#LOOKING AT THE IMAGE LIMIT.. I COULD DO A HUGE ART DUMP AT SOME POINT BUT IM ALSO LAZY LMAO

[submaskudari]

Chat did y’all know that I’m incredibly ill?

[thecorefyp]

[Week 2] Summary Research Game Design: The Art & Business of Creating Games

PART 1 : CHAPTER 2: PRINCIPLE OF GAME DESIGN

Recognized problems in a game after created it. But how do avoid errors ahead of time? This chapter is dealing with design principles that are broadly applicable to all game genres.

Player Empathy

Understanding how the players will think while playing in the moment.

Able to unfold the game by ourselves

At the given points we are able to think:

No designers have completely accurate foresight

Here is the situation the player faces and here is the range of choices he can make

Now what will he likely to do?

The Importance of Testers

Testers gives the insight to the designer how the game would feel like

But remember to shut designer mouth when they are testing.

Else, never discover what thousands of actual gamers will encountered when they go another way.

Feedback

The basic interactions of game and player: I do something, the computer does something in response.

The feedback is what distinguishes a game from every other form of entertainment

Interactivity, is what makes our games specials, without it = watching a movie.

Every input should give him a discernible response. No input should go unanswered.

Many form of "answers" *must have some feedback

Control feedback must exist to tell the players

visual feedback

aural feedback

tactile feedback, if controller is so equipped

can be positive feedback or negative feedback

Grounding the Player

The player should always know where he is in the game and why/what he is doing.

Any given point, he should have a immediate goal, medium range goal, long term range goal

Game is huge can easily to cause player to feel lost

No game are played start-to-finish in one setting.

Medium Range Goal: Good sized steps towards the overall goal Example: Strategy game → Build a home base ⇒ Embodied in the levels

Immediate Goal: A problem that right in front of the player. Example: Strategy game → which units to build to fend off an impending attack

Throughout the game, he should always be doing it with some idea of how this single step fits into the longer path that will eventually lead to success.

The Moment to Moment Experience

Holding the player attention consistency in the game

Player should have interesting thing to do while he is in the game

Positive: Give him a constant stream of interesting choices that have significant outcomes

Negative: Not saddling him with tedious activities

Tips on avoiding dead spots:

Don't let player perform a complex actions twice

Render transitions have an option to bypass including cut scenes, audio and dialogs

Bypass the repeat transitions

Avoid text or dialog dumps

Automatic tasks that are boring

Immersion

compelling moment to moment experience design

bathe the players with a constant stream of image

Avoid gaffes

from typos to bad voice acting

stupid AI

changes of graphical style

Writing

Good writing can enhance the immersion of game

Design Within Limits

Consideration of :

budget and time

technical features that works that without crashing the player's machine

Removing Impediments 移除障碍

Technical problems (excessive disc swapping, long load time, game interruptions, bugs etc.) that need to solve in order to improve the moment to moment experience.

Disc Swapping

Not so much worries in current days, but we should keep in mind to reduce the amount of disc and swapping disc while produce the CD video games.

Load Time

Achieving Shorter loading time. Tech lead should encounter this problem to reduce the load time. Method to solve:

Reduce the size of level

Designate points along the way where to pause the game for short seconds for loading (ref. Half-Life)

Game Interruption

Not bringing back the player to the starting point while hitting the failures. Reduce the chance of him giving up.

Saving the Game

Horrible to not have a saving game method. Find a way for player to save his game or auto-save if possible. Autosave + Manual save is always a good choice

Housekeeping

Activities that the player should be able to perform at any point of game.

Pause

Quit, but reduce the chance he wanted to quit

Save/Load

Option Screen, easy accessible

Help

Bugs

Bug free on several ways:

Clear on Design Document

Be flexible in creating your design

Stay involve through the whole development cycle

Keep a level ahead

Interface Design

Creating a good looking, yet functional, interface is one of the most underrated tasks of game design — but it is vital to make it right.

Screen Layout should be aesthetically pleasing

Vital Information must be easier to get. Player should understand what is going on at a glance. (example: HUD)

Controls must be clear

Hone the input at the minimum number of non-awkward clicks, key presses or button pushes

Do not RELY on instinct to build Interface Design

Required to be tested by team → users.

Pay attention to the conventions in the genre

Elegance and ease of use are more important than increased functionality

Prototype the interface early and keep noodling with it

Keep come back to this over and over again throughout the development process

Not to confuse player

Game should be easy to play and the interface is help to do things quickly and simply

The Start-up Screen

A start-up screen that accommodate to all these users:

first time playing video games?

Expertise and need to go through game ASAP etc.

More different users

Start-up screen should give the player the option to:

"NEW GAME"

Loading a Saved Game

Going to Tutorial and Practice Area

Opening the options menu to tweak features

Replaying the opening movie (just in case people missed it, but the movie should be have option to bypass it)

Customizable Controls

Give the player as much controls over the interface as possible

Make everything adjustable:

Game controls, monitor settings, graphics settings, volume etc.

Provide best default settings we can arrives

Different people have different feeling, so customizable controls are very important

Clear option screen is important

Tutorial / Practice Mode

Some people want to directly jump into games, others might not.

Tutorial gives the player hand-on experience without endangering him.

A way to introduce mechanism

Cannot assume the player will actually play the tutorial

If the mechanism is important, then it is important to introduce it that he hasn't learned those yet which return to tutorial

Any opportunity that we could introduce the tutorial directly into the storytelling?

Structure and Progression

A game should be easy to learn but difficult to master.

Different genre have different meaning for the progression leap.

For puzzle game;

It is important to make the first level easy

"Let the game begin" should be my motto

First 15 minutes of the game should attract the player into the game

Balancing the difficulty of the level of the game.

