Month: November 2004

Minara

Post author By Rhea Myers
Post date 2004-11-13

It’s not as hard as I thought to add an intersection handler, so I’ve added one and now Minara doesn’t crash when the pen tool is being used.
This means that I can keep using OpenGL rather than switching to libart or another rendering library. So I can concentrate on refactoring and adding new code next month instead. Yay!

Sketchblog

1969 – Secret Society

Post author By Rhea Myers
Post date 2004-11-10

Projects

1969 – Nearly There

Post author By Rhea Myers
Post date 2004-11-10

All the images of 1969 have been coloured and divided into Final and Discard groups. I’ll go through them again at the weekend and then 1969 should be finished, with around 30 Final images. See the sketchblog for an example.

Projects

p2p Tuple Space

Post author By Rhea Myers
Post date 2004-11-03

Use a p2p network as a JavaSpaces/Linda – style tuple space.

Create data structures as (possibly metadata-rich) xml packets referring to resource files/urls, and to other xml packets. The data structures from the JavaSpaces book can easily be modelled this way. A weblog or serial could be an open-ended queue, an album, lecture series or split large file could be an array. Use MD5 hashes, domain limits, time limits or other constraints for “security”.

Use the entire internet as a tuple space described in xml packets. Extend the format to allow specifying sub-elements of resources and assemblages of elements/sub-elements for remixes and other derivations.

Free Culture

Cover Versions

Post author By Rhea Myers
Post date 2004-11-03

“This is not my song to you and this is not me singing it,
A cover version, words I found, dressed in black with eyes seductive.
I remember yesterday but someone else bought yesterday,
Dead with nothing left to say, screaming it out anyway.”
– ‘Body Elective’.

One of the themes post-“Free Culture” (the book) that speakers on copyright always come back to is remixing and its historical precedents. The canto is a fascinating example, classical poems made form lines of other poems. Another more problematic example is Shakespeare. Shakey’s re-presentation of themes are more cover versions than remixes. If a remix is a reworking of a performance, a cover version is a reworking of a score. The idea of a score is central to Goodman’s aesthetic theory, and to traditional music copyright, but that’s not why it’s important here. The freedom to re-create a work rather than just to use a particular realisation of it one of the key freedoms of the GPL, and one of the reasons why providing source code is a requirement of it. The source code for a program is its score, and vice versa. The cover version should not be forgotten in the current lionisation of sampling any more than it should be used to obscure the common theme of reworking that it shares with sampling.