Natural Visually Perfect Algebraic Method

The Casio fx-82MS-2 is the calculator I've been using for the last number of years. This is the cheapest and most basic scientific calculator Casio offered at the time I purchased mine. Like the Texas Instruments TI-30X IIB model that I used in high school, it has a two-line display and a familiar button lay-out that has been common to nearly all scientific calculators for over fifty years. This style of two-line display calculators has been the norm for entry-model scientific calculators for over two decades, so I was a little shocked when I encountered the Casio fx-82CW in a general store.  

The Casio fx-82CW was introduced in 2023 as the successor to the Casio fx-82MS and fx-82EX models. 

Casio fx-82MS (left) and Casio fx-82CW (right)

What immediately caught my eye was that the new Casio fx-82CW has what Casio calls a 'natural' display and input method. Such a display and input method mimic the appearance of mathematical equations as one would write them by hand or see them printed in a book.
This change is extremely significant, as the correct formatting of mathematical formulas, even without the need to carry out the calculations, has traditionally been problematic on far more capable desktop computers. Such display has technically been possible since the 1980's through LaTeX and similar markup languages, but those languages are not easy to learn and use. Microsoft Office introduced a mathematical formatting option only as recently as 2007 and to this day Adobe InDesign still requires third-party solutions to include mathematical equations in documents. Having had first-hand experience with the problems one encounters when attempting to correctly display complex mathematical equations on a screen, to see this functionality on the most basic and cheapest of scientific calculators was a real eye-opener.
For those who are perhaps less familiar with the hardships of using a two-line calculator, in the above image the equation input is the same for both calculators, with the same values for the variables. On the right, in the fx-82CW, the entire equation is visible and the result is displayed as a fraction, in the style that one would write it on a piece of paper. Its presentation is clear and uncomplicated, assuming one is familiar with such equations.
On the left is the same input and result shown on an fx-82MS. The input there is (-B+√(B²–4AC))÷2A, which doesn't fit in its entirety on the single input line. This is problematic because you have to provide the calculator with the correct order of operations through the use of nested brackets. This in and of itself is not a problem, but combined with the limited character space on the single input line, you always end up in the situation where your opening and closing brackets aren't on the screen at the same time. When coupled with the mental effort required to 'translate' the formula as seen in a book or your own writing, this creates a situation where input errors are very likely, while checking for such errors is tedious and unwieldy.
To have a calculator with a more 'natural' display is thus a great quality of life improvement over how calculators have been developed and used during the last 60-odd years.
Of course, there have been calculators in the past that possessed such natural display capabilities and this is thus not a new invention. The first Casio calculator that could display algebraic formulas was the CFX-9970G in 1998, but this was a top-of-the-line graphical calculator with a matching price tag. Even today it's offered on eBay for about $100. More recently, the aforementioned Casio fx-82EX model already had the same display technology that the new fx-82CW uses. This model was released in 2015, and while it was very similar in mathematical functionality to the two-line fx-82MS-2 that was simultaneously on the market, it was about twice as expensive at roughly 25 euros. So, while it's a great thing to see this kind of display technology in Casio's cheapest offering, similar functionality has been available from them and their competitors for a number of years.

Which brings us to the other aspect of the fx-82CW that struck me, which is the renewed button layout. As mentioned earlier, the button layout on scientific calculators hasn't changed significantly since they were first introduced over fifty years ago. Both the fx-82MS and fx-82EX models still largely adhere to this traditional layout.

Button layout of fx-82MS (left), fx-82EX (middle) and fx-82CW (right)

The greater possibilities introduced by the new screen has provided the opportunity for a design where the information concerning inputs isn't restricted to the limited space available on and around the buttons themselves. I believe that the designers at Casio recognised this opportunity and designed their new calculator with a two-fold aim. The first is to provide a large degree of consistency between the calculators input and its core functionality, and the second is a greater degree of accessibility for novel users who are used to working with simpler calculators, who are writing equations by hand and who are introduced to new ideas through natural language by teachers or textbooks.

I think the designers did an excellent job at really looking at all the technical functionality these scientific calculators have amassed in the last decades and finding a logically consistent grouping of the major functionalities, even if this meant doing away with some of the ingrained staples of calculator design. Of course, a written text like this one is no substitute for the experience of actually using a device like this, but I nevertheless wish to highlight some of the choices they made and hopefully show how these differ from any other calculator I know.
The first thing that's noteworthy is that there is no equals sign to be found. Instead there is a [EXE] button which is positioned where the [=] button usually goes. 'EXE' is short for execute and simply executes the command you've input. This is perhaps a subtle change, but it's nevertheless important if one wishes to have a more consistent input. To press the [EXE] button after entering an equation makes perfect sense, and so does pressing [EXE] after defining a variable as 'A=1'. This is not the first calculator to move away from the equals sign, but the choice of execute has been particularly suitable for the purpose. Texas Instruments have chosen for [ENTER] on their TI-30XB models, but this has a strong connotation with the keyboards of desktop computers and doesn't imply that any activity will occur after the input.

Right above the [EXE] button is the minus sign, in the place where it is commonly found on a calculator. This minus sign performs subtraction, but interestingly the secondary function of this minus sign is the input for negative numbers. The operators for negative numbers and subtraction have always had two separate buttons on any calculator I've used, which are respectively labelled as [(-)] and [–]. But as both use the same signifier, the minus sign, to express their function in handwriting, it makes sense to have them in the same place. 

Another button that is found in its usual place for Casio calculators is the button for input in scientific notation: [×10^■]. In the manual of the fx-82CW it's written that 'Pressing the [×10^■] key is the same as pressing [×], [1], [0], [◼︎^□]'. This is how I always mentally approached this button, but this wasn't how it functioned on the fx-82MS and many other calculators. On the fx-82MS pressing the [×10^x] inputs '×10' as a single character and the exponent will be whatever number follows this character until a different operator is entered. This system thus gives the following results:
[1], [×10^x], [3] = 1000
[1], [×10^x], [1], [+], [2] = 12
[1], [×10^x], [√], [9] = Syntax error
Even though mathematically all these equations should be equal to the number 1000, the results vary wildly on the fx-82MS. On the fx-82CW however, the input of the button is simply treated as a shortcut for writing the relevant expression and each of these inputs thus give 1000 as the answer. This is again a great step towards further consistency between the user's input and what is shown on the screen.

Buttons used for formatting on the fx-82MS (left), fx-82EX (middle) and fx-82CW (right)

Another new addition I haven't encountered on any other calculator is the [FORMAT] button. The fx-82CW supports a number of different notational formats for displaying the result of a calculation, namely Standard, Decimal, Prime Factorization, Improper Fractions, Mixed Fractions, Engineering Notation and Sexagesimal. Once you performed a calculation, simply press the [FORMAT] button and you can choose any of these options from a menu.
This functionality isn't new, engineering notation was introduced on calculators in the 1970's, but any other calculator I've used had separate buttons for these options and most of the time these buttons aren't physically grouped together because they are also used for other kinds of input. This is confusing to anybody who didn't memorise the manual and it probably meant entire generations of students used a calculator for years without ever finding out what the 'FACT' function was on the [º ' "] button.
A criticism that has been levied against the removal of the [ENG] and similar buttons is that it's less efficient to display a result in engineering notation. After all, you now must go through a menu to do what before simply required a single button press. I do agree with this criticism for heavy users of a single kind of notation that can't be pre-set, and so I am curious to see how Casio will approach this problem in its more advanced or specialised calculators in the future. As it stands, the choice for this approach in this base level calculator is more than justified in my opinion. Core functionality is no longer hidden behind separate buttons with acronyms or other functions, but organised under a single button with a clear label and position. To any new or light user of a scientific calculator the [FORMAT] button will provide access to functionality they previously might have never known even existed.