First level easy, and not too hard

Intermediate level should not be too easy, if so the player will lose interest.

Final level should be hardest of all, and should balance between challenging and impossible

A game is too hard is no fun

Intuitive leap puzzle;

scatter examples of that kind of leap elsewhere prior to the player's encountering the puzzle

Sense of mastering and progression

Must listen to the testers' feedbacks of the level difficulties

Taking Care of the Player

You are not the player's opponents or enemy

Our job is to help the player to enjoy the game we created

My goal is not to beat the player

A good designer tries to help players get through the game.

Dead Man Walking

Do not put the player in the position that he cannot win and does not know it.

Bring the important tools on the player sights and get his notice about it for further use

Do not hide them away and cause them frustrated

Protect Newbies

Game start and make it easy for the player.

Ease him till he get his confidence.

Make the first puzzle easy

Play it Again, Sam

As read, the author wanted to share that designers should not make the game that which hits players badly while they make a single mistake. 

Ways to solve this is to have a save point in the middle of the level.

Checkpoints to the progression

Avoid to design one of these

But recently, the game market began different, they have ridiculous game like Getting Over it, which the player would fail and fall back to the points.

Give the Player the Information He needs

All the knowledge a player needs in order to play the game should be included within the game

Cannot rely on strategy guide, web sites, word of mouth to supply the critical information

In the game rather than in the manual

Many games have undocumented features — special move or tricks that aren't mentioned on the manual

can be fun, but make sure it is not essential for finish the game

Tricky question on dealing with, "everyone knows"

if the game rely on specific knowledge, make sure it is within the game

Reduce Player Paranoia

Give some small, incremental rewards to the player to reduce their paranoia

Gently steer the player in the right direction

HOW TO DESIGN

Create an Integrated Whole

When we have the high concept, it is just the time to build it with multiple questions to ourselves

Thus, lastly and longer the world will build itself

Economy of Design

In game development, economy of design also helps us to schedule and budget.

If we know what to build, we will not waste time and money to create materials that are not important

High concept also important in this regard, the features keep poping and we cannot do it all

Thus can help us to decide what to keep and what to ignore

Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

If we create something interested to us, then the ideas comes out naturally.

Balance the idea and those with the team.

A visionary guys is needed to central the idea and all proposals and suggestion against it

Game Design is a collaborative art, and you need contributions from multiple discipline

such as story, art, programming, gameplay, sound, music and even sales and marketing.

Cabal approach.

set up a highly focus SWAT teams, each of them have one specific mission

Brainstorming approach

gather members to open discussion

small in group, make more focus

game designer can mull around the ideas, either accept or decline the ideas

[aion-rsa]

What Are NFTs and Why Are Comics Companies Selling Them?

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

With an announcement from collectible maker VeVe, the world was introduced to the first officially licensed DC NFTs. “What is VeVe?” you might ask. Or possibly “What is an NFT?” 

Excellent questions, friends! We will do our absolute best to explain them in clear, concise terms to you right now. 

Here are simple answers to complicated questions: NFTs are ecologically devastating vaporware created to part very dumb, very wealthy collectors from their money, made by stoned libertarian math nerds trying to prove a point they think is profound but is actually just very banal. Veve is no different than any other secondary huckster that springs up around a particularly successful snake oil economy.

As for why DC is getting in bed with them, it’s hard to know if the company is trying to just be cutting edge or if it’s because AT&T took on a shitload of debt buying Warner, and like anybody with creditors breathing down their neck, they need to make several quick bucks or else. 

THE NEXT EVOLUTION IN COMICS HUCKSTERISM

Two full decades after Metallica teamed up with record labels to make sure we didn’t own anything we purchased digitally, a group of rejected Captain Planet villains came up with a workaround: NFTs.

NFTs use blockchain, a distributed AI accountant that requires ENORMOUS amounts of processing power to work properly, to assign certificates of ownership and record transactions. Accepting the pitch behind blockchain technology requires one to step back to an absurdly abstract level, then a zoom back into the extremely micro. 

Every transaction between two people is built around trust: I trust that you are giving me the thing I’m paying for, while we both trust that the currency I’m handing you has a (relatively) absolute value which will allow it to be traded for other things. Blockchain purports to eliminate that trust: it uses a distributed ledger that anyone can see and confirm to record our transaction; it uses an algorithm to make sure every copy of the ledger is the same; and it assigns tokens to each transaction that can be given a value. 

NFTs add in an absurd additional abstraction: ownership of digital media. I have always had the ability to, for example, produce an animated reaction gif from a television show and sell that animated reaction gif to you for a fixed sum of money. You would be an idiot for purchasing that reaction gif for several reasons: anyone else could make the exact same gif and you could find it in iMessage’s search engine, for one. But nothing in the past has ever prevented this transaction from occurring. 

The “innovation” around NFTs is that it uses blockchain technology to “prove” “ownership” and “authenticity,” a sentence that is so heavily caveated that to express it correctly in writing makes the writer look like a conspiracy theorist. The NFT assigns a ledger value to the piece of digital artwork, and then that ledger value is what is sold between parties. It is a non-fungible token – unlike Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency, the idea is these art pieces’ tokens’ inherent value doesn’t change (hence the non-fungible), while cryptocurrency is a token whose value is relative to other less imaginary currency. 

This has led to some frankly embarrassing sales online. Jack Dorsey, the vacuous and bizarre founder of Twitter, is auctioning off his first tweet, something that already happened, that you can find with one simple Google search, for millions of dollars. Beeple, an artist the internet assures me is real, auctioned off a digital JPEG collage of all their previous works for $69 million. Jose Delgo, a comics artist from the ‘70s that very few people remembered until this happened, has made almost $2 million selling NFTs of his own artwork, spurring DC to email freelancers to remind them that they should not be using DC characters to try and skate atop this obvious bubble. Not because of the catastrophic environmental impacts caused by the blockchain algorithm, mind you. No, it was because AT&T needed to get some of that sweet, sweet tulip money.

THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS MOSTLY POOR PEOPLE

Joanie Lemercier, a French artist and climate activist, has sold six NFT pieces so far. The act of accounting for those sales – assigning a token, then transferring ownership of that token from Lemercier to the purchaser – was 8.7 megawatt hours of energy. That’s roughly equivalent to the entire energy consumption of his studio for two entire years. 

The algorithm used for NFTs, like the one used for Bitcoin, other cryptocurrency, and all blockchain transactions, requires computers perform a certain volume of complex activity to access the ledger. That’s how it prevents fraudulent transactions – by making the barrier to writable access so high that it’s functionally impossible. 

Of course, as demand for these transactions increases, so too does the computing power needed to record them. Hence the massive power consumption from Lemercier’s sale. Bitcoin transactions, especially since Elon Musk invested heavily in them to drive up their price (presumably the “pump” part of “pump and dump”), now use more energy annually than the entire country of Argentina. 

Here’s the catch: in a perfectly green, zero emission energy environment, this wouldn’t be a huge problem. Unfortunately, as anyone who has gone outside in the past 18 months has noticed, we’re not quite there yet. And while adding another Argentina to global power load isn’t the same as adding another China, it is still a significant drain on existing grids, and if it’s not timed and sited right, it’s using very dirty power (it’s fairly complicated, but the short version is electricity generation generally gets dirtier as demand increases).

So when Grimes auctions off a certificate of creation for her digital artwork, she’s triggering a set of computer actions that put a massive stress on the power grid that churns out oodles of negative environmental consequences, which according to study after study fall disproportionately on poor people and people of color. 

Or! Instead of auctioning off something that clearly doesn’t exist, maybe she’s just using fracked natural gas as laundry detergent for mafia cash.

DIGITAL MONEY LAUNDROMAT

Let’s say I was a certain very sadistic, very fictional, black mask wearing crime lord of an American city and I have $1 million in cash lying around that I made from my operation’s drug business. If I suddenly bought a house with that million dollars, the authorities would notice that large transaction (probably through transaction reporting from the bank handling the sale, or the property exchange paperwork that runs through City Hall) and start sniffing around to find out where that money came from. 

The same goes if I were to purchase IRL fine art through an auction house. The auction house would ask questions about where that money came from, and if it didn’t like what it found, it would report it to the authorities. Same for buying cars, or businesses, or lots of other real life transactions. 

Now replace bank, city hall, and auction house with “a bunch of computers playing tic tac toe against each other on a 1025 square board” and try and guess where the reporting comes in. We don’t have to wait for an answer, that reporting doesn’t exist. 

NFT transactions are the perfect confluence of the shadiness of art dealing with the shadiness of off-book dark web money-moving. They’re not all money laundering, but they are easy enough to use as money laundering that the authorities are getting concerned. 

PRECARITY, PANDEMICS, AND COMICS ART

So why are comics people doing this? To start with, we mean actual people, and not people in the legal sense of the word (corporations).

It’s not hard to see the eye popping amounts of money changing hands and understand why at least some of them are getting involved. But it’s equally easy to look at the economics of the pandemic era of comics creation and at least sympathize with the pull. Comic page rates have been largely stagnant since the 1980s – penciler page rates in recent years are actually lower than the modest demands made by creators during the abortive effort to unionize in the 1970s.

With that money being so limited, most artists relied on the sale of original art, sketches, and sales at conventions to help make ends meet. So the last year has been exceptionally tough on them. Add to that the trend towards digital art, where there’s no actual physical page produced for the comic, and it’s not hard to imagine a hard up artist, one year into not seeing another living soul except for when the grocery clerk brings a bag of food out to their car, seeing someone coming along waving a conservative five figures at them and not explaining the extremely convoluted yet catastrophic environmental impact of the proces, saying yes to the quick cash.

To their credit, many comics creators are repulsed by the idea. Several have expressed serious concerns with NFTs on Twitter, with Doomsday Clock artist Gary Frank expressing “bewilderment” at the idea of his art being used to sell one of these things, and Marsha Cooke, widow of New Frontier great Darwyn Cooke and manager of his estate, going so far as to ask DC to stop using his art in them. 

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Hopefully the companies involved (or thinking of getting involved) with NFTs listen to their creatives. Nothing more honors the spirit of Batman than using his image to help give a pallet of Bratva money a quick scrub. 

The post What Are NFTs and Why Are Comics Companies Selling Them? appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[dannylenihan]

Why things cost what they cost...

In the last couple of weeks my little brand, 3 Legged Thing, launched a brand new Universal L Bracket - the QR11. For the most part, the response has been overwhelmingly positive.

Then, somebody sent me a link to a well known forum, where a conversation had started about the press release for the QR11. The comments were almost wholly negative with more than one contributor stating “You can buy this from **Insert website** for $7″ or “I got one from China for $5 and it works just fine”. 

Fantastic. What you actually did is perpetuate a cycle of intellectual property theft, and put your own equipment at risk by using something that has zero accountability, or any certification, made with unknown materials, in a factory where you have no idea what the conditions are like. That’s what you did. I’ll take you through it, step by step, so you can understand.

1: Intellectual Property.

