Installation of the Exhibition

Follow up to the Process post from a couple of days ago.

I've been in Kendal today, at the Foyer Cafe run by YWCA Kendal, installing my exhibition (twice! "Washable" glue-spots didn't do the job, so I had to re-stick everything with "extra strong" after they started falling like little autumn leaves. The blobs are transparent, but just about visible from outside - special prize to the person who tells me which panel has the most blobs on it!)

Big thanks to Heather Lindsay, Resource Centre Manager at YWCA, for being available to let me in and help out. Also to Sandra from the festival Comic Art Trail, for dropping by and giving some good advice.

Phase 1 of the exhibition is now done. Phase 2 is in progress, and will be installed first thing Saturday morning before I go to improvise at Brewery Arts.

Bookmarks featuring work from the exhibition are on sale from the cafe, and the art/narratives will be collected into a book in time for the Festival weekend (and hopefully a bit sooner). All profits from these go to the YWCA Kendal.

Lot of glue spots harmed and swore at in the making of this exhibition!

I remember the day I came up with the idea of making a square with a lone panel in the centre - it's Deeply Significant, folks

Process: Exhibition

Last couple of days I hit that scary / exciting stage in the project where everything came off the computer, and got printed out. Finally giving me some notion of how the installation is going to be. Each square is 20cm roughly, there are 170 of them, laminated and mounted double-sided to be readable from inside or outside. 

I'm up in Kendal tomorrow setting it up. Will post some more photos when it's up.

Electricomics sans iPad - a (fairly non-techie) How-To

If you're following news about Electricomics, and want to see what the fuss is all about, but you don't have an iPad, you can still read the comics, with a little extra work, in a web browser. Thankfully, most of the work's one-off, so once you're set up, it'll be easier for subsequent reads.

Reading them in this way is not in any sense going against the project, by the way. The project is an open, extensible platform for reading comics. The official iPad app is the only supported reader at present, but the system's designed from the ground up to support other readers.

NB: This won't let you read the official electricomics by Moore, Doran, Ennis et al., those are ipad-only for now. You can use it to read Electricomics you've made yourself, or third-party ones, including mine

Theory

Electricomics are built using HTML and Javascript, and run in a web browser. The iPad app displays the comics inside an "embedded" web browser.

The URL you enter into the ipad App will download a ".elcx" file, which is a zip file containing HTML, javascript and images in a web-friendly format. To read them in a browser, you simply unzip the file manually, and look at it through a web browser.

Practice

Here's an example tweet, pointing to a really good Electricomic by Lars Schwed Nygård and Torgeir Trapnes:

Oh hello! To read The Birds of Twilight Park by @Torgeirtrap & me on @Electricomics, enter this URL into the app: http://t.co/Wt4Eji9QcA

— Lars Schwed Nygård (@larsschwed) September 25, 2015

Click the link in your web browser/twitter app, and it'll download a .elcx file to your computer.

Change the suffix of the file to ".zip", and your system (Windows, Mac, Linux) ought to recognise the file as a zip file, and open it up for you. Once opened, you'll have the following sort of folder structure:

The highlighted file, index.html, is the one you want to view in your web browser.

Double-clicking the file will sometimes work, but sometimes the javascript will only work if the pages are served up by a web server, rather than directly from the filesystem. Fortunately, there are plenty of small easy-to-setup web servers that you can use. Here are a couple of suggestions to get you started.

Windows and Mac (GUI) - Fenix Web Server 

Fenix is a user friendly web server with a graphical user interface. After installing it, run the app, and set up a new web server with whatever name you like, and pick a "port number" - I've gone for the whimsical '54321' (if you don't know port numbers, stick with that, it's probably OK on all systems). The server needs a folder too - point it at the folder you unzipped your Electricomic into. Start the server you've created,  and then open a web browser, at http://localhost:54321 (you can bookmark/favourite this to avoid typing it in every time). Here's Fenix and the web browser running side by side.

If there is no "index.html" file in the folder, Fenix will show a file listing (see above), so you can click down to the electricomic, at which point, you ought to see the "Tap to Start" message. (You're on a proper computer, so "tap" means "click"). Happy reading!

When you're done reading, stop the Fenix server, or close the Fenix app.

