Here's a 3D interpretation of a drawing found on our drawpad, while the 3D scene is initially made for the rendered still below, it's also fascinating, - not only, but mostly from a technical point of view - to see this 3D environment happening in a browser. It provides a behind the scenes look, like a making of. See the full post in an updated browser with WebGL (Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome) to move the image around.
The drawpad on our site is a tool that allows different people to draw simultaneously on the same 'canvas'. Since discovering this way of visual communication, collaborative drawing, we've been experimenting with various other ways of collaboration, sampling, copyright, status etc. Through trial and error we continue to walk on this thin line between originality, authenticity and copy.
Little did we know that this tool - not made by us - after +8 years would still be on-line. Luckily we can still embed it in our website. Downside it's an Adobe Flash application, which is a no go for mobile platforms.
The internet has changed the artistic possibilities, by means of a platform for exhibiting, discovering, meeting and learning. Through the years we've seen many new technologies rise and fall on the world wide web. And while our on-line lives are spied upon, controlled by advertising, harassed by short and shallow top ten lists that you must see in less than thirty seconds - there is a whole universe of knowledge, freely accessible for those with access to internet. Open source soft- and hardware are becoming a standard building block for many companies, crowdsourcing has created opportunities unprecedented by anything we've seen. And while all this new stuff is finding it's balance between openness and sustainability, we as artists, and all other fellow citizens of the internet-age can reap the benefits.
There are many more examples of open source with a far greater reach than the software we use for our images. - Think about the framework of the internet itself: Apache is the web-server used by over 50% of all servers (source: Netcraft). - The 3D image below was made with Blender, a 3D software program not only open source but also freely downloadable (no restrictions). We've been using this software since about the same time we discovered the drawpad app by Flashgear. And as long as the flash app is still hosted by them and as long as browsers keep supporting Flash, we can continue to use the free but closed source application. If either one ends we'll have to turn to any of the open source technologies to build our own app. But untill then let's just draw:
Or see the 3D model:
