Mindscape In Cyberspace

“Some folks think journals should enact specific agendas. Marketers talk about branding; academics the thesis; non-profits and corporations make mission statements. Revolutionaries, of course, use manifestoes. This way, an endeavor can be examined in light of its purpose.” - Editor’s note, Sous Rature*, 2ssue, Winter 2009

Sous Rature 2ssue is out. And guess what? I am there! Along with 25 eminent writers-poets-artists of this time. Definitely, it’s an honour for me!

Click here to see my work on Sous Rature 2ssue

The 2^nd issue of Sous Rature features work of Bernadette Mayer, Nico Vassilakis, Brooklyn Copeland, Maria Williams-Russell, Peter Ciccariello, William Allegrezza, David-Baptiste Chirot, Rodrigo Toscano, Christophe Casamassima, James Sanders, Barry Schwabsky, Michelle Naka Pierce w/ Sue Hammond West, Alexander Jorgensen, Celina Su, Matina Stamatakis, Amy King, Bill Marsh, Brenda Hillman, Charles Bernstein, Samit Roy, Stacy Szymaszek, Paul Hoover, Sawako Nakayasu, Thomas Devaney and Sparrow

* Sous Rature is a literature and art journal edited and published by Cara Benson

Black Robert Journal is an Art and Literature Journal that defines itself by saying, “We subscribe to the notion that there is lots of vital work not being shared, from a spectrum of hills, and we intend to provide contrary voice to the mediocrity of same-same/different-different.”

In their current issue, they have published one Bangla Visual Poetry of mine, titled “Sin” (see the image below) and also an interview with me. The interview was conducted by the poet and vispo artist, Alexander Jorgensen, the Managing Editor of Black Robert Journal.

View my vispo piece here
Read my interview here

Venereal Kittens is a collective, conceptualized and edited by artist-poet Matina L. Stamatakis and dedicated to archiving and preserving innovative works by writers and artists of the 21st century, with a strong preference for experimental, avant-garde,post modern poetry and art. They say very clearly that they are not interested in mainstream writing or art.

They have already featured great artists and writers like, Alexander Jorgensen, Kane X. Faucher, Theoni Tambaki, ek rzepka, Carmen Racovitza, Ted Warnell, John Moore Williams, Angela Genusa, Javier Kronauer, Marco Giovenale, Raymond Farr, Anna Christina, Mauricette Beaussart, Drew Kunz, Nico Vassilakis, Linh Dinh, Robert Chrysler, Catherine M. Bennett, Michelle Detorie, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, Mark Lamoureux, Bruna Mori, Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, Philip Jenks, Diana Magallon, Jeff Crouch, etc.

Recently they have added my digital paintings and visual poetry to their archive. It feels really nice to be featured on a journal with all those great artists who are shaping the art and literature of 21^st century.

Find the thumbnails of my paintings and vispos that are featured on Venereal Kittens, below:

Entangled

… and Birds and Birds

Comics

Park Street Junction

Watching TV - Emotinally Red

Take a look at my works on Venereal Kittens at following locations:
http://venerealkittens.blogspot.com/2008/10/samit-roy.html
http://venerealkittens.blogspot.com/2008/02/samit-roy-continued.html

This work of mine, titled as ‘jeebanjuddha‘ or ‘Struggle of Life’ has been published on Otoliths, issue 11.

Click here to view this image on Otoliths

Otoliths is a contemporary art and literature journal (or A Magazine of Many E-things, as they say), published quarterly from Rockhampton, Australia and edited by Mark Young. Mark has been writing and publishing poetry for nearly 50 years. He started Otoliths with an intention to come up with a magazine for the art and literary work that ‘can be loosely described as e-things’. Many well-known contemporary poets and artists have been featured on Otoliths. It surely feels good to be there with them.

Few months back while flipping through the pages on Flickr, I bumped upon a series of nice line drawings, said to be drawn by The Scribbler. I explored more and found this small but lots-of-fun-to-do tool, The Scribbler - an on-line application that allows user to draw freehand simple line drawings, and create a complex and interesting line drawing, automatically, from that.

The Scribbler, created by ZeFrank, takes simple vector based input and creates its own drawing on top of it based on a number of simple rules. When a new scribble line is created it chooses a few numbers at random that eventually determine what sort of line it will draw. As it begins to draw it fine tunes those values to the type of drawing that you’ve made. Because there is randomness built into the program, each scribble is unique.

In the on-line version, user can adjust some of the values that Scribbler would normally choose at random, such as line thickness, line color, and the maximum length of a scribble line.

Once drawing is reached at the desired stage, the user needs to ‘Pause’ Scribbler and take a screen shot. Well, it seems, that this is the only way to save your Scribbler art. Take a look at Scribbler gallery to check Scribbler art created by people at the Scribbler gallery. Some images are really impressive.

I could not resist myself to try my hands on fun toy and found that this small tool can create amazing results, if one can collaborate with the application. If you follow the logic that the application is using to create the complex lines and eventually form a complex texture from those lines, it will be easy for you to draw the right curves, that might create a nice output, once Scribbled.

Following are a series called Scribbler Earth, that I have created using images generated through The Scribbler. I was trying to doodle on the application, and thinking about earth. These are what came out, after I manipulated those scribble screen shots and added some color on them. Of course, being a first-timer my scribble skills are not so well, but I think I will improve and come up with more Scribbler arts.

Scribbler Earth 01

[Click on the image to view in larger size]

Scribbler Earth 02

[Click on the image to view in larger size]

Scribbler Earth 03

[Click on the image to view in larger size]

Scribbler Earth 04

[Click on the image to view in larger size]

Scribbler Earth 05

[Click on the image to view in larger size]

Flickr is one of the most popular on-line platform to showcase and share your images with millions of users from various corners of the world. Though, primarily Flickr is meant for sharing Photographs (and now video, too), however many artists, painters, calligraphists, print makers, and designers share their artworks, illustrations, paintings and other non-photographic images on Flickr. If you visit specific groups dedicated to non-photographic visual art, like paintings, graphics, digital art, illustrations, you will find thousands of artists showcasing their artworks and providing an amazing spectrum of visual culture, across the globe.

Here is a list of 20 Flickr groups dedicated mainly to non-photographic art, which I find very interesting:

1. Art and Artist »
2. Art is Art »
3. Art Directory »
4. Art District »
5. Art - Drawing and Painting »
6. Art Now »
7. Art Vision »
8. Artists Without Borders »
9. contemporary fine A R T S + Culture »
10. Digital Art »
11. Global Urban Art »
12. Graphic Design »
13. Illustration »
14. Illstration Now »
15. Obsessive Drawing »
16. Painting »
17. Paintings from you… THE ARTIST »
18. Sketches »
19. Urban Artist Collective »
20. Your Art - Not Photography »

While working online, sometimes it really helps to have a handy web tool that allows the users to try and match different shades, design color palettes, pick up the hexadecimal or RGB or CMYK values of the chosen colors and so on. Following are few online color matching tools and sites dedicated to color matching and color palette design, which I find very helpful. The sites and tools listed below, are arranged alphabetically and does not express any qualitative differences between them.

Adobe Kuler
http://kuler.adobe.com/

Adobe Kuler is an amazing color palette generating tool from Adobe that allows the users to explore various color schemes created by hundreds of other users, create their own palettes and share the same with others. One can upload any image or photograph from hard disk and create color palette based on that uploaded image. Adobe Kuler also allows the users to get images from Flickr and create color scheme from them. Flickr members can also login to their Flickr account and their own images to create color palette with Adobe Kuler. The online version of the application is built with Flash, so before trying this tool one should  make sure to have Flash player installed in the system and the browser supports Flash. Once registered, members can save their color schemes and download then as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign and Adobe Illustrator file.

Apart from the online version, Adobe Kuler has a desktop version, as well. The desktop version can be downloaded from this location and it requires Adobe AIR. The site also has a very good Links section, where various useful articles on color theory can accessed.

ColorBlender.Com
http://www.colorblender.com

ColorBlender offers a free online tool for color matching and palette design. It allows to create and edit a 6-color matching palette (which is referred on the site as a “Blend”) in two editing modes – Automatch and Direct Edit. In Automatch mode, once the first color is selected, the ColorBlender will calculate the value of all 5 other colors and display them on the palette itself. Again, each of these 6 colors of the palette could be edited individually, in Direct Editing mode.

Once the color palette has been created and/or edited, ColorBlender allows its users to download the color palette, as Photoshop Color Table (.ACT) or Illustrator Colors (.EPS). It also allows the user to send the palette or “Blend” by mail. The “Blends” could be saved also saved online, and could be accessed whenever the user returns on the site from the same workstation (provided the user’s browser accept cookies).

ColorBlender has recently won the WEB 2.0 Award for 2008, from SEOMOZ.ORG!

