image transform tools (flip / mirror / resize canvas)
save images as a 16-color greyscale (which will import back into Strike with all patterns intact), or as 1-bit black and white image
autosave (see notes)Animation playground
We’d like to show you a new way to create hand-drawn animation. So playful you’ll think it’s a toy, but it's secretly a robust app with a reimagined UI for animators and creators.
Wonderfully musical
Taking inspiration from music creation tools, using Looom feels more like playing an instrument than operating software - exploring lines, shapes and colors through loopable time and rhythm.
Everyone in the loop
Looom is all about looping animation with a smile. It was designed for professionals and beginners of any age, and is already being used by some influential indie animators.
The new Collection online
From Dürer to the Rosetta Stone, explore 4.5 million objects.
The database is based on the British Museum's collection management tool, where we record what we know about our collection. It was created for the Museum to store information for its own use, and is therefore full of specialised terms, abbreviations and shorthand.
The Museum has been working on the database for more than 40 years and, even with more than two million records, we've only catalogued about half of the collection. We're adding and improving records every day but, even so, an object record may not have been checked. In many cases, the most recent research has not yet been added. There will be mistakes and omissions, but the Museum chooses to publish the data, rather than hold it until it is 'finished', as there will always be new information about an object. Only personal and sensitive information has been withheld.
Stream HD : http://stream.p-node.org/dab.mp3
∏-node is an experimental platform for the development of an hybrid web/FM/DAB+ radio format. Through the interlinking of different approaches, tools, technologies and networks a decentralised broadcast structure is established where each of the network’s nodes serves to both receive and transmit information. Such a structure seeks to break with the classic one-way communication scheme, substituting it with a horizontal peer-to-peer model.
∏-node wants to explore the many dimensions of radio – its physicality (ether, radio waves and the electromagnetic spectrum), its spatiality (bandwidth, frequencies), its infrastructure (network of radio receivers/emitters), its methods of production and editorial content management (programming boards/teams, recording studios), its methods of metadata reception (RDS/SDR), its history (free radio and pirate radio movements), and its legislation. Most importantly, π-node also wants to examine the future role and potential of radio in a time when everything is going digital.
Aleatoricism ( /ˌeɪ̯liəˈtɔrəsɪzm̩, -ˈtɒr-, ˌæli-/ ey-lee-uh-TAWR-uh-siz-uhm, -TOR-, al-ee), the noun associated with the adjectival aleatory is a term popularised by the musical composer Pierre Boulez, but also Witold Lutoslawski and Franco Evangelisti, for compositions resulting from "actions made by chance", with its etymology deriving from alea, Latin word for "dice" It now applies more broadly to art created as a result of such a chance-determined process. The term was first used "in the context of electro-acoustics and information theory" to describe "a course of sound events that is determined in its framework and flexible in detail", by Belgian-German physicist, acoustician, and information theorist Werner Meyer-Eppler.In practical application, in compositions by Mozart and Kirnberger, for instance, the order of the measures of a musical piece were left to be determined by throwing dice, and in performances of music by Pousseur (e.g., Répons pour sept musiciens, 1960), musicians threw dice "for sheets of music and cues". However, more generally in musical contexts, the term has had varying meanings as it was applied by various composers, and so a single, clear definition for aleatory music is defied. Aleatory should not be confused with either indeterminacy, or improvisation.
This is an interactive editor for making face filters with WebGL.
The language below is called GLSL, you can edit it to change the effect.
New rules for old games! The Board Game Remix Kit is a collection of tips, tweaks, reimaginings and completely new games that you can play with the board and pieces from games you might already own: Monopoly, Cluedo, Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit.
The 26 rule tweaks and new games include:
Full Houses: poker, but played with Monopoly properties
Citygrid: a single-player city-building game
Use Your Words: Scrabble with storytelling
Them's Fightin' Words: a game of making anagrams, and arguing about which one would win in a fight
Hunt the Lead Piping: hiding and searching for the Cluedo pieces in your actual house
Guess Who Done It: A series of yes/no questions to identify the murderer (contributed by Meg Pickard)
Zombie Mansion: use the lead piping to defend the Cluedo mansion
Judy Garland on the Moon with a Bassoon: a drawing game that uses the answers to trivia questions as prompts The Board Game Remix Kit was originally released in 2010 by the company Hide&Seek (which closed in 2014). We are releasing it here as a pdf (for phones/computers) and an epub (for ereaders) under a CC-BY-SA license.
Libre and modular OSC / MIDI controller :
https://github.com/jean-emmanuel/open-stage-control/releases
a project to excavate shut down, abandoned web ruins and restore them to surfable, accessible, searchable, remixable condition
somewhere between a library and a living museum, we're working on experimental new ways to close the gap between archival and visibility of the web that was lost
launched
geocities
myspace musicon deck
aol hometown
netscape web sites
geocities japan
FortuneCity
tbaRaymond Queneau (1903-1976) was a French writer, closely associatd with the surrealists.
Cent mille milliards de poèmes is a book of ten poems. From them you can create 100,000,000,000,000 properly-formed sonnets.
Queneau was a founder of OULIPO, a group devoted to exploring and playing with language.
The book's exraordinary. Treat yourself. It's published by Gallimard and still in print.
This site is an English translation
You can see the basic poems or random poems, assemble your own poem or run a slide show.
New poems can be formed by replacing lines with any line that rhymes
Background material throws light on Queneau, the book and the translation. The poems are annotated.
