2009 102

this page is under construction ;)

Command Line Media

While the command line, or shell, is a text-based interface, this does not mean that manipulating other kinds of media, image, sound, video, is excluded. Far from it, many command line tools offer extremely useful and uniquely powerful functionality difficult to achieve with GUI programs. In addition, by applying the basics of pipelining and abstraction (through creating your own scripts with parameters), the command line enables highly particular and personal media tools to be created by pulling existing tools together in novel ways.

Making a "frontpage" snapshot tool

An exercise to build a simple tool to support visual comparison of front pages newssites a la Sarah Charlesworth's Modern History (1978). The work, among many other works of interest, can be seen as part of the Order Of Things exhibition, 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"
• cron jobs to automate a process over a long time period

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

Using the date tool for automatically naming a file.

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

Necessary Tools:

• basics: cd, pwd, mv, cp
• ssh
• wget
• ImageMagick: convert, mogrify, montage
• find
• crontab
• date

Concepts:

• variable
• backquoting
• reading man pages
• setting options

a sample:

wget -r -l1 --no-parent -A "*.jpg" "http://www.sarahcharlesworth.net/series-view.php?album_id=34&subalbum_id=53"
mkdir images
find www.sarahcharlesworth.net -iname "*.jpg" -exec mv {} images \;
montage images/* modern.png

Turtle Graphics

Seymour Papert

• http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/?year=1967
• http://www.bfoit.org/itp/IntroCmds.html

Adventures in Command Line

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

Chat bots

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

• Turing tests continue

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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"