Graphics

Jon Phillips, December 2007

Image reigns supreme. From the thousands of films churned out each year from Nollywood, to the persistent recording of images by security cameras in London to the scaling of windows on your desktop computer, you are already a pixel pusher. But, how can you reign supreme over images? How can you become an active participant in the creation of graphics and move beyond passive consumption. While the distinction between amateur and professional is erased in the Youtube-record-a-video-get-rich-generation, the focus upon high-quality content controlling tools is key. What is the point of mastering verion 3.5 of Killer Graphics App 97's fuzz filter [1] if you don't have a use, or you have become locked into a niche application that costs 2000 Euros for each new version? The focus of this chapter is about exploring free and open source tools that empower you to do what you want to say and if the tools aren't working out, you are allowed to change them from the inside-out! The major tools in this chapter to be discussed are bitmap editor Gimp, vector drawing tool Inkscape, 3d graphics with Blender, and algorithmic graphics creation with Processing [2]. By the way, these tools are free! They have huge constructive communities around them waiting to help you with your tasks, adding new features and supporting vibrant actively producing pixel pushers.

In working with any graphics application, it is important to understand the difference between vector and pixel graphics. Vector graphics describe the use of geometrical primitives such as points, lines, Bezier curves, and polygons to represent images in computer graphics [3]. It is used in contrast with the term raster graphics (bitmap graphics), which is the representation of images as a collection of pixels (dots). Vector graphics are math equations to define curves, generally have a smaller file size than raster graphics and also, can be scaled from tiny to massively huge billboards with no loss in quality. The letterforms for these words I'm typing are vector graphics. Bitmaps on the other-hand, are the types of images that a camera outputs, for example. Maybe your camera is a 5-megapixel camera, meaning it can record 5 million pixels per image. With bitmap graphics the more data about an image, then generally the better quality image, and thus a larger file size.

Gimp is one of the oldest free and open source applications. It is now 10 years old and is on par with major closed-source [4] applications. Gimp is primarily a tool you can use to edit all aspects of a bitmap image, from color retouching of photos, to painting on a canvas to fixing blemishes on a face, Gimp is chock full of tools. Its vector-based sibling is Inkscape, an Open Source drawing tool. With it you can make complex typography, make huge billboards, draw architectural plans and make lovely charts. This powerful tool implements the World Wide Web consortium's Scalable Vector Graphics specification (SVG) and points out another strength of Open Source graphics tools in supporting free and open standards that won't just vanish because a company closes shop, or locks down a format under proprietary patents.

Another important concept for graphics is the difference between two (2D) and three-dimensions (3D). Most graphics applications, including Gimp and Inkscape, are two-dimensional, meaning they deal with height and width of graphics, also called X and Y coordinates. Think of 2D graphics as a piece of paper. 3D graphics, like those operated on by the free software editor, Blender, add depth (Z-axis) to 2D graphics. This is what you see in the famous Pixar movies like Toy Story and Cars [5].
These typical 3D animations also add a fourth dimension (4D), time. While Blender does handle the fourth dimension by allowing 3D creators to animate, for these chapters, the concept of 4D also includes the concept of graphics through time and interactivity. When Casey Reas and Ben Fry developed Processing, a simple Java-based language and runtime for creating generative graphics [6], the tools for creating graphics primarily relied upon manual creation with Gimp and Inkscape, or more sophisticated knowledge of graphics programming in C/C++. Processing lowered the barriers for participation in creating interested graphics from code, and also allowed for these graphics to take on a life of their own through user interaction. It should also be noted that Inkscape, Gimp and Blender all offer forms of scripting and automation as well to enable creators to be extended quickly. The main difference between these three apps and Processing, is that Processing generates standalone applications which can be run anywhere. This is great for artists who are making interactive installations, but way too much manual controls for simple photo retouching.

