FRACT V FRICTION

Dick Pountain /Idealog 322/ 07 May 2021 01:10

There’s never been a better time to be a digital artist. Last night Channel 4 News had David Hockney talking about his new show of Spring landscapes painted on his iPad, at the Royal Academy. And back in March Michael Winkelman, aka ‘Beeple’, sold an NFT (non-fungible token) to his work , a collage of 5000 digital images, for a record $69,400,000. It was purchased by Vignesh Sundaresan, aka ‘MetaKovan’ who paid for it using 42,329 Ether digital currency.

I’m not quite in that class but I do consider myself a digital artist, and it must be true because I’ve put it on my business cards. It’s not just that I take digital photographs, which I discussed in last month’s column. I’ve also written here, a few years ago, about the way I took such photographs and turned them into ‘paintings’ by repeated transformation in Photoshop, using layers, filters and other effects. This kept me amused for quite a while, but eventually it palled: such processed photos have become a bit of a cliche in adverts and music vids, so I gave up for a while. 

Then in a major life change I deserted Windows for a Chromebook. I tried Photoshop Express online, but that didn’t cut it so I sought alternatives: there are capable photo editors like Pixlr, but none had all the filters I needed until I came across Sumo Paint, a sort of minor Photoshop clone for Chrome but with several whacky features of its own. One of those features was a ‘fractal morph’ filter, which takes any image created in the draw and paint section and applies a fractal transformation to it, with several adjustable parameters that create very striking, naturalistic looking images with fractal levels of detail. I soon became hooked, stopped working from photographs and started drawing simple, colourful, textured shapes, fractalising them, cropping and further processing them to create a new (to me) medium.

The results were pleasing, looking like very complex paintings that might have taken months to do with brush and pigment. And that after all is what digital art – from painting to synthesisers and drum machines – is all about, creative cheating, skipping the hard slog. You can see some of the results for yourself at my web site.

Greatly excited I naturally wanted to try and sell these images, to become a real artist who gets mashed in the Groucho Club every night. There were several obstacles though, the first and worst being resolution. Fractal morphing is very compute intensive, so runtime explodes with increasing image size and eventually crashes. The biggest initial drawings I could process were between 600x600 and 1000x1000 pixels (dependent on content), and though the results look great on screen, they’re too grainy when printed large. A partial solution is to resample them at 4000x4000 with interpolation, which looks smoother but fuzzes out fine details. A second obstacle is that no-one buys abstract prints like these off screen, and the substantial cost of printing and framing a lot of them on spec was an investment I was reluctant to make. 

A third obstacle is that Sumo Paint was Flash based, and Google terminated Flash support in Chrome in February 2021. Sumo’s authors brought out a new, non-Flash version – and it doesn’t have the fractal morph filter...  When I contacted them they told me they’d permit the older Flash-based app to run on Windows, so I now keep a digital museum piece: a Windows 8.1 installation running discontinued Flash and Sumo Paint. It feels rather precarious, a bit like painting in digital egg tempera.

Things have perked up a bit on the printing front though. A friend of mine who paints the old way in acrylics started putting her work on the Saatchiart website and selling plenty of it, and recommended I give it a try. Saatchi offers two different deals: they’ll print, frame, sell and deliver for you, deducting their commission, or they’ll pass buyers on to you and you deliver (which obviously she has to do with paintings). I’ve put some of my work up there under the first deal, but I’m getting nowhere near her level of sales because I’m selling only prints rather than ‘original artwork’, and most people who spend serious money on art want to own the original. Which makes me very curious indeed about Beeple and his NFTs. It seems crazy that people are prepared to spend millions to not own the original artwork, but it’s not that much crazier than Bitcoin or Ethereum, and when everyone is going crazy then it feels a bit crazy not to go crazy too.      

[Dick Pountain invites you to "get in on the ground floor" at https://www.saatchiart.com/account/artworks/1239765 ]

 

BE STILL MY HEART

Dick Pountain /Idealog 321/ 09 Apr 2021 01:58

I like to cook, and although I have two whole shelves-full of cookery books, digital sloth dictates that nowadays I tend to go online and Google for a recipe rather than trying to find one there. Googling ‘pork mushrooms kimchi’ will get me hundreds of matches. But once I click on a promising candidate, if it takes me to a video on YouTube I’ll back out sharply and try the next, until I find one that’s just a still photograph and a text recipe. 

