In hindsight, this piece is an obvious logical extension of the original painting. Van Gogh’s style calls out for this kind of treatment – it’s so full of energy and dynamism and spiralling brushwork. I wonder how something like this could be extended to his more demure work, or how other styles of paintings might express themselves.

Pointillist pieces presented as boiling, churning clouds of swarming dots? Impressionistic paint daubs oozing around umbrella-holding women and ballerinas? Dadaist art that crashes your computer and sets your battery on fire?

I started off strong, identifying the obvious Julie Payette portrait immediately.

But the rest of them took a little more doing. I’m proud that I correctly identified the Silken Laumann portrait (the skulling boat was a pretty easy clue), Belinda Stronach (with a teacup full of nuts and bolts), Adrienne Clarkson, and I recognised Denise Donlon but it took some effort to recall her name. A few ladies from outside my realm of knowledge made it past me – dancers, equestrians and photographers (shame on me!) who I suspect I should get to know more about. She certainly has a wealth of portrait subjects to draw from!

He’s been in the news a lot lately because of his cancer and losing his jaw (and speech), and he’s been churning out a series of amazingly thoughtful articles lately about his life and observations that all deserve reading. Nothing, however, seems to set the internet on fire like his comments about video games not being art. This latest article is only one of many he’s written over the years calling out video games as some kind of art impostor.

It’s a ridiculous statement – but I think he knows it. He doesn’t even play video games. Yet every time he antagonizes them everyone in the game field crawl out of the woodwork and start posting defenses of the industry, examining the definition of art, and engage in passionate re-examinations of the game production model.

The truth is that defining anything as art (or not art) is a fool’s errand – the definition is so broad and vague that you can make a case that anything (a urinal for instance) is art and anything else (a Sistine Chapel built on contract by common labourers for instance) is not.

What is clear to anyone who plays them is that video games are more visually and narratively sophisticated than ever before – they evoke emotions and change perspectives and inspire. Movements like the “New Games Journalism” are sprouting up all around to lend legitimacy and real criticism to games as a creative storytelling medium.

I think Roger is wise to the idea that by fanning the flames he’s circuitously pushing the video game industry to stand up for itself. Like Louis Leroy who called out the impressionists for displaying a bunch of unfinished paintings, Ebert’s high-profile anti-game statements are going to go down in history as a catalyzing force that lends legitimacy to the medium.

I read that there was a sidewalk chalk rebellion a few years ago in the Glebe – some kids got fined for doodling on the pavement and the entire neighborhood came out to scribble in solidarity.  I’ve been keeping my eyes peeled for a yearly event but haven’t spotted one yet.

There was lots of crying but no permanent damage – unlike the effects of riding this mean-looking rusty bug trike into groups of neighborhood kids, which at the very least is guaranteed to cause a few cases of tetanus.

This was one of the fantastic finds at the Art in the Park festival in the Glebe a few weekends ago, but I’ve sadly misplaced the artist’s name. He had a whole corner of the park full of sharp pointy rusted metal things for evil step-parents to give their kids.

I’d never heard of her before, but I was instantly smitten by her work – I think her landscapes are brilliant. According to her website she paints it all in acrylic, and then carves the paint back down to reveal the underpainting, which leads to all kinds of really interesting contrasts. The colours in her landscapes seem to shimmer. I’m not really as over the moon about her abstract work – it’s great, but not stunning like her scenery. For instance:

Every Day Is A Winding Road – Lori Richards

And then the invented the “Pure” card. I don’t think I’ve ever full-out lusted for a piece of computer hardware before. I feel dirty and greedy and consumerist… but it computes 1.1 BILLION ray intersections a second, and it fits inside your computer.

Let’s do a little math.

If I’m rendering a movie at 640 by 480 pixels for television, say, and all of my polygons were non-reflective and didn’t cast shadows and weren’t antialiased, that’s 307,200 ray intersections to compute.

That means I can render 3580 frames per second.

I feel a funny tingle all over.

Just for fun, -with- all those special enhancements, a ridiculously convoluted scene with five mirrors all facing eachother and always reflecting five times, with each reflection subsequently antialiased, could be rendered at 28 frames per second, or faster than cinema real-time.

Update: They got back to me with a price. I can have the Pure Card for the low low price of $4500 CDN. It’s probably worth it, really… (I *know* it’s worth it) but that’s about 3 times what I paid for my computer,
and 10 times it’s current value.