I've been thinking about fun little artistic things to do with QR codes. What if each individual pixel were a QR code?

There's two fundamental problems with that idea. Firstly, a QR code needs whitespace around it in order to be scanned properly.

So I focussed on the top left positional marker. There's plenty of whitespace there.

Secondly, because QR codes contain a lot of white pixels inside them, scaling down the code usually results in a grey square - which is unlikely to be recognised as a black pixel when scanning.

So I cheated! I made the smaller code transparent and gradually increased its opacity as it grows larger.

I took a Version 2 QR code - which is 25px wide. With a 2px whitespace border around it, that makes 29px * 29px.

Blow it up to 2900px * 2900px. That will be the base image.

Take the original 25px code and blow it up to the size of the new marker, 300px * 300px. Place it on a new transparent canvas the size of the base image, and place it where the marker is - 400px from the top and left.

Next step is creating the image sequence for zooming in. The aim is to move in to the target area, then directly zoom in.

The whole code, if you want to build one yourself, is:

#!/bin/bash

#   Input file
input="25.png"

#   Add a whitespace border
convert "$input" -bordercolor white -border 2 29.png

#   Upscaled image size
upscaled_size=2900

#   Scale it up for the base
convert 29.png -scale "${upscaled_size}x${upscaled_size}"\! base.png

#   Create the overlay
convert -size "${upscaled_size}x${upscaled_size}" xc:none canvas.png
convert "$input" -scale 300x300\! 300.png
convert canvas.png 300.png -geometry +400+400 -composite overlay.png

#   Start crop size (full image) and end crop size (target region)
start_crop=$upscaled_size
end_crop=350

#   Zoom-in target position (top-left corner)
target_x=375
target_y=375

#   Start with a completely opaque image
original_opacity=0

#   Number of intermediate images
steps=100

for i in $(seq 0 $((steps - 1))); do
    #   Calculate current crop size
    crop_size=$(echo "$start_crop - ($start_crop - $end_crop) * $i / ($steps - 1)" | bc)
    crop_size=$(printf "%.0f" "$crop_size")  # Round to nearest integer

    #   Keep zoom centered on the target
    crop_x_offset=$(echo "$target_x - ($crop_size - $end_crop) / 2" | bc)
    crop_y_offset=$(echo "$target_y - ($crop_size - $end_crop) / 2" | bc)

    #   Once centred, zoom in normally
    if (( crop_x_offset < 0 )); then crop_x_offset=0; fi
    if (( crop_y_offset < 0 )); then crop_y_offset=0; fi

    #   Generate output filenames
    background_file=$(printf "%s_%03d.png" "background" "$i")
    overlay_file=$(printf "%s_%03d.png" "overlay" "$i")
    combined_file=$(printf "%s_%03d.png" "combined" "$i")

    #   Crop and resize the base
    convert "base.png" -crop "${crop_size}x${crop_size}+${crop_x_offset}+${crop_y_offset}" \
            -resize "${upscaled_size}x${upscaled_size}" \
            "$background_file"

    #   Transparancy for the overlay
    opacity=$(echo "$original_opacity + 0.01 * $i" | bc)

    # Crop and resize the overlay
    convert "overlay.png" -alpha on -channel A -evaluate multiply "$opacity" \
            -crop "${crop_size}x${crop_size}+${crop_x_offset}+${crop_y_offset}" \
            -resize "${upscaled_size}x${upscaled_size}" \
            "$overlay_file"

    #   Combine the two files
    convert "$background_file" "$overlay_file" -composite "$combined_file"
done

#   Create a 25fps video, scaled to 1024px
ffmpeg -framerate 25 -i combined_%03d.png -vf "scale=1024:1024" -c:v libx264 -crf 18 -preset slow -pix_fmt yuv420p recursive.mp4

Back in 2019, I used Wikidata to improve a popular piece of art. I had lots of fun writing the code, fiddling with the output, and blogging about the process.

Four years later I realised I could pay a poster shop to print it out!

So I uploaded it to my RedBubble shop and paid about a tenner for them to print me off a HUGE version.

The print quality was excellent:

And I was going to use Bluetak to stick it to my wall when my brain did another remembering! You can go to eBay and ask someone to make you a precisely shaped frame!

If you've got a little doodle, or a massive canvas, or a great photo, or something which shows off your creative prowess - it's high time to release it from its digital prison and print it out as large as you dare.

Over the last few years, I've been designing a custom map. As per the credo of the "Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality", this map uses the Equal Earth projection to ensure proportional land-mass size, the South is at the up, and - of course - the globe has been rotated to 150°.

I've had it printed and I think it looks glorious!

Hanging on the wall

You can buy these maps from RedBubble.

Details

Buy

• Buy the Country Name Map
• Buy the Emoji Flag Map

This is a large poster - I recommend buying the 120cm by 60cm version. It needs to be that size in order to make the country names legible. The cost per poster depends on your locale and whatever promotions RedBubble are doing.

These are not limited editions! I will print off as many as people order. Each one comes with a small inscription in the corner saying what the map is, and some other metadata.

As per below, you can download the assets in vector or raster format if you'd like to try printing them yourself.

Disclaimer

Maps are contentious. Some countries don't recognise other countries. Some borders are disputed. Some people clamour for reunification, some for secession. Some countries have a name given to them by their colonial oppressors. Some have been renamed by mad tyrants. Some countries have multiple names in different languages. Some are still fighting bloody wars in order to be recognised. Flags also suffer from the same problem.

The good news is that this is not an official map - my choices have no geopolitical consequences. The even better news is that the code behind the map is open source - so you can redraw it to your heart's content.

I have used the borders from Natural Earth, the country names from OpenStreetMap, and flags from Twemoji. If you dislike any of those, please direct your complaints to them.

Bugs

There are a few of things which have left me slightly dissatisfied.

By convention, most maps use Shaded Relief with the light coming from North-West. However, because this map is flipped, it cause an optical illusion which make mountains look like ravines and vice-versa. As noted:

Viewing images that do not conform to this convention may show a form of convex–concave ambiguity. Wikipedia page on "Top-Left" lighting

If you know how to redrawing or recalculate the shade, please let me know.

Secondly, in their default placement, country names and flags overlap. For example:

I manually adjusted the placement to keep labels and flags roughly in the right place without overlapping. I think I was accurate, but if you spot any mistakes - or know how to automate this - please let me know.

Non-Contiguous countries aren't handled well. For example, Alaska is unlabelled because it physically separated from the rest of the USA. The same is true of overseas territories like the Canary Islands and French Guiana.

The various seas, oceans, and other bodies of water aren't labelled.

I'm sure you will spot a few other errors. Either leave a comment here or raise an issue on GitHub.

How

This was a multi-stage process - mostly involving R.

Background

The background image comes from "Color terrain art without type halos". It's a TIFF which has been rotated and converted to PNG.

mogrify -rotate 180 Equal-Earth-Physical-Relief-No-Halos-150E.tif 
convert Equal-Earth-Physical-Relief-No-Halos-150E.tif EE-SU.png

Country Names

Natural Earth only provides country names in English ☹ - but it also provides 2 character ISO codes. So I grabbed the country codes and names from OpenStreetMap and merged them into the data set using R.

The Code

This produces the country borders and names onto an SVG.

Manual placement

I used Boxy to edit the SVG and place all names in roughly the right place.

Conversion

Inkscape was used to open the resultant SVG at 72dpi. I then used Gimp to autocrop, canvas expanded to 16000x9000, and saved as an uncompressed PNG.

The Emoji wouldn't import to either Gimp or Inkscape. So I viewed the file in Firefox and then printed it to a PDF. That PDF was cropped using pdfcrop and then imported to Gimp.

Some print shops require CMYK colour spaces - convert Export.png -colorspace cmyk Print-CMYK.tif

Copyright

All of the Equal Earth data has this copyright:

The Equal Earth Physical Wall Map is in the public domain. You may use the map any way you like, including modifying the content, reproducing it on any type of media, republishing it, and selling it for profit. Consider the map as yours. By downloading and using this map you agree that the map author (Tom Patterson) is not legally responsible for any errors that the map may contain. You are solely responsible for all problems that may arise from reuse of the map and its redistribution to third parties. Tom Patterson does not endorse the individuals or organizations that may use the map, nor does he endorse their positions on various issues.

It builds on Natural Earth, which is also public domain.

The Emoji flags are either CC BY or MIT - depending on whether you think SVGs are images or code.

In a similar spirit, the code that I've used to create my variation of the map, and the resultant output, is also hereby placed in the public domain. You may treat it as CC0.

South Up, Aotearoa Centred, Equal Earth Projection Map by Terence Eden is marked with CC0 1.0 Universal

Download

You can download all the code and assets from GitHub.

Buy

• Buy the Country Name Map
• Buy the Emoji Flag Map

These days, I enjoy playing with algorithmic art where I am more comfortable controlling the input and output.

A few weeks ago, I went to a "PromptJam" at London's Newspeak House. Think of it like an informal hackathon with people playing with various AI tools to create... something.

After chatting to lots of lovely people, I decided to try my hand at "Midjourney". The concept is very simple - give it a prompt like "Oil painting, woman, dark skin, red dress, eating an apple, ornate frame" and, after a few minutes, it will spit out something like:

Umm... What? Excuse me... What is this witchcraft?

One of the marvellous thing is - the more you look, the more oddities you notice. Why does the subject's hair extend beyond the frame? Do those apples look right to you? What on earth is going on with their fingers? Are those eyes pointing in the right direction? Why are they all in the same pose? I didn't say anything about the model's age - why are they all young women?