Buttons used for variables on the fx-82MS (left), fx-82EX (middle) and fx-82CW (right)

An important feature of this kind of non-graphical scientific calculators is the ability to store and recall variables. Equally important is the inclusion of two mathematical constants, namely π, or pi, and e, or Euler's number. While any basic scientific calculator I've ever used provided this functionality, how these variables were entered has been anything but consistent, or intuitive. On the fx-82MS for example, e is the tertiary function of the [ln] button. This makes some conceptual sense, as e is the base of the natural logarithm, but then on the fx-82EX e is the tertiary function of [×10^x], where π is also found as the secondary function on both the fx-82MS and the EX.
On the fx-82CW, π and e are the secondary functions of the numbers 7 and 8, respectively. There they are positioned next to each other and together with other numerical input because that is how they are approached in the context of a calculator, as numerical input.
It thus makes sense that the programmable variables 'A' to 'F' are also found there, as well as the variables x, y and z. z replaces the 'M', or memory, function of previous models. This memory button was an early addition to scientific calculators to temporarily store numbers before more variables became available. To replace 'M' with z thus once again achieves greater consistency for users who aren't already familiar with the history of calculator design.
All input that is equivalent to a number is now done through the lower left segment of the keypad on the fx-82CW and this is a laudable approach.

Setting these variables has also changed to be more approachable in the fx-82CW and this is once again done by consolidating this function to a single button labelled [VARIABLE]. Compare this with the fx-82MS where [1], [SHIFT]+[RCL], [(-)], [=] are the required commands to store the number 1 as variable 'A'. This somewhat cryptic sequence makes a bit more sense when you're physically using the calculator, but it's nowhere near as instinctive as [VARIABLE], 'A', 'Edit', [1], [EXE].
Pressing the variable button on the fx-82CW also provides the user with an overview of the values of the available variables, something that is understandably absent from the two-line fx-82MS. While the fx-82EX provides the same overview as the fx-82CW, it nevertheless relies on a similar method as the fx-82MS for its input.

Buttons used for arithmetic on the fx-82MS (left), fx-82EX (middle) and fx-82CW (right)

The most important function of a simple scientific calculator will undoubtably be arithmetic and the inclusion of exponentiation, roots and logarithms is essentially what differentiates a scientific calculator from a basic calculator. The styling conventions for these functions have been established long ago, with [x²] for the square of a number, and [x³] for its cube, and then [^] is used for adding any other number as the exponent. Needless to say, these stylistic conventions adhered largely to how the operators were displayed on the screen of the calculator, but still could appear somewhat inconsistent to the user. With the first implementation of their Natural-V.P.A.M. display method, on the fx-82ES from 2004, Casio simultaneously added some changes to the button styling for some of these arithmetic functions. What was previously represented by a letter like x or a, now became a little black square, presumably to indicate where the operator would be placed on the new and more complex screen. This purely visual system does away with letters in favour of shapes to convey vital information about its function. From 2004 until 2023 Casio didn't use this symbolic language consistently, however. On the fx-82EX most symbols were replaced with open or closed squares, yet for all exponent operators an x variable was still used. It seems like old habits were hard to shake. For the fx-82CW Casio once again went with consistency and used only squares where one is expected to find a number in the symbols for the operators. They also removed the unnecessary [x³] button and removed all instances of Euler's number in the operators, instead opting to make the natural logarithm a secondary function of the general logarithm, while e can be found in the numerical section as previously mentioned.
This made this group of five buttons sleek, visually simple, easy to understand and consistent. 

Finally, I must note the inclusion of one last button that I've never encountered before, and this is the [CATALOG] button. Once more this button does exactly what it says, as it opens a menu where all the calculator's functions are grouped in a handful of categories. This includes some probability functions that no longer have a separate button on the keypad. I doubt many people will use this menu to regularly input common functions, but as an overview of the calculator's capabilities this level of redundancy is a nice addition.

Overall, I'm impressed by the fx-82CW for its willingness to challenge and change several conventions that have been in place for decades. These conventions by and large grew out of specific needs for specific users in combination with the limitations of the available technology. Now that the technology has gotten sufficiently affordable to provide these complex and more advanced functions on the most basic of models, Casio has dared to see the impact this could have on users and rethink its core interface. In doing so it has created a great improvement for a first introduction to the more complex calculators found in high school education, as well as a wonderfully clear and workable calculator for unsophisticated daily use.

12800-25600 DPI

In the previous post it is mentioned that the paintings are given their distinctive appearance due to the sharp outlines of the shapes, which are about 20 to 70 micrometers in width. What I didn't describe there is what kind of consequences this has for the reproduction of these works.

Although we don't often think of them that way, digital printing and display technology always work with discrete dots. These dots are droplets of ink in printing and pixels in electronic displays. The maximum attainable resolution depends on the amount of these dots one can fit next to each other. This is usually measured in dots per inch (DPI) for printing and pixels per inch (PPI) in electronic displays. For example, Apple's top of the line 6k Pro Display XDR has a PPI of 218. This means it can fit 218 pixels on a one inch line. The minimum width it can display with a single pixel is thus 117 micrometers.
117 micrometers is already almost double of the thickest part of the outlines in the paintings. And that would just be a single, straight line. To capture at least some of the nuance in the subtle changes in shape and colour, you would require the width of a painted line to span at least 10 pixels or so. This in turn would require the space between pixels to be 1-2 micrometers, which translates to 12800-25600 DPI.

With the current technology this is simply unatainable. For comparision, this would mean that a 1920x1280 full HD screen would measure about 2 by 3 millimeters.
Current inkjet printers top out at about 1280 DPI, or 1/10th of the minimum required resolution. Laserprinters fare somewhat better at about 2400 DPI, but this is still only a fifth of what one would need to display the shape of the line acurately in a single colour of ink.
As physical limitations, as well as practical limitations of potential uses, aren't going to change drastically in the near future, it will very likely always remain impossible to accurately reproduce these paintings in print.
There is some hope for electronic displays, however. While general-purpose displays tend to reach only about 200 PPI, Sony is currently producing high resolution OLED micro displays. They are used in electronic viewfinders, VR headsets and other applications where viewers' eyes are only a few centimeters removed from the screen. Sony's highest resolution offering presently reaches 4031 PPI, or about 6,3 micrometers per pixel. While still not able to display much nuance, at least they would be able to accurately display the general width of the outline.
Presently it's thus unfortunately physically impossible to reproduce these works at their actual scale.