ColorHunter.Com
http://www.colorhunter.com

ColorHunter is an online tool that allows the user to upload an image and create color palettes from the uploaded image. It can also generate color palette from any image available online, once the URL of that image is provided. For each image, ColorHunter can generate two palettes – vibrant and dull and the user can toggle between these two palettes to view them. One can also view the color palettes generated by other users and if the user is registered with the site, it will enable them to share his/her color palettes with others, as well.

Colour Lovers
http://www.colourlovers.com/

COLOURlovers is color and design community for creative inspiration It store thousands of color palettes generated by the members. Designers and color strategists can register on the site to explore various color swatches and color palettes and also share their color creations, color palettes, color swatches, and patterns with other members and non-members.

According to the site, COLOURlovers is a resource that monitors and influences color trends. This community is regularly updated with information and examples of the way colors are used in the real world.

Color Palette Generator
http://www.degraeve.com/color-palette/

DeGraeve.com’s Color Palette Generator is another online tool that allows the users to enter the URL of an image and get a color palette that matches that image. Unlike ColorHunter, this color palette generator tool does not allow the users to upload an image to get a matching color palette. This tool is very helpful for coming up with a color scheme of a web site that matches any key image chosen for the site.

Color Picker
http://www.degraeve.com/reference/color.php

Color Picker is an online color matching tool from DeGraeve.com. Once the hex code of a particular color is provided, the Color Picker generates 4 different 5-color palettes, based on the main color (the hex color that has been provided in the beginning). Clicking on any color swatches will replace the main color with the color clicked and generate another set of 4 different 5-color palettes, based on the new main color. The only problem with this tool is that it understands only hex code and does not accept or provide RGB or CMYK information.

Color Schemes Generator
http://www.wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/index-en.html

Color Schemes Generator is a full-fledged color matching and color scheme generating tool from wellstyled.com. This is one of the most advanced color matching tool that are available online and free of cost. It has a color wheel that allows the user to choose a color as the base color. Once the base color is chosen, user can choose the type of color palette from Mono, Contrast, Triad, Tetrad and Analogic and define the relationships between the colors in the palette. This tool also allows the user to fine tune each palette type, by changing the angle between the colors on the wheel, adding complementary color, reduce the palette to web-safe color. User can also generate variants of the scheme, like Pastel, Dark Pastel, Light Pastel, Contrast or Pale.

The most amazing feature of this tool is the color blindness check option. Once the color palette is generated, this tool allows the user to check how the palette will look, if viewed by people suffering from various types of color blindness, like Protanopy, Deuteranopy, Tritanopy, Protanomaly, Deuteranomaly, Tritanomaly, Full Colorblindness and Atypical Monochormatism.

My Visual Art Blogalleria is one of my favorite personal Blog projects that I have initiated in the beginning of 2006, the time when I started thinking about various possibilities of a Blog and looking for different ways to use blogging as an effective tool to build a credible web presence. I coined the word ‘Blogalleria’ joining ‘Blog’ and ‘Galleria’ together, to establish this blog’s identity as ‘an on-line art gallery created using a blog’ and also, ‘a blog in form of an art gallery’. For last two years, I have been posting my personal as well as non-commercial graphics, photographs, photographics, illustrations, paintings and sketches on this Visual Art Blogalleria and it has become a public archive of my personal as well as other non-commercial artworks.

Recently, I have overhauled this Blogalleria, changed its look and feel and the sidebar content, added lots of new exhibits and items and tried to establish better interactions with my other web-based public initiatives. I am quite excited about it to see how this change affects the visitors of the site.

There was another parallel thought process brewing in my mind, when I was revamping this Blogalleria. Being a designer, I usually believe in eternal design truths, like “a dark text on light background is easier to read”. But, since I stumbled upon two interesting posts on green computing and black google by Mark Ontkush on ecoiron.blogspot.com, almost a year back, I have started thinking about Mark’s argument and since then, I have been following his blog and hist posts regularly. His argument is based on the fact that, “a given monitor (CRT) requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen” and derives a conclusion that says, websites with black background save a minuscule amount of energy, each time opened in a CRT Monitor.

Inspired by Mark’s idea, this time I have decided to change the background color to Black and to use Black as much as possible instead of any other lighter color on flat areas of the site. This effectively means that whenever someone will open any page of this Blogalleria in a CRT monitor, he/she will save a little amount of energy. A small step towards saving energy, saving earth.