That's kinda what prompt-jamming is. How do you convince the computer to draw what you want it to draw? How do you get your imagination onto the screen?

(Aside - the Midjourney user interface is dog-shit. It's all Discord-based. So you have a barrage of other people's images scrolling by. There's no instructions on what the buttons do. GAH! Just build a proper website!)

Midjourney is great for a first draft. If, like me, you struggle to give shape to your ideas then it is nothing short of magic. It gets you through the first 90% of the hard work. It's then up to you to refine things.

It's fascinating to see where artistic AIs tend to fail. Here's "William Shakespeare programming a commodore 64, 1980s, magazine cover, 4k, realistic, photograph".

Amazing! But take a look at the hands! If you squint, those could be old-school computers. Why has it put Shakespeare inside the computer? Why is the text just random squiggles?

Hands and text. Why are they so difficult? You know when you're in a dream and you try to read - and all you see is illegible blobs of ink? That's how Modjourney sees text. Here is a "photo of text, high resolution, Shakespearean, sonnet, poetry":

It's also interesting to see how well it recognises common media properties. Here's "propaganda poster, mickey mouse crushes the workers, museum piece, jagged edges"

It gets the cliché of what a Soviet propaganda poster looks like! And then, when you look closer, it breaks down. In fact, you could argue that AI art is merely a cliché generation engine. Give it a prompt like "video game cover art" or "romantic novel cover" and it will conform entirely to your expectations.

As an example, here's a simple prompt "John Lennon staring as an action hero, film poster". Even before the generation started, I had a fair idea of what it would produce.

Curiously, Midjourney bans certain words. You can't order it to draw a "nude" artwork. Presumably to stop people creating deepfakes of real people. But throw it a prompt with euphemisms like "rubens, renaissance painting, Aphrodite, full length, diaphanous, oil on canvas, ornate frame" and it'll happily spit out something a bit risqué.

Again, look at the feet! And the hands! Yes, Rubens painted women of roughly that shape - but if he'd done them that badly he'd've been laughed out of the gallery.

There's another curio - take a look at the top left painting. Notice anything in the bottom right corner? Midjourney has seen that lots of photos of oil paintings have a copyright notice in the corner, so has placed some text there.

I like building silly artistic things like "A Collection of Imaginary Software" but I don't have the skill to create illustrations. At the moment things like Midjourney are a starting off point. Or a way to generate placeholders. Or a prompt for a human artist to create something better.

Midjourney lets me quickly be wrong in an interesting direction.

Zoom in for the massiveness. It's a 10,000x10,000px image. Because the Unifont displays individual characters in a 16x16px square, it is quite legible even when printed out on a domestic laser printer at 600dpi:

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Replying to @edentStill a Work In Progress.
Created a proper spiral of every Unicode character in the Unifont.
At 600dpi, it is *just about* legible.
The full thing would need to be printed on A2 sized paper! pic.x.com/jsrofjt4xd

---

I also made it as a square spiral - which fits into a smaller space.

Again, printed out at 600dpi it is readable. Just!

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Replying to @edentPrinted out on A4 @ 600dpi.
Amazingly, it is just about legible!
Still a bit more work to do, but quite pleased with the results so far. pic.x.com/d5kwfwhq27

---

Printed onto A0 - 841mm square - it's a bit better. The ASCII set is readable:

But characters in CJK weren't particularly legible:

If I wanted the 16px symbols to each be 5mm wide, I'd need to print this on paper over 3 metres wide!

WHY??!?

Because visualising one-dimensional data structures in two-dimensional space is fun! That's why 😃

I was inspired by seeing two lovely piece of artwork recently.

The first was 2015's Unicode in a spiral by Reddit user cormullion. (Click to embiggen.)

It's gorgeous, but doesn't include all characters. Oh, and you also have to rotate your head to read each character.

There's a larger version which covers a lot more of the Basic Multilingual Plane It's an 18MB PDF. And, because of the resolution of the resolution of the font, it needs to be printed out on a 1 metre square at a minimum.

The second interesting thing I found was a 2016 Hilbert Curve of Unicode:

smly

@smly

UNICODE in the picture frame. The placement of characters along the Hilbert curve is beautiful. Original: github.com/hakatashi/unic… pic.x.com/f69hwyzlvc

---

The Hilbert Curve poster is beautiful. But it only goes up to Unicode 10 - and we're on Unicode 14 by now. Despite the æsthetically pleasing nature of fractal curves, I find them quite un-intuitive.

Neither show off the gaps in Unicode. That is, where there is space to fit more symbols.

So I wanted to do something which satisfied these criteria:

• Contained all of Unicode 14
• Was legible at a small size
• Showed spaces where there are empty sections
• Readable without tilting one's head
• Slightly more visually interesting than a grid

HOW?!?!

I've written before about the wonders of the Unifont. It contains all of the Unicode 14 glyphs - each squeezed down into a 16x16px box. Even emoji!

Well. Mostly…

Limitations

Although I wanted every character, there are some practical problem. Firstly:

Unifont only stores one glyph per printable Unicode code point. This means that complex scripts with special forms for letter combinations including consonant combinations and floating vowel marks such as with Indic scripts (Devanagari, Bengali, Tamil, etc.) or letters that change shape depending upon their position in a word (Indic and Arabic scripts) will not render well in Unifont.

So there are some scripts which will look a bit ugly. And some characters which won't be well represented.

The second issue is one of size. Some of the newer characters are simply too big:

Scripts such as Cuneiform, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, and Bamum Supplement will not be drawn on a 16-by-16 pixel grid. There are plans to draw these scripts on a 32-by-32 pixel grid in the future.

That means it misses out on characters like 𒀰, 𒁏 and, of course, 𒀱. Which, to be fair, would be hard to squeeze in!

The third problem is that Unicode is updating all the time. Although the Unifont is at Version 14 - Python's Unicode Database is stuck at V13. Luckily, there is a library called UnicodeData2 which includes V14.

But, given those limitations, I thought it was possible to craft something nice.

Python Code

I split the problem into several parts.

Plotting equidistant points along a spiral

As ever, I turned to StackOverflow and found a neat little solution:

def spiral_points(arc=1, separation=1):
    #   Adapted from https://stackoverflow.com/a/27528612/1127699
    """generate points on an Archimedes' spiral with `arc` giving the length of arc between two points and `separation` giving the distance between consecutive turnings
    - approximate arc length with circle arc at given distance
    - use a spiral equation r = b * phi
    """
    def polar_to_cartesian(r, phi):
        return ( round( r * math.cos(phi) ),
                 round( r * math.sin(phi) )
               )

    # yield a point at origin
    yield (0, 0)

    # initialize the next point in the required distance
    r = arc
    b = separation / (2 * math.pi)
    # find the first phi to satisfy distance of `arc` to the second point
    phi = float(r) / b
    while True:
        yield polar_to_cartesian(r, phi)
        # advance the variables
        # calculate phi that will give desired arc length at current radius (approximating with circle)
        phi += float(arc) / r
        r = b * phi

Drawing a squaril

I wanted a grid which looked like this:

9 A B
8 1 2
7 0 3
6 5 4

I found a blog post and source code for a spiral array. It's pretty simple - although I'm sure there's lots of ways to do this:

n = 12
nested_list= [[0 for i in range(n)] for j in range(n)]
low=0
high=n-1
x=1
levels=int((n+1)/2)
for level in range(levels):
    for i in range(low,high+1):
        nested_list[level][i]= x
        x+=1

    for i in range(low+1,high+1):
        nested_list[i][high]= x
        x+=1

    for i in range(high-1,low-1,-1):
        nested_list[high][i]= x
        x+=1

    for i in range(high-1,low,-1):
        nested_list[i][low]= x
        x+=1

    low+=1
    high-=1

for i in range(n):
    for j in range(n):
        print(nested_list[i][j],end="\t")# print the row elements with
        # a tab space after each element
    print()# Print in new line after each row

However, that printed the spiral backwards:

B A 9
2 1 8
3 0 7
4 5 6

Luckily, Python makes it easy to reverse lists:

for l in nested_list :
    l.reverse()

Drawing the characters

Turning a number into a Unicode character is as simple as:

unicode_character = chr(character_int)

But how do we know if the font contains that character? I stole some code from StackOverflow which uses the FontTools library:

from fontTools.ttLib import TTFont
font = TTFont(fontpath)   # specify the path to the font in question

def char_in_font(unicode_char, font):
    for cmap in font['cmap'].tables:
        if cmap.isUnicode():
            if ord(unicode_char) in cmap.cmap:
                return True
    return False

But, of course, it is a bit more complicated than that. The Unifont contains some placeholder glyphs - the little black square with hex digits in them that you see here:

I didn't want to draw them. But they exist in the font. So how do I skip them?

Using the Python Unicode Database it's possible to look up the name of a Unicode code-point. e.g. chr(65) is LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A. So if there is no name in the database, skip that character.

But, of course, it is a bit more complicated than that! The Unicode database only goes up to Unicode 13. And, for some reason, the control characters don't have names. So the code becomes a tangled mess of if...else statements. Ah well!

Drawing the characters should have been easy. I was using Pillow to draw text. But, despite the pixely nature of the font itself Pillow was performing anti-aliasing - creating unwanted grey subpixels.

I thought the fix was simple:

jonodrew@mastodon.social

@jonodrew

Replying to @xandypty@xandypty @edent draw = ImageDraw.Draw(image)
draw.fontmode = '1'
...

---

Sadly, that does introduce some other artefacts - so I've raised a bug with Pillow.