As the argument for this has been somewhat mathematical, I'll also try to make a more visual demonstration of this impossibility. The following illustration shows a 200 PPI 4 by 3 pixel grid, with the  the red, green en blue subpixels clearly visible. Overlaid on this image is the outline of a small painting at approximately the same scale.

In order to get a sense of how much detail is present in these paintings, the following image is an all-red pixel grid that also measures 4 by 3 pixels, which may render only as an empty thumbnail if you're reading this on a phone:

 

1337

During the summer of 2023 the Frans Masereel Centrum, a centre for printmaking, hosted an exhibition by Simon Denny called Metaverse Landscapes, primarily to present some lithographs he made at the centre. Denny is an artist who according to his gallery Petzel 'makes exhibitions and projects that unpack the stories technologists tell us'.
The text for this exhibition was written by Adina Glickstein, who according to her website previously done 'editorial and research at studio simon denny' and is a 'writer and editor working between art, tech, and time-based media', with a 'particular interest' in 'critical approaches to emerging technology'. 

She starts her text stating that 'Lithography drives the metaverse. This is not merely a poetic thought: the microchips in GPU's [...] are made using lithographic printing procedures.'
Except they aren't.
Sure, the process of making microchip wafers is called photolithography, but the factual process has little in common with the kind of lithography used in printing. Lithography, the printing process with inks and paper, is most simply explained as creating a hydrophilic layer on an otherwise hydrophobic surface, which is then transfered to another substrate for the final product.
Photolithography, on the other hand, is more akin to a combination of stencilling and etching. There, a so-called wafer is first covered in a photosensitive material. This material is subsequently either hardened or removed by light that's passed through a mask. This exposes parts of the wafer, which is then etched before the photosenstive material is washed away and you're left with an etched surface, a semiconductor.

The only thing the two techniques have in common is the name, which is probably related to the fact that photolithography is ultimately done on wafers made of silicon, of 'stone'. That this misunderstanding is the basis for the rest of the text, as well as the exhibition, doesn't bode well for the self-proclaimed technological interests of Adina Glickstein nor Simon Denny.

Briefly Unavailable for Maintenance

Having owned and operated a number of websites over the years, I particularly noticed the difference in maintaining my personal website, this blog and the website of my gallery.
From it's first conception, my personal website has been difficult to me. Even when choosing the url, I considered many different options before eventually settling on 'geeveedeevee.com', a drawn-out spelling of my initials. This name is a compromise, as my full name seemed too corporate and self-promotional, while anything else seemed like trying to hard to be clever. Maybe it still is. The content of the website itself has also been ever changing, with its appearance as well as the works shown on it never seeming to be in a fixed state. There are always works, categories and exhibitions disappearing and re-appearing, depending on what I want to focus on. This makes my website a highly curated presentation of specific information, rather than an archive where one can find basic information about me or my work. 

This is in sharp contrast with the website of the gallery. The primary function of the gallery's website is to provide information about the gallery's activities, both past, present, and future. Barring any major changes to its functional structure, new information is simply added in chronological order, as it occurs. Upkeep is simple, if time-consuming, and once something is added, it's almost never reconsidered. 

In that sense the blog is a kind of hybrid between these two. Texts are added chronologically and in that sense it is a simple record of thoughts at the time they were fully formed. Yet although nothing ever gets removed from this blog, things are expanded, re-read and re-worked in minor ways over time. At any given moment there are also dozens of half-written posts waiting in the wings, ready to be finished, or started. They are also occasionally grouped in categories for easy retrieval and of course these categories are constantly scrutinised. So even though I made these three websites primarily to document and present my own activities, each requires its own approach. I had often felt these differences subconsciously, although they didn’t became explicit in my thoughts until very recently.

Don't You Know That Downloading is Illegal?

While browsing the website of the Pace Gallery I found the following message:

Which was somewhat disconcerting to me. 

 

Firstly because I can't download 'Rothko Artworks'. At best I might be able to download an image of a 'Rothko Artwork'.

But this is far less important than the fact that the relevant copyright laws of the USA, the UK and the Netherlands (thus the artist, the gallery and this particular user), all include provisions wherein such copying is permitted under certain circumstances.

However, a simple assertion that things are protected by copyright law isn't anything to be offended by,  as there are also plenty of cases where such copying would be prohibited. 

 

What is a little iffy is the phrasing where Pace gallery claims that 'downloading' is prohibited, as I'm not sure how they expect their website to work if this would be case.

Anything displayed on a browser, or any other software that retrieves its information from the internet, has to be downloaded to your computer in order for it to show up on the screen.

For example, the following screenshots show the image of the Rothko paintings I'm supposedly not allowed to download in my temporary internet files folder:

 

 

And there is nothing I could have reasonably done to prevent my browser from downloading this file, other than not visiting the publicly accessible website. 

This very likely isn't what Pace gallery meant with the term 'downloading', but as it stands it's nevertheless bad news that the legal team of one of the largest galleries on the planet can't write an unambiguous legal notice.

Just What Do You Think You're Doing Here?

After being granted a Werkbijdrage Bewezen Talent by the Mondriaan Fund, my name, together with a link to my website, has been listed on the website of the fund.

From time to time I monitor the behavioural statistics of my website and I noticed a peculiar pattern was present in the behaviour of the visitors who were referred to my website through the Mondriaan Fund.

At the moment of writing I've had 42 visitors who arrived at my website by clicking a link on Mondriaan Fund's website.

Of those 42, six left immediately, having only visited the home page. Which makes me wonder why they bothered clicking the link at all.

A further five people proceeded to visit my Biography page. Four of them leave immediately after. One stuck around for a bit, but they only visited the landing pages of other categories, without seeing any images of work.

 

Most people however do come to my website to see my work and of the 42 people who visit my website, 27 of them proceeded immediately to the Work header. 

14 people clicked on the first item of the list that is presented there and ten of them leave without seeing any other work. Only three visitors to the Work header clicked any item other than the first, with only two continuing further to other pages. The last ten people who initially visited the Work section proceeded on to other sections without looking at any works and none of them saw any images before they left my website.

The remaining group of four people first visit the Exhibitions section. One of them leaves immediately after, but the other three visit multiple pages, seeing a number of works and other images available on my website.

In summation, 33 of these 42 visitors saw only one work or less on their visit to my website.

I find it difficult to recognise myself in this behaviour. It is of course impossible to spend a lot of time looking at the work of every artist on the planet. I thus don't expect every single visitor to look at every single thing. Yet at the same time, these statistics also don't adhere to what I would say is the bare minimum of effort one has to exert in order to form any kind of idea about another's work.

Whenever I make the decision to visit the website of an artist whose work I don't know, I always make sure that I get a fairly good idea of what they are working on. That means sampling at least a few works to try and distinguish their general ideas or working methods. Looking at one work, or none at all, of course doesn't allow you to do this. 

Only seeing one work of an artist says little about their concerns or abilities. Even if one only sees the first in a list and thereby assuming it to be the 'most important', it could still very well be the case that whatever they find important might not be what you find important. Making sure you see a number of things is therefore imperative for forming any kind of idea about another's work. 