Mac or Linux (Command Line)

You probably have python installed on your computer. Open a command prompt/terminal, cd to the Electricomic folder, and type the following:

$ python -m SimpleHTTPServer 54321

(thanks to https://gist.github.com/willurd/5720255, which has several recipes of this type). Now open the web browser, go to http://localhost:54321 as above, and you're ready to read.

When you're done, close the terminal window, or hit Ctrl-C to stop the server.

King Canute

Old wooden fast-food fork, string, wire, felt, pair of old cufflinks, photo and digitally scribbled hands

King Canute is often depicted as a vainglorious ruler, trying to command the sea. It is more likely that he was deliberately demonstrating the limits of his power to those who were speaking too highly of him. Humility can cause us to do strange things.

Opening Up the Electricomics Event Model

WARNING This is a technical discussion about the javascript code that powers Electricomics. If you usually come here to read my comics and look at my artwork (and thank you, I'm flattered that you do!), you might want to skip this one. See you on Tuesdays, my regular art-drop day.

So, a week ago, I put together my first Electricomic. This was generated using the Generator GUI program, no real code input on my part, but my intention was to use it as a playground for doing things with the code that the generator can't do. (I'm currently building a physical non-linear comic on a not-quite-infinite canvas, so my head's full of thoughts about doing comics that don't read right-to-left in a straight line/single path. I'll get over it soon, promise!)

Tonight I started mucking about with the code, in situ in the generated comic, and spent a happy hour or two refactoring, swearing and then feeling good because it behaved exactly as it did before I messed with it. Here's the commit, not much to look at yet.

The comic.js file is a client-side piece of javascript that orchestrates the core library code (in electricomics.js), configuring an instance of the comic, and adding the interactivity. (The actual page structure is encoded in index.html, in the <ec-panel> tags.)

Some of the demo comics ("Sway" by Leah Moore, John Reppion and Nicola Scott, and "Second Sight" by Peter Hogan and Paul Davidson) have interestingly weird non-linear plots, which the Generator won't generate (yet). All the generator will create at present, is a hard-coded interaction - single tap on the right-hand 2/3 of the screen to go forward, and on the left hand area to go back a page.


What I've done tonight is to un-hard-code this, moving that set of rules out into a separate object that gets passed into the comic when it's created.

And of course, that means something else could get passed in instead. Which could hold a non-linear navigation model. Which could use swipes, tilts, voice, etc. (I want to make a comic that you navigate by blowing on it - the mic could pick this up!) Which could really unlock the possibilities of this thing. And a library of standard navigation tropes that could be reused across projects would be great for the nascent community, rather than everyone either creating linear tap-to-progress stuff, or else hardcoding their own solutions.
Maybe eventually, we'll even figure out a plugin system for providing GUIs for these things, but that's a job for another day...
Have a look at the comments in the code. I've not got very far, and I think I've divided up the responsibilities in the wrong place. I'm going to carry on down this route, as time permits, and happy to talk about this with any other techies out there.

PS: I still haven't packaged this up. If you want to read the thing, then download fromGit and open index.html in your web browser. That's what Im doing.

Help! Handmines!

Nice to see Doctor Who back - and I did enjoy the "Abbey Road" Beatles album cover reference here. I don't suppose Clara Oswald is dead (or Missy, or UNIT's Osgood, who is back in this series, probably next episode) - there's the Dalek Asylum's Oswin Osgood, references to the "prettier sister" etc. etc. to tie together first. (Hmm, hadn't spotted it before - Clara became a Dalek at one point, and Danny ended up - so far - as a Cyberman. Given the un-tied-up bit about his Astronaut descendant from last series, I bet fifty shiny pennies he'll turn up somewhere too.)

I'm probably wrong about all of the above. Ah, logic...

Anyway, in the spirit of Beatles homages, here's another of their icon album covers mashed up with a bit of Whovian goodness. Enjoy!

Disclaimer: This is fan fiction digital art, based on stills from the BBC TV series "Doctor Who", and the album "Help" by the Beatles, Parlophone Records. Copyright the respective copyright holders, I'm just expressing my enjoyment of these English cultural icons by posting this here.

Pushing the Button