In the end, I kept the anti-aliasing, but then converted the grey pixels to black. And then converted the entire image to monochrome:

threshold = 191
image = image.point(lambda p: p > threshold and 255)
image = image.convert('1')

Putting It All Together

Once I'd go the co-ordinates for either the spiral or squaril, I drew the character on the canvas:

draw.text(
   (x , y),
   unicode_character,
   font=font,
   fill=font_colour)

Except it didn't work!

Sadly, Pillow can't draw non-printable glyphs - even when the font contains something drawable. This is because it can't pass the correct options to the harfbuzz library.

So, I went oldskool! I converted every glyph in the font to a PNG and saved them to disk.

from fontforge import *

font = open("unifont_upper-14.0.04.ttf")

for i in range( len(font) ) :
    try:
        font[i].export( "pngs/" + str(i) + ".png", pixelsize=16, bitdepth=1)
    except Exception as e:
        print ( str(i) )
        print ( e )

Look, if it's hacky but it works; it isn't hacky! Right?

From there, it's a case of opening the .png and pasting it onto the canvas:

character_png = Image.open('pngs/' + str(character_int) + ".png")
image.paste( character_png, (round(x) , round(y)) )

It was too big!

And now we hit the final problem. The image was over 20,000 pixels wide. Why? The Variation Selectors! The last of which is at position U+E01EF. Which means the spiral looks like this:

Here they are in close up:

So I decided to remove that block!

Source Code

All the code is on GitLab. Because GitHub is so 2019…

Licensing?

The GNU Unifont has a dual licence. GPL2 and OFL. The image is a "document" for the purposes of the OFL and the GPL font exemption. But, I guess you could reverse engineer a font-file from it. So, if you use the image to generate a font, please consider that it inherits the original licence. If you just want to print it out, or use it as art, then the image itself is CC BY-SA.

This is based on my lay-person's understanding of the various copyleft licence compatibility issues. Corrections and clarifications welcome!

What's next?

I would like to print this out on paper. At 200dpi, it would be about 1.5m squared. Which I guess is possible, but might be expensive.

At 600dpi, the square will just about fit on A3 paper. But the quality is atrocious. Even at A0 it wasn't great. Realistically, it needs to be at least 3.3 metres along each side! No idea where I can find a printer which will do that. Or where in my house I'd have space for it!

Of course, it will need updating whenever there is a new release of either Unicode or Unifont.

If you have any suggestions or feedback - please drop them in the comment box!

I decided to create a photo-mosaic of a nice photo of me and my wife - using all our book covers.

The Result

Close Up

The image was printed on high-quality canvas - which gives it a pleasing texture and isn't too glossy. Zoomed in, this is what it looks like: As you can see, there is a fair amount of detail on the canvas. Enough so that most titles and authors are legible.

Method

So, here's how to make something like this:

Pick a nice photo

Duh! We chose a selfie my wife took on our road-trip across New Zealand. A happy memory where we both look pretty good, and there's not too much detail in the background.

Get your mosaic tiles

I use Calibre to manage all our eBooks. Run this script to grab all the book covers, and copy them to a directory. All the covers are named cover.jpg - so this renames them sequentially

#!/bin/bash
OUTDIR=~/bookmosaic/
i=0

find /home/whatever/Calibre\ Library -name *.jpg |
while read FILE; do
  OUTFILE="$i.jpg"
  cp -p "$FILE" "$OUTDIR$OUTFILE"
  ((i++))
done

Trim the covers

In order to remove any excess whitespace around the covers, I used ImageMagick's trim command

mogrify -bordercolor white -border 10x10 +repage -fuzz 20% -trim +repage *.jpg

That adds a small white border, then trims it and any other white-ish colours. Without that, it will trim the base colour of the image.

Prune your covers

I ended up with about 3,000 book covers. Hey, we read a lot! But some of the covers were pretty low resolution, some looked crap, and some were from books we didn't want on our walls.

So we flipped through each one and deleted anything that wasn't right for us. A tedious and manual process.

Mosaic Time

There are lots of mosaic programs for Linux. Sadly most seem to be abandoned. I ended up using ImageMosaicWall because it was fairly modern and had a relatively simple GUI

Not the most polished interface, but simple enough to use. Select the image you want to turn into a mosaic, select a folder full of images, fiddle with the resolution and off you go. Even on my modest laptop it took less than a minute to crunch through the images and create the final result.

Resolution

There are two parts to the resolution question - what size will this be printed, and how many columns / rows do you want?

We picked a 75cm x 100cm canvas. According to Photobox, they print at 200dpi so require a 6,000px x 8,000px image.

Next, how many covers are needed to make an image which is recognisable? At 75 covers wide and 75 covers high, the resultant mosaic looked pretty good from a distance. But each book cover would have been a centimetre wide - which would have made most of them unrecognisable. At, say, 50 by 50 the book covers would have been much clearer - but at the expense of the overall image coherence.

I settled on 64x64. That gave a good balance between individual covers and making the photo recognisable.

Variations and Limitations

64² = 4,096 tiles. But I only have about 2,500 covers. That means, inevitably, some will be repeated. The default setting of ImageMosaicWall doesn't have any variation. Which means that the same cover can be repeated multiple times - especially on similar colours like the sky. Here's what it looks like:

Eurgh!

I played around with the variation setting to find a good balance of non-repeating books and overall image legibility. It worked pretty well but there are still a few instances where a book is found in close proximity to itself:

There are different mosaic tools which allow you to set how often an image is reused.

Another thing to note is that the original cover images all have different aspect ratios. This means the algorithm applies some cropping - mostly, it seems, to the bottom:

Print It!

As mentioned, I used Photobox. They were running a promotion so the canvas, hanging kit, and delivery came to about £60. I'll be honest, that's a bit more than I wanted to spend - but they were recommended to me and were the only printer I could find who would print at 200dpi.

I uploaded the 96MB image, picked my settings, and typed in my credit card details.

A few days after uploading, it arrived - and was hung in pride of place.

Lessons learned

A few things that I wish I'd done differently, or that I may do if I try this again:

• Do a test print. I was over-eager to try this out so I paid £60 for the full thing. I should have paid a tenner for a much smaller test to see if the resolution was good enough.
• Get higher quality covers. Some of my eBooks didn't have great covers. I should have spent time making sure that they were all at the highest resolution possible.
• Get more covers. The 2,500 covers weren't sufficient to provide the most detail and there was quite a lot of repetition. I should have added more - perhaps including video game covers and album covers.
• Be more selective. If I look closely, there are a few books on there which I'm not overly happy about being on display. Nothing too disgusting, just things which have fallen far out of fashion. I should have spent more time pruning the list.
• Normalise the size of the covers. Because they were all different aspect ratios, some have been cropped quite severely. I should have used ImageMagick to extend the edges of any book which didn't have a ratio of 3:4.
• Use a full-bleed print. Mine stops just after the side, which leaves a bit of a white edge. That's mostly a limitation of my original photo though.
• Tweak the algorithm to set a minimum distance between identical covers.

But, perfect is the enemy of done. I'm pleased enough with the print. It isn't perfect - but I actually saw something though from idea to creation. And now we have something on our wall which is personal, meaningful, and co-created.

And isn't a bloody "Live Laugh Love" stencil!

Our bookshelves are bare. A few years ago we made the switch to eBooks - we got rid of all our paper books. We've switched to downloading our games, so no gorgeous box art for us. All our DVD discs are in the loft, and their movie-poster allure is hidden away.

When friends walk into our house, they have no idea how cultured we are!

I want to print out a bookshelf. This is a walk-through of the process I took. And, more importantly, why it failed.

Inspiration

In a very fancy lawyers' offices, I saw this amazing bookshelf:

Look closer...

Gorgeous! I don't have the time nor talent to hand-paint book covers. But I have the Internet and a smattering of coding skillz.

Ideally, I'd like a gigantic colour eInk display - but that technology is years away. So, printing it is!

And it would be nice to have something as impressive as this:

aidanmcgarry

@dramcgarry

My partner made a wall of books for me. It was a labour of love. Everyday for last few months Ive been at this desk writing a book. Today, it’s finished. It was also a labour of love. pic.x.com/lrrhmrmgb1

---

Objective

1. Get high-resolution cover art for meaningful books, games, and DVDs.
2. Design a virtual bookshelf.
3. Print onto a suitable material for wall hanging.
4. Sell targetted advertising space based on personal infor... wait... no... just admire it.

Getting Media

Most of eBooks have a fairly high resolution cover embedded in them. Using the Calibre eBook Library it was pretty easy to either extract the covers or download higher resolution ones. We also used the Open Library Covers API for any stragglers.

Computer games are legitimate cultural works and some of the box art is beautiful. There are a number of places to get covers, including The Cover Project, EmuMovies, VG Box Art, and Moby Games.

Sizing Media

Books are all different physical sizes. So are their covers. In order to create a visually pleasing effect, we resized all the covers to the same width. Which means the top of the row of books looks something like this:

First, convert all the lossy JPGs to lossless PNG:

mogrify -format png *.jpeg

Then, resize them all to a maximum of 800px wide, keeping the same aspect ratio:

convert '*.png' -resize '800>' converted_%04d.png

Stitching the media

Imagemagick lets you take several images and stick them all in a row - without gaps.

montage *.png -tile 6x1 -gravity South -geometry +0+0 -background none montage.png

That creates a montage, 6 books wide, with the images aligned along the bottom, with no padding, and a transparent background.

Note - the first book has to be the tallest, otherwise the "South" gravity does weird things.

convert -background white -gravity south [abc].png +smush 10 result.png

Designing the background

OK, so we have lovely art - but what sort of shelves will the rest on? A boring Billy bookcase? Old oak timbers? Shabby chic?

