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.

As I pre­vi­ously stated while I was work­ing on Bird on a Wire a whole series of paint­ings came to me.  This series is a result of my recent immer­sion into social media.  I am a noob (a neo­phyte) to things like Face­Book and Twit­ter, but I hope to get bet­ter.  I even took a class for Face­Book, just before they com­pletely redid the lay­out.  ARGH!

I am still look­ing for Face­Book fan page tips.  My RSS feed is dou­ble post­ing and since they redid the lay­out I can’t find where the RSS Feed link is at on the fan page anymore.

Any­way, when I posted Tweet­Deck, one of my com­men­ta­tors said that Retweet came to mind.  Of course I was already work­ing on it as it was such an obvi­ous follow-on.  And now it is done-enjoy.

Retweet by Jake Beck­man. An orange canary sings to four other yel­low ones who seem to be lis­ten­ing. The binary in the back­ground reads “Retweet.”

Its a lit­tle abstract in con­cept, but also kind of lit­eral too.  The ASCII binary reads “Retweet” from Left to Right, and Top to bot­tom.  In this ver­sion I explic­itly included a spi­ral as a place for my canaries to perch.  I opted to fill the entire back­ground with binary so the upper most bird would have some­thing to stand on, oth­er­wise it would have been hang­ing upside down like an orang­utan.   What do you think?

Update: Details about Retweet, 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.