2009 102

this page is under construction ;)

Command Line Media Research

RESEARCH: Tool to support visual comparison of front pages newssites a la Sarah Charlesworth's Modern History (1978)

• Modern History examples
• The Order Of Things through the end of the year at the MuKHA, Antwerp.

Exercise explores the principle of:

• simple command line tools focused on doing a simple task
• the idea of a pipeline to join various commands together
• introducing the concept of a variable to make a personal "tool"

start with example of how to rip the above page with wget. & re-assemble with montage...

cron job to automate ? (need simple solution for naming files with date, basic back quoting)

In general build up from really simple CL exercises of using imagemagick, file manipulations (moving, renaming, copying, deleting)... Introducing public_html...

Adventures in Command Line

• http://www.ir.bbn.com/~bschwart/adventure.html

Chat bots

Eliza... tie in with Python callbacks...

---

Necessary Tools:

• ssh program (look up for those on windows)

• text adventures == early intersection of narrative and computational forms
• multi-person / time sharing / interaction vs. batch
• getting comfortable with the command line
• command line == programming
• pipeline VS. sealed case "suites"

pragmatic exercises / "puzzles" involving:

• wget for some spidering
• ffmpeg for some media manipulation?
• imagemagick for some xxzzy ?!

Maybe cool to keep in the spirit of group / network activities / timing. How to communicate between users logged into the network. ... too complex for now

Exercises could take the form of puzzles with a description of a desired end result, like:

• Produce a single image made up of images collected from the homepage of a particular website.

(wget => montage)

• Produce an animated gif made up of the headlines from a particular news site

? CL feedreader ?? => image => movie ?

(?! find command / wildcards as a prelimary way to loop ) By creating a single (or more) variables, create a basic tool.

!! show how copying images / animation to public_html allows for instant web "publishing"