I found some lovely high resolution, and freely licensed wood textures at WildTextures.com. Sticking that behind the books was rather pleasing:

With a bit of faffing around in GiMP, I created this bookshelf test:

Effects

I loved the oil painting effect on the artwork, and wondered if I could recreate it with GiMP. It offers some powerful filters. I made some "artistic" endeavours...

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Playing around with how to display video game box-art...
This wasn't what I intended, but I love the effect.
Bonus points if you can name the three fairly popular Xbox games. pic.x.com/cu6eprqouq

---

But, ultimately, none of them looked quite right. The covers had large swathes of plain colours - and none of them were distinctive enough to recognise when heavily distorted.

I found a site which would generate 3D book covers:

These looked OK, but it made the books a uniform size, and took up extra horizontal space. It also means I'd need to create a 3D effect for the bookshelf. And I couldn't find a good way to create a good 3D effect for game box-art. Although BoxShot.com is pretty nifty!

I also tried to use Fred's ImageMagick scripts to make a 3D cover, angled at 25 degrees and with a transparent background.

./3Dcover -s 192 -a -25 -b none cover.png cover3d.png

But, again, it didn't look great.

Time To Stop

I'd considered running off a single small test print - just to make sure things looked OK. But... I just couldn't get anything which looked nice enough to hang on our walls.

I've been noodling on this since the start of lockdown and I think it is time to call it a day.

I have loads of book covers and video game covers. So if you know of a beautiful way to display them - please let me know!

You can view more at This Bench Does Not Exist.

Here's a video which shows how the process generates images. It gives you an idea of what the model "thinks" a bench is.

Download the model

You can download a 300MB StyleGAN neural net .PKL for your own use.

WHY?!?

What does a bench look like? How can you recognise it? Does the human brain process images of inanimate objects differently than it does with faces and animals? Is there an "uncanny valley" for seats?

5 years ago, my wife and I launched OpenBenches - a site to crowdsource photos, inscriptions, and locations of memorial benches. We have been astonished at how popular it has. People have uploaded over 55,000 photos of about 22,000 benches! That's around 191GB of photos. Nice ☺

I wanted to take all the photos of the benches, and train a computer to produce artificial images of benches. In a similar vein to This [Cat|Person|Paper] Does Not Exist, it's just an interesting way to show off how good (or not) computers are at generating images based off a large dataset.

HOW?!?!

It is relatively simple to create this. There is a pre-built set of scripts called StyleGAN3. You can follow along with the tutorial provided. I was doing relatively well, until I hit the system requirements:

1–8 high-end NVIDIA GPUs with at least 12 GB of memory. We have done all testing and development using Tesla V100 and A100 GPUs.

Ah. I don't even have one NVIDIA GPU - let alone 12! And the sponsorship for OpenBenches barely covers hosting. Let along buying expensive hardware.

I put the call out on Twitter and, very kindly, Simon Butcher volunteered some hardware. Aren't people on the Internet nice!

The computation for the 512x512px training set was run for 20 days on an IBM AC922 POWER9 server running RHEL7, utilising all four Nvidia Tesla V100 SXM2 16GB GPUs.

The OpenBenches API lets us grab the URls of all images, and metadata about whether they're a photo of the inscription or the bench. There were about 25,000 photos to download and crunch through.

With that many images, it wasn't possible to manually go through to find images which shouldn't have been in the set. That might have led to some weirdness in the generation process.

COPYRIGHT?!?!

OK, so here's an odd question. All of the photos on the site have been licenced under Creative Commons. Mostly BY-SA 4.0 but a few imported from Flickr and other sites with different CC licences.

What's the copyright situation of the generated images?

I honestly don't know. If you do, stick a comment in the box below.

WEIRD?!?!

There are a number of "glitches" which seem inherent in AI generated images. Some are just weird little graphical quirks.

It's pretty easy to see where the AI has got a little confused. It is totally recognisable as a bench - but just the wrong side of the "uncanny valley" to look real.

Others, however, are full-on psychedelic hellscapes.

Inscriptions

Training a text model using GPT-2 was relatively easy. A few years ago I taught an AI to write Shakespearean sonnets. I used the same Google notebook to read in several thousand inscriptions and then generate new ones.

But… we decided not to use them in the end. It's downright creepy generating the name of someone and their date of death. It would be horrible to stumble on the website and find the details of you or a friend listed on there.

As there have already been lots of attempts to automatically generate semantically valid text based on an existing corpus - we dropped it from the site.

THANKS!!!

Huge thanks to:

• Simon Butcher for training the model on his supercomputer.
• Tom O'Connor for the doesnotexi.st subdomain.
• All the hundreds of people who have generously uploaded their photos to OpenBenches.

Here is another video for you to enjoy:

As I discussed yesterday, being able to resell digital art via an NFT means that the price of art falls to zero. Let's assume that I'm correct and, through a combination of technology and changing social attitudes, no one wants to pay for music, books, films, or art any more.

What are the ways that art and artists could get funded? Here are a few sketched out ideas - they all overlap a little. And then a brief discussion about how smart contracts could solve this - but probably won't.

Patronage

I commission someone to paint a picture or write a book. I can then release it to the public if I want. This is how a lot of public art and statues are funded.

This generally means that art caters to the very rich. This may reduce the choice and inventiveness of the art as it is specifically designed to appeal to an individual patron.

Sponsorship

"And then Harry and Hermione celebrated with a refreshing glass of Coca-Cola."

*shudders*

Of course, product placement is already used to subsidise movies.

Private Works

Lots of performers do "private" gigs. My previous employer once paid Elton John to serenade staff at a private party.

Could I pay James Patterson to write me an Alex Cross book? Or get Jane Campion to make a movie just for me? Sure, if I had enough cash.

This locks other people out of the experience - which, in itself, may be worth paying for.

Elitism

Perhaps only independently wealthy people will be able to afford to create art. If you have no need to make something profitable, you can dedicate your time to making something which appeals to only your tastes.

For a long time, art creation and appreciation was restricted to the wealthy. Do we want to go back to those days?

Hobbyism

The cost of generating art falls to zero, so anyone who wants can do it in their spare time. People may not even care about being paid for what they create.

Is flooding the market with self-published fiction and badly recorded songs a good thing? Does it mean people rely more on taste-makers and trend-setters?

Fan Collectives

The 1,000 True Fans theory states that if you can get a large enough group of dedicated fans, you can make a living. Having 1,000 fans pay £30 per year, would give someone an average income. It then doesn't matter if no-one else pays.

But there's a limit to how many artists one person can afford to be a fan of.

Libraries

An extension of the above. A group of people pay for a library to buy and maintain a collection of books, music, and films. We all pay a small amount, the library tracks what is popular, and pays out on that basis.

This is how Netflix works. And Spotify. And, indeed, regular book libraries.

UBI

If we all have Universal Basic Income, we can spend our time creating whatever art we want. And, if we have spare cash, we can join with others to commission larger works.

But would we choose to create art if there was no profit in it? Would we bother paying artists if we knew they weren't going to starve?

NFTs and Smart Contracts

Suppose you buy a piece of digital art - be it a stupid picture of a monkey, or a book about cheese. Embedded in the smart contract is a clause that a percentage of the resale price goes back to the original author.

For example, a smart contract could say "If you sell your copy of this work, you must pay the author the higher of £1 or 10% of the sale price."

This sets a minimum price for "second hand" digital goods. If the price is set higher than buying directly from the author, it may incentivise people to buy direct.

Limited Releases

The Wu-Tang Clan released a limited edition album - Once Upon a Time in Shaolin. It was a limited edition of just one CD. The buyer is not allowed to play the album to the public - although private listening parties are allowed.

The music industry is in crisis. The intrinsic value of music has been reduced to zero. Contemporary art is worth millions by virtue of its exclusivity ... By adopting a 400 year old Renaissance-style approach to music, offering it as a commissioned commodity and allowing it to take a similar trajectory from creation to exhibition to sale ... we hope to inspire and intensify urgent debates about the future of music. http://scluzay.com (Archive of the original)

Perhaps the final "Game of Thrones" book will be limited to, say, 1,000 single readers at a time. And you'll need to wait for someone to finish reading their copy before you can buy it off them!

Brilliant!

Brilliant?

The central joke about NFT is that they try to impose artificial scarcity on inherently fungible good. My copy of your JPG is bit-for-bit identical in both appearance and utility.

It is often said that the downfall of MP3 piracy was the convenience of iTunes and Spotify. Lots of people are happy to pay a modest sum for music - if it is convenient and reliable.

Could I go to some dodgy torrent site and get a cam of the latest Spider-Man? Sure - or I could pay £6 per month to Netflix and have unlimited everything.

Everyone in the UK has access to a taxation-funded library which gives them access to most books. Or they can pay a subscription to a private company like Amazon.

The key with all of those is breadth of choice, low price, and ease of use.

If prices go up, or services become too fragmented, people return to piracy.

If an piece of art is locked down, it will be trivial to copy it and then either give it away or sell it. And so the cycle continues.

What's the solution?

I want more art by more diverse artists. I think the world is moving to a model of collective micropayment patronage clustered around a few big players.

Small-time artists will benefit from the discovery of being on the big platforms. Maybe they'll go viral and make money - but most likely they'll get dribs and drabs of income. People will still steal their content.

Dedicated fans of small-time artists will buy direct. Better profits for the artist, and a sense of satisfaction for their fans. Some fans will still steal their content.

