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Copy Paste opened at Piksel in Bergen on the evening of Friday 22nd May. Sadly myself and all of the exhibiting artists were unable to be there but fortunately they live streamed the whole thing.

After all of the uncertainty about whether Copy Paste would go ahead I’m really happy that situation in Bergen has been good enough for the exhibition to welcome visitors. It was sad to not to be in Bergen myself to see everything IRL but I’m thankful to Maite and Gisle, Directors of Piksel, for handling all of the logistics and installation of the works.

Copy Paste exists in two spaces. In the physical studio space visitors can find works by Carol Breen, Constant, Lorna Mills, Duncan Poulton, Eric Schrijver, and Peter Sunde.

Here’s a pixelated look at some of the artworks as captured by me in the UK from the livestream:

Copy Paste also exists as a virtual online exhibition in the Piksel Cyber Salon.

The space is built using Mozilla Hubs and works in your web browser (or VR headset if you have one). In the Cyber Salon you can find works by LoVid, Matthew Plummer-Fernandez + Julien Deswaef, Carol Breen, and Duncan Poulton.

Many thanks Malitzin Cortes for designing this space. You can visit it at any time and all of the live streamed events will also be streamed to there.

Events

Speaking of events check out these upcoming events happening as part of Copy Paste!

Curator’s Tour

24th, 31st, 7th, 14th, 21st June 13:00 - 14:00 Each Sunday at 13:00 - 14:00 CEST I’ll be giving a tour of the exhibition (remotely, obvs), talking a bit about each artwork and how they contribute to the exhibition and explore ideas around copying.

Live Coding Algorave Performance with Alex McLean and Antonio Roberts

29th May 23:00 - 00:00 CEST On 29th May 23:00 - 00:00 myself and Alex McLean will be doing a live coding performance. Alex will be doing his usual patterns of sample based music and visually I’ll be mixing things up a bit.

Authors of the Future

6th June 18:00 - 20:00 CEST An online presentation from Constant of Authors of the Future, with a focus on the Cinemas Sauvage license. This license shows the pitfalls and fun (im)possibility of coming to an agreement with a bunch of anarchist people who do not want to agree on a rule.

Internet Archaeology for Beginners

7th June 16:00 - 18:00 CEST Join artist Duncan Poulton on 7th June 16:00 - 18:00 CEST for a virtual workshop which offers an introduction to techniques for mining and misusing the web for creative reuse. Attendees will visit the depths of the internet that search engines don’t want you to find, and learn to make their own digital collages from the materials they gather.

To book onto Duncan’s workshop and find out more about the other eents send an e-mail to piksel20(at)piksel(dot)no

Hope y’all enjoy the exhibitoin!

I’m happy to announce that I am curating the exhibition Copy Paste, taking place at Piksel in Norway from 22nd May - 21st June.

If you are an artist, then you have no doubt copied the work of others. This copying can range from using pages from a magazine in collage, adopting the style of an artist, or simply being inspired by the work of an artist. This natural process of copying, taught to us at every stage of our artistic development, is burdened by a very complex and messy set of laws and social conventions which define and limit how we can use copying within our practices. These don’t take into account exceptions or nuances, and come from a historical world where artworks were scarce physical objects, and don’t translate well into a world where culture is abundant and can be accessed and copied at will.

Being an artist who copies is to be an artist working in this murky grey area of right and wrong.

For those artists, I have curated Copy Paste. This exhibition features the work of nine artists and art collectives who all incorporate copying as a core aspect of their work. Taking the form of a physical exhibition at Piksel in Norway, an online exhibition, and an event series, the exhibition aims to show that copying is natural.

Exhibiting artists: Carol Breen, Constant, LoVid, Lorna Mills, Matthew Plummer-Fernandez + Julien Deswaef, Duncan Poulton, Eric Schrijver, Peter Sunde.

There will be a few events happening throughout the exhibition, taking place online and IRL at Piksel’s studio in Norway. More details of that will follow here and on Piksel’s website. Thanks so much to Piksel for the invitation to curate this exhibition :-)

On 16th May 22:00 BST I’ll be doing a gif-enfused audiovisual performance for the Well Now WTF? exhibition.

In the 30 minute performance I’ll be live coding music and sounds for all of the gifs currently stuck at home! If you want to be at the party send me a gif of yourself dancing against a green screen or solid colour by 12th May and tune in to the performance over on Twitch :-)

I’d like to return to the fifth video in the Design Yourself series to show how i did a glowing neon trail. The video is heavily themed around robots, and if you look in the background you’ll see that it’s actually a circuit board.

The circuit diagram was a random one I built using the rather excellent Fritzing software. If you’re ever looking for high quality SVG illustrations of electrical components then Fritzing is a great resource. I brought the exported SVG diagram into Blender to illustrate it a bit.

