The Problem

This weekend, I discovered my localhost wasn’t working when I wanted to do a bit of local website development. I got a pretty unfriendly ‘Failed to Connect’ message when trying to hit http://localhost/, http://127.0.0.1/ or the IP my mac was telling me my Sites/ were at in System Preferences. Bummer. I tried pinging my server from Terminal, which gave false-positives that the server was running (I should have used $ ping localhost:80, which properly showed the host was down). $ apachectl configtest returned that my syntax was OK. sudo apachectl start told me the server was already running. Everything looked right, it just wasn’t showing up in the browser.

Searching around the internet, I found that lots of other people had different problems with WebSharing (trying to use .htaccess files, permissions errors preventing pages from showing, and enabling php), but no one was experiencing quite the same thing as me.

The Solution

This ended up being really easy. Chandler McWilliams, via email, suggested I check my apache error logs. They should live in /var/logs/apache2/error_log. My machine lacked even an apache2/ directory. So I made one: $ sudo mkdir apache2, and all of a sudden, it was populated with a new error_log (among other things), and my localhost was working again.

Solutions to other problems:

If you want to enable .htaccess files on your Mac Apache setup:
in /private/etc/httpd/httpd.conf:
AllowOverride All
in /private/etc/httpd/users/yourname.conf:
AllowOverride AuthConfig
For extended instructions, check out this blogpost on enabling .htaccess files.

To enable php5 on your Mac, you’ll need to load the module in /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf:
Uncomment LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so
Tyler also made a note of this.

If you get a 500 error on stuff on your Mac server, try changing the permissions from the command line. chmod -R 744 problemdirectory/ should do it.

While walking with Rebecca earlier today, I began thinking about how online art should be funded. Only some models of funding the material arts (painting, drawing, sculpture, etc.) can effectively translate to work that exists online. Websites can’t really be sold to patrons in the way a painting can; there is no value added in owning the domain name, and limiting access to the domain defeats the point of it being online. Grants for the creation of new work can obviously be applied to work that exists online. Corporate sponsorship is another option, although I find it generally unfit for funding personal work (since you have to promote the company’s agenda). What struck me as the most obvious and probably far-fetched method of funding online art is by designating it as public art.

Online art is inherently public art. It exists on the internet, that virtual space is where many people spend the majority of their time (Dangerous words in there; this ain’t journalism). Just as we beautify the public spaces we walk past on our way to work, we should beautify the virtual space that we visit in between trips to productive/useful web sites and applications. It’s not that we always notice the park or sculpture on our way to the office, but that we have the option to stop and appreciate it.

The obvious challenge in all of this is knowing who should fund public works in a space so public it operates largely without regulation. Internet service providers could fund unique works. 2% of their expenses could go enhancing the quality of the content they provide access to. Wouldn’t you feel better knowing that AT&T or Comcast actually cares about the things they’re bringing in to your home (not in an anti-net-neutrality way)? Maybe cities should promote the online work of their residents. Physical-world tie-ins bind the content of the online works to a specific place, making the work more meaningful when you visit the city. I would be happier to run across more engaging personal content online that encourages me to visit a new city than to see a Mark Di Suvero sculpture when I get there. Or perhaps an independent entity should be formed, a branch of the NEA (miserably underfunded as it is) or UNESCO.

Yeah, making the work is not about money. However, if making artwork for the internet (or anywhere) began to at least fund itself, it would make thinking about money less critical. Right now, everything is decidedly about indirect revenue streams. I have a day-job making commercial stuff for the internet as a result of spending my free time making my own work. The money I make allows me to pay to keep my personal sites up. Just imagine the quality of work people could produce if they didn’t need to hold down a day-job.

I have a habit of picking up new things to try when I want to do things I could accomplish with the tools already at my disposal. This weekend, I spent a bit of time with ruby-processing. It runs everything in Ruby, and uses JRuby as a bridge to run Processing. I used it to visualize some data about web developers after parsing the original .xsl file into .tsv files and cleaning up the data using Python. I’m going to do quite a bit more work on the visuals above, but I wanted to put in a good word for ruby-processing now.

The first thing that I liked was that I wasn’t writing Java, a language lots of people seem to hate on, the source of which hate I am coming to understand as I learn about other languages. Ruby’s syntax is cleaner, even if it seems strange at times (welcome home ‘@,’ ‘$,’ and ‘:’ prefixes).

The next big improvement over vanilla Processing was writing the code inside of TextMate. This isn’t inherent to ruby by any means; I could probably write Java inside of TextMate. However, ruby-processing made it really easy to launch sketches I was working on, and also to edit them in real-time.

I also spent some time messing around with field on Saturday. It looks like really exciting software, with a lot of promise. Unfortunately, it bogged down and became unusable while running through the examples on their site. I’ll probably give it another go, but ruby-processing is letting me make what I want to for now (and that’s what is really important).

There are lots of things worth noting in the William Kentridge exhibition: Five Themes. For now, I will simply note the superb blending of mechanical actors with hand-drawn animation in ‘Black Box’ (pictured above, not playing). The piece also incorporated found video footage of a rhinoceros “hunt”—the rhinoceros being a prominent figure throughout the piece, and much of Kentridge’s other work.

