Notes from cory's class

# 060208 Disassembly

## Agenda
- INTERNET ART
- EDITING IN HEX
- steal a jodi popup window
- pagesucker
- intro to perl, page scraping

## Roll Call
mike
charles
daniuelle
o
catherine
ck
rapheal
lee

## Internet Art

- 386 DX
[http://oss.jodi.org]
home computer band called 386 DX
sets u a 386 PC has it do midi and voice synth
performing music on stage, rock-star conventions
moshitng, videos, steege lieghts
compureter draws computer screensaves type visuals too
the computer's the star, although the prgrammer playes a geyboard like a keytar. but he wears a tshirt that says "not the artist"
pretty frickin great
circe 1998: "california dreaming
2001: "rape me"

[easylife.org/386dx]

1995: blahblahblah sites: sites he ahd found at the time that just had the words "blah blah blah" on them to see if hte page worked. no google, no decent search engines.

alexi shulgin

his new thing is called WIMP - windows VJ tool/turns windows into OpenGL-ish transformations

cory's noticing a theme- tkaing pop detritus and putting it somewhere it doens't belong using technically obsolete tools. eg, cory's site, alexi (nirvana-->386), ascii art ensemble

- Deep ASCII
Ascii Art Ensemble converted "Deep Throat" to an ascii movie.
ASCII History of Moving Images

- VinylVideo
store images on vinyl LPs -
alexi and asaciie art ensebmle teamed up on this one too

http://www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/

- History of art for airports
Vuk redid all of art history in bathroom-man illustrator style
late 1990s: illustrator came out in full effect

http://www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/history

Vuk pulled a disappearing act at the height of his fame

## Documenta done
every 10 yrs there's a huge art show in germany called "Documenta"
its like the whitney biennial times 20
first time there was a website for documenta, early in the wev, ppl didn't really have a hanfle on the web yet. when the festival was over, they were gonna take down the website. a very "art" concept; we put this up for the show and we're taking it down now.
"its a concept that's really relavent for file sharing and stuff"
Vuk copied the whole site the night before they took it down and reposted it as "Documenta Done"
ppl called him a "hacker"; all he did was copy the webite

jodi was featured at DOcumenta
it was the first time that the art world and the internet world met (and decided that they didn't like each other)
they wanted jodi to show their website on a local server; they didn't want anyone else to be able to get in
trying to get out to see jodi's exhibit would crash the computer

## Heath Bunting

[http://www.irational.org/cgi-bin/front/front.pl]

posted the london white pages to the net, had ppl call them. the art was phones ringing in london. it was a big deal at the time; showed the dissolution of distance

## ASCII Star Wars via Telnet

telnet://towel.blinkenlights.nl
http://www.blinkenlights.nl/thereg/

## ANSI



from wikipedia:

ANSI art is a computer artform that was widely used at one time on BBSes. It is similar to ASCII art, but constructed from a larger set of 256 letters, numbers, and symbols. Some ANSI artists take advantage of the cursor control sequences within ANSI X3.64 in order to create animations, commonly referred to as ANSImations. ANSI art and text files which incorporate ANSI codes carry the de facto .ANS file extension.

ANSI art is considerably more flexible than ASCII art, because the particular character set it uses contains symbols intended for drawing, such as a wide variety of box-drawing characters and block characters that dither the foreground and background color. It also adds accented characters and math symbols that often find creative use among ANSI artists.

The popularity of ANSI art encouraged the creation of a powerful shareware package called TheDraw coded by Ian E. Davis in 1986. Not only did it considerably simplify the process of making an ANSI art screen from scratch, but it also included a variety of "fonts", large letters constructed from box and block characters, and transition animations such as dissolve and clock. Mysteriously, no new versions of TheDraw emerged after version 4.63 in 1993, but in later years a number of other ANSI editors appeared, some of which are still maintained today.

The decline of both BBSes and DOS users has made it difficult for many users to even view ANSI animations. As a consequence, this form of art is no longer practiced to the degree it once was.

## Cracked BBS screens

- BBS welcome screens used ANSi graphics
- holy crap, cory's emulating the commodore64
- emulator's called "Power64"
- kids in europe are hijacking this new medium to get famous


## Commodore64
- first time computer fgames were on floppies rather than cartridges; it was the first time that computer games could be cracked. kids, mainly in europe, started cracking it, putting their name into the "registered to" field.
- Pretty quickly ppl started putting animations onscreen before the game loaded.
- Pretty soon they coelesced into "computer gangs" and started mirroring real street gangs and grafitti that had been around 15 yrs earlier in nyc.
- they approrpiated a hip hop aesthetic

### Avantgarde intro screen
- screen scrolling
- shout outs to friends
- cory found these guys and interviewed them
- they thought of it like they were in the masons; an undrground secret society

### Eaglesoft Incorporated
cracked marble maddness

### What gives you status?
- who's crack it first
- dissing the competition
- compressing the files
- adding cheat screens

### F4CG
- "fantastic four cracking group"
sounds like a early 80s hacking group

## Hacking Hex
- Hex is a way of encoding 1s and 0s that isn't as annoying as strings of 00011100
- hex is a mod-16 system: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F

### Headers
- a beginning part of the file that tells programs what kind of file it is

### Compression
- lets say we have an all black img.
- no compression would look like 000000000000...
- with compression, we could just say "256 zeros"
- BMP files: there's a color lookup table and then image data
- cory: aliasing is gonna come back as a design element

### Assignment for next wk
- make something using this
- ie, write something in hex/aftereffects
- there're lots of annying and frustrating things that you'll discover
- exporting movs in AE is really annoying

## Pagesucker
- lets you clone websites