If you look closely you can see that the circuit board has a glowing trail. To achieve this effect I followed this tutorial:

At around 6:00 the author tries to find the point where the neon trail position loops but does it visually. At first I was doing the same but then I remembered that in the past I had faced a similar problem when trying to loop the Wave texture. To get an answer for that question I consulted the Blender Stackexchange site

I adapted this a bit and came up with the following solution: To seamlessly loop the neon trail effect first insert keyframe with the Value of the Add node set to 0. Move to a point along the timeline where you want it to loop and add another keyframe to the Value of the Add node and type (0.3333*pi)/$scale (but replace $scale with whatever the Scale of the Wave texture is). My node setup is the same as in the video but here it is as well:

Now when you play the animation the neon trail effect will loop seamlessly!

For the fifth video in the Design Yourself series I was faced yet again with the task of doing a typewriter text effect. Yay… For each of the videos the participants wrote a poem to go with it. The poems were a really important part of the video so they needed to have a prominent role in the video beyond standard Youtube subtitles. At the time I was producing the video I didn’t yet know whether or not I wanted to use the typewriter text effect but I certainly wanted to explore it as a possibility. One of the first times I tried to achieve this was back in 2019 when I was making the video to promote the Algorave at the British Library.

Since making that video, to add subtitles to a the second Design Yourself video I was using a Natron plugin that would allow synced playback of an audio file via VLC. By using this approach I could seek through the audio and add keyframes to the Text node when the text changed. This mostly worked but sometimes the audio did go out of sync. At some point afterwards I wondered if I could offload the editing of the subtitles - and maybe even subtitles with a typewriter text effect - onto another more specialised program and then import that into Natron later for compositing. Subtitle editing software already exist and are much better suited to editing subtitles than Natron.

I explained this on the Natron forum to one of the developers and some time later the Text node gained the ability to read an SRT subtitle file! An SRT file subtitle file format that is widely used on video files. If you open one up you can see exactly how it works:

The way the SRT reading function works in the new Text node is it basically gets the time stamps of the text in the SRT file and assigns them to keyframes in the Text node.Yay! :-)

The next stage in the equation was to find a subtitle editor capable of doing a typewriter text effect. There are several open source solutions out there including Subtitle Composer and Gaupol. One of the available software, Aegisub, has quite the feature set. It has a karaoke mode which, as you would expect, can let you edit the timing of words as they appear on screen.

This sounds like the solution to my problem of getting a typerwriter text effect but there’s one big problem. The karaoke text mode only works if the file is exported as an .ssa file format. The SubStation Alpha file format supports lot of formatting options, including typewriter-like text effects. This is good except for Natron only supports .srt file format, and even if it did support .ssa files, I’d still want control over formatting.

To make this work in an SRT file what I needed was for , at user defined poitns, each word to be appended. For example:

1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:01,000 Some

2 00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:02,000 Some BODY

3 00:00:02,000 --> 00:00:03,000 Some BODY once

4 00:00:03,000 --> 00:00:04,000 Some BODY once told me

5 00:00:04,000 --> 00:00:05,000 Some BODY once told me the

6 00:00:05,000 --> 00:00:06,000 Some BODY once told me the world

7 00:00:06,000 --> 00:00:07,000 Some BODY once told me the world is

8 00:00:07,000 --> 00:00:08,000 Some BODY once told me the world is gonna

9 00:00:08,000 --> 00:00:09,000 Some BODY once told me the world is gonna roll

10 00:00:09,000 --> 00:00:10,000 Some BODY once told me the world is gonna roll me

It was clear that at this time the Aegisub SRT export can’t do this so in the meant time I made a feature request and reverted back to using the method I described in July 2019 Development Update which makes use of Animation Nodes.

But even then I had a few issues. To synchronise the text with the speech I was expecting that I could use keyframes to control the End value in Trim Text node. However, as explained by Animation Nodes’ developer, the keyframes of custom nodes aren’t visible on the Dope Sheet and so animate anyway. To get around this I used the suggestion by the developer:

I suggest you create a controller object in the 3d view that you can animate normally. Than you can use eg the x location of that object to control the procedual animation.

This worked in the viewer but not when I rendered it. What I instead got was just one frame rendered multiple times. This problem has been reported in Animation Nodes but the solutions suggested there didn’t work. Neither did doing an OpenGL render.

However, I came across this interesting bug repot . It seems like the crashing I was experiencing back in 2019 is a known bug. The solution suggested there was to use a script to render the project instead of the built in render function.

import bpy

scene = bpy.context.scene render = scene.render directory = render.filepath

for i in range(scene.frame\_start, scene.frame\_end): scene.frame\_set(i) render.filepath = f"{directory}{i:05d}" bpy.ops.render.render(write\_still = True)

render.filepath = directory

The downside of this script is that it doesn’t show the animation being rendered. It also doesn’t allow you to set the start or end point of the render but that is easily accomplished by changing the range in line 7.

After all of that I was able to render the text with the rest of the video! Finished video is below:

I’m getting one step closer to being able to easily create and edit typewriter text using open source software…