I just fed my blogpost about bird circles to Shredder, a work of net-art by Marc Napier. It takes my orderly facade and makes the jungle of code beneath it visible – a subject that appeals to me as I am juggling code myself these days. Apparently, Napier takes my HTML and runs it through a Perl script, rearranging the original code so my page gets torn into shreds and rearranged. I like it!

Just for fun I checked the code behind my shredded page. It’s huge  - and weird  :

Progress! This is the algorithm that leads to circles:

1. get a place name;
2. call on Flickr to get georeference for place name;
3. call on flickr to get 22 images geo-tagged to georeference, sort for high ‘interestingness’;
4. store these images in folder as .jpg;
5. convert images to .bmp and store in same folder;
6. randomize .bmp images;
7. make randomized .bmp images into circles;
8. output randomized circles to browser, onclick go to Flickr original.

I am getting closer to my goal: total control over the picture at the pixel level.  Next steps to be considered: make colored barcode = colour map for place; input image string to voicebot; input images to flash movie.

Went to the opening of van Abbe’s Spirits of Internationalism’ yesterday. It is a joint venture with M HKA in Antwerp, and covers the bipolar period of the Cold War, where us Benelux people looked up to the United States and our counterparts across the Iron Curtain were forced to do the same towards the Soviet Union. The exhibition shows mainstream art from the ‘West’  between 1956 and 1986 and under-the-soviet-radar art from the ‘ East’, and stresses the fact that art did cross the divide.

It came home to me that  under-the-soviet-radar artists were very much confined to the  intimate gesture – at home, in parks, at the beach. Had the giggles in front of ‘Activities with Dobromierz’ , a series of colour slides where baby  Dobromierz is surrounded by and put into all kinds of different home utensils by  his – doting? – parents Sofia Kulik and Przemyslaw Kwiek.

Some interesting experiments with lines done by the OHO group, who developed neo-avant-garde in Slovenia. The booklet that accompanies the exhibition states that they did  research about ‘the thing’ as distinguished from ‘the (consumer) object’. Wonder what they mean by this?

I talked with Charles Esche  for a while at the drinks party after the opening. He’s in the un-enviable position of having to secure funds for the museum from local government while having an  (inter)national orientation. Spending money on art is an ‘out’ thing to do in the political culture of the Netherlands these days. Spending money on art that the locals don’t fancy – no lines in front of the van Abbe yet – is even less popular. The van Abbe is a museum’s museum: they ask questions about the role of the museum in modern times, and do so really well. But as a result, they tend to be rather abstract. Their rabbit warren of rooms and corridors not easy to navigate, either.

Congratulations are in order: I managed to pull Flickr images by geo-tag! Circumventing the authentication problem – it turned out I did not really need this – which is just as well as I understood about zero percent of the for-dummies explanation about this subject. Does this make me a super-dummy?

Anyway: I made some more code and it works. Just input a placename here and the 20 top pics from that place will show. Actually, I told the algorithm to get pictures from jan 1th 2010 onwards, in a 10 km radius around the place’s centroid, and sorted by interestingness.

Interestingness is what Flickr calls the criteria used for selecting which photos are showcased. “All photos are given an Interestingness “score” that can also be used to sort any image search on Flickr. The top 500 photos ranked by Interestingness are shown in Explore. Interestingness rankings are calculated automatically by a secret computer algorithm. The algorithm is often referred to by name as the Interestingness algorithm. Although the algorithm is secret, Flickr has stated that many factors go into calculating Interestingness including: a photo’s tags, how many groups the photo is in, views, favorites, where click-throughs are coming from, who comments on a photo and when, and more. The velocity of any of those components is a key factor. For example, getting 20 comments in an hour counts much higher than getting 20 comments in a week.” 

Interesting!

I’m doing the software thing again – it is so interesting ! I combine Flickr API stuff with  PHP programming and I am slowly unraveling their mysteries. “Code is poetry” – I think the wordpress people  have it right. I managed a simple ‘call by tag’ function that calls Flickr pictures. I managed to convert  the picture to binary, which shows when you hover the mouse over the picture. I’m putting this function under the  ’Test‘ tab – it can be played with  if and when I am not testing something. Then, it will give error messages and other weird stuff,  because I’m working  trial-and-error style.

