The artist and the iPhone

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Lovely FT.com piece about David Hockney.

He has drawn recent portraits with computer software, using a Wacom graphic tablet and tablet pen, producing inkjet prints that can be physically reworked by hand; these are the subject of next month’s London show Drawing Inside a Printing Machine. One depicting Celia’s granddaughters Lola, Tilly and Isabella – made while the girls watched a DVD on a baby-white chaise longue – has the snapshot spontaneity of a photograph but the fluid lines, a composition interrogating their relationship, and a nonchalant loveliness, characteristic of Hockney’s best portraits.

Tea is poured, and as Fitzherbert disappears briefly to walk Freddie, Hockney produces his newest tool, an iPhone. With a few deft strokes he draws the outline of a face with his finger, clicks a button to alter the thickness of the line, adds eyebrows, lips. Another button produces the peals of York Minster; then the thing becomes a mouth organ that Hockney pretends to play; next it emits sounds like a razor and he pretends to shave. “It’s better than a Blackberry, which is all about efficiency – for businessmen,” he says. “This has a sense of the absurd – so it’s true to life, for me.”

Worth reading in full if — like me — you enjoy Hockney’s work.

Thanks to Lorcan Dempsey for the link.

Amazon: power – and responsibility

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This morning’s Observer column.

When Jeff Bezos founded Amazon, his single strategic goal was to “get big quick”. His hunch was that, in online retailing, size and scale would be the ultimate determinants of success. And his vision was never limited to books – they were the obvious starting point, because they are goods that people could buy without having to handle them. But Bezos had much more ambitious plans. He wanted to sell everything that could be sold online. He saw Amazon as potentially the Wal-Mart of the web.

Last week we saw two very different illustrations of how close he has come to achieving his goal…

Moderating RIPA (slightly)

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When RIPA was being pushed through Parliament in 1999, some of us were very concerned at its apparent extensibility — especially (i) the scope it offered for its powers to be extended virtually without limit to any public authority in the UK, and (ii) its use for purposes other than detecting organised crime and terrorism. And lo! it came about — the Act has been used by Local Authorities to legitimise snooping in all kinds of areas, none of them connected with terrorism or organised crime.

The abuses have become so outrageous that now there’s to be a public consultation on the matter. here’s the text of the official announcement:

Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000: Consolidating orders and codes of practice

Passed in 2000, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (called RIPA), created a regulatory framework to govern the way public authorities handle and conduct covert investigations.

This consultation takes a look at all the public agencies, offices and councils that can use investigation techniques covered by RIPA, and asks the public to consider whether or not it’s appropriate for those people to be allowed to use those techniques.

In light of recent concerns, the government is particularly interested in how local authorities use RIPA to conduct investigations into local issues. Among other things, in order to ensure that RIPA powers are only used when they absolutely need to be, the government proposes to raise the rank of those in local authorities who are allowed to authorise use of RIPA techniques.

To respond to the consultation, reply by email to ripaconsultation@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk

You can also reply by post to:

Tony Cooper
Home Office
Peel Building 5th Floor
2 Marsham Street
London SW1P 4DF

A convention of cant?

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Conor Gearty was not impressed by the Convention on Modern Liberty.

I first wrote that Britain was in danger of becoming a police state in the New Statesman, in June 1986. The occasion was the Public Order Bill that was then before parliament. Our civil liberties were being “horribly squeezed”, as I saw it, by an increase in police power that was producing a “distressing drift into discretionary law”. I ended by declaring that a “police state, even a benevolent one, is not a free society for long”. I wish now I had not used that phrase: it was too shrill for the circumstances it sought to describe, drawing too quick a conclusion from too flimsy a factual base. Yet if we are to believe many of the enthusiastic champions of freedom at the recent Convention on Modern Liberty we are still – 23 years later – on our way to becoming a police state or a “surveillance society” or whatever the latest colourful label is to describe the decline of freedom in Britain. The point is as overstated today as it was in 1986.

First it reveals a serious lack of historical perspective. When was this golden age from which we measure the decline?

Worth reading in full. Thanks to Charlie Beckett for spotting it.

Footnote: Cant is a great word, but I’m not sure Conor’s use of it is entirely accurate. Its origins are obscure, though some people claim it’s derived from the Irish ‘caint’, which means talk. (A nice touch since Prof Gearty and I are both Irish.) But Wikipedia claims that “the original meaning of ‘cant’ was a secret language supposedly used by rogues and vagabonds in Elizabethan England. This Thieves’ Cant was a feature of popular pamphlets and plays particularly between 1590 and 1615, but continued to feature in literature through the 18th century.” The Shorter Oxford doesn’t mention this at all, but has lots of different definitions (e.g. creek, border, edge, portion, share, division, musical sound, singing, sale by auction, apportion, give an oblique or slanting edge to), only two of which seem appropriate to its use as a term of abuse: ‘a whining manner of speaking’; and ‘jargonistic, ephemerally fashionable, uttered mechanically’.

Hashmobs

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Nicholas Carr was, predictably, not impressed by the #amazonfail business:

Flashmobs were okay, but they had a couple of big downsides. First, they required you to go outside. Second, you had to, well, be in a flashmob.

Hashmobs solve both problems by transferring the flashmob concept into a purely realtime environment. A hashmob is a virtual mob that exists entirely within the Twitter realtime stream. It derives its name not from any kind of illicit pipeweed but from the “hashtags” that are commonly used to categorize tweets. Hashtags take the form of a hash sign, ie, #, in front of a word or word-portmanteau, eg, #obama or #obamadog. The members of a hashmob gather, virtually, around a particular hashtag by labeling each of their tweets with said hashtag and then following the resulting hashtag tweet stream. Hashmobbers don’t have to subject themselves to the weather, and they don’t actually have to be in proximity to any other physical being. A hashmob is a purely avatarian mob, though it is every bit as prone to the rapid cultivation of mass hysteria as a nonavatarian mob….

Tesco: every little helps, er, Tesco

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Guess how much Tesco paid for the rights to Rosie Cosie?

Then check your estimate here.

(Prediction: the next step will be a letter from Tesco lawyers accusing Julie Williams for using the image of Tesco Cosy Bunny without permission.)

UPDATE: The link to her blog no longer works. Ms Williams has taken her post offline. She explains:

A quiet thank you

I had no idea that things would escalate to such proportions when I wrote about my egg cosy problems earlier today. I need to sleep on the whole matter and consider some of the very valid points that have been raised. This is a matter for me and one that only affects me and my very little business. To see things snowballing from a small and personal matter is a little disconcerting, and the reason I’ve taken my post off-line for now.

Wonder what happened?