Extremely large artists will, eventually, become annoyed by the limitations of the big platforms and try to go independent as well. The network effects will be too strong, and the non-dedicated fans will just steal their content

The future ain't what it used to be!

We tend to label this "Piracy". Someone buys a DVD, rips it, then either sells or gives away copies.

The Blockchain book that I'm reading suggests NFTs as a way to combat this (stop giggling at the back). Let's say that we replaced every MP3 player with an NFT player. You load your file onto your NFTman, sign in with your wallet, and it checks whether you have the rights to play that piece of music.

Later, you decide to re-sell the digital album. Your NFTman refuses to play the files because the BlockChain says you're no longer the owner.

Hurrah! We've created a second-hand market for digital goods!

But, here's the thing… you can only listen to one album at a time. That huge collection of music you have is mostly sitting idle. So why not turn your library into a tradeable asset?

With a CD or vinyl collection, this is impractical. It is physically and logistically difficult to sell things. And if you decide that you want to listen to an album you sold, you have to go through the effort of buying it again.

Digital makes this easy. The digital world is about reducing and removing the friction of the analogue world.

I can buy an NFT album, listen to it, and then immediately sell my copy. The minute I want to listen to it again, I find someone else to buy it from.

People will want to recoup some of the money they spent, and they will probably charge less than a "new" copy. Otherwise, there's no incentive to buy 2nd-hand.

What if, with a click of a button, my music player could find the cheapest seller of The Best of The Beatles, buy it, play it, and then re-sell it afterwards?

The same goes for my Kindle. An NFT eBook reader can go online buy a book and then sell it the second I finish it.

At the moment, I buy a hardback book for £15 and then sell it for £5. So it costs me a tenner over all.

In the future, I could buy an eBook for £15 and then sell it for £14.99.

Given enough competition, this means the price should drop to zero.

Digital copies don't degrade. A second hand MP3 sounds as good as a brand new one. If you want someone to buy your NFT/DRM music, you'll have to charge less than the original seller if you want to recoup any money. You will also have to charge less than all the other resellers. Sure, maybe there's a natural price floor. But it only takes one person to decide that they want to sell their copy for free - and the floor becomes zero.

Think about it this way - you don't charge your friends when they borrow a CD, do you? When you donate a CD to a charity shop, you don't take any payment. Why should it be any different with digital files?

What happens to art when NFTs drive the price down to zero? That what I'll cover in tomorrow's blog post.

This time, I'm taking a different Nook, and turning it into a magic gallery. Here's what it looks like in action:

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Upcycled an old eReader into an art frame.
Displays a new black & white piece of art from Flickr every few minutes.
Full write-up this weekend, but pretty straightforward to do. pic.x.com/ttvrbhz3ee

---

Video

With the front light off:

With the front light on:

How it works

Every few minutes, it finds a black and white artistic image from Flickr and displays it. Simple!

Inspiration

Ambient home cinema by Tom Whitwell

Build

I've previously replaced the battery on an eInk Nook, so I know how easy they are to disassemble. But for this I wanted to keep the plastic frame on, so that I'd be able to attach a more æsthetically pleasing wooden picture frame.

Finding a picture frame of the right size was a little tricky. The physical dimension of the unit are ~170mm x ~140mm. But the screen is only ~125mm x ~93mm .

I used eFrame - they have a really handy website for custom sized frames and inserts. I ordered a mount for an 135mm x 103mm picture (they cut them slightly smaller but I didn't want any overhang) with 20mm top and bottom borders, and 35mm left and right borders. That gave me enough space to fit the Nook. But, as long as the aperture lets you see the eInk, and masks off the plastic frame, you should be OK.

I was also able to buy a frame without a glass front. As this is my first attempt, I went for simple and cheap wood - rather than something more ornate and artistic. Total cost including shipping was £25.

Attaching the frame

It is useful to be able to get to the main "N" button - and there needs to be a gap for the charging cable. I thought about cutting out a little bit of the frame but, in the end, it was easier to attach the Nook to the frame using velcro and blu-tak. Because of the weight of the Nook, I used some sturdy hooks for the wall mount.

Power

There wasn't enough room in the frame for a normal USB cable, so I used a right-angled micro-USB cable. With the page refreshing every 5 minutes between 0600-2300, it got about 3 days of battery life - less if it used the Glow-Light. So a permanent wired connection seemed sensible.

Background

On the surface this seems quite simple - get a bunch of images and display them. But there are some limitations.

The original Nook Simple Touch is, bless it, an old and slow device. I want to do the minimum amount of processing on it as possible. The screen resolution is only 600x800. I don't want to convert colour artwork to black and white - that will just look messy. I also want the image size to roughly match the screen - so things aren't shrunk down.

So, I want a list of art which meets the following criteria:

• Intended for monochrome display⁰
• Roughly 4:3 aspect ratio
• Proper art¹ by real artists²

I started by looking at the Open Data produced by various museums and art galleries. Unfortunately, none of them indicated whether an artwork was greyscale. So, I turned to Flickr!

Using the Flickr API

Sadly, the Flickr API has been neglected for the best part of a decade. So the documentation is grossly out of date.

Two of the undocumented Search API calls are styles and orientation. I use them to search for black and white images in landscape orientation. You can discover more by using the Flickr search website and opening the "Advanced" panel.

The rest of the API call is quite standard. A keyword to search for ("art") - or whatever you want. Sorted by "interestingness" - although popularity is also a good metric. With safe_search turned off - no prudes in our house. And an image size no wider that 800px - because serving a correctly scaled image means less work for the eReader.

The Code

It is almost embarrassing in its simplicity. It uses Sam Wilson's PHP library for Flickr. It grabs 100 images, and then picks a random one to serve. It is resized to fit in a bounding box of 800x600 and repaginated to centre the image. The image is rotated it 90 degrees and served over HTTP with an appropriate caching policy. Nothing else. Here it is³.

require_once 'vendor/autoload.php';
$flickr = new \Samwilson\PhpFlickr\PhpFlickr("123465789");

$search_terms = ["art", "artistic", "painting", "drawing"];
$search_rand = array_rand($search_terms, 1);

$sort_terms = ["date-posted-asc", "date-posted-desc", "date-taken-asc", "date-taken-desc", "interestingness-desc", "interestingness-asc", "relevance"];
$sort_rand = array_rand($sort_terms, 1);

$s = $flickr->photos()->search(["text"        => $search_terms[$search_rand],
                                "per_page"    => "100",
                                "styles"      => "blackandwhite",
                                "orientation" => "landscape",
                                "sort"        => $sort_terms[$sort_rand],
                                "safe_search" =>"3"
                               ]);

$number_of_photos = count($s["photo"]);

$random_photo = random_int(0, $number_of_photos - 1);

$p = $s["photo"][$random_photo];

$farm   = $p["farm"];
$server = $p["server"];
$id     = $p["id"];
$secret = $p["secret"];
$title  = $p["title"];

$image_url = "https://live.staticflickr.com/{$server}/{$id}_{$secret}_c.jpg";

$image = imagecreatefromjpeg( $image_url );

$cropped = imagecropauto( $image, IMG_CROP_DEFAULT );
if ( $cropped !== false ) { 
   imagedestroy($image);  
   $image = $cropped;
}

$x = imagesx( $image );
$y = imagesy( $image );

$width_ratio  = $x / 800;
$height_ratio = $y / 600;

// Scale
if ( $height_ratio >= $width_ratio ) {
   $new_height = ( 600 / $y ) * $x;
   $scaled = imagescale( $image, $new_height, 600 );
} else {
   $scaled = imagescale( $image, 800, -1 );
}

$x = imagesx( $scaled );
$y = imagesy( $scaled );


// Make a background canvas
$canvas = imagecreatetruecolor( 800, 600 );
$black  = imagecolorallocate( $canvas, 0, 0, 0 );
imagefilledrectangle( $canvas, 0, 0, 800, 600, $black );

$dst_x = ( ( 800 - $x ) / 2 );
$dst_y = ( ( 600 - $y ) / 2 );

imagecopy( $canvas, $scaled, $dst_x, $dst_y, 0, 0, $x, $y );

$rotated = imagerotate( $canvas, 90, 0 );

header('Content-type: image/jpeg');
header("Expires: on, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT");
header("Last-Modified: " . gmdate("D, d M Y H:i:s") . " GMT");
header("Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate");
header("Cache-Control: post-check=0, pre-check=0", false);
header("Pragma: no-cache");

imagejpeg( $rotated );

// Tidy Up
imagedestroy( $image );
imagedestroy( $scaled );
imagedestroy( $rotated );

Displaying

As I mentioned in my previous post about displaying web pages on the Nook - the browser is slow, old, and can't handle https connections.

So I used ElectricSign which is an old Android app. Give it a URL and it will display the contents on screen. It can be set to periodically refresh.

I've had it running for months on a different screen and it hasn't crashed.

That's it!

TODO

• Buy more cheap, 2nd hand eInk screens on eBay. Preferably larger and with higher DPI.
• Get some fancy frames.
• Start a pirate art museum.
• Monetise it by tracking how long people stare at a particular artwork.
• BitCoin?⁴

Thanks for reading

If you've enjoyed this blog post, you can buy me something from my wishlist or sponsor my GitHub. Find out more way to support this blog.

Into the woods, it's time to go, I hate to leave, I have to go. Into the woods, it's time, and so I must begin my journey.

I live near the ancient Abbey Woods. Site of the derelict Lesnes Abbey, full of flowers, trees, and eternal mysteries. A tattered parchment map fluttered into my hand promising adventure and enlightenment deep in the heart of the woods.