There's also a marked difference with the behaviour of visitors who arrived at the website through other channels. Other visitors' behaviour is less predictable, with no clear pattern emerging for the length of their stay or their interests. While visiting the first listed item in the 'Work' section remains popular, for the rest the behaviours of the other visitors are more varied, mimicking my own personal behaviour more closely. 

I don't have an explanation for why the behaviour of the Mondriaan Fund visitors is somewhat atypical (and apathetic), but it's worthwhile to remark that it has been.

Sign of the Times

On the website of a major news outlet there is paywall, as is common these days. This paywall puts some kind of obstruction in place that prohibits a user from accessing the content they want to access until they provide some kind of payment.

In the (publicly accessible) source code of the articles on this particular website, there are a number of variables to be found that are related to this paywall.

One of these variables is "type", defined in this case as "NewsArticle". Which is unsurprising, the website presents a news article, so to call its type "NewsArticle" makes perfect sense.

The following variable is named "isAccessibleForFree", which is set to false. This is the flag that makes the paywall appear, making the article unreadable to any non-paying user.

That's the theory at least.

The next variable is however named "articleBody" and its content is simply defined as the full article in plain text, contained on a single line for easy copying.

 

Progress!

In 2005 Panasonic released the final version of the AG-DVX100, their last professional mini-DV standard definition camcorder.
For reference, YouTube was started in the same year, Blu-ray discs were still a year away and the first iPhone would only come out two years later.

Still, even at that time it was clear standard definition PAL and NTSC video was on its way out and would soon be overtaken in popularity by High Definition video, before that in turn was overtaken by 4K video only a few years after. It is thus clear that technology is progressing quickly and it is paramount to keep up with developments.

While resolutions were going up, devices were getting smaller, ironically creating less of a need for high resolutions to provide sharp images.
This became all to clear to me when I sent a friend a video I made last year with my AG-DVX100 through Telegram on my phone and I noticed it looked even sharper than some of the High-Definition videos I had been streaming on the phone in the previous months before.

As it turns out, the screen of my current smartphone in portrait mode is 720 pixels wide, which is exactly the same pixel width as SD video. In 14 years, technological progress has thus arrived at a point where something that came from a 15 year old, supposedly outdated and inadequate, recording device is the most natural fit for the screen of a current device meant for displaying. Due to the far superior optics and separate CCD-sensors that individually register red, green and blue wavelengths which are found in a professional camera like the AG-DVX100, the image quality also possesses a richness that exceeds anything that's expected to come from a modern phone when shown at this resolution and at this size.

 

 

What the Non-Fungible Token

At the time of writing, non-fungible tokens, or NFT's, are digital ledgers that are sometimes sold for large lumps of money when they are related to 'art', or rather digital image files. This has created some speculation in the media about NFT's as the future of the digital art market. 

Given that the world of NFT's involve technology, legal issues and money, there is naturally a lot of interest from an art public. Just as predictably, much of that interest is founded on poor understanding of the relevant concepts.

For example, it's sometimes claimed that an NFT makes the buyer the 'owner' of an image. This isn't true as a buyer doesn't gain any rights pertaining a file by obtaining an NFT. 

Another common misinterpretation is that an NFT is akin to possession of an autographed copy, in other words, a non-unique item that is nevertheless verified as something unique by a (digital) autograph. This also isn't true, as the NFT doesn't contain any data related to the art/file in itself, but merely a pointer to where the file in question can be found. The NFT isn't a copy of a work, it is instead nothing but the autograph and furthermore, that autograph is only the autograph of the person who issued the NFT, which doesn't necessarily need to be the original creator.

In fact, the closest analogy in the traditional art world to an NFT is not a certificate of ownership as is sometimes claimed, but rather a certificate of authenticity. Like an NFT, at its core a certificate of authenticity is nothing but a pinky swear by somebody that something is 'authentic'.

Imagine that I've made a sculpture and instead of selling you this sculpture, or even a cast or a photograph of this sculpture, I sell to you nothing but a piece of paper stating that this sculpture is an genuine work made by me and that it can presently be found in my studio. That piece of paper is what an NFT is. 

A buyer of this piece of paper doesn't own the work, they don't own any rights to the work, they don't even own anything pertaining to the work that by and of itself can guarantee its authenticity. All they own is my claim that I've made this work and my assurance that it exists at the present time in some location, with no guarantee about its existence in the future.

 

Now, while such a certificate may be largely pointless, it isn't inherently worthless, so that a market for them makes sense to some degree. Imagine for example if I owned a certificate of authenticity of a Van Gogh painting signed by Van Gogh himself, yet I don't own the painting, have access to the painting or even know what it looks like. That certificate would still be worth something by virtue of its historical value and general demand for Van Gogh related items. This is true even if the original purpose of the certificate has vanished, with the actual painting belonging to a museum collection for example, where the authenticity of the work has already been established by other means such as chemical analysis of the painting and a detailed provenance record.

So while these NFT's may themselves hold some value as certificates, the prices they are fetching now rely on faulty assumptions of value based on an utility they don't posses.

It's Not Like I Have All the Answers

 

A little while ago I was messing around making some doohickey's with the aid of an Arduino and it struck me that art has a strange relationship to electronics in general and writing code in particular. It's a relationship that I've found difficult to describe and even more difficult to define, so I hope by writing about it here that I'll be able to get some insights into my own thoughts on the subject.

Writing code, or programming, quite literally consists of nothing but making a list of logically valid statements. Unlike more pure mathematics, these statements are furthermore pre-defined by other human beings. While some mathematics can be discovered or invented, depending on your viewpoint, programming generally consists of applying the known possibilities of a set system.

If one is privy to my conception of art as object manipulation uncommon in daily life, it stands to reason that no piece of programming could ever be considered art. As all possibilities can be theoretically known in advance, any uncommon or surprising ways to write code is dependent fully on the understanding, or lack of understanding, of the person perceiving it.

Yet at the same time I'm aware that there are such endeavours like 'The International Obfuscated C Code Contest'. Most of this is way above my pay grade, but the first winner in 1984 was a program that 'prints hello world, where read is write'. Clearly that is a way to write some code which is uncommon in daily life. Simultaneously one could describe it as object manipulation as well, as no code affects anything unless some physical object changes according to its laws.

Then there are also initiatives that commission 'web art', like turbulence.org. I again have mixed feelings about this. Some of the projects seem like genuine uses of the internet that can only be the result of some unusual interpretation of its workings, but other projects are just data visualisation or some slightly-odd way of using social media. Are those latter projects genuinely different from the famous photo of an egg on instagram or the brochure design of the yearly fiscal reports for some multinational corporation?

 

One of Cory Arcangel's projects for the initiative was titled Data Diaries, wherein he substitutes the video data of a QuickTime file with whatever was in the RAM of his computer at the time, resulting in various glitchy patterns of colours. Which is you know, interesting, but at the same time he just loaded the data of one program into another that isn't meant to display that sequence of information. Fundamentally this is not that different from opening something like a .png in a text editor and then marvelling at the strange text that appears. Which is something that has happened to many people on accident, especially to those among us who have been using computers before the 2000's and had to deal with the many incompatible file formats of the time.

