Digital Artists Handbook: Game art: theory, communities, resources

Like all digital media, video-games can be designed, produced, deconstructed and re-appropriated within the context of art. Even though the history of video-games is relatively short, it is already rich with examples of artistic experimentation and innovation. Unlike film or video, games still represent a fairly immature medium, slowly evolving to locate itself in mainstream culture. The majority of games often present simplistic or crude visions of interactivity, narrative and aesthetics, but the mediumoffers unique potential for the creation of exciting new forms of art. Like any digital medium the evolution of art/games is  closely tied to the development of Read more

Digital Artists Handbook: Hardware hacking: open hardware and stand alone objects

That’s a broad title. Building your own hardware can mean a lot of different things. To narrow thescope a bit, this article talks about embedded Single Board Computers (SBCs) and microcontrollersfrom birds eye view. An embedded SBC is anything that is complex enough to comfortably host astandard operating system, while a microcontroller is too small for that. PDF: Digital Artists Handbook: Hardware hacking: open hardware and stand alone objects

Digital Artists Handbook: working with others

It is of course a truism, often repeated, that the Internet has been the basis for a revolution in (remote) interpersonal communications, collaboration and data sharing. It is probably safe to say that there would be very few of the Free/Libre and Open Source (FLOSS) projects that exist today without the collaboration technologies the Internet supports. One of the many effects of the powerful tools FLOSS has put in to the hands of creative people is that it has potentially made them more independent. No longer are they reliant on specialists with access to expensive software and hardware to carry out Read more

Digital Artists Handbook: Software Art

The term ‘software art’ acquired a status of an umbrella term for a set of practices approaching software as a cultural construct. Questioning software culturally means not taking for granted, but focusing on, recognising and problematising its distinct aesthetics, poetics and politics captured and performed in its production, dissemination, usage and presence, contexts which software defines and is defined by, histories and cultures built around it, roles it plays and its economies, and various other dimensions. Software, deprived of its alleged ‘transparency’, turns out to be a powerful mechanism, a multifaceted mediator structuring human experience, perception, communication, work and leisure, Read more

Digital Artists Handbook: Working with digital video

Working with digital video is part of many artistic disciplines. Besides single screen narratives, video productions can range from animation, multiple screen installation to interactive work. Still, many aspects of digital video can be traced back to the history of film. The interface of a timeline editing software such as Cinelerra shows a multitrack timeline, a viewing monitor, a bin for clips; echoing the setup of a flatbed table for editing celluloid. PDF: Digital Artists Handbook: Working with digital video

Digital Artists Handbook: Licensing: copyright, legal issues, authorship, media work licensing, Creative Commons

In this article, we will cover a few questions and principles of open content licensing. We will discuss why to use a license and how it helps to give a stable legal background to start a collaboration. As choosing a license means accepting a certain amount of legal formalism, we will see the conditions required to be entitled to use an open license. Using the comparison of the Free Art License and the Creative Commons, we will try to give an accurate picture of the differences that co-exist in the world of open licensing, and approach what distinguishes free from open licenses. Read more

Digital Artists Handbook: Publishing your work

Self publishing is not a new phenomenon. It is the publishing of all media by the author/artists of those works rather than by established, third party publishers. Although self publishing has been around since the beginning of publishing , it has seen a huge increase in activity with the advancement of publishing technology and the World Wide Web. PDF: Publishing your work

Digital Artists Handbook: Blender: Working with 3D

Once upon a time to work with 3d software you’d need a small fortune to get you started – a few thousand Euros for the software, and a few more to partake in a premium rate course or two to learnthe basics. Or you could save your pennies and buy a mute tutorial book, which would invariably goout of date as newer versions of your program would surface, and keyboard short cuts, terminologyand layout would change.   Now the world of 3D computer graphics has opened up and its anyone’s game. Blender potentially replaces the industry standards of Maya, Cinema4D and Read more

Digital Artists Handbook: Working with graphics: Processing

You might have come across the ‘made with Processing’  hyperlink on the internet or heard ofProcessing before. Over the past six years it has become a real phenomenon, allowing creative mindsto access the digital world. Based on a rather simple syntax and minimal interface, Processingsmoothly drives beginners into the scary world of programming.This article is not a tutorial, but rather an attempt to give you a global idea of what the programmingenvironment is, looks like and why it was created. Should you decide it is the tool you need, thisarticle will hopefully provide enough pointers to online and offline resources Read more

Digital Artists Handbook: Graphics

Image reigns supreme. From the thousands of films churned out each year from Nollywood, to the persistent recording of images by security cameras in London to the scaling of windows on your desktop computer, you are already a pixel pusher. But, how can you reign supreme over images? How can you become an active participant in the creation of graphics and move beyond passive consumption. While the distinction between amateur and professional is erased in the Youtube-record-a-video-get-rich-generation, the focus upon high-quality content controlling tools is key. What is the point of mastering verion 3.5 of Killer Graphics App 97’s fuzz Read more

Digital Artists Handbook: Pure Dataflow – Diving into Pd

This article introduces the possibilities of the software Pure Data (Pd), explains a bit why it’s so popular among artists and shows what Pd can be used for. The goal is to help artists decide if Pd is a tool for their own work. Pure Data, or PD for short, is a software written by mathematician and musician Miller S. Puckette. It  has become one of the most popular tools for artists working with digital media. Originally conceived in the late 90s as an environment to create sounds and to compose music, it was soon extended by modules to work Read more