Creative Cogitation

The paint­ing made its pub­lic debut last night at the Scottdale Fes­ti­val Art­walk.  It was a chilly night to be out and about. My free cof­fee and Reeses were very pop­u­lar.  Any­way, meant to post this blog yes­ter­day, but I didn’t get a roundtoit.

In this paint­ing I explore the darker side of the inter­net, one which has been in the news lately, PleaseRobMe.com.  PleaseRobMe.com works off an appli­ca­tion FourSquare.com, (or any geo­t­ag­ging soft­ware such as Google Buzz or Bright Kite etc.) which allows peo­ple to track their friends via twitter.com to pre­sum­ably to make it eas­ier to con­nect in the big blue box.  PleaseRobMe.com basi­cally notes when peo­ple using this appli­ca­tion tweet things like “I am going away for the week­end,” or “Going to the gym now, be back in a few hours” or “I am at the mall now.” etc.  The folks at PleaseRobMe.com say they are basi­cally re-listing these tweets to make peo­ple more aware of the dan­gers of telling peo­ple where you are and where you are not.  Essen­tially their ser­vice is a dressed up Twit­ter search. It gen­er­ally does not take too many tries to find a per­son, who is listed on PleaseRobMe.com, and whose home address is also listed on the inter­net.  The own­ers of PleaseRobMe.com do say it is not their inten­tion to have anyone’s house bur­gled, but clearly show this is one pos­si­ble nefar­i­ous use of this pub­lic information.

“2nd Story Job” by Jake Beck­man. A crow with bur­glary on its mind lis­tens to geo­t­agged tweets look­ing for an empty home to rob.

In this paint­ing the binary code on the wires all read,

• “I’m leav­ing” (the color binary),
• “FourSquare.com” (up (b or d) and down (p or q) binary),
• “RobMyHouse.com” (right (b/p) or left (d/q) fac­ing binary).

I chose a crow as they are one species of bird known for thiev­ery.  Besides I like crows, ravens, and the other clever mem­bers of the fam­ily corvi­dae.  The sym­bol on the nose of the crow is a dis­torted ver­sion of the FourSquare.com logo — I think the round thing in the logo is sup­posed to be a dodge ball, or is it a track­ball? I dunno. But I have trans­lated it into the eye of the crow that is lis­ten­ing to the buzz of the wires.  Also I have cho­sen a dif­fer­ent color pal­let of red,  green­ish black with shad­ings of green and pur­ple.  I hope you like this lat­est in the Social Media Birds series (I really need a bet­ter name — help?)

I am notic­ing my high res­o­lu­tion pho­tos are really not doing jus­tice to the color gamut of my backgrounds-I don’t think there is much I can do about that, except maybe get a new cam­era, which I can’t afford right now.

Any com­ments? Do you like it, hate it, think its too dark, think its funny…”

Update: Some­one sug­gest I put the size of the paint­ing in the blog; details about 2nd Story Job are avail­able on its art page at AKAJake.com

Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

The art work in this blog is fed­er­ally copy­righted. All repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights are retained by the artist. Images are not to be copied, re-distributed, imi­tated, derived OR oth­er­wise used in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.

In this fifth install­ment of the Social Media Birds series, I explore binary with birds. As peo­ple have talked about the pre­ced­ing paint­ings I have been asked, “What do the ones and zeros mean?” Yes, I did write a code in ASCII binary, and, yes, it does mean some­thing, and I have no prob­lem with telling the viewer what the binary means. But… Like all art, it’s in the eye of the beholder who is free to apply what­ever inter­pre­ta­tion they want to the paint­ing includ­ing the code. I could have put the actual words in the paint­ing, but I chose to put rep­re­sen­ta­tions of words instead. That is one rea­son for the binary, being lit­eral with­out being lit­eral. That there is this abstrac­tion of lan­guage is suf­fi­cient. I would like the viewer to explore mean­ing a lit­tle more deeply than the face value. What are those birds talk­ing about? Why is one bird orange? Are canaries a valid way to rep­re­sent “Social Media?” Is cyber-communication real, or just a fac­sim­ile of real? Feel free to come up with your own, ques­tions, answers, inter­pre­ta­tions and “code;” after all, how many peo­ple can actu­ally read ASCII binary just to look at it? Your story could be bet­ter than mine.

ASCII Bird, by Jake Beck­man. 80 birds are encoded with the binary messages.

In this paint­ing I took off on a tan­gent, rep­re­sent­ing the binary code with a code. Each bird rep­re­sents three dis­tinct pos­si­bil­i­ties and there­fore three dis­tinct binary states. The bird can be perched or fly­ing, the bird can be black or white and the bird can face left or right. This allowed me to layer three dif­fer­ent “mes­sages” in the binary coded by the states of the birds. You don’t need ones and zeros, you just need some­thing that can be dis­tinctly one thing or another.

Beyond that I broke with using bright col­ors and also laid the birds out in a grid pat­tern to re-enforce the “code.” I think it has a vaguely Egypt­ian feel. If you want to know what the binary means, you can check it the ASCII Bird page on my web­site, where I have decoded the messages.

What do you think? Which one do you like best so far?

Update: Details about ASCII Bird, size etc., can be found on its art page at AKAJake.com

Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

The art work in this blog is fed­er­ally copy­righted. All repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights are retained by the artist. Images are not to be copied, re-distributed, imi­tated, derived OR oth­er­wise used in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.

In this fourth install­ment of the Social Media Birds (work­ing title), I have bro­ken down the rigid lin­eal struc­ture of the binary and turned it into a kind of rib­bon shape. The canary flares for a land­ing car­ry­ing the bit of news; it fills the small can­vas so much that it over­flows it to some extent. I am also play­ing with the col­ors a bit, break­ing away from the blue and yel­low of the pre­ced­ing works.

“RSS Feed” by Jake Beck­man, an orange canary flares for a land­ing car­ry­ing a rib­bon of binary; it appears to be singing as it lands.

The ASCII binary reads “RSS Feed” from Lower Left to Upper Right, and Top to Bot­tom. In this ver­sion I explic­itly included a spi­ral in the back­ground as a line of con­flu­ence for other things in the paint­ing. What do you think? Which one do you like best so far?

Update: Details about RSS Feed, size etc., can be found on its art page at AKAJake.com

Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

The art work in this blog is fed­er­ally copy­righted. All repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights are retained by the artist. Images are not to be copied, re-distributed, imi­tated, derived OR oth­er­wise used in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.