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[[[[[[[THE PASSMORES]]]]]]]]]]
Modbrowse modifiable-web browser (Rhizome voting system is at the bottom of the page here)
Project Proposal
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Modbrowse is a firefox web browser plug-in that allows the user to browse a modifiable internet woven with ANSI art, a text-based computer artform most widely used in the BBS (bulletin board system) subculture of the early 90s. Modbrowse functions as a normal internet browser with the stipulation that all digital still image files are converted and viewed in ANSI. In addition, Modbrowse allows users to edit these text-based images themselves for other users to see, offering a portal into an underground graffiti community, wherein users can edit the ANSI version of public images themselves using Empathy, modbrowse's internal ANSI image editing program, allowing for the following work flow: Images in websites will be automatically converted into an ASCII or ANSI image. Users can then select an image, open the ANSI editor, and modify the image to create their own custom ANSI artwork. After an ANSI image is hand-modified to become a personalized artwork, it remains posted online in its original context in its newly modified state. Users can also add arbitrary ANSI tags on top of any page (think ``tag'' as in graffiti, not ``tag'' as in metadata). In this way, modbrowse users can leave their ANSI calling cards on public sites, such as the front pages of the New York Times online or myspace.com, and stumble across modified ANSI artworks left online by other users as a sort of netart graffiti on the living web. ANSI online on modbrowse is similar in spirit and form to hand-painted graffiti art in the city, as well as playing the same role of psychogeographic marker.
The modbrowse homepage will contain a directory/gallery of all new mods, and modbrowse users can choose to disable the ANSI image feature for ``pure'' browsing, as well as search for or block tags and work by specific users. Users of other browsers (safari, internet explorer, et cetera) who have not installed modbrowse can view modified images directly on the modbrowse homepage directory, but will be unable to visit the living internet in ANSI form.
History of Modbrowse Modbrowse pays respect to the incredible wealth of artwork created by the ANSI/high ASCII art scenes of the pre-internet underground BBS scene and recognizes their influence on contemporary net art and online and social networking communities. BBSes were a subculture based around making and sharing art, information, and programs online that preceded the rise of net art by several years; the subculture has made its way into the work of many net artists, e.g. Vuk Cosic. Many artists today remain nostalgic for the heyday of the amateur web, using formats like the animated gif. Modbrowse pares this reflection back a step deeper into the history of computer art. The constraints that defined early text-based art are also the same rigid, unforgiving perimeters that forced these scenes to flourish; Modbrowse allows the net user to webcrawl wearing ANSI goggles, instigating consideration of that silent community who lay the groundwork for much of netart today without sentimentality, by placing ANSI art as constantly refreshing force on the living web. Early 90's ANSI thrived as part of the dial-up pre-internet BBS scene (before the wide proliferation of networked computers, a time in which single users were linked by telephone lines) and with the demise of traditional BBS communities, the vital life force of ANSI all but died with the advent of the contemporary internet (with the supreme exception of old school diehards still active today, such as Jack Phlash and Eto). By introducing a new generation of tech-saavy web users to ANSI processes, modbrowse ensures that the lineage of the tangible skill of editing text-based art lives on, and forges an alternative contemporary narrative for what has been called the ``obsolete'' art of text-based craftsmen such as ANSI artists, drawing attention to its place in net art history. Modbrowse also allows the user the opportunity to modify the public web as a means of appropriating the medium, founding an ownership of annotated content and silent discourse on public sites. Feasability Modbrowse - a downloadble firefox browser plugin for the ``modifiable-web'' coupled with an ANSI editor and ``modifiable-web'' social community directory website - will be designed and programmed by The Passmores, brother-and-sister duo Grant Olney Passmore and Jacqueline Passmore. Modbrowse's editor, Empathy, is the official editor of ANSI stars ACiD Productions, is open source, and is the only XBiN editor in existence (XBiN is a form of extended ANSI that allows people to make hybrid ANSI/VGA images.) Empathy was programmed and designed by The Passmores member Grant Passmore in 1998 at the age of 14 while he was head coder for the Avenge Cult art group. He then took up post as head coder of ACiD Productions at 15 and continuted to develop Empathy within the ACiD community. We are aware of the ambitious nature of this project and are confident about its feasibility given past experience with this kind of software development. We are encouraged by other web annotation initiatives such as Annotea and ShiftSpace and will investigate the ShiftSpace API and other web annotation APIs as frameworks for building Modbrowse in a way that is compatible with existing related efforts.
MODBROWSE BUDGET
At present, (and for the last several years) the American dollar is worth approximately half the value of the British pound. However, the relative values of the dollar and the pound are the same- a $1.50 coffee in the States is a GBP 1.50 coffee in London. Because of this, we're going to obtain additional support for our project in England to cover the difference. As we are UK residents, we're applying for matching support from the Arts Council England to cover a modest development period subsistence fee and material costs, and would like Rhizome to commission the primary artist's fees for the production of Modbrowse. MODBROWSE TIMELINE
THE PASSMORES The Passmores are brother-and-sister duo Grant Olney Passmore and Jacqueline Passmore, American-born artists based in the United Kingdom. Grant Olney Passmore is a mathematician and theoretical computer scientist (currently a Ph.D. student in the Algorithms and Complexity Group in LFCS, University of Edinburgh, Scotland) and was a prominent coder in the 1990s BBS/DEMO/ANSI/ASCII/XBiN underground text-based art-scene, becoming head-coder of ACiD Productions in 1998. He is the author of many influential art-scene applications, including the Empathy Experience Image Editor, a sort of `Photoshop' for the underground BBS/DEMO/ANSI/ASCII/XBiN art-scene, and the first and only XBiN (eXtended BINary) image editor. He is also the author of the Infusion Bulletin Board System, a popular multinode dial-up bulletin board system, the Avenge Packer Pro scene art-pack manager, the Impulse Tracker Tosser, a helpful utility for users of a popular electronic music tracker, the AvengeView ANSI/XBiN Image Viewer, the Defjamz e-mag (electronic magazine) engine, the Avenge ANSI Basic Training Simulator, and many more. As a mathematician, his interests are wide, with the current focus of his dissertation upon feasible algebro-geometric algorithmic proof procedures for restricted classes of non-linear number-theoretic conjectures. More on Grant Passmore: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/s0793114/ Jacqueline Passmore is a visual artist who works primarily with experimental film/video, live video performance and installation. She holds a BS in Film and Video Production from the University of Texas at Austin, studied photography at New York University and photography and sculpture at the Glassel School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Her work has been featured by the ICA London, the Design Museum London (for Zaha Hadid) FACT Liverpool, the TATE, the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Bargate Monument Gallery, Cinematexas Film + Arts Festival, Ensemble Contemporain de Montreal, and Futuresonic Electronic Music Festival, with support from the Arts Council England, the Experimental Television Center, New York, and the British Council. From 2003-2006 she toured internationally with seminal female-led electronic groups Stereolab and Ladytron performing critically acclaimed live-mix performances of her own hand-manipulated film and video artwork across Europe, Asia, and North and South America at venues including Coachella Festival, Los Angeles, CA, the TATE (for friends assume vivid astro focus) Oxygena Festival Barcelona, SP, La Cigalle, Paris FR, EXIT Festival, Novi Sad, Serbia, Fu Xing, Shanghai, China, famed psychedelic haunt the Fillmore, San Francisco, CA, Akropolis, Prague, CZ, with over 100 exhibitions in 2006 alone, and engaged in beta-testing for video hardware/software sponsors including Korg and Vidovox. She is proactively engaged in media activist education and has served as project artist on over 60 community media arts projects since 2001 for institutions including the British Film Institute, Art on the London Underground, the Daugherty Arts Centre, the TATE, webstreaming collective Tenantspin.org and London Metropolitan Film School. She has curated exhibitions and screenings for institutions including Dundee Contemporary Arts, Futuresonic Electronic Music Festival, and Static Gallery. WORK SAMPLES Grant Olney Passmore The Empathy Experience Image/Screen Editor ~ 1997-present
The Empathy Experience Screen/Image Editor (``Empathy'') is a console-mode program used to create ANSI/ASCII/XBiN artwork. ``ANSI art originated on BBSes. We would use terminal programs running in an 80 line by 25 column text console (full-screen in DOS, for instance) to dial up local Bulletin Board Systems, and ANSI was an art form that developed within the confines of the display medium: Each line of the computer screen had 80 spots in which characters could be displayed, the screen could display 25 lines at a time, each character could be one of 256 ASCII characters, and each character could be coloured one of 16 possible foreground colours and one of 8 possible background colours. An ANSI drawing is an image created with these parameters. ``The wonderful thing about these images is that they could be encoded in text files using special `ANSI escape sequences' and could then be transmitted quickly over the slow modems we had at the time. It was hard to create these files by hand, though! Probably the most important development in the history of ANSI art occurred when Ian Davis released TheDraw, an ANSI drawing program that allowed users to draw images originally up to 25 lines long and 80 columns across (e.g. the size of one console screen) in a way analogous to a painting program one might use in a graphical environment (though we were in text-mode!). TheDraw contained many other impressive features -- future editors, like my program Empathy, could not have existed without TheDraw's many conceptual break-throughs. ``Because BBSes were such a local phenomena (it cost a lot of money to call outside one's own area code!), art-groups developed wherein friends through BBSing would stay in close touch about their ANSIs, and at the end of each month they would together release an archive (usually a .ZIP file) of the artwork they had all created. Those of us who could program became `coders' and wrote tools to help people draw ANSIs, to help people run BBSes, etc. Over time, art-groups became very competitive, with extremely selective membership, inter-art-group review boards which rated each different art-group's pack each month, and so on. As it became easier to interface with people in different area codes, a heirarchy of `local versus national' art-groups developed; already by the early 90s, it was clear that ACiD (ANSI Creators in Demand), iCE (Insane Creators Enterprise), and CiA (Creators of Intense Art) were the cream of the crop national groups. ``Fast forward, and in 1997 I found myself as head coder of one of the smaller national groups, The Avenge Cult. I then began writing Empathy when I was 14, coding it from scratch in Borland Turbo Pascal and Turbo Assembler (I believe the source is around 60,000 lines of code). It was for a long time a secret project (we took ourselves quite seriously!), and binary versions of Empathy were encoded initially with hardware-specific data so that only Avenge members could run it. Empathy was to be our secret weapon. Sometime in 1998, Avenge folded due to personality conflicts, and I took a position as head-coder of ACID Productions, whereupon Empathy became an ACiD product, and then became ACiD's official editor (making Empathy the successor of ACiD's previous editor, ACiDDRAW written by Sinned Soul). ``It was clear that in 1997, (1) modems were sufficiently fast so that we could encode additional metadata alongside ANSI images, (2) modern machines had enough eXtended memory (XMS) and disk-space to feasibly allow images to be much longer and wider than they had been permitted to be before, and (3) the mind-blowing amount of processing power available in most cheap workstations afforded the opportunity to investigate interesting algorithmic image processing techniques in the context of text-based art. I began developing Empathy with the goal of creating a new modern scene screen editor that would expand the expressive power of the medium. As work progressed, Empathy became the first and only XBiN image editor (XBiN, or eXtended BINary, is a form of hybrid high and low resolution artwork, originally conceived by Tasmaniac of ACiD, that allows an artist to remap the BIOS font and palette of a machine; one is still limited to 16 colours and 256 characters, but now one can redefine these colours and characters as they wish: each text-mode character is simply an 8x16 binary matrix that can be edited pixel by pixel, and each palette colour is simply a 3-tuple of 6-bit RGB values that can be edited inside of Empathy. This metadata is then stored as a header within a compressed binary encoding of each image, and the metadata can be translated into an ANSI-like collection of escape sequences for ASCII transmission between a BBS system and an XBiN-aware terminal program. The combination of high and low resolution images possible with XBiN can be breathtaking.) ``The screen-shots that follow show Empathy in use. A neat thing to note is that most (all?) of the interface artwork for Empathy was drawn in Empathy itself by members of the underground art-scene. The help-screen is an example of an XBiN image - note the smooth curves and richer colours -- these were edited by hand using Empathy's built-in Font and Palette editor.'' -- Grant Olney Passmore
*** (initialization screen):
*** (main drawing mode, with quick-palette up):
*** (XBiN font editor - the `A' character has been re-mapped in BIOS):
*** (main drawing mode, with block manipulator):
*** (help screen with curves and nonstandard colours - this is an XBiN drawn in Empathy):
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Jacqueline Passmore and Cathy Shive Performance in which participants were interviewed to determine their appropriate roles as BUS or RAM and then forced to either move or store data (black and white cardboard cubes) inside of our computer (designated white room). Unfortunately, on the second day of the installation, a virus attacked (party with dancing) which destroyed data, necessitating disk utility (manual repair of aforementioned data).
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