Firstly, we (manufacturers) all trip up on intellectual property from time to time. When you file a patent, it takes the examiners upwards of a year to do all of the searches required to see if any prior art exists. As a small company, we simply don’t have the resources or the time to do this kind of search, and neither do most larger corporations, but we try our level best to ensure that we are only filing utility patents for true innovation. From time to time every company inadvertently steps on another’s toes, which is why we have a licensing system.

Chinese manufacturers have little or no regard for intellectual property. They are well known for copying other designs. They just buy the product, scan it, pull it into a CAD system, and then load it up to their machining. Voila - product copied. Zero overhead, unless you count the cost of the product in the first place, plus the engineers time, reverse-engineering, and maybe two or three attempts for a production sample before it comes out correctly - or at least, how they perceive “correct”. The process probably takes a couple of weeks, if that.

So, basically it’s a counterfeit, that took the hard work of a small company like mine, and without any consideration for the legalities (yes, it’s illegal) they copied it, stuck it in a box and sold it. But sure, you can have an L Bracket for six dollars.

2: Design & Deliver - this is just to demonstrate the work it takes to bring a single product, like our new L Bracket, to market.

a: Design meeting - new product introduction. What are the objectives? What are we trying to achieve?

b: Meetings with camera stores. Measure every camera. This takes a couple of weeks

c: We make a box sketch for the underside, and left side aspects, taking in to account every camera we've measured.

d: With all of the data in place I create a simplistic design which offers the most universal coverage for all cameras. Is it perfect? No. But that’s not the point - the point is a one-size-fits-all bracket, which may have some limitations, but serves to do the job it was designed for - to enable a photographer to switch from landscape to portrait without moving the tripod or head, retaining the composition.

e: Then I start to design the mechanical necessities - usually I start with the rubber pads. This process can take a long time. The rubber pads are crucial to the final product. My goal is to create maximum surface contact and grip, to provide a stronger, more secure connection. 

f: Innovation comes next - what other value can we add to this product? We add a number of extra functions to all of our products. This part of the process can take several weeks.

g: Once we have a final design, there are a number of stages. Filing patents or design registrations comes first - over the life cycle of a patent it will cost upwards of $100k for extending worldwide, annual renewals, legal costs, filing fees etc. 

h: Making a short run production for samples is next, and handing these out to a number of Pro-Team members to test and try and comment on.

i: Build the asset library. The costs and time implications of this should not be underestimated.

Photograph the products - pack shots

Lifestyle Images - shots in use, in different locations and environments

Product Video 

Product Information Packs for dealers

j: Packaging design and Instructions actually happens towards the end of the process. This can take a few months itself, as there are a number of things to consider - we write manuals in six languages, and our boxes and packaging have to comply to regulations in 206 countries - no easy feat.

k: Finally it’s the launch - Press releases, marketing, adding listings and writing copy for websites, blurb etc.

That whole process just took between 8 and 12 months, with thousands of man hours, and costs upwards of $100k in time, materials, legal fees, outsource costs etc.

The Bottom Line

The Chinese factory did it in two weeks, without any of the above effort. Is it any wonder they can produce something that looks similar for six dollars?

3: Factory Standards

Working conditions is an important part of our company ethos, as it is for most manufacturers in our industry. Sure, I could make things cheaper - the first factory I worked with, with one of my other brands back in 2005, was a total chop shop - I pulled out of there when I realised how bad the conditions were. That was a steep learning curve for me - since then, I inspect any factory for compliance to health and safety regulations before deciding whether or not to trial them, and I always, always stay at the factory for first production, to see that workers are treated fairly, provided with the necessary tools and safety equipment required to do their jobs properly.

"I always, always stay at the factory for first production, to see that workers are treated fairly, provided with the necessary tools and safety equipment required to do their jobs properly."

I’ve seen factories where the conditions are appalling. Where old ladies sit with woollen gloves, using their hands to knock burrs off die cast components, blood pouring up their arms. Where moulds that weigh over 600kg are carted around on rusty chains by workers with no safety helmets, wearing sandals or flip flops. Where workers using lathes or DMC’s sit with sparks flying at them, no goggles on, hands covered in splinters.

It’s inhumane. And for us, unacceptable. But sure, you can have an L Bracket for six dollars.

4: Materials

We use only the highest grade of materials. We use T6061 for aluminium with a 1.1% magnesium content. We use the highest grade of stainless steel for the safety pins and the camera screw. We’ve tested these to destruction, because we know that a 4mm shaft of stainless steel is the difference between holding your camera and losing it. Is the cheap, Chinese version free from materials that are restricted in most countries? Lead, cadmium and a few others besides? 

Here I am inspecting the aluminium billets at the factory. Our QC process starts at materials in, and is duplicated through every stage of production.

"We use only the highest grade of materials."

Then there are the actual processes to consider. I saw one comment along the lines of “got one from AliExpress, CNC’d, so every bit as good as a brand version”. That’s just not accurate. A CNC machine is just a 3D drill that does what it is mapped to do. There are all sorts of other considerations - which kind of lubricant do they use? Is it toxic? Do they have sealed waste flushing and specialist disposal? What about the tolerances? Is it precision engineered? Unlikely. Being that the aim of the game is to be as cheap as is humanly possible, I doubt that any single item sits in a block for more than five minutes, meaning it’s machined crudely and cheaply. It’s also the difference between using a $2 drill bit and a $100 drill bit. Both will make a hole, but only one will do it smoothly and accurately.

How is it finished? Is it anodized? Anodizing is a horrible chemical process that requires strict controls and safety equipment, and extensive training. Even the Chinese government have started to close many of the non-compliant factories, because of the injury and fatality rates, and the dumping of chemicals into groundwater.

"We recycle every gram of waste - from swarf to filings, everything is collected, rinsed, packaged and recycled."

