February 15, 2005

Frames are Required

by Nick Montfort · , 3:27 pm

Grafik Dynamo by Kate Armstrong and Michael Tippett feeds images from LiveJournal into a comic strip generator, juxtaposing them with curious captions, speech, and thought bubbles. (Quite apropos of the discussion about computer-generated comics that we had on here…) Although the resulting comics aren’t exactly Love and Rockets, the system is interesting. Framing disparate images from LiveJournal as art and as part of a narrative is effective and amusing. Crawling for images, rather than texts, makes for an interesting twist on projects such as Microsoft Comic Chat – not to mention another Turbulence commission, News Reader, by Noah et al. I do think that there’s still interesting work to be done that engages the meanings of images and texts. The non-automated site Exploding Dog provides proof of how effective such interplay can be in a project on the net.

3 Responses to “Frames are Required”


  1. WHAK'd Says:

    Create one cartoon cel at a time on http://www.comicstripgenerator.com to make your own comic strip that you can download as JPEG ;)

  2. Dave Miller Says:

    It’s still a work in progress, but I’d be grateful for any feedback.

    It’s a sort of RSS comic, another way to experience the news- news anarchy that recycles and mixes the news. I’ve called it the Daily Scratch, following the idea of scratch/ mixing, but it’s not a good name.

    The text in the speech bubbles comes from new feeds (mostly the Guardian at the moment). I take all the text from each feed, stick it all together, and then at random pull a sentence out of it, and put it into a speech bubble. This makes the speech.

    For each subject I’ve drawn a 3 panel comic that matches the current news. i plan to keep these updated every few days, so you get the latest news and current people in the news, but they’re out of place, disjointed.

    You can also influence the news. For each subject, in the PHP script I’ve automatically replaced “the” by a sentence, to make it more
    surreal, or to let the user put themselves into the news. For example on Showbiz, I’ve replaced “the” by “you know, like, i was the one with the talent, but”, which is suit the mccartney 3 panel comic. So for each comic I can change this text (it goes in a database) or the user can change it – type in the “editor” box (I’m not sure of the wording).

    many thanks, dave

  3. Dave Miller Says:

    I should have given the URL of my art blog as well, where I’ve written more about the work, and tried to give it more context.

    dave

Powered by WordPress