I spend an inordinate amount of my free time watching Japanese sushi slicers, guitar neck resetters, jet fighters and restorations of rusty mangles on YouTube, so it strikes me as odd that I have such a powerful aversion to watching cooks performing a recipe that I want to do. Why is it? It’s only partly pragmatic, because most of these online cooks take so long to do stuff and to talk about it, compared to me just reading an ingredient list. And it’s only partly because so many of these cooks are intensely irritating (indeed a few of them are quite cute). No, it’s something more fundamental than that, and I felt a column coming on…

The difference between a still photograph and a video runs ontologically deep. A still photograph does something that’s otherwise impossible, namely it stops time, which your living eyes and brain refuse to do. That’s not all it does though: unless you’re a superb professional photographer, it’s your camera rather than you that decides most of what goes into a picture. Certainly you decided this was a scene or moment that you want to record and remember, but most likely it was only a couple of objects in it that sparked your interest, and much of the background detail will escape notice until later. Video is entirely different, behaving more or less exactly like your eye and sharing its inability to stop time: when you’re videoing you’re capturing a continuation of your ongoing perception. A still photo represents what’s strictly in the past, while video in effect makes past events present again. 

The great art photographers all took pictures in black and white mainly because colour film wasn’t invented or was so poor back then, but there’s a sense in which it was also right: the past ought to be monochrome because colour belongs to the living present. That’s why most kids under 30 find it hard work watching black and white movies, and why Hollywood is prepared to spend big bucks to colourise some of the classics.  

YouTube videos don’t just show us a resumed present but also their author, whose voice and ego are on display. A still photograph makes no comment apart from its manifest content: it’s the camera, not the author, saying ‘here’s the stuff that was in front of my lens when you pressed the button’. This quality of impartial historical commentary becomes increasingly desirable as our world becomes more and more swamped by 3D-animated, CGI-fied, deep-faked video. Hence the excitement when a large cache of old photographs is discovered, as happened with Vivian Maier’s Chicago street photographs and similar finds in Aberdeen and Hackney. We somehow feel that such pictures are less-tainted testimonials to the past (not true of course because they represent just one person’s choice of what to record).

Anyway, perhaps why I prefer still recipes over YouTube videos is that I really don’t want someone else’s opinion or experience of a dish, simply its bare, unvarnished facts so I can interpret them in the way I want. And this preference extends to my taking of pictures too: I’ve never been interested in shooting video (though I do enjoy hacking together GIFs from sequences of still images). I’ve been taking still photos for quite a long time: I got my first proper camera, a Yashica TL-Electro back in 1972 and my first pocket camera, a Canon Dial (half-frame, with clever built-in clockwork motordrive) soon after. 

Over the years I’ve been through quite a few pocket cameras - a Sony WX350 being the latest - but I’ve never succumbed to shooting with a smartphone until a couple of weeks ago. I’d clung on to an old HTC Desire phone with a crappy camera for as long as I could, but last week I couldn’t, so I bought me a new Moto Power. The quality of its cameras and flash impressed me, so off I trot to the park to take some pix of the Spring blossom. Back home the pictures looked odd and behaved even more oddly, until I realised that they were all actually videos. Those tiny icons for still and video are right next to one another, and in bright sunlight without my specs on… 

[Dick Pountain does not possess a selfie stick]

 

LET ME IN

Dick Pountain /Idealog 320/ 05 Mar 2021 10:07

Last month I confessed to feeling less hostile toward the giant digital corporations than is fashionably required nowadays, and this month I’m heading further still into the wilderness by admitting that I’m not particularly paranoid about online security either. That’s not to say I deny the importance of my dear colleague Davey Wilder’s advice which I do follow, and as a result have only experienced two successful virus attacks in 40 years. 

In the mid-80s I used to visit CeBit with Byte every year, where one drunken evening with members of the Kaos computer club I accepted a floppy disk of source code that blew up the laptop I was using. (Un)fortunately it wasn’t mine but borrowed from a friendly London dealer. Ooops. The second one I caught around 1998 after clicking a photograph on The Register which injected some malign entity that rapidly paralysed my own Thinkpad. Windows backup failed too and the plucky PC Pro lab folk had to dig me out of that one. 

Maybe it was that experience which persuaded me to sell my soul to Google. Since then Gmail’s antivirus abilities have stopped all manner of nasty attachments, and together with regular Windows Defender and Malwarebytes scans kept my laptop clean until I moved to a Chromebook. All fine, until recently Google’s vigilance has turned oppressive: I occasionally get a Critical Security Alert saying someone has just logged in using my password. I have four devices, two connecting via Android, one via Windows and one via ChromeOS and Google appears no longer to realise that they’re all me. I do change my password now and again, just in case it was true, and thrillingly Google refuses to accept my new password the first time I try it and asks for the old one, then accepts it and sends a Critical Alert saying someone has just changed my password. All very exciting, but small beer compared to some of the other sites I use.

I recently had a spat with PayPal when they upgraded me to a paid-for professional account I didn’t want. It was quite a performance trying to sort that one out as it’s virtually impossible to speak to a human and they place ‘limitations’ on your account that stop you changing anything. In the end after sending several emails from the help centre I was permitted to close the account and open a new, none-pro one that I now use satisfactorily.

But that again is a model of efficiency and approachability compared to Patient Access. A subsidiary of EMIS Health, this site provides appointment booking and repeat prescription services to GP practices, including mine. I only use one service, a 3-monthly repeat prescription for blood-pressure medication (not induced by Google or PayPal I hasten to add). This had been working well for over 10 years until last November, when Patient Access announced an extra level of security using a memorable word and hint mechanism. This didn’t bother me as my bank has been using a similar system for years, so I duly set both and forgot about them until last week when my prescription needed renewing.

Logged on with my old ID and password, was asked for three characters from the memorable word, which it said were invalid. Tried several times more, same, told only had three tries left. Decided it must have stored my memorable word wrong, so went to change it. Could only do that after receiving a code sent by SMS to my mobile, but since mobiles had never been involved before they had an old number from a previous phone. You guessed it, to update my mobile number I need to enter the memorable word….

I did eventually reach a human via email (after much digging to find an address) who told me there was nothing they could do except close the account, and I must re-register by visiting my GP surgery (pretty well inaccessible due to Covid). Fortunately I had linked the account to my local pharmacy years ago, which is now permitted to renew the prescription for me, so I’ve just walked away from the wreckage. Being curious though I Googled “Patient Access memorable word problem” and stumbled into a pit of boiling white-hot rage and indignation: hundreds were similarly locked out despite correct log-on details, some needing far more serious meds than me (one of them wondered whether the site had been designed by Dido Harding). 

In last month’s column I suggested that perhaps a good way to tax the digital giants would be by accepting part payment in use of their excellent infrastructures for our public services. Can’t imagine a better example of where Amazon’s seamless purchasing process is sorely needed. 

[Dick Pountain’s blood pressure is 128/76] 

   

  

TOO BIG TO LOSE

Dick Pountain /Idealog 319/ 11 Feb 2021 09:15 

Having used most of them since they first emerged, I’m far better disposed toward the giant digital corporations, aka Big Tech, than most people. I started working from home long before the current emergency, 38 years ago in fact, and doing that without Google and Wikipedia is unthinkable to me, while entertainment would be very dull without YouTube and Spotify. Amazon wasn’t quite so essential before it put Maplins out of business, but the last year has made it indispensable, while Facebook has become a place to gather, joke and grumble (often about FB itself). Twitter and Instagram I find irritating and only rarely use. 

This very long acquaintance means that I still regard Big Tech’s services as remarkable amplifiers of my abilities, rather than sinister threats to my freedom. I do of course acknowledge that their monopoly power, lack of care over fake news and hate speech and flagrant tax avoidance are very, very serious problems, but I believe they need to be cured rather than crippled or exterminated. I feel increasingly out-of-step in this though: more and more people I know boast of giving up one or more of these online services (usually FaceBook or Amazon) and claim to support drastic government action against Big Tech.

I’ve written here before about how their wealth makes the digital titans serious competitors to states, but I also remarked (as Joe Stalin once sneered about the Pope) that they don’t have armies. What they do have is a cosy relationship with the Democratic Party, and they do tend to be more progressive over climate change than fossil fuel corporations, so I was surprised how little action Donald Trump took against them (maybe because Twitter and Facebook were so essential to his rise: if he escapes impeachment to run again God help them). 

He did however initiate an antitrust lawsuit against Google which experts agree Biden is likely to continue, and several states including New York are filing their own suits to combine with the DoJ’s. Biden has hinted he might revoke Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields internet companies from liability for their content, while Congress Democrats have published a 449-page  on the monopolistic practices of Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google. There’s talk of a national consumer privacy and data protection bill – like California’s Consumer Privacy Act  – which would restrict tech companies’ ability to store our data and thus severely damage their business models. It’s unlikely however that actual break-up will be on the cards any time soon. 

Many of the tech giants are ambitious to provide real-world as well as virtual services: Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Uber are already working to penetrate healthcare, education and transport, using innovative, ‘disruptive’ services supported by their powerful infrastructures and AI capabilities which are often more efficient than state equivalents. They remain commercial, unelected, enterprises though, committed first of all to shareholders and whose incentive is to displace rather than create jobs. If they’re permitted to gradually take over services from shrinking states, promising to invest in carbon-reduction technologies while simultaneously creating mass unemployment, then states are tempted to lean on their technologies to integrate welfare, security and taxation, as is already happening with India’s Aadhaar system, Singapore’s ‘Smart Nation’ and Alibaba helping Chinese local governments to run the Social Credit system. There are serious questions about how effective such systems really are, but they certainly grant states a sinister degree of extra power over citizens, letting them punish dissidence by loss of benefits.