So, the materials are unknown, potentially full of non-compliant chemicals, made in a factory that’s possibly poisoning the groundwater of the local community, and might be responsible for many workplace injuries, but sure, you can have an L Bracket for six dollars. 

5: Pricing

With months of development, huge legal costs for protecting designs and technology, thousands of man hours of labour, outsource costs, prototyping etc, this product has to make money. Contrary to popular belief, “profit” isn’t a dirty word. It enables everyone in the world who works in the private sector to have a job.

I have distributors in countries around the world. I need to sell the product to them, with a layer of profitability for my company. They need to sell it to camera stores, and also need to make a profit. The camera stores sell it directly to you, and they too need to make a profit, and it is this last link in the chain which is so at risk of extinction. Our industry has millions of employees around the world. We’ve already seen huge losses of jobs and stores since 2010, and we’re only just seeing small signs of recovery. A huge proportion of camera sales happen in stores - not online, and it is this facet that is most critical. The more stores that close, because they simply cannot compete with Chinese rip offs and off-the-shelf rebranded products, the less innovation will occur, and less production will happen, leading to higher prices and less jobs, until the economic viability of our industry is no longer sustainable.

The Reality

THAT is what you’re buying in to when you decide to get it cheaply. Far be it for me to judge anyone for their decisions - that’s not what this is about. This is about the disposable, throw-away comments that largely circumnavigate the actual circumstances of a product’s arrival in the market place.

Have you ever heard the expression “You get what you pay for”? Well, you do, if you buy something, anything, off the shelf in China, without any sort of verification process.

Anyway, I’m sure that any number of keyboard warriors will have something to say about this article. I’m not here to condemn anyone for their actions, far from it, I’m just trying to educate people to the realities of Chinese copies. 

There are only really a dozen or so global brands involved in camera support technology. As the smallest of these we are, perhaps, less affected by the Chinese copies, so I’m not writing this to protect my own company. This is about all of the great manufacturers, past and present, who spend millions on product development every year, only to see themselves ripped off by unscrupulous factories who don’t have the vision, the skill or the tenacity to create anything themselves. This is for the tens of thousands of employees of those companies who work hard, in daily fear of their livelihoods thanks to the incursion of illegal copies into our market place.

Are we perfect? No. But at least we’re doing it ourselves, with integrity, with compassion, with respect for human rights, with regard for regulations and compliance, with one eye on our planet and recycling, and with a degree of passion for this great industry.

That’s why it costs $50.

Thanks to Simon Pollock for the factory images.

[alisonpoonresearch]

Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art

Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art (2015) Directed by James Crump [Film]. USA: Summitridge Pictures

“Beginning in the mid-1960s, a group of artists working primarily in New York City began to take up land as a subject but also as a material in the practice of their art. Sharing overlapping interests with minimal and conceptual art, these radical pioneering land artists sought to transcend the limitations of classical painting and sculpture and the orthodox parameters of making art for the traditional gallery space. These artists sought to make work on a monumental scale in the vast and desolate desert spaces of the American South West. Today these works remain impressive for their audacity and ambition.” - James Crump

Gallery vs Outdoors / Scale

“Everybody viewed themselves as an explorer." - Charles Ross

“They were looking for a larger canvas to work on.” - Virginia Dwan

“The idea of Land Art is related to the idea of the globe. Especially after the spaceship and the first picture of the Earth give you the idea that our Earth is an object. So the idea of these artist after 1963 is that you can shape something which is a sphere. Another element which changed the vision of art was flying by airplane, so looking from the high level is changing the perspective of your knowledge about art, because you have the sphere which is the Earth and you can design on it you can draw. The aerial view is a change in the history of art." - Germano Celant

Gallery

“The artist was retaliating against the gallery, that them moving away from the gallery and out into the West was an anti-gallery statement that they were making.” - Virginia Dwan

“And we really thought that the work we were doing would end galleries.” - Vito Acconci

“My personal experience was that Land Art or Earth Art was not an anti-gallery statement or anti-gallerist statement, but that wide open space was really what they were looking for and found. No gallery or museum could possibly do what the open space does for the individual, the viewer, the experiencer.” - Virginia Dwan

“For the first time one has to be part of and go into the actual art object. In this case Michael Heizer’s Double negative and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty one can walk on out on. The Lightning Field of Walter De Maria’s. We become a part of the piece as we view it.” - Virginia Dwan

“The idea of Michael and Walter to be in the piece and not to be an aerial view. I think the piece has to control you and not you control the piece. Otherwise it becomes an object, and they refuse that. If you take the aerial view of double negative which is ok but become an object, you control the object. While you are inside you are taken by the wall.” - Germano Celant

When Attitudes Become Form, Bern 1969

“It was a very prophetic show. It really was not so much works that had been done but works that artists dreamed of, so it was a show in a way of artists dreams.” - Carl Andre (WHICH SHOW)

“There is no huge amount of space in Europe. The idea of walking for hours and not seeing anybody which is impossible. So the idea of spending time in a naturalistic landscape is kind of appealing for us Europeans. The function of Europe was very important because it was the first to recognise American Art of this kind.”- Germano Celant

“Actually the idea to go outside the building was again typical of artists that were already involved in the outdoor work. There was no way they can do something inside coming from the vision of the landscape and actually to go against the construction of the street which is the tar and destroying it and finding Earth.” - Germano Celant

“This is very unimportant compared to the idea. If I do this piece in Amsterdam or I do this piece in New York it’s exactly the same piece even though it may look a little different- a different kind of wall it’s still the same piece. See I don’t have to do it, somebody else can do it. It’s not a precious unique object, what it is is a unique idea. But in being a unique idea it has 50 or 60 or 100 different representations and each time it’s new. I like the idea that you can’t insure the work and you can’t lose it. You can’t damage it, nothing can happen to it. It’s there forever and that’s all.” - Lawrence Weiner

“Heizer for example, to dig his holes, he took the engagement to be a sculptor who makes holes, objects in the desert. It was really the process of the work, the motion, the attitude, it wasn’t about the form, it was about the content.” - Harald Szeemann

“Coming to Europe you have some kind of constrain because of bureaucracy in Europe, control and so on. Michael Heizer cancelled one piece because it was not well done enough for him and it was too small. Scale I think is a very important element that Europe doesn’t have.” - Germano Celant

Michael Heizer

The son of an archaeologist, Michael Heizer was one of the first artists known practicing in the new genre of Earthworks.

“Michael was a real pioneer for the desert, he also was the one that lived there.” -  Gianfranco Gorgioni

“Double Negative is really a scar of a kind, an intrusion of nature, an assault of some sort. It’s as though a surgeon took an exploratory cut of a mesa to show its innards.” - Michael Heizer

Virginia Dwan was a huge supporter of the Earthworkers and she helped to fund many projects, including Michael Heizer’s Double Negative in Nevada. 

“The work which is 1800 feet across, it involved two maces- actually its cut from one side to the next mace and there is an indentation between. And the indentation is also part of the work and that involves dirt that was pushed from these two big cuts into the centre so that the drop is part of it as well.” - Virginia Dwan

“Negative was about using areas of volume but defined space and then even compounding it and that’s what double negative meant. It was compound, it wasn’t just using space as something but it was a doubling up in a compound affirmation of that application. That was metaphysics.” - Michael Heizer

“I think all large sculptures have been technically difficult for all people who ever built. I haven’t tried to surpass that scale, I simply tried to keep pace with it. It’s a historical scale. I think that it’s normal and natural to build a sculpture of this measurement at this time.” - Michael Heizer

“I was interested in metaphysics and the idea of making sculpture, which I thought at the time sculpture needed to be reinvented in the sense that you could redefine the physical properties of mass and stuff like that and that was part of that creative time and that type of thinking." - Michael Heizer

Walter De Maria

Lightning Field, 1977

Robert Smithson

“It was something infernal, it was something other-worldly but I hesitate to say hell… the feeling of aloneness and of it being in a place that was unsafe and something devilish, something devilish there.” - Virginia Dwan

“The way I saw Smithson, the idea was probably more important than the actual doing it. Of course you had to make the idea in some way concrete. I think Smithson always had that larger idea much more dominantly in his mind.” - Vito Acconci

“Smithson came to me at one point and said that he wanted to do work out in the open space and he and I and Nancy Holt his wife and Carl Andre made forays into New Jersey to find land to work on.” - Virginia Dwan

“He liked the Jersey meadows because it was a dump land. He lived on the hill right above the Jersey meadows -that’s where he grew up.” - Carl Andre 

“Both Bob and I are from New Jersey, we grew up there so that it was a way of re-experiencing places that we had experienced before at a younger age and it was also a matter of unlearning a lot of sophisticated things that we had learned in our early adulthood. Getting rid of a lot of useless concepts and getting back in touch with the place, with the land, with the physical surrounds of our experience and perceiving it in a new way.” - Nancy Holt

“You have nature and when it’s tranquil and you have nature when it rages. A lot of people tend to have a Disneyland idea of nature, that somehow (you know) it’s all pastoral. And it isn’t. There are storms and there are other forces and there is an aspect of the closer you get to it that the more you develop the sense that there is… that there is a balance between what you would call tampering and things as they are but nature has a way of tampering with its seemingly solid ground.” - Robert Smithson

Dennis Oppenheim

“The art doer at that time of that kind of work that I was most interested in was Dennis Oppenheim because I think he was trying to being person in relation to nature.” - Vito Acconci

“The other thing about public art it really stands alone it’s really a star that appears at times to be totally unlinked to anything. This is both a blessing and a curse. A lot of artists find that they burned all their bridges in the gallery world and it’s wonderful and now there’s yet another world. It’s like going to Alaska is like the last point.” - Dennis Oppenheim

Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels

“More and more it became an image in my mind that I really wanted to make. Tunnels and tunnels that you can walk through and look through. And but putting the holes into the top that are in the configuration of stars in the 4 different constellations and the holes varying in size according to the magnitude of the stars they represented. By doing that I was using the sun which is also a star and using its light, the star light shining thought the star holes and that cast a pattern of light on the bottom of the tunnels. Sort of bringing the sky down to earth or inverting the sky ground relationship. So that when you are walking in the middle of the day in the tunnels you’re walking on stars and it creates a shadowed environment with the star spots.” - Nancy Holt

Mortality / Virginia Obsession? / Dedication

“I once asked Virginia what is it that you see in this strange outrageous art that you show? And she just said obsession.” - Carl Andre

“Artists are like that, they are really crazy that way. They are obsessed, it’s an obsession.” - Virginia Dwan

“The idea of negative implied metaphysical, you know that the positive is the physicality and the absence and the negative is always dealing with death, you know in a sort of way.” - Germano Celant

Rather fittingly, the fates of some of the Land Artists seems as monumental as their works. 