In addition to these great free and open source tools that exist, there are projects as well, which focus on the community of graphics creation and on connecting together graphics applications into a coherently focused suite. The Open Clip Art Library encourages the upload and remix of public domain vector graphics under the guise of “clip art” and the Open Font Library goal is to build the world's largest free and open collection of fonts [7]. The Open Clip Art Library has approximately 15,000 pieces of high quality public domain clip art, meaning anyone can do anything they want with these resources. The Open Font Library is still a fairly new project with ~40 high quality fonts that are either in the public domain or under the new SIL Open Font License [8]. The most notable font on the system is by famed kottke.org blogger, Jason Kottke. He created the super-popular font Silkscreen, a small bitmap-looking font used everywhere on the web. He recently licensed it under the Open Font License and uploaded it to the collection, signally clearly to other font creators that they can build upon it and make it better.

While all these projects exist in the free and open source software universe, the projects did not talk very much until two key projects developed. The first is the Create Project, whose goal is to provide a third-party space for creation applications to work together on standards, shared resources (palettes, brushes, patterns, keyboard mappings), and to encourage inter-project communication [9]. The other key development is the annual Libre Graphics Meeting [10] which is the major event where artists and developers come together to work on making free and open source tools better, seeing what is possible by artists, and massive amounts of cross-pollination to create the future for graphics pixel pushers.

The major difference to closed source proprietary drawing apps is that you can't reign supreme over images. You can't become a true pixel pusher. You can only be the pixel pusher that someone else wants you to be. By using Gimp, Inkscape, Blender, Processing or one of the many other free and open source applications, you can dig deep into the code and communities of these projects. You can even shape the direction of these projects by joining in the discussions, filing bugs about problems with the tools, and showing off how much you reign supreme over images pixel pusher.

Notes

[1] Please note, this is vast satire over learning tools rather than having a reason to use them. Also, please note, this should be called the cheese filter.

[2] See http://gimp.org, http://inkscape.org, http://blender.org, http://processing.org

[3] My Vector Graphics definition is based on http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/v/vector_graphics.html because of the object-oriented reference.

[4] I dare not link to the various Adobe applications you all know I'm referring to: Adobe Photoshop for the GIMP, Adobe Illustrator for Inkscape

[5] The irony of this is that 3D graphics are rendered back into a 2D representation onto a screen, or in a movie theater.

[6] See http://processing.org

[7] See http://openclipart.org and http://openfontlibrary.org

[8] See http://sil.org/openfontlicense  (CHECK THIS URL)

[9] See http://create.freedesktop.org

[10] See http://libregraphicsmeeting.org

Working with sound

Thor Magnusson, November 2007

FLOSS Audio Tools... How fantastic! There is a whole world of free and exciting instruments at our disposal for play and work. These instruments try to cater for all the needs that the musician or the sound artist might have. And what is better: if you program computers, you can get the code source of the software and adapt it to your own specific work pattern, thus transforming yourself from being a mere consumer to a co-author of the software. At the moment FLOSS software provides most of what commercial software can provide, and sometimes more.

Normally someone decides upon making a specific software tool when he or she wants to perform a certain task and there is no existing tool that does the job. Software is based upon people's needs and work habits. There might exist a tool that performs a certain task, but not in the same way as is desired, so a new tool is created. If we look at the question of user needs from a very basic overview position, we can define the following categories: Audio Editing (for recording and processing sound); Sequencing (for layering sound events as tracks on a timeline and perhaps apply effects on the tracks); Score writing (creating musical scores on staves or piano roll interface. This is software based upon the old tradition of writing music as notes on paper); Virtual Instruments (tools that allow you to generate sounds through events such as commands from a sequencer or input from hardware such as a MIDI keyboard); Sound Feature Analyser (for analysing the nature of the sound: its timbre, temporal onsets and amplitude); Patchers - Algorithmic/Interactive/Generative Composition (for working with formal structures, algorithms and generativity - and that's what music essentially is). In the following sections  we will look at some of the FLOSS tools that are found in each of these categories.

Audio Editing

The most basic need of anyone working with sound is the capability to record it into the computer. This requires a microphone and a soundcard (inbuilt in most computers, but for good quality people buy special soundcards) that digitizes the analog signal from the microphone. Once the sound is digitized (through the soundcard) it can be recorded onto the hard disk with a sound editor and represented graphically in various modalities. The most popular FLOSS audio editor is Audacity [1]. It allows you to record sounds on multiple tracks, process them with virtual effects such as the LADSPA [2] or VST, and export the sound in various known audio formats, such as wave, ogg vorbis [3] (open source compression format) or mp3.