The level of skill on display here is therefore hard to pin down. On the one hand it's obviously higher than that of your average user, because it deliberately circumvents some ways in which a program is meant to handle data. On the other hand the result it gives is a garbled mess that even an expert couldn't distinguish from an accidental glitch. A glitch that could possibly be caused by a manufacturing defect in the computer's hardware and thus have no relation to the artist's actions at all.

A defining feature of artwork in traditional art media is that discernable traces are left by which an informed spectator can retrace the origins of a work. Digital artworks often rely on logical processes that aren't formally valid and by extension they also can't be mentally reverse engineered to any reasonable extent, thereby calling into question how a viewer must approach the work. 

By analogy I am thinking of shuffling methods in a casino. Any skilled dealer with the dexterity to shuffle cards in a truly random fashion, also has the skills to order them exactly how she wants them to. A common solution to this problem in high-profile casinos is for dealers to shuffle the cards by making a big pile on the table and moving them around like a toddler would, as this ensures a fully random order while being in plain view of all the players. Is that thus the smartest or the dumbest way to shuffle?

The influence of technology on art has always been a strange one. As already covered in one of the earliest posts on this blog, new technologies rarely have an immediate impact on art making. Over time they can however become quite significant after clear and common methods are established, for which artists are able to find contrasting solutions.

However I don't think that this particular problem is at play with coding. Coding itself hasn't changed fundamentally over the decades and I also think that you can't change it in any fundamental way to make the act of coding artful, or however you want to call it. Just like how in more general mathematics, no artist has ever truly called Euclidean geometry into question. 

But then again there are also artists like M.C. Escher that do at least appear to mess around with those mathematical ideas, albeit in a circumlocutory way. 

Perhaps more broadly speaking one can say that coding might not have much ability to go truly beyond its mathematical intricacies, but its influence on the physical apparatus it's meant to manipulate could posses such an ability. 

It also occurred to me that electronics in art rarely get to look like electronics in the way that we all use them in our daily life. Consumer electronics are often packed inside closed plastic or metal containers, both for protection and an aesthetic appeal to consumers. No consumer would want an iPhone if it was just some battery and a screen soldered to a PCB.

 

 

Artists commonly expose the insides of the electronics they work with when making art. This is perhaps to show that it is not simply an off-the-shelf product and that the artist did something unusual to make the work show what it shows.
I'm of course inclined to say that this is to distinguish the electronics artists use from the electronics found as objects in everyday life, but perhaps it has more to do with aesthetics or a general interest in seeing how things look like on the inside. My first Game Boy had a transparent case and I was absolutely fascinated with seeing how the thing looked like on the inside, without having the slightest clue about the functions of its various components. As there are plenty of decorative fashions in art that have little to do with the content of the work, perhaps exposing the electronics is simply one of them.

I'm sure you as a reader have gained little insight from these ramblings, but in the process of putting pen to paper I nevertheless have understood that the crux of my own confusion lies in the apparent paradoxical relationship between the extreme axiomatic restraint of Boolean algebra and the seemingly limitless number of ways it can be exploited by way of electronics.

I don't understand why it doesn't work on your computer

A few years ago I was responsible for the technical production at an exhibition venue. One of the artists wanted to present a work that consisted of a digital animation that was overlaid with subtitles in a number of different languages. The order and appearance of these languages changed every few seconds and included Hindi, Russian, Japanese and Arabic. She had encoded these texts in a plain-text .srt file and failed to include so much as a charset pointer to indicate how the computer should interpret the information. As should be obvious to anybody with basic computing knowledge, this gave rise to a number of problems while installing the work, with many characters not displaying properly or being otherwise scrambled. My suggestion that perhaps the subtitles should be hard-coded into the video file was met with some derision for the amount of 'difficulty' involved. A few days later the subtitles still weren't rendering correctly and with a somewhat desperate voice she exclaimed 'I just don't understand why it doesn't work on your computers'.  The only reply I could think of was that I couldn't understand why it did work on her computer. In the end the 'solution' we implemented was buying a used computer that had the same specifications of hers and even then we ran into some small issues.

This problem has popped into my mind on several occasions since then. Because of the large number of possible issues and causes I still don't know how to readily solve these problems, but I thought it would be worthwhile to at least point out some of the difficulties involved.

This text will get technical rather quickly and because I'm writing a text on a digital platform about the difficulties of writing text on a digital platform there are also some meta-issues you hopefully won't notice.

The first thing I would want to address is that the default character set a .srt file uses is Windows-1252, which is a barely extended ASCII set used in Windows 3.1. While .srt files can handle UTF-8 and UTF-16, both being theoretically able to handle multiple different scripts and reading directions, you still have to ensure that this is specified in some kind of charset detection in the .srt. While most devices will look for these detection pointers and interpret them correctly, there are also some devices that are able to read the .srt file, but not able to implement the specified charset. The metadata about the specifics of the language, reading direction and so on, is wholly dependent on the information present in these character sets, so there is no reason to assume that a file such as the one she made would work on any unknown device.

In simpler terms, the problem is that text that is displayed on a computer isn't encoded as such on a computer. Everything in a computer are strings of 1's and 0's that are then interpreted through some logical operations and appropriately converted to other strings of 1's and 0's which transform into pixels on screen that humans can read. For example, the binary code for the letter 'a' in UTF-8 is 00110110 00110001, while the same letter 'a' in ASCII is 01000001 and 01100001 in Windows-1252. So you have to remember that a computer doesn't see 'a', it can only see 00110110 00110001 or 01000001 and so on. Furthermore, each glyph is a discrete set of 1's and 0's and a computer can only interpret these strings in one direction. So while 00110110 00110001 might be an 'a' in UTF-8, in ASCII it would actually display '61'.
At the same time, assuming the computer 'reads' the binary codes 'left-to-right', then in order to present a right-to-left script, it would have to process the binary in the same order as all other text, but then present the outcomes in the reverse order. While this doesn't necessarily pose any problems to a computer that simply follows logical instructions, it will very quickly confuse the humans programming those instructions. Indeed we see that even high profile companies like Coca-Cola and Google get this wrong all the time and obviously that is not due to a lack of means. Even InDesign, the industry standard for setting type, didn't include official support for such features until the introduction of version CS6 in 2013.

