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From the link: > Chuck Close does not want his art to be trivialized. He will exercise his legal rights, even if your motives are good. If he knows about your

From the link: > Chuck Close does not want his art to be trivialized. He will exercise his legal rights, even if your motives are good. If he knows about your project and does nothing, that will put him in a position where he cannot fight the next, even more egregious usage of his copyrighted images and use of his name. This is the kind of behavior that shows nothing but weakness and lack of faith in his own art. You have just trivialized his works using something that is even more beautiful - the construction & logic behind his intricate mosaics. I have just lost respect for him and his works.

Liuser 10y ago
I'm really flattered you like the results. I'll be honest that when I first started the project (and continue to work on it) that I was conflicted. I truly love his work. I spent hours and my weekends analyzing his artwork. I'm still studying his usage of colors because there's still work to be done there. With the discovery of legal threats and actions against Scott Blake I was disheartened because I don't believe he would like me working on this project. Here's an artist I admire and here I am doing something I love that he may not like. Difficult to come to terms with. Like everyone on HackerNews we're driven to create and solve problems. Curiosity and challenge got the best of me and I pushed forward. I still plan on releasing a Windows version and eventually making the source code public once I cleanup some things. I'm not making a killing on the app either. It's been out for a month and it's averaging me a dollar a day (with initial publicizing it on /r/macapps and other subreddits). Helps fuel the coffee that goes into these after hours side projects. Since I'm charging for the app, I plan on donating a portion of the proceeds to the MoMA as well (after all, they're the source of inspiration and I hope this helps give back to other artists).
- eigenvalue 10y ago
  If you made an iOS version, I'd buy it for up to $5.00. I suspect it would be popular.
  - Liuser 10y ago
    Thank you -- I'm going to revisit this suggestion as it's been brought up by friends as well. I actually implemented a mobile web version at first with the up-sell of buying high res images. I wasn't happy with the images it was producing though because I forced 1 setting for all images being converted for the sake of ease-of-use for the user. But this was a mistake. Not all photos are the same: Some photos looked better with smaller/larger cells, as a diamond grid, with different color settings, etc. Server costs and complexity grew too: (nginx, nodejs, rabbitmq). The algorithm is CPU intensive and not fast enough to my liking yet. So I released the macOS version and put the computational cost on the end user and avoiding the need to support servers. Sounds like I should make a native mobile version with the option to tweak parameters.
    - eigenvalue 10y ago
      Or just pre-compute low-res previews using a variety of settings and have the user highlight ones that look pleasing. Over time, you can collect this data and find heuristics (i.e., machine learning) for automatically choosing the most pleasing settings for a given image.
theoh 10y ago
What Close actually wrote: "Even if your motives are not bad, I still do not want my work trivialized. I must fight you because if I know of your project, and do nothing to exercise my legal rights, that will put me in a position where I can’t fight the next, even more egregious usage of my copyrighted image and use of my name. It may be an amusing project and many people might like it, but it is MY art that is trivialized, MY career you are jeopardizing, MY legacy, which I have to think about for my children, and MY livelihood. I must fight to protect it. I hope you will realize the harm you are doing me and my work that you claim you admire and voluntarily shut down the site so as to avoid a law-suit." It was amicably resolved. http://hyperallergic.com/54104/my-chuck-close-problem/ http://hyperallergic.com/54104/my-chuck-close-problem/ Scott Blake's Close-like images were a travesty of Close's paintings, and they potentially give the impression (to an uninformed bystander) that there's no creativity or individuality in Close's work. The fact is that the similarity with Close's work is recognizable, and Close's work can be devalued by imitation ("bad money drives out good", etc.) Dean L.'s work is more convincing as an image, but it doesn't avoid the problem of dilution by not mentioning Close's name. It's still obviously a Chuck Close filter that acts in a way that completely erases/ignores the materiality, labour, and individual creativity that Close put into his paintings. I'm no fan of Close, but he was absolutely right to act to try to stop this from happening.
- npgatech 10y ago
  Scott's TEDx presentation says otherwise[1] - he was pretty much against Chuck's allegations to the point where he did a tongue-in-cheek presentation. > It's still obviously a Chuck Close filter that acts in a way that completely erases/ignores the materiality, labour, and individual creativity that Close put into his paintings. I disagree. In no way does that ignore Chuck's materiality, labour and individual creativity. In fact, it sheds more light on the process (which is very procedural and art critics would argue it is very "mechanical"). There is a tremendous amount of creativity in figuring out, as the OP has done, the underlying algorithmic beauty of replicating Chuck's works. Your definition of creative endeavor (materiality, labour) is profoundly limiting and very "physical". I feel the opposite - OP's algorithm is way more interesting than Chuck's "materiality" and "labour". I will resort to Feynman's clip on 'Beauty of Flowers'[2], which does a better job of explaining my point. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKndFPr4vWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKndFPr4vWk [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbFM3rn4ldo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbFM3rn4ldo

Liuser 10y ago

I'm really flattered you like the results. I'll be honest that when I first started the project (and continue to work on it) that I was conflicted. I truly love his work. I spent hours and my weekends analyzing his artwork. I'm still studying his usage of colors because there's still work to be done there. With the discovery of legal threats and actions against Scott Blake I was disheartened because I don't believe he would like me working on this project. Here's an artist I admire and here I am doing something I love that he may not like. Difficult to come to terms with. Like everyone on HackerNews we're driven to create and solve problems. Curiosity and challenge got the best of me and I pushed forward. I still plan on releasing a Windows version and eventually making the source code public once I cleanup some things. I'm not making a killing on the app either. It's been out for a month and it's averaging me a dollar a day (with initial publicizing it on /r/macapps and other subreddits). Helps fuel the coffee that goes into these after hours side projects. Since I'm charging for the app, I plan on donating a portion of the proceeds to the MoMA as well (after all, they're the source of inspiration and I hope this helps give back to other artists).

eigenvalue 10y ago
If you made an iOS version, I'd buy it for up to $5.00. I suspect it would be popular.
- Liuser 10y ago
  Thank you -- I'm going to revisit this suggestion as it's been brought up by friends as well. I actually implemented a mobile web version at first with the up-sell of buying high res images. I wasn't happy with the images it was producing though because I forced 1 setting for all images being converted for the sake of ease-of-use for the user. But this was a mistake. Not all photos are the same: Some photos looked better with smaller/larger cells, as a diamond grid, with different color settings, etc. Server costs and complexity grew too: (nginx, nodejs, rabbitmq). The algorithm is CPU intensive and not fast enough to my liking yet. So I released the macOS version and put the computational cost on the end user and avoiding the need to support servers. Sounds like I should make a native mobile version with the option to tweak parameters.
  - eigenvalue 10y ago
    Or just pre-compute low-res previews using a variety of settings and have the user highlight ones that look pleasing. Over time, you can collect this data and find heuristics (i.e., machine learning) for automatically choosing the most pleasing settings for a given image.

theoh 10y ago

What Close actually wrote: "Even if your motives are not bad, I still do not want my work trivialized. I must fight you because if I know of your project, and do nothing to exercise my legal rights, that will put me in a position where I can’t fight the next, even more egregious usage of my copyrighted image and use of my name. It may be an amusing project and many people might like it, but it is MY art that is trivialized, MY career you are jeopardizing, MY legacy, which I have to think about for my children, and MY livelihood. I must fight to protect it. I hope you will realize the harm you are doing me and my work that you claim you admire and voluntarily shut down the site so as to avoid a law-suit." It was amicably resolved. http://hyperallergic.com/54104/my-chuck-close-problem/ http://hyperallergic.com/54104/my-chuck-close-problem/ Scott Blake's Close-like images were a travesty of Close's paintings, and they potentially give the impression (to an uninformed bystander) that there's no creativity or individuality in Close's work. The fact is that the similarity with Close's work is recognizable, and Close's work can be devalued by imitation ("bad money drives out good", etc.) Dean L.'s work is more convincing as an image, but it doesn't avoid the problem of dilution by not mentioning Close's name. It's still obviously a Chuck Close filter that acts in a way that completely erases/ignores the materiality, labour, and individual creativity that Close put into his paintings. I'm no fan of Close, but he was absolutely right to act to try to stop this from happening.

npgatech 10y ago
Scott's TEDx presentation says otherwise[1] - he was pretty much against Chuck's allegations to the point where he did a tongue-in-cheek presentation. > It's still obviously a Chuck Close filter that acts in a way that completely erases/ignores the materiality, labour, and individual creativity that Close put into his paintings. I disagree. In no way does that ignore Chuck's materiality, labour and individual creativity. In fact, it sheds more light on the process (which is very procedural and art critics would argue it is very "mechanical"). There is a tremendous amount of creativity in figuring out, as the OP has done, the underlying algorithmic beauty of replicating Chuck's works. Your definition of creative endeavor (materiality, labour) is profoundly limiting and very "physical". I feel the opposite - OP's algorithm is way more interesting than Chuck's "materiality" and "labour". I will resort to Feynman's clip on 'Beauty of Flowers'[2], which does a better job of explaining my point. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKndFPr4vWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKndFPr4vWk [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbFM3rn4ldo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbFM3rn4ldo