You can find out more at the Exhibition Website. The show runs until May 31, 2009.

This morning, I learned that Time Spent Alone was nominated for a Webby Award. It is a collection of explorations of personal themes using, not surprisingly, the internet.

Check out the project, and consider giving it your vote for the People’s Voice Award in the NetArt category.

It seems I’ve been catching shows at the last possible moment lately. The Art of Participation is closing tomorrow, leaving behind stacks of empty bottles from a few months of free beer with Tom Marioni, reams of paper covered in news stories, and crates full of portraits taken of visitors.

The pieces that worked best for me were simple concepts with simple executions. Hans Haacke’s “News” prints out an rss feed of news stories as it is published. The beauty is in the overwhelming amount of content generated; many rolls of printer paper flow out onto the floor, curling up on themselves and forming an elegant pile. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s “Microphones” was similarly austere. A series of microphones were arranged in a circle in the center of a darkened room. Whenever someone spoke loudly enough into a microphone, it would play back their voice, then add some previously recorded sounds in response. The piece demanded a certain level of confidence from audience members to get it towork,but also stood on its own as a collection of beautiful objects.

A number of classic performance/interactive pieces were also on display. Many of these pieces were shown alongside an updated version. Video of Yoko Ono’s “Cut Piece” performances from 1965 and 2003 were on simultaneous display. Tom Marioni’s work from the 1970s, “The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest form of Art” was recreated every Thursday for the duration of the exhibition. In other cases, visitors to the museum were encouraged to create their own work using the props and ideas of artists on display. Notably, there was a platform with props for making one-minute sculptures. The inclusion of updated participatory work with classic pieces is a great curatorial move, and really helps to keep the ideas of the older pieces relevant to todays audience.

View more images from the museum in my SFMoMA flickr set.

When I returned to San Francisco after the winter holidays, I went to see Maya Lin’s Systematic Landscapes at the de Young Museum. The museum was packed, but fortunately the crowds were mostly interested in Yves Saint-Laurent (which after viewing, it turned out, I was mostly uninterested in).

Lin’s recent work represents landscape data rather than the landscape itself. It is a transformation of scientific viewing into artistic viewing. The direct observation of the world is done through mechanical, sonic, or digital means by non-human systems. Lin translates this information–the landscape as it is perceived by machines–into a new set of drawings or scaled-down landscape structures, allowing us to move around and inhabit the data. The work still looks very digital, but the transcription has an obvious human hand, and the bumps in the data are smoothed to the point where the analog feel of a landscape is restored.

After meandering through Lin’s constructions, I made my way through many of the other galleries at the museum. I was really happy to run into a lot of work by Al Farrow, whose reliquary series I first encountered at 21C in Louisville a week prior. Farrow constructs iconic religious structures from ammunition and weaponry. The structures themselves are beautiful, and the obvious subtext of religiously-sanctioned violence makes the work challenging without being didactic.

Systematic Landscapes was on view at the de Young museum October 25, 2008 – January 18, 2009. It traveled to be there, so there is a chance it will travel to a city near you in the future.

View more photos taken at The de Young Museum on Flickr.

For a time now, I’ve been posting things on flickr, vimeo, this blog, twitter, archiving projects in various ways, and using tools like delicious and (recently) ffffound to keep track of things that come to me through the tubes. My stuff, like many other people’s, exists in a lot of places on the internet, and it became far too many to continue to tack onto an increasingly tall sidebar. So I stripped everything out (pretty much), and replaced it with a new website.

Keep reading »

We at the San Francisco Barbarian Group office had an incredible holiday party on Friday. After a full afternoon of shooting assorted handguns, we reassembled at the office. A great spread of holiday snacks and beverages was laid out before us, ready to help us recover our strength spent on the range.

For the party at the office, I had set up a photobooth of sorts. Motion in front of the camera caused it to begin capturing frames which were then turned into animated gifs. You really should check out the photos from the party.

Keep reading »

While on the plane to Boston, I got a little frustrated that I can’t program my iPhone directly. No simple, scriptable terminal or anything. Since I’m not of the skill or inclination to quickly write a python interpreter or processing development environment as an app for the phone, I went a different route. I decided to use the icons on the home screen as a low-resolution display matrix.

When adding a page to your homescreen, the iPhone creates an icon for the page by rendering the whole thing down to a square format. I took advantage of this to create half-filled dots on the screen.

Naturally, I had to write something with the pixels I was making. It being party time and all, I decided to encourage celebratory behavior with my downsampled display. Keeping with the spirit of lo-res, here is a video of the display in action, converted into an animated gif.

In the end, I rather like the simple visual weight of the 50/50 webpages: 01v 01h 10v and 10h. They are flexible minimalist works; they scale to fit any size real-estate. Use them to create your own iPhone cum lite-brite or just enjoy your monitor’s ability to crank out pretty, high-contrast black and white pixels.