Political polarisation is weakening states throughout the Western world so that their very survival depends on delivering the goods more equitably: with the right policies Big Tech infrastructure could be made to help rather than destroy democracy. A spectrum of measures from outright break-up at one extreme, through increased regulation and fairer taxation, to public-private partnerships at the other (hopefully better designed than those New Labour finance-friendly initiatives that we’re still paying for) could enable governments to tame the corporations’ power without destroying them. Construct different ‘packages’ for different economic sectors – armaments, fossil fuels, pharmaceuticals, automotive, medicine, education –  by assessing the social value of each and choosing the appropriate set of measures from that spectrum. The precise composition would be negotiable, providing the leverage the state needs. 

The digital titans aren’t too big to be regulated, though ironically enough it’s the EU that has been most effective at doing it so far. Rather than simply collect more monetary tax from tech companies (who have made an artform out of evasion via haven countries) states might instead accept some of the payment due in free public use of their services, heavily discounted electric vehicles for public transport, or similar non-cash alternatives.

PICTURE WORTH HOW MANY WORDS?

Dick Pountain /Idealog 318/ 08 Jan 2021 10:58

Pictures mean as much to me as music does. I love paintings and used to regularly visit galleries before Covid closed them. The region of Italy where I lived for some years was within 40 miles of half the world’s greatest paintings and the birthplaces of Michelangelo, Piero della Francesca and Luca Signorelli. I don’t paint myself, having failed to bond with oils or watercolor, but I do love to play with digital images. (I could never consider writing a novel with pen or manual typewriter, and similarly I can’t imagine painting in any medium that doesn’t have Undo). 

For many years I’ve been creating fractal art using two main tools, Sumo Paint and Zen Brush. The latter emulates a Chinese/Japanese style bamboo calligraphy brush that you can use on a tablet with either finger or stylus: the original version was grayscale-only but they’ve recently released Zen Brush 3 which has gorgeous colour and very realistic watercolour effects. I do feebly try to sell work via the Saatchiart website (which has so far failed to make me rich) but at least they cost me very little in either time or money to make. The US abstract expressionist Philip Guston once observed that “The great thing about painting and drawing, as opposed to thinking about it, is the resistance of matter”, but it’s precisely that resistance that makes experimenting with canvas and oil paint so expensive: it confines lesser artists to garrets, and while overcoming that resistance makes a few of them great, I’ll just stick to dabbling on the cheap. 

Which brings me neatly back to one of the recurring themes of this column, namely that ’bits aren’t atoms’. I love to remind you that while you can order a pizza from a picture on your screen, you can’t eat the picture. That observation was actually true long before the computer age – you can admire a lobster in a Willem Kalf still life but you can’t eat it, and that painting was made using pigment particles suspended in oil, not bits. Representations of any kind, whether bits, or paint, or words on a page, aren’t the things they represent, even if modern technologies conspire to make us forget that. 

I’m a great admirer (wouldn’t say follower because he didn’t want to be followed) of the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana. He’s not much remembered nowadays, and was never popular in England or the USA where linguistic philosophy still rules. 

His major mature work ‘Realms Of Being’ proposed that there are four such realms: Matter, which is all that exists and of which everything is made; Essence which consists of configurations, images and representations of matter; Truth, which contains just that subset of essences that actually correspond to material things; and Spirit, by which he meant the intelligence of living creatures, via which they perceive and process essences. We can never see matter directly, only perceive images of it, and that these images correspond well enough with actual material objects – so we don’t bump into trees or step off cliffs – is thanks to evolution honing our senses to fit our particular niche well enough. 

Most important of all, essences can’t do anything, they can’t affect matter directly: there is no magic. There are indeed dreams and imaginary objects, but they can only affect the world of matter if they persuade us to move, to do something. Santayana’s Doctrine Of Essences applies not only to the inedibility of digital pizzas, but to everything we do, and it’s a particularly powerful tool in these times of digital imagery, deepfakes and fake news. For example saying that we are ‘in control of the virus’ doesn’t affect the transmission rate of SARS-CoV-2 one little bit: only doing stuff, like vaccinating, hand washing, social distancing and mask-wearing can do that. Make America Great Again does nothing to increase the well being of Americans unless accompanied by policies that affect the material world. Sticks And Stones do indeed Break Bones, but words do not (though they can incite people to use baseball bats to accomplish that). A painting can change the world only by inspiring some people to do something, like go on a crusade or resist a dictator. 

In his recent book ‘Narrative Economics’ the US economist Robert J. Shiller attempts to apply a similar doctrine to the dismal science. He notices that people’s economic behaviour is not governed solely by self-interest nor by rational choice as current orthodoxies would have it, but by the stories people tell themselves, or are told by their friends or the media, about what is happening in the world and what that might do to their own future prospects. Take hoarding bog-roll for example...     

 [Dick Pountain is rather sorry that Augmented Reality can’t ever let you Undo the world]