Joshua Napoli

My wife’s encaustic paintings (made of beeswax) are hanging in Boston at The Brant Gallery (on the 3rd floor of South Building at Mass Art) until May 30. She was also chosen to have a solo show at Medallion Gallery. Hopefully she can get some exposure at the next opening and get to the “next level”. The exhibitions are part of Naveed Nour’s Photo Emerge project. He is trying to promote fine art photography in Boston. Both of my parents are also artists, but they live in Florida. There are more buyers down there and the art scene seems to be closer to a meritocracy. My impression is that in Boston, art is more of an academic pursuit where overcoming obscurity is governed by a certain clique.

Selling fine art on the web is undoubtedly a challenge! Perhaps it is possible for well-known artists where markets for their work are already established. For emerging artists, I think that the sense of exclusivity of ownership of the product is important but difficult to communicate through a web site. Perhaps there is a way to accomplish this with a very interactive application that learns something about the potential patron.

On Saturday, I went to BarCamp. I skipped out on the Sunday sessions, since the weather was too nice to spend the day nerding in a high-school basement. CEOs from places like diet.com, mypunchbowl.com and pixily.com (online OCR document processing) were slapping stickers on anyone who stood still for too long. The event seems to have been too much for poor babbledog: their web site has been down since then. One item that stood out was Many Eyes. While Many Eyes does not appear to have been substantially updated in the past year, they are looking for a contract developer now. They probably want to make some new charts types with the new Flash 10.

Up to this point, if you need a perspective projection of a raster image on a web page, you’re pretty much stuck with a Java applet or browser extension. Scalable Vector Graphics, the HTML “canvas” element, Silverlight and Flash 9 are all limited to affine transformations. A common problem is to combine two photographs in a perspective-correct way. The image of the painting needs a perspective projection to match the background image. Alexander Zadorozhny has written a Flash demo illustrating tessellation of an image to approximate a correct perspective projection. While good quality and reasonable performance can be achieved, there is a large impact on the complexity of the application.

Soon there will be a couple of new options for 3-D rendering in a browser. Flash 10 has pretty complete GPU-accelerated rendering functionality. Webkit is also possibly introducing a 3-D perspective transformation property into CSS. Perhaps this will be taken up by the new standard.