“The idea to be eternal is one of the desire of artists. And about death I think all his work is about death. The risk of death is everywhere. Think about Lightning Field. First thing that Walter said is “be careful if you see a cloud, run out because it could be light coming in, you could be burned like a rabbit.” So in a certain way the idea of death, of sacrifice because means you are part of it.” - Germano Celant

“When I did a book on Michael Heizer he was on the verge of dying because all his nervous system was collapsing. So dying in the middle of the work not finished, this kind of divinity of creating something so big to die for it. To be a slave for yourself and creating our own pyramid and being buried inside. That makes the nature of the work inevitable and kind of mythological.” - Germano Celant

Avalanche Magazine

Editors: Willoughby Sharp and Liza Béar

“Willoughby followed the artists and the artists were starting to work outdoors, it didn’t have anything to do with the gallerists. It was the one nice point in time where the artists really pushed the parameters. Willhoughby decided to be dedicated to the dissemination of art information by any means possible.” - Pamela Sharp

Avalanche Magazine was an art publication set up by artist-curators, Willoughby Sharp and Liza Béar. It was published seasonally and thirteen issues were created, the first in Fall 1970 and the last in Summer 1976.

“Very few artist at these galleries get money. If Avalanche could pay the artists like… $3000 for appearing in Avalanche, then it would replace- not replace- but make a much stronger alternative to the gallery.” - Willoughby Sharp

The magazine looked at contemporary art at the time, exploring new genres and artists through articles and interviews. It did not particularly write reviews, as to keep a neutral stance, but was about getting to know the artist, their art and ideas. 

“I feel totally in competition with the galleries. That the magazine was put together as an alternative to museum and galleries.” - Willoughby Sharp

“Earth was an early focus of Willoughby Sharp. He was an artist curator. His home and his comfort zone were with the artists.” - Dennis Oppenheim

http://avalancheindex.org/

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/troublemakers_the_story_of_land_art_2016 02/02

[photomaniacs]

Why Camera Gear Costs What It Costs http://ift.tt/2uj4aYH

In the last couple of weeks, my little brand, 3 Legged Thing, launched a brand new Universal L Bracket, the QR11. For the most part, the response has been overwhelmingly positive.

Then, somebody sent me a link to a well-known forum, where a conversation had started about the press release for the QR11. The comments were almost wholly negative with more than one contributor stating “You can buy this from **insert website name** for $7″ or “I got one from China for $5 and it works just fine.”

Fantastic. What you actually did is perpetuate a cycle of intellectual property theft, and put your own equipment at risk by using something that has zero accountability, or any certification, made with unknown materials, in a factory where you have no idea what the conditions are like. That’s what you did.

Our brand new QR11-LC and QR11-LG retails at $49.99. Here’s why.

I’ll take you through it, step by step, so you can understand.

1. Intellectual Property

Firstly, we (manufacturers) all trip up on intellectual property from time to time. When you file a patent, it takes the examiners upwards of a year to do all of the searches required to see if any prior art exists. As a small company, we simply don’t have the resources or the time to do this kind of search, and neither do most larger corporations, but we try our level best to ensure that we are only filing utility patents for true innovation. From time to time every company inadvertently steps on another’s toes, which is why we have a licensing system.

Chinese manufacturers have little or no regard for intellectual property. They are well known for copying other designs. They just buy the product, scan it, pull it into a CAD system, and then load it up to their machining. Voila — product copied.

Zero overhead, unless you count the cost of the product in the first place, plus the engineers time, reverse-engineering, and maybe two or three attempts for a production sample before it comes out correctly — or at least, how they perceive “correct”. The process probably takes a couple of weeks, if that.

So, basically it’s a counterfeit that took the hard work of a small company like mine, and without any consideration for the legalities (yes, it’s illegal) they copied it, stuck it in a box and sold it. But sure, you can have an L Bracket for six dollars.

2. Design & Deliver

This is just to demonstrate the work it takes to bring a single product, like our new L Bracket, to market.

Design meeting. New product introduction. What are the objectives? What are we trying to achieve?

Meetings with camera stores. Measure every camera. This takes a couple of weeks

We make a box sketch for the underside, and left side aspects, taking in to account every camera we’ve measured.

With all of the data in place I create a simplistic design which offers the most universal coverage for all cameras. Is it perfect? No. But that’s not the point – the point is a one-size-fits-all bracket, which may have some limitations, but serves to do the job it was designed for – to enable a photographer to switch from landscape to portrait without moving the tripod or head, retaining the composition.

Then I start to design the mechanical necessities – usually I start with the rubber pads. This process can take a long time. The rubber pads are crucial to the final product. My goal is to create maximum surface contact and grip, to provide a stronger, more secure connection.

Innovation comes next — what other value can we add to this product? We add a number of extra functions to all of our products. This part of the process can take several weeks.

Once we have a final design, there are a number of stages. Filing patents or design registrations comes first – over the life cycle of a patent it will cost upwards of $100k for extending worldwide, annual renewals, legal costs, filing fees etc.

Making a short run production for samples is next, and handing these out to a number of Pro-Team members to test and try and comment on.

Build the asset library. The costs and time implications of this should not be underestimated.

Photograph the products – pack shots

Lifestyle Images – shots in use, in different locations and environments

Product Video

Product Information Packs for dealers

Packaging design and Instructions actually happens towards the end of the process. This can take a few months itself, as there are a number of things to consider — we write manuals in six languages, and our boxes and packaging have to comply with regulations in 206 countries – no easy feat.

Finally it’s the launch. Press releases, marketing, adding listings and writing copy for websites, blurb etc.

That whole process just took between 8 and 12 months, with thousands of man hours, and costs upwards of $100k in time, materials, legal fees, outsource costs etc.

The bottom line is, the Chinese factory did it in two weeks, without any of the above effort. Is it any wonder they can produce something that looks similar for six dollars?

3. Factory Standards

Working conditions is an important part of our company ethos, as it is for most manufacturers in our industry. Sure, I could make things cheaper — the first factory I worked with, with one of my other brands back in 2005, was a total chop shop — I pulled out of there when I realized how bad the conditions were. That was a steep learning curve for me.