Please consider the following example for some further demonstration of the problems at hand:

‘Wood / 木 / خشب’

I hope that it shows up correctly, although if it doesn't then it serves as an example of why all of this can be quite painful.
This text, the word 'wood' rendered in English, Japanese and Arabic, corresponds to the following Unicode according to a Unicode code converter. I added the colours for easier comparison:

U+2018 U+0057 U+006F U+006F U+0064 U+0020 U+002F U+0020 U+6728 U+0020 U+002F U+0020 U+062E U+0634 U+0628 U+2019

Note that in the Arabic, the leftmost character, U+062E, or the letter khāʾ, is actually the rightmost glyph in the word خشب. So while the order of {U+062E, U+0634, U+0628} is the way Unicode, and your computer, interprets it, in order to be legible to a human reader it would have to be presented on screen in the reverse order as {U+0628, U+0634, U+062E}. Arabic characters also change in appearance depending on their proximity to other characters, so an additional level of complexity (and thus potential for error) is introduced. For example, these: خ ش ب are the glyphs of خشب when they are taken in isolation.
In an attempt to mitigate some of these problems Unicode has a number of characters that can be used to indicate reading direction and they have updated these characters throughout the decades. For example, U+202A and U+202B, or left-to-right and right-to-left embedding, could be used, as well as the older U+200E and U+200F, which is a more general right-to-left mark. U+2066 and U+2067, or left-to-right and right-to-left isolate, were introduced in Unicode 6.3.0 in 2013 and Unicode now recommends their use for texts that have multiple changes of reading direction. There also exists an 'Arabic letter mark', U+061C, which is generally advised for use in the case of Arabic languages, but naturally doesn't work well for other right-to-left scripts like Hebrew. All of these characters also rely on specific pop (or end) tags. As these kind of technical characters are rendered invisibly on most text editors,  there is no practical way to check if they are actually present in the file you prepared. Even the Unicode code converter I used already doesn't recognise these directional characters and simply ignores their instructions.

So these are but a few of the issues that can arise when trying to incorporate different scripts and reading directions into a single file and I haven't yet gone into the problems of syntax errors, font compatibility, nor the fact that even if a device is interpreting the correct character set, it's often very difficult to ascertain that it is actually using a compatible, up-to-date version of that character set.

Computers are extremely limited in what they can do. Some things they can do extremely well, like making the quick calculations required to navigate a rocket into space, but other things they can only do through extremely cumbersome approximations of something that a human child can handle without any problems, like distinguishing the appropriate occasions to use katakana as opposed to hiragana.

An Existential Statement of the Form ∃x φ(x) such that φ(t) is True

This post is a bit unusual as I will talk about my experience with The Witness, a video game released in 2016. I'm writing about this game because it is a puzzle game which does not give explicit, verbal, explanations about its own rules and as such I feel its existence is relevant to a view of art in general.

The Witness is a game that has a very large scope. Starting from a simple idea of a puzzle where a single line runs from a beginning to an endpoint, the full game contains an entire three-dimensional island to explore with various themes and settings.
The core gameplay of The Witness, as it's presented to the player, consists of solving line puzzles. The player has to draw a line from a circle to a rounded-off end of a line.

Throughout the game there are multiple symbols added to the puzzles that define ever-more complex rules for the route the line can take between these two points. These rules are never explicitly explained to the player, however, and the main hook of the game consists of the player figuring out what the rules are that govern these puzzles and their symbols.
The clearest example of this is the swamp area. Before you enter the swamp, you have traversed through at least two other areas. Then when you enter the swamp you see this set of puzzle panels:

 

These panels, starting on the right, gradually teach you how to define a shape within the panel with a line. It starts out extremely simple and by the sixth panel you have a decent idea on how to define a shape. When finishing this puzzle, you look to the left and you see the following:

In this view going straight seems like the most logical step. The walkway leads to an open area and the yellow path is brightly marked. This yellow marked path actually contains a puzzle that you haven't been shown the rules to yet. By this point you've nevertheless realised that part of the game is figuring out these rules, so you fumble until you get it to work and bring you further along, only to encounter two other groups of puzzles ten seconds after:

These puzzles require definite knowledge about how you're allowed and able to combine the various shapes within a single line segment, knowledge these first six introductory panels haven't touched upon. So you get frustrated and you move backwards to where you came from. At the earlier junction where you went straight, you now turn right and you find these:

A total of eight panels that very explicitly serve as a reference on how you can combine the shapes by a single line. Panels four to six even share a single solution to make it very clear what matters and what does not matter when defining these shapes. After you have found these, the rest of the puzzles in the area are quite straightforward, increasing the difficulty largely by introducing a higher density of shapes and adding a few smaller rules.

Acquiring this kind of knowledge is how most players will spend a large part of the game. Knowledge is introduced and then tested in a number of puzzles, which tend to be somewhat trivial once you have formulated the rules right. After you solve all the puzzles in each area, you activate a laser that points to the top of a mountain, clearly indicating that this mountain is somehow a point of interest.

Once you have gone through a number of areas like this, you have become acquainted with the game's mechanics and you enter into its last areas: the town and the mountain. In these areas it is no longer about gathering knowledge about the mechanics of the various puzzles, but about applying this knowledge and understanding it more deeply to solve a wide range of complex and creative puzzles, without ever being able to do anything other than moving around and drawing lines.

This latter part of the game, once you have seen most of the island, was for me by far the most enjoyable part and I found it ended rather quickly once I got there.

So far, so good, you might think. Designer Jonathan Blow has made a silent game about solving line puzzles on an island. Fun to explore if you're into that sort of thing and if you don't like drawing mazes then maybe this game isn't for you.
The story doesn't quite end there though and in order to delve more deeper into other aspects I first would like to point out some flaws I find with the part of the game I have just described.
As you can see from the description above, the first part of the game is more or less about learning, while the second part is about applying the knowledge gained in the first part.

If the first part of the game is about learning the ruleset of the island, it is important that this introduction is done clearly and, more importantly, without contradictory information. For the most part, Blow and his team succeed in doing so and have demonstrated well that it is perfectly possible for a game to let players figure out what they need to do without actually telling them. The earlier example of the swamp puzzles show that is very possible to provide a clear introduction to the rules for a puzzle using non-verbal communication.
Even the existence of environmental puzzles, considered one of the game's biggest secrets, is at one point communicated very, very, clearly. One of the areas closest to the beginning also has you use elements from the environment to find its solutions, which should be a huge clue that you should pay attention to your surroundings.

Before I delve further into those, however, I would first like to bring back the focus on what has frustrated me the most while playing The Witness. This is the fact that it at times deliberately obfuscates the kind of information that is necessary to understand the rules to the game. Blow has stated in interviews that this kind of obtuseness is something he has tried to avoid and while I believe he has genuinely tried to do so, I can't say that he has always succeeded, at least in the way I experienced this as a player.
For example, let's take a look at the introduction of a symbol with one of the more complex rulesets. The first panel and a solution look like this:

Which is fairly straightforward, even if you have no idea what's going on. The puzzle only has twelve possible routes and three of those are correct solutions. Even when merely fumbling around at random, I still have a one-in-four chance of finding a valid outcome. Like in the introductory panels of the swamp, this is more than alright, as any grounded deductions about the functioning of a symbol can't reasonably be made from any single panel. Which is exactly why the following panel is so problematic:

This is the next panel you encounter in a set of five introductory puzzles. The other panels are only activated once the previous panels have been solved, so there is no other way to continue except solving this panel. Because we only have the knowledge gained from the previous panel, the player can't reasonably be expected to have a well-formed hypothesis of the function of the symbol yet. At the same time, making a lucky guess isn't realistic either. Where the previous puzzle had twelve possible routes, this one has 184 possible routes. Only six of those routes are valid solutions and all of those solutions are longer than the average route. So while the number of solutions has doubled from the previous puzzle, the number of possibilities has increased fifteen-fold. You are therefore asked to extract an enormous amount of knowledge from a tiny amount of information. While in retrospect it is technically possible to come to the right conclusion given what you already know about the puzzle, I don't believe it is an effective, nor refined, method for teaching a new set of rules. From my own experience I can only think that these particular panels were designed in this way as to provide an artificial difficulty level that is perceived to be necessary when solving any kind of 'puzzle'. In my own playthrough, I got stuck trying to figure out this rule for about thirty minutes, before obtaining a hint for it outside the game. This quickly made me understand what the rule was and I consequently solved all other puzzles in that particular area within the next half hour.
The difficulty therefore doesn't lie in comprehending the system, but in simply knowing its rules. If you know the rules, it is easy, if you don't, it's extremely difficult.

