The Remix reading main site is now online. Take a look (and upload some work!) at:
http://www.remixreading.org/
http://www.remixreading.org/
November 2004 Archives
For many artistic works there is source that can be provided: the preparatory work. Preparatory sketches can be provided online or in printed book format. Having access to the preparatory work for an artwork can be incredibly useful for understanding and building on the work, much like having the source code for a binary.
I have two examples of this that feature work in the style of Jackson Pollock. From the point of view of an artistic producer, at art school I was set a project to make a painting that combined two existing images. I chose a Pollock painting and a Futurist cyclist. The library had a book on the Futurists that had the preparatory sketches for the painting of the cyclist, showing how the forms of the finished painting had been abstracted from a fairly literal sketch of a man on a bycicle. This allowed me to understand and reproduce the compositional structure of the piece far more effectively than just copying the finished result would have.
From the point of view of an artistic consumer, Art & Language did some wonderful paintings of and titled "A Portrait of Lenin In The Stryle Of Jackson Pollock" around 1980. They made sketches of the images before painting them, and these are very useful if you can't quite "get" the images when you first see them. Those sketches are often reproduced in exhibition catalogues and are available online.
Having access to the source material for even traditional media like painting can be very valuable for both consumers and producers. For consumers, it's like being able to read the source code to figure out what's going on in the binary. For producers, it enables remaking, reworking or build on the original work as surely as being able to hack and make the sources to a binary.
I have two examples of this that feature work in the style of Jackson Pollock. From the point of view of an artistic producer, at art school I was set a project to make a painting that combined two existing images. I chose a Pollock painting and a Futurist cyclist. The library had a book on the Futurists that had the preparatory sketches for the painting of the cyclist, showing how the forms of the finished painting had been abstracted from a fairly literal sketch of a man on a bycicle. This allowed me to understand and reproduce the compositional structure of the piece far more effectively than just copying the finished result would have.
From the point of view of an artistic consumer, Art & Language did some wonderful paintings of and titled "A Portrait of Lenin In The Stryle Of Jackson Pollock" around 1980. They made sketches of the images before painting them, and these are very useful if you can't quite "get" the images when you first see them. Those sketches are often reproduced in exhibition catalogues and are available online.
Having access to the source material for even traditional media like painting can be very valuable for both consumers and producers. For consumers, it's like being able to read the source code to figure out what's going on in the binary. For producers, it enables remaking, reworking or build on the original work as surely as being able to hack and make the sources to a binary.
If I release an image in, say, Photoshop format, I am limiting my audience.
If, however, I convert the image to a non-proprietary format, I will lose some of the editability of the work. Which is more important, breadth of access or depth of access? (Hmmm. This parallels some current governmental debates on the arts here in the UK :-) ).
In my own work this can best be illustrated by the case of some images I made about ten years ago using Adobe Dimensions (a *vector* 3D package). I couldn't have done the work any other way at that time, I can't convert the work to another editable format now, so what do I do? I can release the all-but-unreadable editable format, or I can render the work as a 2D vector image which is editable as far as it goes, but does not have the full editability of the 3D version. I'm about to make some more of this work in Illustrator CS, again using its unique capabilities. As I said before, if one takes FSF-style Freedom as aguiding principle, I shouldn't even be using Illustrator. But as an artist, I need various facilities it has until Inkscape catches up, facilities Inkscape can't even render (full-strength masking for example), and I want to provide editable files containing those features.
In the absence of a guiding principle of FSF-Freedom, this is a dilemma. A producer will want the fully editable format, they will probably have the software. A consumer will want the accessible format. I provide various formats, but even with scripts to derive various formats for me from the original, this takes effort, and with (say) a movie, the space requirements would become a consideration.
I'm not arguing against editability or accessibility, far from it, they are vital. But I do want to illustrate that this may mean something (or some things) different for Creative Commons than for Free Software.
If, however, I convert the image to a non-proprietary format, I will lose some of the editability of the work. Which is more important, breadth of access or depth of access? (Hmmm. This parallels some current governmental debates on the arts here in the UK :-) ).
In my own work this can best be illustrated by the case of some images I made about ten years ago using Adobe Dimensions (a *vector* 3D package). I couldn't have done the work any other way at that time, I can't convert the work to another editable format now, so what do I do? I can release the all-but-unreadable editable format, or I can render the work as a 2D vector image which is editable as far as it goes, but does not have the full editability of the 3D version. I'm about to make some more of this work in Illustrator CS, again using its unique capabilities. As I said before, if one takes FSF-style Freedom as aguiding principle, I shouldn't even be using Illustrator. But as an artist, I need various facilities it has until Inkscape catches up, facilities Inkscape can't even render (full-strength masking for example), and I want to provide editable files containing those features.
