Month: May 2014

Digital art exists, there is a trading place for that

Interesting conference this week in Mozilla office in Paris. Chris Messina @chrismessina stopped by, invited by FivebyFive, to share his current hobby. Digital art.

He discussed several aspects of digital art : what is it, what does it look like, how could it be tomorrow, provided that the technology evolve. And the essential question behind : in the era of pixels and beats being multiplied in one click at no (visible) cost, how could digital artist survive and get paid for their creations.

Well. First it is a matter of faith and value. Either you don’t care, and you copy like hell. Or you believe that artists have a special role to play in our society, and deserve your support. Second, you need to have a place where digital artists are offering their work to a public. Reproducing the principles of commercial gallery. Third, to refrain the hacking, you may enable a versioning of the art pieces. Versioning will create scarcity, which is a fundamental for value creation for art.

Let’s say. I am a fan of unicorn drawing, I buy a digital drawing on the internet, I get a place to store it and a certificate. When I get bored owning it, I can sell it to another unicorn addict. Chris Messina presented to us a platform which enables that scenario. It is named Neonmob https://www.neonmob.com/ and is in beta version. With Neonmob, you acquire art piece, for free or for money, it comes with a certificate – limited editions are stamped, thanks to a bitcoin-like crypto operation. The platform allows you to track if your art piece is extremely rare, or very common, which helps you to define a value to your collection.

 

Note that @marklor reminded his friends that ‘deviant art’ http://www.deviantart.com/ is also a platform allowing to do more or less the same. I let you benchmarking both solutions.

That evening was really interesting cause it covered at the same time the question of what is digital art (a drawing, an animated GIF, a programmable image, a piece of music created with movement sensors, an image animated via wind sensor, …), why is it necessary to create scarcity in digital art, how to collect and enjoy your digital art… This is certainly just the beginning of the questions technologist and art lovers will have to think about and share.

[Musée] Art contemporain, du côté de chez Cartier

fondation cartier 30 ansLa fondation Cartier fête 30 années de mécénat tourné vers l’art contemporain. Une occasion pour aller visiter ce lieu, posé rive gauche, le long du boulevard Raspail. Cette tour de verre accueille s’élève sur plusieurs étages, et accueille dans son sous-sol, et son rez-de-chaussée des œuvres rapportés de rétrospectives précédentes. Les pieds de la tour sont plantés dans jardin, qui lui aussi est une œuvre d’art. Que peut-on observer dans cette exposition anniversaire ? L’art contemporain a ceci d’intéressant qu’il a souvent un parti pris de caractère, et risque donc de détourner aussi bien que d’étonner son spectateur. Je ne partagerai donc ici que les œuvres qui m’ont tapée dans l’œil, dans le désordre, et vous laisse le soin de visiter l’exposition pour me signaler les autres pièces qui vous paraîtraient maîtresses.

–          « Fishnet » de Jivya Soma Mashe. Une toile très classique, comparée au reste des pièces présentées. Elle représente une scène de pêche, délicate, en deux tons.

jivya soma mashe fishnet paris - Copy

–          ”In bed” de Ron Mueck. Une sculpture terriblement réaliste d’une femme mélancolique dans un lit. Réaliste, mais également géante. Pas un visiteur ne reste silencieux ou immobile devant cette vision, frappante de réalisme.

femme geante bis

–          Moébius. Représenté par deux carnets, effeuillés et soigneusement alignés sur les murs. Le trait précis du maître ne peut que séduire. Une projection d’un film en 3D est également programmée. Moébius y met en valeur la légèreté par le vol de vaisseau, la danse effrayante de créatures filiformes, la course des corps dans une végétation bondissante.

carnet moebius

–          Les objets amusants de Takeshi Kitano – oui le cinéaste. Mi-animal, mi-machine, Takeshi Kitano transforme des insectes, des poissons ou des mammifères en moteur de tank, roue motrice de train…

gosse d artistegosse d artiste tergosse d artiste quatre

 

–          Les lampes en pliage de Issey Miyake, qui éclairent la pièce principale de l’exposition, mais également le jardin.

issey miyakke in-ei

Justement, parlons-en du jardin qui cerne la tour Cartier. Il est vert, sauvage, mais structuré. Certaines installations sont des acquisitions de la fondation, des pierres agencées, un mini-auditorium composé de deux bancs et un lavoir. Une roulotte sert des boissons. Je n’aurai pas le temps d’en profiter  de grosses gouttes de pluie s’écrasent sur mon carnet et me font fuir. Reste un couple d’amoureux attablé qui discute sagement sous un parapluie…

 

Note : autres billets relatifs aux musées https://poulpita.com/tag/musee/

Ordering an orange juice at W3C bar

ordering at the bar

Little tiny things that would make my W3C life better…

Those who contribute to W3C know that it is a real experience, mixing technical, human and procedural aspects. Trying to think about a better W3C, there a few things I’d like to share, hoping the next W3C Advisory Board will fix it –with or without me. As this requires several posts, here is the episode 1 season 1 on little tiny things that would make our W3C life better. And it is named ‘Ordering an orange juice at W3C bar’