I have been fascinated by Internet or worldwide web since I was introduced to it, initially as an user and later as a designer, during mid 90s. I remember those days when there were ‘Web Pages’ and how the idea of ‘Web Site’ as “a group of interrelated ‘Web Pages’ seamlessly integrated together to form an information pool” evolved. I noticed how simple formats and default fonts in normal black and underlined blue of the text-heavy sites started getting eager for cosmetic make-overs, often ending up over-doing it, when Graphics were introduced on web pages. How usability experts have started defining the minimalist parameters and how ‘Rich Media’, equipped with high-speed broadband, has overwhelmed the cyberspace with gigs of data. I was always fascinated by the changes of the behavioral patterns of people as they move on from early one-to-one telnet chats to the applet-based public chat-rooms to Webex conferences to voice chats to cam chats. The changes of user psychology that create an complex yet logical mesh of on-line habits as the users evolve themselves from early mailing lists and threads users to someone with multiple profiles in more than one web business and social 2.0 communities and networking sites.

Below are few websites that I like, among all other web presences designed be me in recent past.

Website Design for Altered Black

Altered Black
Being a design shop providing creative design and related services primarily to the corporate clients, I wanted a sober and conservative design scheme, that will eventually make the corporate visitors feel comfortable and confident while visiting this site. At the same time, I also wanted the web site to represent creative ability of the organization and provide sensual pleasure to its visitors. I tried to achieve these goals by using pastel shades, lots of white and empty spaces, a so called ‘Arty’ look, a simple but comprehensive navigation and IA, and a flexible layout that can accommodate enough information about the organization. The site is also well optimized for search engines, has a page rank of 5 and secured its position in Google top ten for targeted keywords.
Visit Altered Black’s website here »

Website Design for South Asia Center, UPENN

Website Design for South Asia Studies, UPENN

South Asia Center & South Asia Studies, University of Pennsylvania
University of Pennsylvania needed a strong visual presence for the websites of their South Asia Center and Department of South Asian Studies to reflect the exclusive nature of these two departments. The main challenge was to create multiple distinctly different visual identities on one single theme and combining multi-cultural characteristics of South Asia on the layouts without emphasizing on a specific one. In these designs I tried to merge various socio-cultural values of different parts of South Asia and meet the visual expectations of people from various demographic zones, by creating ethnic yet cross-cultural design scheme for each site.
Visit South Asia Center’s website here »
Visit South Asia Studies’ website here »

Website Design for Boipara Dot Com

Boipara Dot Com
Boipara is a vernacular literature archive that features alternative Bengali literature, e-books and magazines. I have created an informal design for the site to express the unconventional nature of this particular initiative. The main challenge was to create a template-based design scheme that can be handled by non-designers, later.
Visit Boipara Dot Com here »

Website Design for Films for Freedom

Films for Freedom
This is an on line platform for Indian documentary film-makers, where they can share their views, showcase their movies and organize screenings. A huge group of documentary film-makers led by eminent directors, has started this initiative as a protest against the role of censor board at MIFF 2002. I decided to take up the theme of ‘protest’ for this site and used a photograph of a demonstration by the group as an integrated part of user interface. I have used Courier font for the content, which is not very common in websites, to simulate the feel of manually-typed legal documents or petitions.
Visit Films for Freedom website here »

If you are a visual artist and looking for an on-line WEB 2.0 community, where you can showcase your artworks and photographs, share them with fellow artists, build your own network, create an online portfolio and publish it, then Dripbook is the perfect place for you. In a nutshell, Dripbook is a full-fledged WEB 2.0 community for visual artists, painters, illustrators, photographers, graphic designers, animators, fashion designers, printmakers, sculptors and architects. One needs to register with Dripbook to avail the services offered by the site. Currently Dripbook is invitation-only for new accounts and does not offer direct registration. To create a new Dripbook account, you need to send a request to them with a little brief about you. Once they receive your request, they will review it and if satisfied, they will send you an access code to your email address. This access code is needed to create a new account on Dripbook. The standard membership is free, but one can upgrade a free account to a premium account with a nominal charge of USD 12 monthly, $ 30 quarterly or $ 108 annually. The premium membership will allow the user to publish customized website, upload more images and create more books.

Once registered (Standard or Premium), one can start uploading the images, publish books (portfolios), create his/her profile and portfolio page. Dripbook allows all its users to have customized URL for their portfolios. The URL is simple to remember and looks like this: http://www.dripbook.com/[username]/

I have created my art portfolio on Dripbook and got my personal URL too. Please visit my art portfolio on Dripbook at following location:
http://www.dripbook.com/visualsamit/

If you are a visual artist and want to create a Dripbook profile and portfolio, then please visit following URL to request a membership:
https://secure.dripbook.com/restricted/