This is Lore of the Wild an immersive art installation as part of the Estuary 2021 festival.

And so, shortly before sunset, a dozen of us gathered at the entrance and began our traipse through the mulch to see what we would find.

It was magical. There's no other word to describe it. Each of us had headphones and listened to specially commissioned music and poetry designed to harmonise with the surroundings.

We went on an artist guided tour, but you can download the audio tracks and take a wander at your own pace.

I recommend using open-ear headphones which allow you to hear the screaming of the birds. Are all the noises you hear diegetic? Are the whispers in your ears still there when the music pauses?

Halfway through our journey, we wandered into the Old Chalk Pit, where we found Nick Hart waiting for us.

Old English folk songs sung in an old English pit, the tang of fresh smoke and the scent of wild-flowers. Accompanied by the cacophony of crows and parrots waging their regular evening warfare.

Nikki Spencer

@NikkiS49

Last night I went for a magical audio storywalk in @lesnes_abbey woods created by @sophiejanesays @betterussell for @estuaryfestival . I have always meant to visit & #loreofthewild was a wonderful way to explore. It’s easy to download. Wearing horns is optional. pic.x.com/cuPQf9wkQG

---

It reminded me of the London SubtleMob I attended a decade ago. A group of strangers wandering through a landscape listening to - and becoming - art.

ellie kurttz

@elliekurttz

Last Sunday into the woods we went and it was beautiful. #loreofthewild Wonderful stories co-created and written by @betterussell and @sophiejanesays 🌿🪵@lesnes_abbey pic.x.com/RtLDXPMSAX

---

If you can get to the woods - and CrossRail will opening soon! - I recommend bringing a pair of headphones and following the guided trail. It's a gentle walk - although not suitable for wheelchair users - and a wonderful way to experience the environment.

David Coates

@OziasMidwinter

Bookshop clock... pic.x.com/1tvwJiI4kn

---

I wondered - if it was possible to create a similar clock using books from a single author? So here's my first attempt - using Agatha Christie's novels.

I've tried to use first edition covers, where possible. There are a few notable absences - 8, 9, and 11. The 2 is represented by "And two other stories" - which is a bit weak! If you can suggest ways to fill the gaps, I'd love your ideas.

Or, if you can think of a prolific author who can easily fill the twelve spaces, do let me know!

Other Suggestions

Richard Morton (he/him)

@accessibleweb

@edent A Roman Numerals one could work with tech books e.g Vi editor, OS X

---

Parts

• Floppy Disks
• Printer Labels
• Frame

Background

As part of my Floppy Disk Walkman project, I asked my friends to send me a couple of floppies. Alistair and @gas_liverpool both sent me loads. So I needed something to do with them!

Close Ups

Note!

• What a "classic" floppy label looks like, and what you remember it looking like, can be two different things.
• I also can't afford a colour printer - so I stuck with black & white on colourful floppies.
• I'm not a graphic designer. Thankfully, neither were most of the people who designed floppy labels back in the day. If graphic design is your passion, feel free to improve these!
• The labels don't have the rounded corners of proper labels.

GLaDOS - from Portal

Are you still there?

Bandersnatch - from Netflix's Bandersnatch

I used an open source Teletext Font called Bedstead rather than the more corporate Courier.

Holly - from Red Dwarf

I thought a dot-matrix style vision of Holly would be a nice touch.

A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer - from The Diamond Age

Using the Reenie Beanie font and a bit of groovy clipart.

Janet - from The Good Place

The font is close enough

Polybius - from the arcade

I spent so much money on this arcade game back when I was a kid. Not so easy to find nowadays.

Mother - from Alien

I made great use of this excellent article about the typography of Alien.

WOTAN - from Doctor Who

This was a difficult one to get right. The font is not Westminster!

Clayton Hickman

@claytonhickman

Just noticed the War Machines title font isn't one of the regular typefaces I assumed it was. Was it specially made? pic.x.com/jiyfllgl8d

---

I grabbed the title card and manually recreated the font.

WOPR - from War Games

A slightly modified copy of the games list from WOPR. Using a reconstructed font

Rejected Ideas

Originally, I thought about making disks of Vapourware. Things like "Commander Keen: The Universe Is Toast!" and "Half-Life 2: Episode Three" - but I really couldn't find enough good titles.

So, I asked on Twitter:

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Which fictional bit of software would you like a copy of?

(As in some program you've seen in books, TV, films, songs, etc.)

---

Some of the suggestion were brilliant, but a bit hard to implement. What does the software disk for Blade Runner's Zoom Enhance look like?

Famous Movie Floppies

There are only a few popular movies which feature floppies prominently. And none looked particularly cool. Besides, there's nothing interesting about just copying someone else's artwork.

Here are some that I considered.

Hackers

The floppies on display don't have anything interesting written on them.

Similarly, what does The Gibson look like?

Alien

The floppy disk props were never actually used.

The Net

We all love Sandra Bullock, and The Net is a fine movie. But this is hardly an iconic shot.

Red Dwarf

I lol'd, but I wanted something a bit more like real software disk.

Better Than Life is a brilliant bit of software, but there are no product shots.

Star Trek

LCARS was a popular request. But it is so colourful, that it's hard to show on a black and white printer.

What's next?

Not sure. I'm painfully aware that most of these are AI systems, rather than discrete software. I have no need for a colour printer - so I don't think I'll upgrade these. And I don't think I'm a good enough designer to make many more. So this will just sit as a curio on my wall.

I think it looks great during video calls.

Here's how I did it:

Step One - Stalk eBay

With lockdown, I couldn't exactly go to my local record store. And I didn't fancy rummaging through bins of second hand items trying to find exactly what I wanted. So I decided to buy a job-lot of records from eBay.

Beatles collections are regularly sold. Some are designed for people who want pristine records, and some who want original pressings. Prices can go absolutely wild. I managed to find someone selling a collection of Beatles (and solo) records which had attracted no bids. While other sets went for £400, I snapped up 33 records for £165 including delivery.

A fiver per LP!

While it might have been nice to have factory-fresh covers, I kinda like the worn æsthetic.

OK, it didn't include every record that I wanted. And had a few that I didn't really want on my wall (sorry Michael Jackson fans!) so the real cost was about a tenner per record.

Step Two - Hang 'em High!

Sticking things to walls is fun! But I didn't want to damage the record sleeves, and I wasn't overly keen on drilling a hundreds of holes in the wall. I considered lots of solutions (see later) but ended up using...

STICKY MAGNETS!

These strong magnets come with 3M glue pads to stick them to non-magnetic surfaces.

These particular ones were £9 for 10 magnets. A cost of £1.80 per album

Step 3 Test

I stuck one of the magnets to the wall. The glue held it tight, so I tested whether two magnets could hold up a the weight of the cover and the record. They couldn't. I could have bought some more powerful magnets, but I decided just to ditch the vinyl.

I didn't want to damage the record sleeve, so I stuck the magnet to a bit of cardboard which was small enough to fit inside the sleeve.

Moment of truth...

IT WORKS!!

Step 3 - Stabilise

Getting the interior magnet in exactly in the right place was a bit annoying. Especially as my grid wasn't exactly perfect.

The strip of cardboard was just what I needed. I could snap the magnets together, and then move the album sleeve vertically and horizontally - keeping the magnet in place.

Flapping open

Some albums aren't just sleeves, they open up gatefold style. I didn't want them flapping about, so needed a non-destructive way to keep them shut.

I used paperclips. They're small, discreet, and cheap.

Sorry that I didn't use some 3D printed, biosonic, weak-nuclear-force, mechanised doo-dahs. Sometimes simple is best!

Step 4 - More Music

I had 10 magnets, so I stuck five albums up - one by each Beatle, and Sgt Pepper.

Step 5 - More Magnets

I had proved that the set-up worked. So I bought a butt-load more magnets. They're cheaper in bulk. And you can always find a use for a spare magnet.

Final Costs

• £10.31 per LP
• £ 1.69 per pair of magnets
• =====
• £12.00 per stuck up sleeve. Not bad!

I also have a bunch of records to sell, or swap, and four pairs of magnets for other projects.

Other options I considered

Buy pre-framed records.

Some enterprising folk sell pre-framed Beatles record covers for £20 each.

Didn't include the vinyl. But ready to go.

Solo Frames

If I just wanted 12x12 frames, the cheapest I found was around £9 each.

Print your own

There are loads of high resolution scans of album covers. Printing a ready-to-hang canvas box frame would cost about £15 each.

Minor risk of copyright infringement. Lack of authenticity. A bit sterile?

Simple Hangers

I found these hangers with built in record sleeves for £15

The plastic might be too glossy. The reviews mention the sleeves tearing easily. There's also no sense of mystique that you get with floating magnetics.

But, £1.88 per record is a good price, and they're a lot easier to hang - just bash a nail into the wall!

3D printed shelves

I found a bunch of 3D printed mini-shelves on Etsy

They were about £2 - £4 each. They looked nice - but I was worried they'd be too fragile. And, they're really only suitable for holding records. With my magnets, I can swap to anything light enough.

Final Thoughts

I don't care if I'm going through a mid-life high-fidelity crisis. I've turned a plain, boring wall into something that brings me joy. If my tastes change, I can quickly and easily shuffle the record sleeves around.

And there's no way I'm buying a record player!

I had this gorgeous Barret Biggers - Link Blot poster which had lain in a drawer for far too long. So I turned it into an Amiibo.

Nestled in the corner, sandwiched between the print and the glass, is an NTAG215 chip.