Spectral and waveform view in Audacity

Audio Editors perform tasks that the tape would have done in the pre-digital age, but they add the powers of analysis, graphical representation of the sound (very difficult in the pre-digital age), multiple and easy cutting and pasting, and high quality digital signal processing. Audacity performs tasks that go beyond simple audio editing such as multi-tracking and it has its own scripting language called Nyquist which can be used to generate sound and manipulate or generate MIDI data. Audacity exists for Linux, Mac OS and Windows.

Other editors include Snd [4] and WaveSurfer [5]

Sequencing

Sound Sequencers are basically a digital implementation of the multi-track tape machines that were found in recording studios in the latter part of the 20th century. Sound sequencers can layer sounds into tracks that play at the same time. You can either record directly into the track or import a sound from the hard disk of the computer. Two typical usage situations would be: a) a musician that records sounds in the field or downloads them from the net [see http://freesound.iua.upf.edu]. She manipulates them in an audio editor and then imports them into a sequencer in order to layer them and create a formal structure. b) a band with many instruments creates a demo recording by recording each instrument through a multichannel sound card. Each instrument is recorded live into the respective audio tracks of the sequencer. Later they then process and mix the tracks before bouncing down to a soundfile.

Screenshot of Ardour

Ardour [6] is the most impressive free and open source multi-track sequencer to be found at the moment. It compares to software such as Cubase, ProTools or Logic. It supports multi-track recording, audio processing (using native effects, LADSPA or VST), MIDI recording and manipulation, virtual instruments and post-production. It exists on Linux and Mac OS X.

Score Writing

This category overlaps with "Sequencing" but it might have a different user focus. Before computers were powerful enough to deal with real audio (with 16 bit, 44100 sample rate) they were often used to create scores that would be played out through MIDI to hardware synthesizers or samplers. The score-writing tools could often switch between various representational modes such as the piano-roll (where you would see a vertical piano keyboard on the left and then time would be represented horizontally) or the good old 5 line stave. Obviously the piano roll was better suited for people without formal music education. The most popular software in the late 1980s would be Cubase on the Atari computer.

Score writing software is not focusing on recording audio in real-time but is aimed more at the composer who wants to compose music by arranging notes and let the software play the score in order to hear the results. Rosegarden [7] is perhaps the best FLOSS audio software for writing scores. It has to be noted here that Ardour can also be used for arrangement of MIDI notes and Rosegarden in turn records live audio, it's just that the focus of the two tools are different.

 Rosegardens Matrix editor

Rosegardens powerfull  notation editor

When a MIDI score has been made in Rosegarden the ideal software to set up and print out scores is called Lilypond [8]. It accepts various formats such as MIDI and MusicXML but it also has its own scripting protocol that can be written out from any programming language. Lilypond does great job in writing out beautiful and logical scores for musicians to play.

Virtual Instruments

Above we talked about the score sequencer software for arranging notes and how they would send MIDI notes out to external hardware to generate the sound. In the late 1990s affordable computers became powerful enough to do real-time synthesis and virtual instruments and effects were added to the flora of audio tools. Steinberg, the company behind Cubase (then the most popular sequencer), created the VST (Virtual Studio Technology) audio plugin architecture. The software development kit is open and it has resulted in thousands of developers continuously creating new effects and instruments. Apple has created their own open architecture called Audio Units (or AU). Other architectures include FreeST for Linux which makes it possible to use VST plugins on Linux. The native Linux audio plugin architecture is called LADSPA [9] (Linux Audio Developers Simple Plugin API) and it is supported by most of the software mentioned in this article.

Virtual instruments can be used in various setups. For example you could plug your MIDI keyboard into the computer and use a host program to load up the instruments and effects you want to use. You can create a chain of instruments and effects, typically choosing a sound, say guitar, and then route that through effects such as bandpass filters, reverb, delay or distortion. You could then use the host program to record what you play for later editing. Another usage would be to compose directly by writing notes, perhaps using Rosegarden, and then listen to what you write by playing the score through a virtual instrument.

Sound Feature Analysers

Musicians, artists and scientists often need to analyse the sound they are working with. They might be curious to look at the spectral (the distribution of frequencies) qualities of the sound and change its harmonic structure through manipulating the sound’s partials. Praat [10] is a great application for this purpose. It can do spectral, formant, pitch, intensity and other types of analysis. It is particularly well suited for speech studies and it provides neural network algorithms for learning and synthesis algorithms for speech synthesis.

Screenshot of Praat

Tapestrea [11] from the productive Princeton Audio Lab is another interesting and fun sound feature manipulator.  Like Audacity it has scripting capabilities and it uses the ChucK programming language [20]  for scripting.

Other applications include Sonic Visualiser [12], Baudline [13] and RtFFT [14]  or snd-peek [15].

Patchers - Algorithmic/Interactive/Generative

This category of “patchers” is where FLOSS software blows away the commercial world in quality, ingeniousness and experimentation. The computer does not merely have to imitate old technology from our physical world. It allows us to create our own tools according to our own ideas of how music should be or how tools should behave. For that purpose there are many different patchers out there: basically environments where you can create your own synthesis graphs, control structures and interfaces.

Historically the patchers originate from the Music N languages made by Max Matthews in the 1950s and 60s. The idea here is to create unit generators that generate the sound and then provide a programming environment to control them. This is ideal for sound synthesis and algorithmic composition. From the user interaction perspective, we can divide the patchers into two categories: graphical programming environments such as Pure Data [16] or jMax [17] and textual programming environments such as SuperCollider [18], CSound [19] and ChucK [20].

Screenshot of Puredata

The patchers allow you to create your own program, so you could create an algorithmic composition based on rules, a generative composition that plays music that's never the same, sound toys, interactive installations (using sensors, audio, video and motors), musical analysers, a thought platform for music theory, explore sound physics or psychoacoustics and so on... These programming languages are made for sound, but try to shy away from incorporating too much music theory. Therefore you won't find any 16 step sequencers or 12 tone keyboards. It's up to you (and not some software designer) to define the conceptual foundations of your music.

It varies what people prefer when choosing their environment. In open source software, the most important things to consider when choosing a platform to learn (apart from the sound quality and the way you embrace the environment) is the status of documentation, stability, continuity and community. A helpful mailing list community is characteristic of all the above mentioned patchers where more experienced users help less experienced users to understand their way through the theoretical maze one can find they are.

People have different cognitive styles. For some Pd is the ideal platform for composing their music or instruments as the interface and the programming language are one and the same thing. It provides a graphical data-flow representation of the internal functionality of the computer. For others, textual programming languages like SuperCollider can be more efficient for what the goal is. The power here is that of writing classes, compact code, ease of use and different type of representation. Each of these environments have their cons and pros and it is only meaningful to compare them when thinking about some specific task that needs to be performed.

Screenshot of some SuperCollider code

Conclusion

All musicians or artists have their own agendas and goals and it is impossible to tell which tools are suitable for each and every person. It is now up to you to download and install these environments and see where they take you. Read the tutorials and subscribe to the mailing lists. There are always people there to help you, and it is easy to unsubscribe again. And remember that people have put their free time into developing these dynamic, free and open source programs. Using them can therefore be exciting experience where you will establish personal relationships with other users of the tools and their developers. New ideas or discussions about the tool are always welcome. There are many good reasons to use free and open source software, but perhaps the most important one is this change of status the user will experience from being a mere “customer” of a company or a “consumer” of software, to a fellow “user” or “co-developer” of it.

Tip: Want to try?

Would you like to try these programs without having to install all of them on your machine? You then have the possibility of running a "live-cd": basically a Linux operating system that runs from a CD. Planet CCRMA [21], pure:dyne [22], Ubuntu Studio [23] or 64 Studio [24] all provide you with a Linux distro on a CD that can be run on your computer just by booting up from the CD drive. This way you can explore and try out most of the software that we have covered in this article.

Notes

[1] http://audacity.sourceforge.net

[2] http://www.ladspa.org

[3] http://www.vorbis.com

[4] http://ccrma.stanford.edu/software/snd

[5] http://www.speech.kth.se/wavesurfer/index.html

[6] http://ardour.org

[7] http://www.rosegardenmusic.com

[8] http://lilypond.org

[9] http://www.ladspa.org

[10] http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat

[11] http://taps.cs.princeton.edu

[12] http://www.sonicvisualiser.org

[13] http://www.baudline.com

[14] http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~gary/rtfft

[15] http://soundlab.cs.princeton.edu/software/sndpeek

[16]  http://puredata.info

[17] http://freesoftware.ircam.fr/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=14

[18] http://supercollider.sourceforge.net

[19] http://www.csounds.com

[20] http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu

[21] http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software

[22] https://devel.goto10.org/puredyne

[23] http://ubuntustudio.org

[24]  http://64studio.com

Images

Rosegarden screenshots from http://www.rosegardenmusic.com

Puredata screenshot courtesy of Frank Barknecht http://footils.org

All other images courtesy of the author.

Working with others

Phil Chandler, September 2007

It is of course a truism, often repeated, [1][2][3] that the Internet has been the basis for a revolution in (remote) interpersonal communications, collaboration and data sharing. It is probably safe to say that there would be very few of the Free/Libre and Open Source (FLOSS) projects that exist today without the collaboration technologies the Internet supports. One of the many effects of the powerful tools FLOSS has put in to the hands of creative people is that it has potentially made them more independent. No longer are they reliant on specialists with access to expensive software and hardware to carry out aspects of their projects for them. Their limitations are now time and knowledge, not the lack of access. It is in fact precisely this issue that the Digital Artists' Handbook seeks to address, by providing authoritative information to guide practitioners in to new fields of endeavour.

The downside of this independence is that many artists find themselves more isolated, working alone at home rather than interacting with others at shared studios or where shared resources were previously found.

The Internet, being fundamentally a communications medium, offers potential solutions to this isolation, but the solutions themselves have, to date, largely dictated that collaboration happens in new ways, shaped by the technology. For some, the thousands of FLOSS coders for example, the tools have made possible projects that would otherwise be virtually inconceivable, but for other artists looking to enhance their existing practice with new digital methods the situation is perhaps more double-edged.

It maybe be useful to step back for a moment and consider what we mean when we talk about working, or collaborating with others. For a start it could be divided in to five broad types of collaboration:

Communication

This is the everyday backwards and forwards of discussion:

email: To most people the original and still the fundamental communication channel on the Internet. Although under constant assault by junk (spam) email, the simplicity, cheapness, robustness and asynchronous nature of the email system are it's fundamental advantages. There are probably few Internet users who are not already familiar with using email, and all internet service providers offer email services to users.

chat/instant messaging/IRC: where synchronous, near real time communication is required these text-based media have proved popular. The common theme is that users type what they want to say in to a chat window, and their words will appear almost instantly in the corresponding windows of those they are connected to. In all cases there are servers out on the Internet that act as hubs for this communication, and a level of complexity is introduced by needing to know which system the person you wish to converse with is using. Chat may be on a one to one basis or in a group situation. Client software is available for all common platforms, sometimes bundled with the operating system. These days systems tend to offer additional services such as the ability to send a file to someone you're chatting to, or even to use voice and video communication. In other words technologies such as chat, VoIP and video conferencing (see below) are converging. There are even websites that allow you to set up a chat session without even installing any software. [4]

Voice over IP (VoIP) / 'Internet telephony': This describes the technologies that use the basic protocols of the Internet to transport voice communications between users. This has allowed computers to be used as telephony devices, and for users to turn their high speed Internet connections in to cheap international telephone lines. Due to the way the Internet presently works it is often hard to achieve equal quality of service compared to a traditional circuit-based telephone connection, however the low cost has encouraged a boom in VoIP's use. It has been popularised by the proprietary Skype software [5] but many open source equivalents exist [6][7]. As with chat services, you need to create an account on the VoIP service you wish to use, and install the relevant software. Whilst computer to computer connections are generally free, connecting to a traditional phone is usually a paid for service.

