I spent this afternoon at Brooklyn Artists Gym, a shared studio space that’s usually empty – and I have 4000 sq ft to myself (there were two other woman painting today).

The picture I took of my large acrylic sketch/painting is “My Segmented Life” and is about 4 feet x 2.5 feet – my 1.3 mega-pixel camara is not able to get much better than this- I did the work in about 4 hours.   It’s a self portait but I decided not to focus too much on detail.

I have been thinking of merging my web analytics work with painting (or maybe it’s a bad idea – I don’t know).  My idea was to take traffic segmentation to pages of a web site as it shown in packages like ClickTracks and do the same thing in my painting – except the segmentation is the parts of my life (I did not represent all the parts of my life – I just painted in a couple of segments as an after thought).

Was thinking of this idea for a couple of weeks – right after the artist Olan drew a map of me, describing my life (while we were talking about life) - decided to see if I could paint my life as visitor segmentation map - yet still hold it together as a painting (and avoid being too illustrative).

I don’t take any of these works that seriously, but I do find that I’m liking my work more, the less I try to “finish” it.  I used to spend so much effort trying to finish paintings and lately I don’t have time – it has to work the first time – I don’t know what my mood will be next time I come in to paint on something – don’t want to mix moods – would rather just do the painting in one sitting if I can.

So, incase you can’t make it out, I painted the words “web analytics” in red in the lower left, “work” in the mid, upper left, “blogging” in the mid-upper right and “Seo” in the bottom right.

Went to the DADA show at the MOMA this afternoon.  I put a bit of work into my post then my blog ate the post – and so I’m just writing a short description.

To me DADA is more an anti-movement than a real art movement – the attempt to take everyday objects and make them into Art seems as artificial as the art it was meant to replace.

I can say this now, 80 years later – but at the time, the DADA artists thought they were doing everyone a favor – and maybe they were.  Except for a couple of works, most of the show is pretty much everyday objects that are made into Anti – Art (like Anti-Matter) by the artist.

But just because a Duchamp pissing pot is symetrical, it does not mean it should be put into a museum – as the DADAist would have it.  The DADA movement was more important, historically, than for what it produced.

I also looked briefly at Douglas Gordon’s Timeline exhibition which was also at the MOMA. From the exhibition notes:

In his most well-known works, Scottish artist Douglas Gordon (b. 1966) addresses the familiarity and popularity of moving pictures by manipulating, reframing, and superimposing them to alter viewers’ perceptions. His works provoke feelings of anxiety, recognition, and amnesia with respect to the circumstances of the reception of media today.

This retrospective of Gordon’s work presents thirteen significant works by the artist, including 24 Hour Psycho (1993), Between Darkness and Light (After William Blake) (1997), and Play Dead; Real Time (2003).

By forcing new encounters with the familiar and confrontations with the willfully forgotten, Gordon exposes the distance between our dimmed, distorted memories and, perhaps, the truth—emphatically demonstrating that what he sculpts is not only media but time itself.

My take, the show seemed stupid to me – it was trying to take what looked like the 1930′s mimialist paintings and illustrate a relationship that really happens much better in my mind than in film.

I have been to many art openings recently, and with the proliferation of Computer Generated Films, many artists are trying to be deep filmmakers – but more often than not, what I see is noise – something I feel I should look at but really don’t want to.

But why force myself to look at something that’s not attractive or interesting to look at at the first place?    The modern filmmaker can have the same problem as DADA tried to solve – taking the ordinary and making it into art.  In the case of DADA, they took garbage and said it was sublime.  Modern filmmakers like Douglas Gordon are taking the ordinary and trying to super-impose some fake meaning – a meaning that looks artificial – the same way the DADA stuff looked to me. 

Give me something real – and natural and interesting to look at – not these Pseudo Movies.

The New York Times talks about H.D.R. Photography.

“Although H.D.R. photos are often compared to paintings, they are an attempt by software makers to allow photography to more accurately mimic human vision.

Dynamic range measures how great a difference between light and dark can be captured by a digital camera or film. Relative to the human eye, all photography has a limited dynamic range, and digital photography suffers even more than film.

It is this limitation that leads to landscape photos where a dramatic sky appears as a washed-out smudge. A classic example of the problem is trying to photograph a room’s interior while still capturing the view outside its windows. In that case, photographers are usually forced to choose either the room or its view as their subject.

“The concept of H.D.R. photography is fairly simple. It starts with a photographer harvesting every bit of difference in brightness by taking several different photos of the same scene, with large exposure differences between them. Software then sorts through the resulting images, which range from underexposed views that are nearly black to washed-out overexposures, to calculate the full dynamic range of the view. Using that vast amount of data, it then constructs a single, high dynamic range photo.

At least that’s the theory. While the actual practice can be highly automated, it is slightly more complicated.

These H.D.R enhanced photos, such as those shown in the New York Times, look like illustrations or highly polished paintings – but they’re still photographs.  I think the story here is not so much about High Dynamic Range Photos but the power that highend Adobe Software brings to the average photographer who has many more options of where to go with their photos than ever before.

I came across a press release earlier today about digital paintings that change based on your emotional state.  This looks interesting but I’m not sure how easy it would be for your average artist to use the technology.

Computer scientists from Bath and Boston have developed electronic artwork that changes to match the mood of the person who is looking at it.

Using images collected through a web cam, special software recognises eight key facial features that characterise the emotional state of the person viewing the artwork.

It then adapts the colours and brush strokes of the digital artwork to suit the changing mood of the viewer.

For example, when the viewer is angry the colours are dark and appear to have been applied to the canvas with more violent brush strokes.

If their expression changes to happy, the artwork adapts so that the colours are vibrant and more subtly applied.

The project forms part of on-going research looking to develop a range of advanced artwork tools for use in the computer graphics industry.

This has already resulted in software which produces highly-detailed artistic versions of photographs, and allows designers to create animations directly from digital footage.

“The programme analyses the image for eight facial expressions, such as the position and shape of the mouth, the openness of the eyes, and the angle of the brows, to work out the emotional state of the viewer,” said Dr John Collomosse from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bath.

“It does all of this in real time, meaning that as the viewer’s emotions change the artwork responds accordingly.

“This results in a digital canvas that smoothly varies its colours and style, and provides a novel interactive artistic experience.

“This kind of empathic painting only needs a desk top computer and a webcam to work, so once you have the programme and have calibrated it for the individual viewer, you are ready to start creating personalised art based on your mood.

“The empathic painting is really an experiment into the feasibility of using high level control parameters, such as emotional state, to replace the many low-level tools that users currently have at their disposal to affect the output of artistic rendering.”

The empathic painting project was carried out with Maria Shugrina and Margrit Betke from the University of Boston.

The images used in the project were created by the researchers using advanced artistic rendering techniques which give the computer-generated artwork the appearance of having been painted onto canvas.

More information on the empathic painting project, including a video demonstration, is available on the project website (see related links section).

The research was recently presented at the fourth International Symposium on Non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering (NPAR) conference in Annecy as part of the International Animation Festival.