Using the open source TagMo app for Android, I've written the data of one of my Nintendo amiibo to the chip. Now, in the middle of an epic battle on Breath of the Wild, I can run up to the artwork, awkwardly hold the JoyCon in just the right place, and get a much needed power up! Sweet!

What's the point?

YOU'RE NOT MY REAL DAD, JEFF! YOU CAN'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO WITH MY LIFE!

Geez sport, I was only askin'. Wanna tell me what's really on your mind?

You wouldn't understand...

Try me...

Other uses

My ridiculously talented cousin, the artist Judi Lapsley Miller creates the most brain-bending bird-based artworks.

Hidden in the corner is another NFC tag. Tap it, and it goes directly to the artwork's homepage.

Visibility

NFC suffers from several problems - most of which can be solved by using a QR code.

• The tag needs to be visible. That white circle is a little incongruous. I could have hidden it behind the paper, but then no one would know it was there, and they wouldn't know where to place their phone.
• Where is your phone's sensor? Do you know? If not, you'll be rubbing your phone all over the glass, attempting to find it.
• Physical contact is damaging to artwork. NFC is "contactless" - but if you ever watch people pay for things with their phone, they often slam it down on the reader. Not what you want on your art.
• NFC is expensive. Between 50p - £2 per chip, depending on model. QR just requires black ink and white paper.
• Limited data. The NTAG215 holds 504 bytes. QR codes can hold 8x that amount.

Basically, for anything other than an amiibo, QR codes still win.

So, there you go, I have created an impractical video game accessory. Where is my VC funding?

I've been like that ever since. I have a crippling fear of doing something artistic which cannot be undone. That's why I prefer computers to the corporeal world. Mistakes are only ever a CTRL+Z away from being fixed.

My new laptop is bare. An blank canvas of "Space Grey". Anonymous in a sea of similar shells. So, like all good geeks, I decided to add stickers to it. Being in lockdown means I'm not visiting conferences any more, so I don't have any hip-cool startup branding to plaster over the cracks in my personality. So I raided my unused pile, and ordered a bunch more from RedBubble.

And then I got the fear.

If I put that one there it will overlap with that other one. But I want this one in the corner, which means that one won't have room. Will these look silly next to each other?

Liz Eden

@summerbeth

Replying to @edent@edent @edent can confirm concentration levels on the Serious Business of perfect laptop sticker placement! pic.x.com/zO3RNdhYzz

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ARGH!

Eventually, I settled. I'm at home. No one is going to see this for months. Hell, I won't even see it because it's facing away from me! Stickers are pretty cheap, and so is cleaning fluid. No one's life is getting ruined because of my poor sticker placement.

But still…

No! Stop it!

Ta da!

I've got a few more coming in the post - and I hope to do some sticker swaps with friends once the pestilence has been driven from the land. If you have interesting stickers - or want to swap with some of mine - let me know.

I'm not a big fan of net curtains. They always look a bit ratty, and are a dust trap. So we decided to get some "stained glass" privacy film. We found this beautiful Mondrian-style sticker

It brings me joy every day to see something so bright and illuminated. As a bonus, when the sun is just at the right angle, it shines a rainbow on our stairs.

A long roll was about £8 on Amazon

At first glance, it appears to be a normal London Tube map. But look closer...

Cool! But there is something about it which has always bothered me. Each Tube line represents a theme - therefore, a station at the intersection of multiple lines should be represented by someone who matches all of those themes.

For example, here's Baron's Court - the intersection of the Explorer line and the Saint line - represented by Saint Ursula. She is just an saint - she has nothing to do with exploring. This artwork is wrong!

So, can we write something to query Wikidata to generate a more accurate artwork?
Because accuracy is my aesthetic.

Jump straight to the finished product and skip all the geeky details!🔗

A brief guide to SPARQL

Wikipedia holds structured data about people and things. It uses SPARQL to query that data. It is a bit complex to use, but a valuable skill.

For example, this query finds people who are explorers and also saints.

SELECT DISTINCT ?person ?personLabel WHERE {
  ?person wdt:P106 wd:Q11900058 . # People whose occupation (P106) is explorer (Q11...)
  ?person wdt:P411 wd:Q43115      # People whose canonization status (P411) is sainthood (Q43...)

  SERVICE wikibase:label {
    bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en" .
  }
}

The result is just four people. And that's where the problem starts. Simon Patterson chose categories for the lines which often don't have any intersections. There is no one who is an Italian Artist who is also a Saint and also a Footballer.

So, to create a more accurate artwork, we'll need different categories.

Nodes

One of the first things we need to do is understand the Tube map as a graph - with stations as nodes and lines as edges.

We want to know:

1. Which stations are on which lines
2. Which stations are on multiple lines
3. Which station has the most lines
4. How many stations are on each line

Thankfully Mark Dunne has done lots the hard work for us, and provided a great tutorial. Sadly, the data are about 5 years out of date.

Alternatively, the TfL API has lots of the information we need. Here's the call for all the stations on the Bakerloo line - https://api.tfl.gov.uk/line/bakerloo/stoppoints

Let's throw some Python down to grab the data we need. First, how many stations are there on the Bakerloo line?

import requests
r = requests.get("https://api.tfl.gov.uk/line/bakerloo/stoppoints")
stations = r.json()
count = len(stations)
print("There are " + str(count) + " stations on the Bakerloo Line")

Next, let's get the lines for each station:

import requests
r = requests.get("https://api.tfl.gov.uk/line/bakerloo/stoppoints")
stations = r.json()

for station in stations:
    stationName = station["commonName"]
    lineGroups   = station["lineModeGroups"]
    for lineGroup in lineGroups:
        modeName = lineGroup["modeName"]
        if (modeName=="tube"):
            lineCount = len(lineGroup["lineIdentifier"])

    print(stationName + "," + str(lineCount))

The line names can be found at https://api.tfl.gov.uk/Line/Mode/tube

Brief survey of the problem...

270 Tube Stations(!) across 11 lines. King's Cross St Pancras has the most lines - 6.

There a few anomalies in the data. It lists Edgware Road as two separate stations - even though it's really one station. The same problem is present on Hammersmith and Paddington. Cleaning data is "fun"...

The categories are also challenging. This is how many times the Bakerloo line intersects with the other lines

'bakerloo': {
    'circle': 3,
    'hammersmith-city': 1,
    'jubilee': 2,
    'metropolitan': 1,
    'northern': 4,
    'district': 2,
    'central': 1,
    'victoria': 1,
    'piccadilly': 1,
    'waterloo-city': 1
},

That is - the Bakerloo line touches every other line at least once. As do the Northern, Central, and Jubilee lines. Those lines will need to contain some very broad categories.

Back to Wikidata

So, we want to replace each station's name with a human's name. We need attributes which are wide-spread enough to get good coverage in the data - and quirky enough to be interesting. I'd also like to keep some of the original categories:

I suspect there's a way to interrogate SPARQL to find a list of categories based on a graph - but I'm not clever enough to do that. I started off with an entirely arbitrary set of attributes:

• Academy Award Winners
• Left-handed people
• Nobel Prize Winners
• People born in London
• Educated at UEA (the university where my wife and I first met)
• Female Computer Scientists
• Saints
• Explorers
• Journalists
• Sinologues
• Comedians

Here's the query for Comedians who were educated at UEA and were born in London:

SELECT DISTINCT ?person ?personLabel WHERE {
  ?person wdt:P69 wd:Q1045828 .
  ?person wdt:P106 wd:Q245068 .
  ?person wdt:P19 wd:Q84
  SERVICE wikibase:label {
    bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en" .
  }
}

One result - Doc Brown. There are no saints who have won an Oscar, and data about left-handed people is suspiciously absent. The categories will have to be completely rejigged.

Keep It Simple, Stupid

I figured the easiest thing to do would be to start from a well data'd individual and work backwards from there.

SELECT DISTINCT ?person ?personLabel WHERE {  
  ?person wdt:P108 wd:Q35794  . #Employed by Cambridge University #Bakerloo
  ?person wdt:P19  wd:Q84     . #Born in London                   #Circle
  ?person wdt:P463 wd:Q123885 . #Member of the Royal Society      #Hammersmith&City
  ?person wdt:P106 wd:Q121594 . #Professor                        #Waterloo&City
  ?person wdt:P106 wd:Q205375 . #Inventor                         #Metropolitan
  ?person wdt:P106 wd:Q81096  . #Engineer                         #District
  ?person wdt:P106 wd:Q4964182. #Philosopher                      #Piccadilly
  ?person wdt:P106 wd:Q11063  . #Astronomer                       #Victoria
  ?person wdt:P106 wd:Q170790 . #Mathematician                    #Jubilee
  ?person wdt:P106 wd:Q82594  . #Computer Science                 #Northern
  ?person wdt:P106 wd:Q188094 . #Economist                        #Central

  SERVICE wikibase:label {
    bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en" .
  }
}

The result of that query is the inventor of steampunk, Charles Babbage!

We can do a reverse query. Given these people, which common properties do they have?

SELECT ?property ?propnameLabel ?value_Label
where
{ 
  wd:Q46633 ?property ?value . #Babbage
  wd:Q7259  ?property ?value . #Lovelace
  ?propname wikibase:directClaim ?property . # constrain to directClaims
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en".
                         ?value rdfs:label ?value_Label .
                         ?propname rdfs:label ?propnameLabel .}
} order by ?property

(Thanks to TagishSimon for the help)

This is where things got trickier! Most of the major intersections didn't have any candidates other than Babbage - truly a Renaissance Man! - so I expanded "born in London" to "born in the UK".