Content management systems (CMS), wikis and discussion forums: Although these equally fall in to the area of websites and self-publishing, I mention them here due to their use for community and project websites, where registered users can discuss, publicise and share work. One example is the Lancashire Artists' Network site [8], based on the open source Drupal content management system [9]. CMS' provide a framework where non-technical users can create web content of various types via their browser without needing to understand how to code. Some CMS's support, in addition to text and images, audio, video, as well as specialised areas such as discussion forums. Wikis fit in to a similar model, however tend to be simpler, more focussed tools which are designed to make adding text and linking information together particularly easy. The most famous example of a wiki is probably Wikipedia [10], however many collaborative projects have a wiki for members to discuss and develop project documentation[11]. Forums are webpages that are designed around the idea of threaded discussions, where users post topics and replies to those topics.

mobilephones/SMS: Of course mobilephone networks are not strictly speaking part of the Internet since they do not use the Internet's protocols, however they are in many countries a ubiquitous communication system. The wide availability of the system is somewhat offset as a collaboration medium by the present general restriction to one-to-one communication and mainly voice and text messages. As bandwidth capacity increases and costs fall it may well become more viable to expand in to video use. A number of projects, for example Twitter [12], are exploring how to integrate mobile and web-based systems. Whether such projects are serious collaborative tools or toys for the under-employed is still open to debate.

social networking websites: These are essentially highly branded content management systems, allowing users to present their content within fairly tightly controlled home pages. As the market matures various networks are competing on the functionality they offer in terms of managing content and connections to other members. [13][14][15]The challenge facing the large networks at present is how to convert their large memberships in to a profit without alienating them.[16]

virtual environments: the natural extension of social networking and online gaming is the 3D virtual environment, the most high profile one at the time of writing being Second Life [17]. Although in essence a relatively immersive chat client, (with voice features now appearing), from a collaboration point of view virtual environments offer some additional features such as the ability to embed, e.g. video content, in virtual objects, to allow sharing and performance of works. As with nearly all online environments, the tools available for use online are prescribed by the environments themselves.

video conferencing: This can cover a wide range of technologies and qualities. At one end there is the low resolution, somewhat jumpy output of cheap webcams combined with domestic broadband connections. As mentioned above such functionality is increasingly being integrated with text based chat and VoIP software. At the other end of the spectrum there are the high quality, high bandwidth options most commonly found in corporations and universities, who have access to the expensive Internet connections required.[18]

Sharing work

Although there is often no clear demarcation, since you can for example send files by email, this refers to technology more explicitly designed around sharing data files:

project websites: Aside from the discursive uses of project websites and wikis, these provide some of the simplest means of widely disseminating digital works. Content management systems often have built in functionality to manage file repositories and control access to the contents, for example restricting downloads to registered users.

file transfer protocol (FTP) sites: The traditional method of disseminating large files over the Internet, this method is perhaps falling from favour compared to the various web-based options. It is nevertheless useful to have a good FTP client [19] in the tool kit to access such sites. Incidentally if you are managing your own web space and need to upload files to your web server, if your provider supports it, a much more secure alternative to FTP is SFTP [20] [21]. SFTP is supported 'out the box' in most Linux file managers.

code management tools such as CVS: For more complex projects, especially where it is important to track what changes have been made to work by multiple collaborators, a code management system is vital. Simon Yuill explores this in detail in his article, however from a new user point of view the first requirement is probably a friendly graphical client to access such systems. You need of course to have the right client for the particular system you're using but examples are [22][23][24].

peer-to-peer filesharing: If media and record industry hype was to be believed [25][26] then peer-to-peer filesharing networks are the font of all evil. However for collaborative projects that need to disseminate very large files, such as major software projects or video sharing, the ability to share the bandwidth load across many users has proven very useful. In essence peer-to-peer networks work by some users downloading files from an original 'seed' server, and then being willing to allow others to download the same files from them. As time goes on more copies proliferate across the Internet meaning that no single server or user takes the bulk of the demand. A technologically advanced example is Bittorrent[27].

Sharing Ideas

Obviously an idea can be shared by describing it in words, sending a code example or other sample of work. Sometimes though more structured methods aid the collaboration process. One is the idea of design patterns as Simon Yuill discusses in his article, however a more general and widely popular method is that of mindmapping with some good free tools available [28].  Mindmapping is an example of a visualistion tool to allow individuals and groups to share and refine their ideas. These can be coupled with feedback mechanisms such as annotation, voting and messaging [29].

