Categories
Free Culture

Free Culture Roundup

Stupid registration required link from the American version of The Times that is about something interesting to do with theatre and copyrifght expansionism but I now can’t remember what. I’m sure it’s worth going to Bugmenot to get a password for, though:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/theater/newsandfeatures/29gree.html

Last chance to stop the support of litigation by religious extremists act:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/news/story/0,,1697498,00.html

A groovy-looking Creative Commons Media Kit. Hopefully it’s not all NC:

The kit includes a flyer explaing CC, a DVD with CC cartoons and videos, and a CD with re-mixed CC licensed music.

http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5763

The first Libre Graphics Meeting looks excess kewl:

LGM will be a melting pot, with free software graphics developers and artists meeting each other, exchanging ideas and tips, and planning the future of free graphics. Graphics professionals interested in learning about the state of the art in free software are also welcome.

http://libregraphicsmeeting.org/index.php

Art is not terrorism:

http://happyfamousartists.blogspot.com/2006/01/art-is-not-terrorism.html

Free Culture Art Show at New York University:

http://wiki.freeculturenyu.org/wiki/index.php?title=Art_Show_2006

Technorati Tags:

Categories
Generative Art Projects

Shoutbacks

The weblog “Apologen: Anekdotes met een beethe moraal”:

http://www.apologen.be/2006/01/13/laat-je-tekeningen-maken/

A Rhizome discussion thread on draw-something:

http://rhizome.org/thread.rhiz?thread=19888&page=2#37963

Technorati Tags:

Categories
Free Culture

Free Culture Roundup

vectorizeme vs julian opie

http://happyfamousartists.blogspot.com/2006/01/vectorizeme-vs-julian-opie.html

The BNP’s Plymouth organiser Graham Green said party members had been handing out leaflets on behalf of the Christian campaign.

He said the “Christian majority” was being discriminated against because a similar show about a minority would not have been allowed.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4640588.stm

And previously:

Arts Council England has denied that it refused to fund a UK tour of the musical Jerry Springer: The Opera over protests by Christian groups.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/4152308.stm

Technorati Tags:

Categories
Free Culture

Free Culture Roundup

Madhav Sharma, an actor in the sabotaged 2004 production of Behzti (Dishonour) by Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti has written an impassioned account of his experience.

http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2006/01/26/speaking_up_for_artistic_freedom.php

The courts eventually found in favor of Francine, awarding her sole custody of the Cousteau trademark in oceanographic endeavors.

Today, Jean-Michel and his siblings cannot use their own last name in conjunction with oceanographic pursuits.

http://righttocreate.blogspot.com/2006/01/ridiculous-trademark-cousteau.html

CPSD Comics: Bound By Law?

http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/index.html

The Open Rights Group is proud to announce its second networking evening, with guest speaker Cory Doctorow. More details of the evening to come soon.

This free event is open to digital rights campaigners, grassroots activists, the press and the general public, so please do send this information to anyone you think may be interested.

Refreshments and nibbles will be provided free of charge.

http://www.openrightsgroup.org/orgwiki/index.php/Second_ORG_networking_evening

Technorati Tags:

Categories
Free Culture

Second Commons

Transcript of Lessig’s talk in Second Life (via BoingBoing):

http://secondlife.blogs.com/nwn/2006/01/the_second_life.html

Second Life Creative Commons License Generator:

http://secondlife.blogs.com/nwn/2006/01/creating_creati.html

Second Life Free Culture Group:

“Free Culture”, the group created for reserving seats at the Lessig event, will continue on, running in-world events related to Lessig’s ideas and projects, including Creative Commons and copyright reform– some of which, hopefully, will involve Professor Lessig himself. To get in the group from SL, select Find> Groups, then search and join “Free Culture”. If you’re interested in becoming an officer in this group, helping create and organize future events, contact me– “Hamlet Linden”, or hamlet@secondlife.com, via e-mail.

Technorati Tags: , ,

Categories
Generative Art Projects

draw-something 0.4 and 0.5

draw-something 0.4 will draw on a number of classic AI applications for its structure whilst building on the existing code and drawing style.

AARON

Harold Cohen, Tate Gallery, 1983, ISBN 0905005392

The drawing will consist of a series of figures, as it does now. Each figure will consist of more than one form, which has an outline and a fill. The outlines and fills of each form may touch other forms, and so not every outline will go all the way around each form. This is the equivalent of the linked lists of figures, developments and lines (each line consisting of a number of points) described in the Tate catalogue.

The First Artificial Intelligence Colouring Book, 1984, ISBN 0865760608

To help allocate space for figures in the drawing, draw-something will use a coarse grid of cells superimposed over the co-ordinates of the drawing, as described in “The First Artificial Intelligence Colouring Book” and elsewhere. As figures are generated, cells will be marked as belonging to each figure. This will allow fast location of space for new figures, and fast location of figures to overlap.

copycat

Fluid Concepts And Creative Analogies, 1995, ISBN 0465051545

http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~mm/how-to-get-copycat.html

Like AARON, copycat is a probabilistic rules system with a knowledgebase that constructs aesthetic structures. But copycat structures its rules as “codelets” and its knowledgebase is a kind of semantic network that allows generalisation, a “slipnet”. draw-something’s rules will be structured as codelets, initially just simple codelets that re-implement the current drawing system.

draw-something 0.5 will add more codelets and implement a kind of slipnet about pictorial and spatial construction. This is inspired by SHRDLU, which may also have influenced the “block world” version of AARON.

SHRDLU

http://hci.stanford.edu/~winograd/shrdlu/

The interesting part of SHRDLU for draw-something is not its natural language processing but its spatial knowledge: SHRDLU knows how objects can interact and will not allow impossible interactions. draw-something will use a copycat-style series of codelets to identify properties of figures being constructed, and a SHRDLU-style knowledgebase to decide how they can go together.

Technorati Tags: ,

Categories
Free Culture

Goodbye Fair Use, Hello “Customary Historic Use”?

This sounds even worse than “fair dealing”:

Big Content would like to outlaw things no one has even thought of yet

The thinking behind the term “customary historic use” is pure newspeak, a real ‘talking point’. Who can argue against allowing people to keep their customary, historic privileges?

Anyone who understands that Fair Use is a dynamic, ongoing process that can react to future use rather than fossilising past allowances. That’s who.

Technorati Tags:

Categories
Projects

Project Plan For 2006

Jan – draw-something

Feb – website redevelopment, Open Score, remixes

March – remixes

April – remixes, minara

May – draw-something

June – remixes

July – minara

August – minara 0.1 release at end of month

The April minara work will just be cleaning up multi-window operation and the GUI ready for the big push in July.

Categories
Aesthetics

Art And Cognition

Interdisciplines is an organisation that aims to link the humanities with the cognitive sciences and their latest online conference focuses on art and cognition.

http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2006/01/art_and_cognition.html

Hyman’s paper is notable as it criticises the current trend of suggesting that adequate theories of aesthetics must, in essence, be neurologically based.

Indeed. The sad spectacle of nerobiologists and “cognitive scientists” discovering how a single set of cells functions in the brain and declaring that an entire area of art must be regulated by this really needs to stop. Chemists don’t insist that all sculptures must be shaped like hydrogen atoms, or that those sculptures shaped like hydrogen atoms have no experiential, social, or even higher-level cognitive -uh- physical component.

Technorati Tags: ,

Categories
Generative Art

slime-refcard

A reference card for the SLIME Lisp system, derived from the Emacs reference card. In TeX format with derived PDF.

Click here to download.

Technorati Tags: