[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.After you have established a slightly larger network of people who have a direct interest in you and what you do,it's important to cultivate their interest.The down side of high speed communication is that things grow old fast.Try to stay in touch with what others are doing.Study online techniques or presentations in areas completelydifferent from yours.Occasionally, through a news group or a mailing, announce a new service that you provide.You now have an online presence to maintain.I liken it to animated neon displays I create in my storefront studiowindow.I feel an obligation to keep things running, and periodically I make a refreshing change.I keep myoutdoor neon clock set to the right time.I have learned over the years that people do notice and do appreciate it.Following UpDon't forget to follow up the responses and requests that you receive.This provides further opportunities topresent yourself and your work in greater detail.You also begin to accumulate information as to what approacheswork and what information or aspect of your work needs further clarification.Your new contacts possiblyprovide more degrees of expansion for your growing personal network.And lastly, don't overlook nonnetworkrelated activities.We often get so involved in trying to locate someone or some service online that we fail tosimply use the phone book.Similarly, the fact that you are working online does not preclude using the mail.Abrochure that can be held and leafed through and grabbed off the shelf without having to boot up and then goonline to retrieve it certainly makes up for its lack of Internet chic.Internet-Based ArtIn the first part of this chapter, we examine the communities of artists and art users on the Internet and theiractivities.In this section, we look at artwork that is actually on the network and art that actually is the network.Again, as mentioned earlier, I am primarily focusing on visual art which tends to be a predominant area in onlineand off-line life.Keep in mind, however, that not all forms of art are represented on the network and that someforms of art are evolving.There may be art forms we have not yet seen which may eventually be so well suited tonetwork interactivity that these forms overshadow the existing media.There are also areas where art formsintersect and overlap.GIFs, for example, may be used to display choreography.We will look at art forms foundon the Internet and the Internet itself as an art form.Art Forms Native to the Internethttp://docs.rinet.ru/ITricks/tig22.htm (8 of 22) [4/18/1999 12:46:02 AM] Tricks of the Internet Gurus tig22.htmMany art forms that have existed in the world of desktop computing have made an easy transition to the Internet.Just about any file format can live on the Internet, and a vast array a file types and program structures can befound.The examples covered next are among the most common and most universal.Image Files: ASCII, GIF, JPEG, and MoreIt wasn't long after the first line printers were outputting text-based information that the desire arose for sometype of graphic display.ASCII art was the earliest visual computer art form, and it has enjoyed a remarkablelongevity.Art work that uses the shapes and locations of text and other ASCII characters forms the basis ofgraphic signatures, ranging from a simple smile-sized creation all the way to immensely complex pictures.Figure22.1 is an example of a relatively simple ASCII art file.Figure 22.1.An ASCII art picture.ASCII art has grown in its sophistication, as well.Programs exist, for example, that can sample a high-resolutionGIF image and then choose ASCII characters that most closely resemble small clusters of pixels, and thus displaya detailed gray-scaled image on a text based screen.Figure 20.2 is an example of this style of a gray-scaleconverted to ASCII file.Newsgroups and archives of ASCII files exist throughout the Internet, and it is an artwhere the only requirements are a text editor and some patience.Figure 20.2.A gray-scale drawing converted to ASCII.A close cousin of ASCII art is ANSI art.Originally, this art form applied to desktop screen effects that used theextended character sets.These character sets redefined character keys as filled blocks, double lines, corners andso on.Also included are the ANSI escape sequences that cause a character to blink, display in higher intensity,clear a line of text, position the cursor, and so on.Because of the nature of how a vt100 screen refreshes itsdisplay, ANSI art has become the low budget animator of the Internet.Clever use of escape sequences (programsexist to facilitate this) allow the creation of animated moving text banners and ASCII cartoons.Compuserve's GIF standard is a reliable and lossless format that allows the exchange of almost all types ofgraphic files native to specific computers or graphics packages.A user can, for example create a file in MacPaintand then either save it or convert it to a GIF.It can be uploaded to an archive and downloaded to an Amiga or aPC for viewing or further conversion.GIFs can be mailed through the use of uuencoding.With the propersoftware and a decent band width, a GIF can be viewed online.Mailers that send and receive MIME understandGIF files, as do Gopher and WWW browsers.As the demand for visual display increases and as modems get faster and more people connect their computers tothe Net via SLIP and PPP, the graphic standard is expanding.Enhanced text effects and fonts and a variety ofgraphic standards are being supported.Popular formats such as JPEG, compressed image files containingenormous amounts of information, are being exchanged.Sound and Media FilesStatic graphic imagery and text aren't the only medium available on the Internet.Sound, and in particular, musichas had an enormous presence on the Net.There are dozens of archives where sheet music and chords areavailable for downloading.There are hundreds of downloadable files containing sound samples for all systemsincluding au files that can play on the Sun /dev/audio device.Sophisticated tools that browse the Web can playsounds embedded in a document in the same manner they display images.A new site named Cirque de laMAMA (http://lancet.mit.edu/cirque/introduction.html) is a multimedia and multidisciplined showcase area.http://docs.rinet.ru/ITricks/tig22.htm (9 of 22) [4/18/1999 12:46:02 AM] Tricks of the Internet Gurus tig22.htmArtists who contribute to this site make use of combined sounds and imagery.Full-scale compositions are stored as MPEG files, a fairly lossless form of compression.One of the mostinteresting applications for music is NetJam, a program developed largely by Craig Latta (fingerlatta@xcf.berkeley.edu for one of the most amusing and interesting, if not longest.plan files I have seen).NetJamallows a virtual real-time jam session between musicians in remote locations.A synchronization server times theinformation so that the musicians do, in effect, interact real-time.There are also archives of existing compositionswhere a user can work in a ones-own-time frame.NetJam information files and program documentation areavailable via FTP at xcf.berkeley.edu /pub/misc/netjam.Video is emerging on the Net as well.There are several sources of video clip files and software for working withvideo.Programs such as CU-SeeMe allow real-time video conferencing across the network.This software (forMac and PC) is publicly available via Gopher or FTP at gated.cornell.edu
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]