Project Management

For larger or longer term projects more formal management tools may be appropriate. Some are built in to code sharing sites such as Sourceforge [30], while others provide a specialist approach, such as dotProject [31] which can be hosted on a website and thus accessible to all members of the project. For many, projects wikis provide the necessary level of co-ordination. The term groupware is sometimes applied to integrated packages of collaboration software including email, instant messaging, and document management functions.[32][33]

Working in real time

The methods mentioned so far are either a) asynchronous and/or b) essentially for talking about the work, or for making some version of the work available for others to see, try, or perhaps alter themselves. There are simple online creative tools [34], and even some that allow more than one person to work at the same time [35]. These are obviously not comparable with the tool sets provided by such software as GIMP [36] and Inkscape [37]. It is also noticeable that many of these tools tend to be basic drawing tools. What is still at an early stage are ways for artists to actually work together, remote from each other, on the same piece of work, at the same time. There are interesting experiments going on, such as Furtherfield's Visitors' Studio [38], however most have been orientated towards developing new tools specially for use on the Internet. But why should we leave the tools we are used to using 'at home' when we go online? There is a new frontier to be explored as to how we make the tools we are comfortable with available to us when we start working with others remotely. Perhaps the area where the most progress has been made so far is in the audio world with technologies such as streaming, Pure:Data and Open Sound Control (OSC) [39].  Going further one idea might be to have an underlying framework that can share sessions between any appropriately adapted software.  This is perhaps somewhat analogous to the role JACK [40] plays in the free audio software world, where any piece of software that has JACK support built in can exchange audio data with other similarly equipped applications.  In this case what would be shared between two remote instances of a particular application would be information about their state, key presses and mouse clicks etc.

Whatever technical solution is found it is to be hoped that it won't be too long before a new level of working with others becomes available, whereby we can work interactively on the same piece of work, using the full power of the tools we've invested time learning.  Perhaps one day we will be able to take our favourite tools in to virtual 3D studios and work closely alongside our chosen collaborators wherever in the (real) world they might be.

Notes

[1] “UN Fights US over internet's future” The New Zealand Herald 2005
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/2/story.cfm?c_id=2&ObjectID=10354409 [Accessed 12/12/2007]

[2] “Internet and e-mail policies” ACAS 2006 http://www.acas.org.uk/index.aspx?articleid=808 [Accessed 12/12/2007]

[3] “How the Internet has Changed Our Lives” Neilsen/Netratings 2003 http://www.nielsennetratings.com/pr/pr_031229_uk.pdf [Accessed 12/12/2007]

[4] http://www.gabbly.com

[5] http://www.skype.com

[6] http://www.ekiga.org

[7] http://www.linphone.org/index.php/eng

[8] http://www.lanarts.com

[9] http://drupal.org

[10] http://www.wikipedia.org

[11] http://puredyne.goto10.org

[12] http://twitter.com

[13] http://www.bebo.com

[14] http://www.myspace.com

[15] http://www.facebook.com

[16] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7130349.stm [Accessed 12/12/2007]

[17] http://secondlife.com

[18] http://www.videocentric.co.uk/videoconferencing/videoconferencing.shtml#...

[19] http://filezilla-project.org

[20] http://www.winscp.com

[21] http://cyberduck.ch

[22] http://www.tortoisecvs.org/ and http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org

[23] http://sente.epfl.ch/software/cvl

[24] http://www.twobarleycorns.net/tkcvs.html

[25] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/12/copyrights_and_wrongs

[26] http://www.riaa.com/physicalpiracy.php?content_selector=piracy_details_o...

[27] http://www.bittorrent.com/what-is-bittorrent

[28] http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

[29] http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Collaborative_Networked_Learning:_A_Guide/S...

[30] http://sourceforge.net

[31] http://www.dotproject.net/index.php

[32] http://www.icthubknowledgebase.org.uk/opensourcegroupware

[33] http://www.opengroupware.org/en/applications/index.html

[34] http://selfportraitchallenge.net/2007/02/27/march-online-tools

[35] http://www.imaginationcubed.com/Imagine

[36] http://gimp.org

[37] http://www.inkscape.org

[38] http://www.furtherstudio.org/live

[39] http://www.yourmachines.org/tutorials/collab_stream.html

[40] http://jackaudio.org