Am now wrestling with the authentication that Flickr demands for its more nifty API functions. No light at the end of that particular tunnel – yet.

And here’s the particular poetry that makes the above happen – great gulf between form and function:

<?php

/*
Template Name: testapi
*/
?>
<?php get_header(); ?>
<h2 >

<?php
echo “call flickr images by tag”;
?>
</h2>

<?php
/*
#
# get the tag
#
*/
?>

<?php

echo “<form action=\”http://www.visual-art-research.com/test-8/\” method=\”post\”>”;
echo “Write a tag: <input type=\”text\” name=\”ftag\” value=\”$tagname\”>”;
echo “<input type=\”submit\” />”;
echo “</form>”;
$tagname=$_POST["ftag"];
?>

<?php
if (isset($tagname)) {
/*
#
# build the API URL to call
#
*/
?>
<?php
$params = array(
‘api_key’ => ‘xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx’,
‘method’ => ‘flickr.photos.search’,
‘tags’ => $tagname,
‘format’ => ‘php_serial’,
);

$encoded_params = array();

foreach ($params as $k => $v){
$encoded_params[] = urlencode($k).’=’.urlencode($v);
}
?>
<?php
/*
#
# call the API and decode the response
#
*/
?>

<?php
$url = “http://api.flickr.com/services/rest/?”.implode(‘&’, $encoded_params);
$rsp = file_get_contents($url);

$rsp_obj = unserialize($rsp);
/*
print_r ($rsp_obj);
*/
?>

<?php
/*
#
# display the first 20 photos (or an error if it failed)
#
*/
?>

<?php
$photos_total = $rsp_obj['photos']['total'];

if ($photos_total > 0){

echo “<h3 class= \”pagetitle\” >”;
echo “Displaying photo’s with tag \” $tagname \” (max 20 photo’s)”;
echo “<br/>”;
echo “</h3>”;

for ($i = 0; $i < 20 and $i < $photos_total; $i++) {
$photo_farm = $rsp_obj['photos']['photo'][$i]['farm'];
$photo_owner = $rsp_obj ['photos'][photo][$i]['owner'];
$photo_server = $rsp_obj['photos']['photo'][$i]['server'];
$photo_id = $rsp_obj['photos']['photo'][$i]['id'];
$photo_secret = $rsp_obj['photos']['photo'][$i]['secret'];
$photo_title = $rsp_obj['photos']['photo'][$i]['title'];
$photo_URL = “http://farm”.$photo_farm.”.static.flickr.com/”.$photo_server.”/”.$photo_id.”_”.$photo_secret.”_s.jpg”;
$flickr_URL =”http://www.flickr.com/photos/”.$photo_owner.”/”.$photo_id.”/”;
/*
echo “<img src=”.$photo_URL.” width=150 height=150>”;
*/

# write the image to a file named $img and find length of $img
$img=file_get_contents($photo_URL);
$length = strlen ($img);

# add binary info to the #binTotString variable

for ($j = 0; $j < $length; $j++) {
$hexString = $img[$j];
$binNumeric = hexdec($hexString);
$binString = decbin($binNumeric);
$bin_length = strlen ($binString);
$binTotString .=$binString;
}
echo “<div id=contentnw>”;
echo “</div>”;
echo “<div>”;
echo “<div>”;
echo “<a href=”.$flickr_URL.” title=’”.$binTotString.”‘> <img src=”.$photo_URL.” alt=”.$binTotString.”></a>”;
echo “</div>”;
echo “<h5>”;
echo “<a href=”.$flickr_URL.” width=150 height=150> View ‘”.$photo_title.”‘ at Flickr </a>”;
echo “</div>”;
echo “</h5>”;
}
}else{
echo “<br/>”;
echo “Sorry, no images with tag \” $tagname \”";
echo “<br/>”;
}
?>
<?php
}
?>

<?php get_footer(); ?>