Since then, I inspect any factory for compliance to health and safety regulations before deciding whether or not to trial them, and I always, always stay at the factory for first production, to see that workers are treated fairly, provided with the necessary tools and safety equipment required to do their jobs properly.

Photograph courtesy of ©Simon Pollock

I’ve seen factories where the conditions are appalling. Where old ladies sit with woolen gloves, using their hands to knock burrs off die-cast components, blood pouring up their arms. Where molds that weigh over 600kg (1,300+ pounds) are carted around on rusty chains by workers with no safety helmets, wearing sandals or flip flops. Where workers using lathes or DMCs sit with sparks flying at them, no goggles on, hands covered in splinters.

It’s inhumane. And for us, unacceptable. But sure, you can have an L Bracket for six dollars.

4. Materials

We use only the highest grade of materials. We use T6061 for aluminium with a 1.1% magnesium content. We use the highest grade of stainless steel for the safety pins and the camera screw. We’ve tested these to destruction, because we know that a 4mm shaft of stainless steel is the difference between holding your camera and losing it. Is the cheap, Chinese version free from materials that are restricted in most countries? Lead, cadmium, and a few others besides?

Here I am inspecting the aluminium billets at the factory. Our QC process starts at materials in, and is duplicated through every stage of production. Photograph courtesy of ©Simon Pollock

Then there are the actual processes to consider. I saw one comment along the lines of “got one from AliExpress, CNC’d, so every bit as good as a brand version”. That’s just not accurate. A CNC machine is just a 3D drill that does what it is mapped to do.

There are all sorts of other considerations: which kind of lubricant do they use? Is it toxic? Do they have sealed waste flushing and specialist disposal? What about the tolerances? Is it precision engineered? Unlikely. Being that the aim of the game is to be as cheap as is humanly possible, I doubt that any single item sits in a block for more than five minutes, meaning it’s machined crudely and cheaply. It’s also the difference between using a $2 drill bit and a $100 drill bit. Both will make a hole, but only one will do it smoothly and accurately.

How is it finished? Is it anodized? Anodizing is a horrible chemical process that requires strict controls and safety equipment, and extensive training. Even the Chinese government have started to close many of the non-compliant factories, because of the injury and fatality rates, and the dumping of chemicals into groundwater.

Photograph courtesy of ©Simon Pollock

So, the materials are unknown, potentially full of non-compliant chemicals, made in a factory that’s possibly poisoning the groundwater of the local community, and might be responsible for many workplace injuries, but sure, you can have an L Bracket for six dollars.

5. Pricing

With months of development, huge legal costs for protecting designs and technology, thousands of man hours of labor, outsource costs, prototyping etc, this product has to make money. Contrary to popular belief, “profit” isn’t a dirty word. It enables everyone in the world who works in the private sector to have a job.

I have distributors in countries around the world. I need to sell the product to them, with a layer of profitability for my company. They need to sell it to camera stores, and also need to make a profit. The camera stores sell it directly to you, and they too need to make a profit, and it is this last link in the chain which is so at risk of extinction.

Our industry has millions of employees around the world. We’ve already seen huge losses of jobs and stores since 2010, and we’re only just seeing small signs of recovery. A huge proportion of camera sales happen in stores, not online, and it is this facet that is most critical.

The more stores that close, because they simply cannot compete with Chinese rip offs and off-the-shelf rebranded products, the less innovation will occur, and less production will happen, leading to higher prices and less jobs, until the economic viability of our industry is no longer sustainable.

The Reality

That is what you’re buying into when you decide to get it cheaply. Far be it for me to judge anyone for their decisions — that’s not what this is about. This is about the disposable, throw-away comments that largely circumnavigate the actual circumstances of a product’s arrival in the market place.

Have you ever heard the expression, “You get what you pay for”? Well, you do, if you buy something, anything, off the shelf in China, without any sort of verification process.

Anyway, I’m sure that any number of keyboard warriors will have something to say about this article. I’m not here to condemn anyone for their actions, far from it, I’m just trying to educate people to the realities of Chinese copies.

There are only really a dozen or so global brands involved in camera support technology. As the smallest of these we are, perhaps, less affected by the Chinese copies, so I’m not writing this to protect my own company. This is about all of the great manufacturers, past and present, who spend millions on product development every year, only to see themselves ripped off by unscrupulous factories who don’t have the vision, the skill or the tenacity to create anything themselves. This is for the tens of thousands of employees of those companies who work hard, in daily fear of their livelihoods thanks to the incursion of illegal copies into our market place.

Every time a cheap copy is purchased, pressure mounts on manufacturers to produce goods for less money, and make them more widely appealing and competitive. Product quality slips as the price goes down. Then the copies start coming down in price, until it gets to the point when stores don’t want to stock it any more, because they can no longer sell it competitively, and manufacturers don’t want to make it anymore, because it’s no longer economically or commercially viable.

Then, investment into innovation stops, and as new cameras are developed, there’s nobody around to make supporting accessories, because nobody wants to sink $100k of investment into a product that’ll be ripped off in 5 minutes. Once that happens, it’s all over. The industry gets smaller, less jobs, less profit and less products. It should be obvious to see what happens next. And it’s not just about photography. This is happening everywhere.

Are we perfect? No. But at least we’re doing it ourselves, with integrity, with compassion, with respect for human rights, with regard for regulations and compliance, with one eye on our planet and recycling, and with a degree of passion for this great industry.

That’s why it costs $50.

About the author: Danny Lenihan is the founder and CEO of 3 Legged Thing. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. Prior to his career in entrepreneurship, Lenihan was also a comedian, actor, and musician. You can connect with him on his website, Twitter, and Facebook. This article was also published here.

Image credits: Header illustration based on photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

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July 21, 2017 at 09:00PM