In the absence of a guiding principle of FSF-Freedom, this is a dilemma. A producer will want the fully editable format, they will probably have the software. A consumer will want the accessible format. I provide various formats, but even with scripts to derive various formats for me from the original, this takes effort, and with (say) a movie, the space requirements would become a consideration.
I'm not arguing against editability or accessibility, far from it, they are vital. But I do want to illustrate that this may mean something (or some things) different for Creative Commons than for Free Software.
A poster by AARON for the International Lisp Conference 2002:
https://secure.franz.com/store/aux/hcposter.jpg
I want one for my birthday (cheaper shipping option OK). :-)
https://secure.franz.com/store/conferenceware
https://secure.franz.com/store/aux/hcposter.jpg
I want one for my birthday (cheaper shipping option OK). :-)
https://secure.franz.com/store/conferenceware
Opsound have joined Loca in the Creative-Commons-licensed CD market, and Positron are kinda sorta gonna start CC-licensing work:
Loca
Opsound
Positron
Positron have got a CC-remix competition here. This is good because you get the "sources" for the track to play with, which is more what Free Music should be about.
Loca
Opsound
Positron
Positron have got a CC-remix competition here. This is good because you get the "sources" for the track to play with, which is more what Free Music should be about.
I've just seen that my old associates SoDA are at the ICA in London at the moment:
http://www.ica.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=13659
http://www.soda.co.uk/media/index.htm
Soda Constructor brought kinematics to the masses, their new stuff looks great as well.
http://www.ica.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=13659
http://www.soda.co.uk/media/index.htm
Soda Constructor brought kinematics to the masses, their new stuff looks great as well.
"Chinese or African or African-American or Native American aesthetics are much more accessible to my students than the works of ?their own? tradition (whatever that means; my students have multiple origins, and the ?western tradition? is a fiction anyway)."
Auto-oppression reaches new heights. Or depths. Crypto-imperialism, rehabilitating cultural difference as cultural difference. How people can keep a straight face whilst comparing the "fiction" of Western Culture to the romanticised projections of "Other" (sic.) Cultures I'll never know. But whilst enjoying the frisson of superior moral inferiority, do bear in mind that other canons may just be based on exclusion, or even be fictions themselves, and that fiction is not exactly a marginal element of human culture.
http://www.aesthetics-online.org/ideas/sartwell.html
Auto-oppression reaches new heights. Or depths. Crypto-imperialism, rehabilitating cultural difference as cultural difference. How people can keep a straight face whilst comparing the "fiction" of Western Culture to the romanticised projections of "Other" (sic.) Cultures I'll never know. But whilst enjoying the frisson of superior moral inferiority, do bear in mind that other canons may just be based on exclusion, or even be fictions themselves, and that fiction is not exactly a marginal element of human culture.
http://www.aesthetics-online.org/ideas/sartwell.html
I finally bought a copy of Illustrator CS. It's got the old "Dimensions" engine that I used for some of Inbetween Cities built in, so that could be fun. But mostly it does modern file formats, AppleScript, and metadata.
It's ten years since "Fuse 94". I was there, an art student at a typography conference, and it was great. The best speakers were definitely Letterror, whose work on smart fonts influenced my work quite majorly.
A review of Fuse94.
I spent lots of time in the lab as well, making some Psychetecture in PhotoShop amongst other things. It was the first time I had my work put on the web (and the first time I'd been on the Internet). I don't have the files any more, they wouldn't fit on a disk then and the site isn't there now.
People still use the word "vernacular" too much. Vernacular to postmodern graphic design is like Pastoral to yBA art: a displaced, ironised aesthetic social virtue masquerading as an aesthetic.
A review of Fuse94.
I spent lots of time in the lab as well, making some Psychetecture in PhotoShop amongst other things. It was the first time I had my work put on the web (and the first time I'd been on the Internet). I don't have the files any more, they wouldn't fit on a disk then and the site isn't there now.
People still use the word "vernacular" too much. Vernacular to postmodern graphic design is like Pastoral to yBA art: a displaced, ironised aesthetic social virtue masquerading as an aesthetic.
I saw the first remix of my work today. It's quite a coincidence that the remixer added arrows as they are the central motif of my next project.
"Mountain Stroll"
© 2004 Ber Kessels, Rob Myers.
Licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA-2.0 license.
Derived from "London (For Evie)".
"Mountain Stroll"
© 2004 Ber Kessels, Rob Myers.
Licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA-2.0 license.
Derived from "London (For Evie)".
The Remix Reading site is shaping up very well. They've got a domain but it's just a placeholder with the flyer on at the moment. Do download the flyer, though.
http://www.remixreading.org/
http://www.remixreading.org/
This site is excellent, but the debates they link to very quickly go all Wolfie Smith:
Socialism In an Age Of Waiting.
Socialism In an Age Of Waiting.
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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