Bars. We all know what it is to enter the first time in a bar, lets say in a new town, or even an unknown country. If this place is really really new, you don’t know what are the customs. You may wonder how to get your orange juice (or beer, or wine, or sake, or tomato juice, whatever you drink in bars). Can you get a table on your own, or will someone allocate you one ? Do you get served by a kind waiter, do you need to order at the bar, or do you place order from the electronic table itself ? Do you need to pay directly, or later. It may not be the most natural thing to shout ‘call me the director of this bar, I need to understand how things are ruling here’. In that case you may look at the others, try to read announcement, observing the ambiance. And that is part of the discovery adventure.

W3C. If you want to contribute in W3C, you may enjoy the same experience. When rambling from one working group to another, you discover different spirits (more or less rock and roll) but also different tools. Example. You wanna track bugs on a spec ? Several options. Use W3C tracker, suitable for issue, action. Use W3C bugzilla for bugs. Use github for everything. WABTC ! What a barrier to contributors. If you combine this with the fact that survival kit is not always provided, contributor may spend a lots of time understanding the working rules of a specific working group. They may call the director to get explanation about how things are ruling. But W3C should also help them to enter smoothly in the working group.

What to do to make W3C a place you naturally order your orange juice? I would not wish to have all W3C working group adopting the same tools. People want freedom there. But what would help would be.

–          When creating a new working group, train the team (chair and editors) to the entire set of tools, with a rationale for their specific advantage. This should include the github platform, which is widely used in W3C, popular to some developers, but not the usual framework for all of them (and I don’t even talk about non-developers, like me who are also reasonable part of the working force and contributors in W3C). But it could also include platforms such as Discourse that some poeple like Robin Berjon is experiencing.

–          Document accurately working group customs and working methods, including some of the process to follow up on the specifications. How to open a bug (who, when, where), how to contribute to a bug (who, when, where), how to close a bug (who, when, where). This should be made in an easy place to find, with cool design… And if all answers to those questions is ‘it depends’, then the working group team should revise its working method.

Lets make W3C a cool place to contribute, lets make contributors life easier !

 

Note : picture by Mista Boos in Creative Commons https://www.flickr.com/photos/mistaboos/

[book] L’écriture : travail de mémoire, de force et d’équilibre

Le weekend dernier se tenait à Aix en Provence les Journées des Écrivains du Sud, dans la majestueuse cour de l’Hôtel Maynier d’Oppède, à deux pas de la Cathédrale Saint Sauveur et de l’Archevêché. Un bel endroit, pour de belles rencontres. On y croise Fréderic Mitterrand (en tenue décontracté, entouré de groupies de tous âge, qu’il accueille patiemment), quelques caricatures d’intellectuels parisiens (coupe longue, écharpe en soie…), mais surtout, on y écoute la parole d’écrivains sur le processus d’écriture. Laissez-moi-vous rapporter quelques points de vue sur cette question, entendus au cours des nombreuses conférences qui animaient ces rencontres. Deux perspectives, de deux écrivaines, qui m’ont paru particulièrement pertinentes, généreuses et sages.

Mazarine Pingeot. Ecrivaine. Fille de François Mitterrand. Longtemps gardée au secret. Que nous dit Mazarine sur les raisons et les procédés d’écriture. Elle y mêle évidemment son parcours singulier, et son enfance contraignante, où il lui était devenu une seconde nature de ne parler, ni trop, ni trop précisément, au sein de sa famille et à l’extérieur. Afin de ne pas trahir le secret des autres. Dans cette situation particulière, la lecture et l’écriture lui ont paru le media idéal pour dire les choses interdites, rencontrer des univers bavards et transparents. Voilà pour la motivation de se construire une vie d’écrivain. Maintenant pour le geste d’écriture en lui-même. La fiction apparaît à Pingeot comme la voie royale, pour retrouver sa mémoire confisquée, étouffée par nécessité. Car les choses non-dites, nous rappelle-t-elle, disparaissent (un argument qui me touche particulièrement, mais il s’agit là d’une autre histoire). La recherche de cette mémoire est donc un travail de chaque instant, un travail de récupération, qui oblige l’auteur à saisir chaque écho, chaque fulgurance, et de les retranscrire avec une voie singulière, un style particulier. Dans quel but ? Mazarine s’explique. Pour résoudre le problème d’avoir été crée par l’histoire des autres (un peu le lot de chacun, n’est ce pas ?). Pour se réconcilier avec soi. Pour accéder ainsi à une certaine forme de liberté.

Autre écrivaine. Autre perspective Maylis de Kerangal présente le roman comme un espace, dans lequel toute forme d’usage des mots est soluble : le fait divers, la biographie, la chanson, l’histoire, le poème. Genre malléable, sans règle – le mauvais genre, résume-t-elle – c’est également le lieu de l’hyper-décision de l’auteur. L’auteur doit donc être porté pour couper, trancher, décider, percer les mots, et créer une œuvre vraie. Ainsi Mayliss partage avec nous son processus de création. Elle décide de l’ambiance de son ouvrage. Plutôt intérieur, extérieur, ouvert, fermé, lumineux, sombre. Elle dégage ensuite une histoire, un univers, puis une question – qui peut apparaitre au fil de l’écriture. Et elle l’alimente. Par de la documentation, et par les émotions, les expériences, les rencontres que cette démarche documentaire fait émerger. Un processus qui se nourrit des matériaux rencontrés en chemin. Un processus qui nécessite un élan au départ. Ce que Maylis appelle la vague. Un mouvement, pétri d’énergie, mais aussi de risque de retomber, de céder au vertige. Le roman ne se résous et n’émerge donc que lorsque l’écrivain sait concilier les forces contradictoires qui le traversent : la terreur d’écrire et le désir d’écrire.

Deux voix, l’une prônant le travail de mémoire nécessaire à une liberté, l’autre prônant le travail volontaire et courageux.

Deux voies que les auteurs pourront mêler pour trouver leur propre chemin vers l’écriture.

 

Note : je ne peux que vous recommander de lire Corniche Kennedy de Maylis de Kerangal, un roman dense et court.

 

More web developers in W3C !

palette_couleur_by_romain

W3C Advisory Board elections are getting lots of traction from W3C members. Questions, suggestions, initiatives are multiplied and when being part of the candidates, you need to take position, agreeing disagreeing… For example voting system discussion (see the W3C public process mailing list thread). But there is behind this voting question, the question of W3C participants. Who are they ? Do they really represent the web ? Do they really represent the web developer comunity.

But first, why would we need more web developers ? Actually, we do have some smart and brilliant ones. But most of the time, the ones working for big companies, big structures or universities. But they might not represent the actual developer who will be torturing the features and APIs embedded in browsers. Some of them are present, but a majority is not.

As a tourist. Since I entered the web community, I am going into web developers conferences to learn, meet people, evangelize also security. And each time I am explaining I am representing my company in W3C, I can see stars in the eyes of my interlocutor. “Such a great job, so lucky to be there ?”. And I am always thinking. “Well, if I can do it, you should be able to do it, especially because you have already designed a super-nice-smart-cool web app, something I have never done in my life, but which is on my to do list “.

As a chair. In the working group I am chairing, we are in theory 50 people, but 10 of them are driving the work. They are mainly browser vendors and there is one service provider. Off course all those guys are educated and connected with web developers community. But it happens that W3C needs also to design APIs which is not going to be used by the 3 or 4 use cases that group participants are thinking about, for them, and for their own developer community. And it happens also that sometimes we miss a feedback from the real life (as an example, in the web crypto API, we asked, please mister or mrs web dev, give me your opinion on the best design, but reviews are always hard to get).

What I think. I think that W3C needs to interact more with the web developers community, not only during events and conferences (which is already something great, see http://www.w3.org/Talks/), but also *in* W3C. We need fresh blood. To review and challenge the spec. To make sure the feature designed will be actually widely used, wider than initially thought. To help in prioritizing the features we want to develop (we may call our mate, our mum, our brother to decide which feature is the most urgent, but they may have exactly the same opinion as ours). To edit specifications (see the very good post from Robin Berjon explaining how it is difficult to have editors). To beta-test API prior it is shipped. To counter balance the opinion of the super-hyper-expert who maybe lost his or her freshness.

How to have more web developers ?

With a 2 steps approach.

One. Make sure that all working group participants, chairs, editors are always ambassadors of the W3C. Getting traction from web developers they meet, convincing them to look at the spec, comment, be involved. This is very easy for popular specifications like EME (everyone has something to say about EME, right ?), WebRTC (which is so powerfull that it pulls entire conferences), Service Workers (which is promoted by charismatic people). This can only happen if all W3C participants are educated on a regular basis on what is going on, by receiving training, regular reviews on domain activities. The quest here is information for all,…

Two. Make sure there is a structure to welcome the web developers. W3C has different members status. You can be a startup, you can be an invited expert, but the individual membership is not yet available. When Brian Kardell pointed me on a group of people in W3C setting up the basis of a web developer individual membership, I realized that it was exactly the missing piece. This ‘webizen’ task force https://www.w3.org/wiki/Webizen will share the result of its thinking in June 2014, during the W3C Advisory Council meeting, where all W3C members representatives meet. Webizen brainstorming is open to anyone, so if you feel you have ideas, do not hesitate. The quest here is W3C membership for all.

I really hope that W3C and its current members will succeed in lowering the entry barrier to W3C and benefit from having all players around the table, including web developers. Integration of web developers into W3C circles, getting them more involved in discussions and decisions, as candidate to AB election, I support that !

 

Note : picture ‘Gamme’ by Romain https://www.flickr.com/photos/xyotiogyo/