We can't use ?person wdt:P27 wd:Q145 becuase that only covers the current United Kingdom - not The Kingdom of Great Britain (1707–1801) nor The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (1801 to 1927)

The correct query seems to be ensuring the place of birth is within the current administrative territory of UK:

?person wdt:P19 ?pob . ?pob wdt:P131* wd:Q145 .

But you can also use a UNION

{?person wdt:P27 wd:Q145} UNION {?person wdt:P27 wd:Q174193} UNION {?person wdt:P27 wd:Q161885} .

That got closer - but still not enough.

Unions

Wikidata is fickle. Someone may have an occupation as a "computer scientist" or they may work in the field of "computer science". SPARQL eschews the or operator, and uses UNION:

{?person wdt:P101 wd:Q21198} #Field of Work CS
UNION
{?person wdt:P106 wd:Q82594} #Occupation CS

I'm beginning to see why the original artist was more liberal in his accuracy!

Sorting

I want the map to contain notable people. There are a couple of ways to assess the "notability" of a Wikidata subject. I've chosen to use "sitelinks" - that shows how many languages their article is available in. It's a crude, but quick method.

Here's it in action:

SELECT DISTINCT ?person ?personLabel ?sitelinks WHERE {
  ?person wdt:P106 wd:Q205375 . #Inventor
  ?person wikibase:sitelinks ?sitelinks .

  SERVICE wikibase:label {
    bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en" .
  }
} ORDER BY DESC (?sitelinks)

Correcting for Bias

Wikipedia has an acknowledged male bias. So I used SPARQL's FILTER property to great effect:

FILTER ( !EXISTS{ ?person wdt:P21 wd:Q6581097 }) 

It says to return anyone without the sex/gender of "Male". (Yes, I know things are a bit more complicated than that - but this is a good way to return women, intersex people, agender, transgender folk etc).

If no non-men were returned, I repeated the search but omitted the filter.

Because I used "Born in the UK" as a filter, there is probably a bias towards white people. And people who become Professors or members of the Royal Society may also be the product of a biased society. There are many other filters and categories I could have chosen - and I hope some of you will create maps for your own cultures and societies.

P-p-p-pickup Some Python

There are several Python libraries for SPARQL, I used sparqlwrapper.

Here's a sample query

from SPARQLWrapper import SPARQLWrapper, JSON

sparql = SPARQLWrapper("https://query.wikidata.org/sparql")
sparql.setQuery("""
    SELECT DISTINCT ?person ?personLabel ?sitelinks WHERE {
        ?person wdt:P106 wd:Q81096 . #Engineer
        ?person wdt:P20  wd:Q84    . #Died in London
        ?person wikibase:sitelinks ?sitelinks .
        SERVICE wikibase:label {
            bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en" .
        }
    } ORDER BY DESC (?sitelinks)
""")
sparql.setReturnFormat(JSON)
results = sparql.query().convert()

for result in results["results"]["bindings"]:
    print('%s %s %s' % (result["person"]["value"], result["personLabel"]["value"], result["sitelinks"]["value"]))

Plotting onto an image

Let's leave who and what we select for now, and work out how we draw the eventual results.

We could do all sorts of clever things plotting out locations - but I decided to cheat!

There is a fully semantic SVG of the tube lines (Thanks to Oliver O’Brien for finding it).

I removed all the lines I didn't want, then I was able to search & replace station names with my preferred text.

Search And Replace

Well... sort of! Charing Cross Station has an ID of 940GZZLUCHX.

On the map it is:

<g id="s-940gzzluchx_label">
    <g id="s-940gzzluchx_label_1_">
        <text transform="matrix(1 0 0 1 515.8999 487.6963)">
            <tspan x="0" y="0">Charing</tspan>
            <tspan x="4.3" y="4.5">Cross</tspan>
        </text>
    </g>
    <polygon id="s-940gzzluchx_nr" fill="#EE3124" points="514.3,487.7 512.6,486.9 515,486.9 515,486.4 512.5,486.4 513.8,485.8 515,485.8 515,485.3 513.8,485.3 512.2,484.6 511,484.6 512.7,485.3 510.2,485.3 510.2,485.8 512.7,485.8 511.4,486.4 510.2,486.4 510.2,486.9 511.5,486.9 513.1,487.7 "/>
</g>

Whereas the SVG element for North Wembley is just:

<text id="s-940gzzlunwy_label_2_" transform="matrix(1 0 0 1 282.1489 289.1079)">North Wembley</text>

Again, I'm not quite clever enough to work out a way to reliably find the inner text for an element which may be inside (or not) several other similarly named elements.

So a lot of repetitive search-and-replace it is. *sigh*

I also need to manually place some of the station names, because they're a different length to the originals. *double-sigh*

Putting it all together

I have great pleasure in revealing to you "The Great(er) Bear"!

See the full sized version.

Copyright

OK gang, turns out that copyright law is even trickier than computer code! I've spoken to Simon Patterson and he is happy for me to host a not-for-profit version of this piece of art which is heavily indebted to his original.

TfL has been litigious in the past when it comes to derivative maps. I tried contacting them several times, but didn't receive any clear answers as to whether I could do this.

The data that I used to generate the art is "Powered by TfL Open Data" and provided under OGLv2. It may contain OS data © Crown copyright and database rights 2016.

The original font is tightly controlled. So I've used a freely available font called Hammersmith One which is broadly similar.

Lots of people create modified tube maps:

• The Literary Tube Map - putting authors on the map
• Tube Map of Beer Prices
• Decibel levels on the Tube
• House Price Tube Map
• And no doubt many more.

If you want to build your own version of my modified map, all the data are on my GitLab!

Details

Here are a few interesting close-ups of the map - they may be different from the final version.

Errata

• The data in Wikidata may be incorrect or incomplete.
• I originally didn't restrict it to just humans! So a few weird entries snuck in. Using ?person wdt:P31 wd:Q5 . corrected that. But I'm wondering if anyone on the map is fictional...!
• Due to timeouts and my crappy coding, I ran the code over several passes on different days. If you run the code, you might get different results.
• I didn't use people's names in their original language, I had to back-fill them. I probably missed some. I should have used P1559.
• Even after lots of jiggling of categories, one or two stations kept coming up blank. So I manually added in a few people. Can you spot who they are?
• Some people's names were too long for the allotted space, so I have swapped a few people around. Better code would try to keep name length as close to the original as possible.
• There's no (intentional) ordering. It might be nice to put people on the line in order of, say, year of birth.
• Similarly, there's almost no relation between the people and the places. Although I've contrived to put the author of Mary Poppins somewhere special!
• The Hammersmith One font only has a basic set of characters - so non-European languages (and some accents) are in the default font.
• The Elizabeth Line / CrossRail hasn't opened yet. I suspect it will be much harder to produce a new map once it goes live. Similarly the DLR and Overground lines are excluded.
• The SVG renders well in Firefox, and seems to work OK in Chrome. Please let me know of any glitches.
• I've also added a couple of Easter Eggs. Enjoy finding them!

Thanks

Mainly to my wife, Liz, for being very patient with me while I swore at my code.

I am indebted to Simon Patterson for his incredible and inspirational artwork. When it was created in 1992, Wikipedia did not exist. Linked Data stores were in their infancy. It would have been close to impossible to create a semantically correct map. Nothing in my version is intended to take away from Patterson's work and creativity.

One in particular caught my attention. On the surface it seems to solve an important economic problem - art forgery and provenance.

By putting your artwork on the "BitCoin Blockchain", Verisart will ✨hand wavy magic✨ increase the trust in art dealers and reduce fraud.

That's a pretty neat idea. A distributed public ledger of who I have sold my art to. And, if they sell it, they have a cryptographically signed certificate proving its provenance. The seller can sign the certificate with their private key to say they've sold it to the new owner of a specific public key. Nifty!

Except… and I hate to bring the art industry into disrepute… what if I sell a fake and keep the original in my Underground Vault?

There's no way to permanently attach a digital certificate to a physical work of art.

Incidentally, this is the problem with all the startups claiming the blockchain will revolutionise the integrity of global logistics markets. Sure, you can slap a QR code on a crate - but nothing stops an unscrupulous middle-man from replacing or adulterating the contents of the crate.

Let's get back to Verisart's other issue. Proving that I am the creator or owner of a piece of artwork.

Long story short, I convinced them that I painted the Mona Lisa. An excellent situationalist prank. Much avant-garde, so postmodernism.

For this "proof" I provided Verisart with...

• An email address
• A photo of the Mona Lisa from Wikipedia
• …
• Er…
• That's it!

That was all that was required. I didn't have to provide them with a public key, a certified copy of my passport, a high resolution copy of the artwork. Nothing.

Because the blockchain is immutable, that "proof" is there forever now. You mustn't make mistakes when irrevocably signing something.

So, what does this mean? Can I waltz into the Louvre and ask for "my" painting back?

No, obviously not. Not even a moron in a hurry would think that I was a time traveller or that I owned the most famous portrait in Europe.

But, if it is certified on the blockchain, it must be true!

I'm sure there are many sensible uses for this technology. I'm also sure there are many investors who will throw money at any pitch which contains the right buzzwords.

It's almost as if we can't just throw technology at the social problem of trust…

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

I don't understand the blockchain hype.
A startup has certified my artwork & placed their verification on the bitcoin blockchain.
Now art dealers & auctioneers can feel secure that I am the original artist.

One small problem… I am not Leonardo da Vinci!
verisart.com/works/23f2c64a…

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• Discussion on HackerNews
• Discussion on Twitter
• Discussion on BitsOnLine
• Article in The Economist