The Witness is described as a game where you solve puzzles and I believe many of its problems stem from this description. In my opinion, the game mostly presents its panels as logic puzzles. In a logic puzzle you are given a set of rules and you have to understand how they interact with each other to see what their possible outcomes are. Figuring out the rules themselves isn't a challenging puzzle, or at least it shouldn't be. Shoots and Ladders, for example, does not automatically become a puzzle game by simply refusing to explain the rules.
Where Blow has gone astray in some parts of the game is that sections that should have been there to non-verbally explain the rules of a certain puzzle and have instead been treated as if they were puzzles themselves.
This has made some parts unnecessarily difficult, while at the same time partly undermining Blow's own vision of creating a game that allows a player to grasp the concepts of said game by simply observing well and 'being treated as an intelligent person'.

There are also other parts of the game where things are made more difficult than they need to be in a more arbitrary matter. After finishing the puzzles in the jungle, for example, the laser you have to activate is located within a small maze. This is already somewhat annoying on its own account, but it is made worse by the fact that the actual entrance inside the maze to the room that contains the laser looks like this:

It's right there in the center and I couldn't see it either. There is a little open area with a distinctive tree next to the entrance to help recognise its significance, but this tree simultaneously blocks the clearest view of the entrance. In the end I just used the knowledge that every maze has a solution by simply following a wall to its inevitable conclusion, which is tedious at the best of times. I can understand the importance of mazes for this game and have no problem with the other instances, but this particular one was a needlessly burdensome implementation for what in every other area is a fairly straightforward path.

Another component of the game that has been somewhat of a double-edged sword for me are the aforementioned puzzles which incorporate the environment, most notably the sunshine. I wholly applaud their inclusion and I think it's one of the main reasons The Witness feels like every part of it is somehow connected to all the other parts. At the same time I can't help but feel that the gameplay implications are occasionally extremely frustrating for the player. The vast majority of these puzzles require the player to stand precisely in a specific spot to either find the solution or see the puzzle at all. Even when you know where to stand, it is still sometimes awkward to get it right, with many tiny button presses required to obtain the correct viewpoint. It is thus once more the case that if you posses a certain kind of knowledge, the puzzle is hardly a puzzle at all, but if you don't have this knowledge the solution is literally out of sight.
At times these puzzles are made even more difficult by introducing a changing element on a timer. In that case moving around haphazardly to find the right viewpoint and at the same time trying to keep an eye on where you are going is cumbersome and adds little to your understanding of the puzzle's mechanics. I believe that as soon as you understand how a puzzle ought to be solved, executing that solution should be trivial. Unfortunately this isn't always the case in The Witness. Blow's previous game, Braid, also had these kind of moments where once you understood the solution to a level, there was still some finicky platforming maneuvers necessary to execute that solution.
It must also be mentioned that I had to play the game on a low graphic quality setting. This admittedly kept the game playable, but it certainly didn't help with of some of these puzzles that are so dependent on the way things appear. Especially in puzzles that had to do with shadows it was at times unclear whether I had the wrong solution or if I had simply mistaken one pixelated line for another.

Then there are also some decisions made during the design process that I can't really understand or account for. In some puzzles, I would estimate about one tenth of them, the puzzle panel turns black after you input a wrong solution. Then you have to go back to the previous panel and redraw the solution for that panel to light up the other panel again. This already tedious endeavor is made worse by the fact that the solution to the previous panel is still highlighted there. You just need to mindlessly trace a line that is clearly visible before you can go back to the panel you want to be working on. 

I have yet to find a good reason for those particular panels shutting off after inputting a wrong solution. As I said before consistency is very important if you want to teach somebody about anything, so having some panels shut off while others do not without any particular reason can't really be justified in my opinion. Perhaps some playtesting would have shown the errors of my ways, but even their necessity at parts of the endgame isn't enough for them to be included earlier in a more forgiving setting.
The wrong turn taken in the swamp described at the beginning is also an example of this kind of problem. It's understandable that having all the panels in a single line is monotonous and therefore unwanted, but simply luring the player away from something that is required to progress further isn't a very elegant design solution either. There surely must have been better and more consistent solutions for these kind of issues.

As a whole, I would argue that one of the more general problems in the Witness are those kind of diminutive lapses in consistency.
The interface of the game is kept very simple, for example. A great effort has been made to make sure that the only interaction the player has with the world is done so by drawing a line from point a to point b. It is one of my favourite features of the game and is wonderfully implemented, both mechanically, visually and conceptually.

That being said, there is one common item in the game that doesn't require you to draw a line. These are small voice recorders, found at various places all around the island. You have to click on these and then they play a soundbite. Why an exception has been made for these voice recorders is never made clear. There are other ways to play media on the island, including audio, and all of those use a line-drawing interface. The only reason I can think of for housing these soundbites in tiny, clickable, voice recorders is that in that way they are more difficult to find, or perhaps easier to hide. I'm not sure if that alone is worth losing a certain sense of cohesion in a game that otherwise goes through extreme lengths not to use buttons or any other forms of interaction.

Elsewhere in the puzzles there is at times a similar inconsistency. This doesn't hurt the puzzles in isolation but are detrimental to an overall view of the puzzles, and therefore the game, as a cohesive whole. One of the earliest puzzles you will encounter shows that its possible to have two different outcomes from a single line.

Yet in most of the puzzles found in the rest of the game, even those with multiple beginning- and endpoints, there is only one valid beginning and ending for any single line. There are some important puzzles much later in the game where knowledge of this kind of possibility is required to progress at all, but I think that showing these kind of multiple solutions as one of the few distinct possibilities at the beginning of the game is similar to the 'I before E, except after C' rule. Even if it's true on some occasions, the rule has just as many exceptions, so perhaps its better not to teach it at all.
In another instance the rules are more complicated than they need to be. In the game there are two different symbols which indicate two different kind of exclusion of other symbols. Their rules aren't readily compatible if they were to be used in the same panel. As far as I can remember they are never used together in the game, but at the same time that begs the question why there are two different types at all. I can understand why one of them was introduced in a particular area and then barely used in the rest of the game, as it only applies to one other set of symbols. Yet given the view that one part of the game is about learning mechanics and the other is about implementing those mechanics, the inclusion of this symbol in one area seems like an ad-hoc solution to flesh out a section that would otherwise be rather short.

