Shiraz Art House • Daralhokoomeh Project • May/June 2014 As part of Bitrates - an exhibition curated by Morehshin Allahyari and Mani Nilchiani at the Dar-ol-Hokoomeh Project, Shiraz, Iran – I asked 50 artists to create or curate an animated GIF with a short snippet of audio, to be looped together ad infinitum at GIFbites.com. For the opening of Bitrates on May 23rd a select version of this project will be displayed in the gallery, followed by a complete showcase of all the GIFs for the GIFbites exhibition, opening on May 30th in Shiraz Art House (Daralhokoomeh Project). GIFbites In an era of ubiquitous internet access and the extensive post-production of HD and 3D images, the animated GIF has an ironic status. Small in dimension and able to be squeezed through the slenderest of bandwidths, GIFs hark back to a World Wide Web designed for 640×480 pixel screens; a web of scrolling text, and not much else. Brought on – ironically – by their obsolescence the animated GIF has become a primary medium of communication on the contemporary net. The simplicity, freedom and openness of the medium allows even the most amateur web enthusiast to recuperate images plucked from TV, cinema, YouTube, CCTV footage, cartoons, videogames and elsewhere in their desire to communicate an idea or exclamation to the world. GIFbites is a mesmerising homage to brevity and the potential of poor, degraded images to speak beyond the apparent means of their bitrates. The results will hopefully navigate the web for many years to come, stimulating cut-and-paste conversations undefinable by Google’s search algorithms. GIFbites Project Page • بیت بر ثانیه / Bitrates Facebook Event Coming Soon: Bitrates/GIFbites Lp! Featuring the work of 50 artists

Morehshin Allahyari Mizaru/Kikazaru/Kyoungzaru Kim Asendorf & Ole Fach

Eltons Kuns Anthony Antonellis Lawrence Lek

LaTurbo Avedon Gretta Louw Jeremy Bailey

Sam Meech Alison Bennett Rosa Menkman

Emma Bennett A Bill Miller Benjamin Berg

Lorna Mills Hannah Black Shay Moradi

Andrew Blanton Nora O Murchú Nicolas Boillot

Alex Myers Tim Booth Peggy Nelson

Sid Branca David Panos Nick Briz

Eva Papamargariti elixirix Holly Pester

Jennifer Chan Antonio Roberts Theodore Darst

Daniel Rourke Angelina Fernandez Alfredo Salazar-Caro

Annabel Frearson Rafia Santana Carla Gannis

Jon Satrom Emilie Gervais Erica Scourti

Shawné Michaelain Holloway Krystal South Nathan Jones

Arjun Ram Srivatsa Nick Kegeyan Linda Stupart

Jimmy Kipple Sound Daniel Temkin

The universe (which others call The Twitter) is composed of every word in the English language; Shakespeare's folios, line-by-line-by-line; the Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, exploded; Constantine XI, in 140 character chunks; Sun Tzu's Art of War, in its entirety; the chapter headings of JG Ballard, in abundance; and definitive discographies of Every. Artist. Ever...

All this, I repeat, is true, but one hundred forty characters of inalterable wwwtext cannot correspond to any language, no matter how dialectical or rudimentary it may be.

What is ROFLCon? It's a biennial convention (this year was its third) held to celebrate and discuss internet memes and the celebrity that is often created alongside them. This year's invited guests included Chuck "Nope" Testa, Antoine Dodson, who became famous when he appeared on local news after a home invasion, Paul "Bear" Vasquez, AKA the "Double Rainbow" guy, and "Tron Guy" Jay Maynard. There are also internet celebs of a different ilk — people who have created loved and admired "works," like Chris Torres, creator of Nyan Cat, Matt Oswald, creator of the "Me Gusta" guy, or film editor Duncan Robson, creator of the very well known supercut "Let's Enhance." There were also academics, thinkers, and media on hand to round out the very diverse crew. Oh, and Scumbag Steve was there.

Fractal, rorsch patterns in Google maps

Ever wanted to connect your Legos and Tinkertoys together? Now you can — and much more. Announcing the Free Universal Construction Kit: a set of adapters for complete interoperability between 10 popular construction toys.

This is the story of Horse_ebooks, beloved online automaton, and how I tracked down its human master.

Horse_ebooks is a Twitter spam bot originally set up to promote horse-ebooks.com, an online store of horse-themed ebooks with a retro design equal parts GeoCities and MySpace. In addition to tweeting spam links, Horse_ebooks has apparently been programed to evade Twitter's spam filters by posting random snatches of text it scrapes from books and websites. About seven times a day, Horse_ebooks spurts out bits of context-free nonsense, like: "Worms – oh my god WORMS," and "I noticed that my hair grew faster from spending time in my pyramid."

The Creators Project interview: Sing Glitchy Karaoke Over The Web: London-based conspirators Kyoung Kim and Daniel Rourke are on a mission to kludge and con the world into partaking in an internet-based, 24-hour karaoke marathon. We spoke to them to find out more about what that means, exactly. The Creators Project: How would you describe GLTI.CH in four words without using karaoke? GLTI.CH: Collaborative technological error wallowing. What exactly is GLTI.CH and what is it trying to do?GLTI.CH is about kludging. A kludge is a make-do solution to an immediate technical problem, like stopping a table from wobbling by folding a napkin and shoving it under one leg. It’s not a hack or some fancy programming. It’s looking at technology as a building block, not an end product. We’re wannabe hackers, but we’re amateur programmers at best. It approaches technology like Lego blocks and GLTI.CH Karaoke is the mishmashed world we make through play. We want to kludge people together, breach hopeless distances with cultural and technical make-dos. Karaoke has a liberating potential. Before it was about achieving the right notes or knowing the words by heart, but karaoke is about togetherness first and foremost. A pop song can become an emotional centre of gravity for the people in the room, even for a generation. So GLTI.CH is aiming to hijack that, to turn a “make-do” into a cherished moment. And GLTI.CH is also FUN. Especially when there’s beer. Lots of beer.

GlitchBot is an automated glitch creation / distribution program and persona. GlitchBot maintains an active presence on flickr, including a profile and photostream, with new images created and uploaded daily. GlitchBot is not an interactive program. GlitchBot works alone on a fixed schedule, creating a single new glitched image every day and presenting it to the world via the GlitchBot flickr page (see above links) and slideshow (see below). GlitchBot creates its images by glitching source images pulled from other flickr users' photostreams. Only source images with an appropriate Creative Commons license are used. In order to ensure compliance with license terms, the original creator is credited and linked to in the descriptions of the resulting glitched images. The glitched images are then released under the same license as their source - ensuring compliance with share-alike licenses

Offsets images automatically to create simple, but effective glitches

Dump.fm is a digital version of the old Surrealist genre of the exquisite corpse, a “show and tell” for the polymorphously perverse. The art of dump.fm is genuinely interactive. Social relations are inherent to the entire art making process for these artists, rather than just getting tagged on when a conventional, art world artist begrudgingly begins the promotional stage for their work. The creators of dump.fm have allowed users to post images by pasting URLs into a box or uploading them from users’ computers. There is a convenient interface that allows users to post stills from webcams that dump.fm users often modify. The text is usually chatty and has an insider feel to it. Long time users appear to have developed genuine friendships. However, as long as you can keep up and communicate something using the visual grammar and syntax that lies behind the at times seemingly random flow of images you can join the fun. 

Want to learn how to make a computer go foom just by talking to it? Here's a step-by-step tutorial from the master himself, Captain Kirk. And below, we've got every scene where someone destroys a computer with carefully chosen words.

Desert Bus is the best known trick minigame in the package, and was a featured part of Electronic Gaming Monthly's preview. The objective of the game is to drive a bus from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada in real time at a maximum speed of 45mph. The feat requires 8 hours of continuous play to complete, since the game cannot be paused.

The bus contains no passengers, contains little scenery (an occasional rock or stop sign will appear at the side of the road), and there is no traffic. The road between Tucson and Las Vegas is without exception completely straight. The bus veers to the right slightly; as a result, it is impossible to tape down a button to go do something else and have the game end properly. If the bus veers off the road it will stall and be towed back to Tucson, also in real time. If the player makes it to Las Vegas, they will score exactly one point. The player then gets the option to make the return trip to Tucson—for another point...

2010 is the year of the animated gif. They are everywhere. Tumblr’s Three Frames, a site that posts only gifs drawn from movies on a daily basis is recommended to me by students virtually every time I give a lecture. Fuck Yeah Gifs, and Gif Party are also popular. Images on group artist-run blogs like Nasty Nets and Spirit Surfers have always had a keen interest in the file format and have custom software to better display them. No one does the job better than Dump.fm on the image platform front though, which likely explains the frantic production amongst their users.

Notably, only three or four years ago, gif production amongst artists tended to fall into two categories — found and carefully handmade. Typically the latter were lone painstaking efforts. Yesterday, even a brief visit to the sites listed above made clear that the spectrum of approaches has vastly expanded. The casual gif maker, the careful gif, the multiple gifs arranged to make one giant gif, the artist-made authorle

Video games are worth loving, but loving them comes with shame. Not passing regret or social embarrassment, but a sharp-edged physical guilt: the hunch-backed, raw-fingered, burning-eyed pain that comes at the sad and greasy end of an all-night binge. You have ostentatiously, really viciously wasted your life; you might as well have been masturbating for the last nine hours—your hands, at least, would feel better.

Waste is not a byproduct—it’s the point: playing video games is a revolt against life. All art forms, even the polite ones, are escapist in that each answers some fundamental objection to the world and its limits. Novels let you know, granting access to inner lives and narrative arcs otherwise hidden and guessed at. Films let you see, permitting you to stare at the world and its inhabitants as long and as hard and as many times as you want. The gratification provided by video games is particularly sweet because the objection that drives them is more urgent. What they offer i

One of the side-effects of having your work appear in a public forum such as this is that people often email me asking for advice on how to break into writing, presumably figuring that if a drooling gum-brain like me can scrape a living witlessly pawing at a keyboard, there's hope for anyone.

I rarely respond; partly because there isn't much advice I can give them (apart from "keep writing and someone might notice"), and partly because I suspect they're actually seeking encouragement rather than practical guidance. And I'm a terrible cheerleader. I can't egg you on. I just can't. My heart's not in it. To be brutally honest, I'd prefer you to never achieve anything, ever. What if you create a timeless work of art that benefits all humankind? I'm never going to do that – why should you have all the glory? It's selfish of you to even try. Don't you dare so much as start a blog. Seriously. Don't.

Sometimes people go further, asking for advice on the writing process itself. Here I'm equal

Occasionally, even experienced Wikipedians lose their heads and devote every waking moment to edit warring over the most trivial thing. This page documents our lamest examples. It isn't comprehensive or authoritative, but it serves as a showcase of situations where people lose sight of the big picture and obsessively expend huge amounts of energy fighting over something that, in the end, isn't really so important.

Back in the good old days, people would just get out their swords and guns and fight a duel; nowadays physical combat has been replaced by careful inciting of personal attacks, strategic 3RR templating and canvassing, timely notices on WP:AN/I and (in some cases) marking the changes as a minor edit. Truly, the revolutionary Wikipedia outlook has changed the way things get done. It has changed them from actually getting done to never getting done. On the other hand, nobody gets killed (so far!).

We've dedicated this Power Grid to the most disgusting alien civilizations to ever grace the page, screen, or hard drive.

Why is biology used as technology the easiest way to make aliens seem alien? Why are the bad guys’ ships always covered in strange fluids and dubious orifices?

And for another thing! Why are the ships in Star Trek and Galaxy Quest so damp?

On a cool, clear night (typical to Southern California) Warren G travels through his neighborhood, searching for women with whom he might initiate sexual intercourse. He has chosen to engage in this pursuit alone.

Nate Dogg, having just arrived in Long Beach, seeks Warren. On his way to find Warren, Nate passes a car full of women who are excited to see him. Regardless, he insists to the women that there is no cause for excitement.

Warren makes a left turn at 21st Street and Lewis Ave, in the East Hill/Salt Lake neighborhood[6], where he sees a group of young men enjoying a game of dice together. He parks his car and greets them. He is excited to find people to play with, but to his chagrin, he discovers they intend to relieve him of his material possessions. Once the hopeful robbers reveal their firearms, Warren realizes he is in a less than favorable predicament.

Meanwhile, Nate passes the women, as they are low on his list of priorities. His primary concern is locating Warren. Af

Sometimes it's really hard to let go. Like that vinyl collection you've got stashed away in the attic or those VHS cassettes of movies that you've already replaced on DVD that you just can't force yourself to flog on eBay. There are just those times when nostalgia takes over, leaving a home strewn with junk and a partner pleading for you to move on.

If there is one area of life in which people do embrace change, however, it's gaming. Did you love Operation Wolf back in the 1980s? Pah, we're now shooting out way with friends across the universe on Call of Duty. Let those Mega Drives, Dreamcasts and N64s be thrown by the roadside. We're technophiles and we're marching to the promised land of the best that electronics have to offer.

But it's not that simple. Just as music lovers tend to get stuck in an era of their youth, many gamers also nostalgically hanker for days gone by. Retro gaming is big business. You only have to switch on your Nintendo Wii, head for the Virtual Console and yo