It is easy to confuse these kind of inconsistencies with an expanded ruleset that keeps elaborating on the players knowledge and possibilities. I would therefore say that there is an important distinction between having a player expand their understanding and simply negating or ignoring something that was previously explicitly shown as an (im)possibility.

These criticisms aside, The Witness is definitely an unique game. It is vaguely reminiscent of the nearly uncrackable adventure games of the 1990's and as such it often gets called an adventure game, as well as a puzzle game.
The thing is, I don't think The Witness fits into either of those monikers. In my opinion it's an understanding-what-this-thing-is game. This works on many different levels, but is best exemplified by the fact that the very last part of the game, far beyond the ending as described in the beginning of this text, is something called 'The Challenge'. The Challenge is a tightly timed sequence of puzzles that are randomised each time you attempt it, while also requiring you to memorise the solutions to puzzles early in the sequence to use in a later part of the sequence. To be able to complete this challenge, you have to fully internalise the mechanics of the game, as nothing short of skill and understanding will allow you to complete it.
So while the game seemingly is about solving puzzles, or discovering the so-called secrets of the island, in my experience the very core of the game is concerned with not only exploring, but also communicating, the fullest of consequences of what can be done with a single concept. It's about taking a simple idea, drawing a line between two points, and expanding that idea as far as it can go while still maintaining a cohesive, playable game. Making that game cohesive and enjoyable is trying to let the player venture on this journey as well and let them think about this concept as if they thought of it themselves. In other words, The Witness is an understanding-what-this-thing-is game.

It is precisely in this point that The Witness is different from any other game I've ever played and I think it therefore has gotten a somewhat odd reception. The game has received critical acclaim for the most part, but neither the positive nor the negative reviews manage to make a meaningful distinction about this point. For some the lack of a singular narrative and meaning has been a point of criticism, but this almost becomes irrelevant if the game is seen as a far-reaching exploration of a single mechanic. The little narrative that is available in the game then mostly serves as commentary on the exploration itself, not its outcome. This is very clear at the endgame, where a secretly recorded casual conversation about the inclusion of the voice recorders is re-enacted by voice actors and played from a voice recorder in the game.
Likewise and oddly enough has The Challenge at the end been negatively perceived by some critics as a strong break with the 'calm and contemplative' gameplay of the rest of the game. I don't think this is the case at all, with The Witness cramming in a great deal of implications in a relatively short amount of time, with The Challenge merely being a possible, but logical, outcome of those presented facts.
A very common comment I have encountered are the 'incredibly difficult puzzles', but that really isn't true either. If The Witness came with an exhaustive manual detailing all the rules and mechanics of the different puzzle types, I believe arriving at the first ending in The Witness will be a somewhat trivial matter for most players. Solving those puzzles therefore hasn't been interesting at all in my view.
What however is very interesting and peculiar to me is that at the same time I also believe if a player was somehow in possession of this manual, it will take them much longer to complete The Challenge at the very end. While I at times have my problems with the way The Witness teaches its mechanics, I am in full agreement with the idea that this kind of self-reliant teaching ultimately leads you to a deeper understanding of what the game is.

One of the concerns that Blow had while making The Witness has been investigating what makes video games unique as a medium. The obvious answer is interactivity and it is precisely this kind of deep, elongated, investigation into the workings of an otherwise lifeless object that interactivity allows for. In the physical world it's never sufficient to merely analyse the components of a game in order to figure out how it is played. Chess pieces don't tell you anything about even the basic rules of chess and a football field doesn't tell you anything about the offside rule. Software in general, and video games in particular, are the only medium that essentially consist of nothing other than rules. To explore the full extent of a single rule therefore seems like a good way to investigate the 'true' possibilities of the medium.
The Witness is commendable as possibly the first game that attempts to discover what can be done if a simple rule is truly taken to its furthest consequences, without taking the common real world limitations of finances, time or company structure into account. It has come short at this attempt in some places, but being the first of its kind these shortcomings are expected and can be overlooked when the game is taken as a new beginning, rather than an end.

The Website of the Artist; a rudimentary observation

In the past years of browsing the internet and visiting the websites of artists, I have come to realise they can be roughly split up into four categories. Please note that these are not absolute and there are definitely exceptions to everything I'll say here.

The first category I would call the website of the young artist. The website of artists at an early stage in their career is usually marked by a significant lack of personal knowledge on website design, as well as funding to hire somebody who does. The main purpose of these websites is to be a showcase of the persons work, as well as allowing people to retrieve some kind of contact information.
In order to nevertheless provide the visitor with a professional-looking homepage, their lack of resources is most often compensated by free frameworks such as indexhibit. While these are functional, they often result in websites that appear commonplace with code that is difficult to read.
Examples include Wesley Meuris, Chaim van Luit, Katja Mater and many others.

When artists have a bit more options at their disposal, it seems that their websites change accordingly. These websites are often not that much more complicated than those of their younger colleagues, yet much more attention has been given to details that distinguish them from others with a more generic appearance.
The website of gerlach en koop is a great example. Its very straightforward, yet every detail has been carefully considered. There is a interesting day/night mechanic and the various clickable projects are separated by a simple yet effective forward slash. This forward slash is also featured as the websites icon, that together with he somewhat unusual url help it stand out. The font used is Frutiger, noted for its legibility, and although widely used, it helps to differentiate from the ubiquitous instances of Helvetica. 
Another good example is the website of Cory Arcangel. At first sight it might look like a typical early 2000's style blog and therefore at odds with Arcangels often technology-focused work. In reality this kind of website is quite typical for technical people. People like Jonathan Blow and Neil Sloane have extremely bare-bones websites where the appearance of the code has been given more attention than the GUI. This can also be seen in the website of Arcangel, with code that is properly indented, aptly characterised with comments and exceeding the width of the screen only when necessary.
Further examples of this kind of website include Philip Metten, Gabriel Lester, and John Körmeling. Each of their websites accurately resemble their respective practices even at first glance.

In all the previously mentioned websites contact information still plays an important part. Even in the case of Cory Arcangel, whose career must keep him rather busy, an email address for his studio is still provided for feedback on his undertakings.
For those artists to whom interaction with the general public is unwanted and who can afford to miss smaller opportunities, the ultimate attainable goal is to have no website at all. These artists are instead represented on the world wide web by their galleries, so that valuable information can be controlled and business can be conducted according to established contracts, while the artist is left in peace.
A slightly less aloof alternative to this practice is a website where nothing but a link to those galleries is presented, as is the case with Tacita Dean, Elmgreen&Dragset, and Heimo Zobernig.

Then there are the websites of those artists who have nothing to prove and posses more than ample means to maintain them. These websites tend to serve as a public archive. Martin Creed, Bernard Frize, Damien Hirst, Thomas Schütte, Anthony Gormly and Gerhard Richter all provide the visitor with a detailed overview of their long careers.

As a final note there is one more category of artist website. Usually these are of deceased artists, whose estate is now managed by a foundation that is set on publishing a catalogue raisonné. Helen Frankenthaler, Donald Judd, Anne Truitt, and Roy Lichtenstein are but a few whose work has been poorly kept track of during their lifetime and now are appealing to the public to send them any information they may posses.