August 2005 Archives

I'm hacking on Minara again. Undo, transformations, and the pan&zoom tools are taking shape.

Undo is a double-linked list of undo/redo actions attached to each buffer. Hopefully it's efficient and robust. I need a way for functions to tell the method calling them to stop without returning a value and without being passed a function to call. Oh, and without using globals. Easy, huh? :-)

Transformations I'm going to cheat and use OpenGL transformation matrices for: other renderers and the export filters can interpret calls to push and pop the transformation stack and do whatever they need to.

Pan & Zoom use transformations, and have their own buffer at the bottom of the buffer stack. The current Pan & Zoom data is stored in buffer variables and the buffer is regenerated as needed. This is a nice example of how Minara's design philosophy gets a simple, transparent implementation of something that would otherwise be entangled with the guts of the system, hidden away from the user.

I think I'm going to use FLTK for the UI basics. It's too much effort for too little reward to write anything myself at the moment. File load/save and CMYK colour dialogs will help make Minara feel much more usable.

One this round of development is done, next it's picking and copy/paste. Then a decent pen tool and Minara is ready for 0.1!

Federico Carraro blogged me:

ammmore

Grazie!

Modelling emotions is an important component of artificial intelligence art. Not because of any outmoded romantic ideas about tortured genius, but because curiosity, boredom, excitement and satisfaction direct art better than infinite recursion.

Emotions For Believable Agents

Via the ever wonderful DataIsNature:

Howard R. Barnhart

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/news/story/0,,1559096,00.html

Publishers and learned societies are fighting a last ditch action to stop the research findings of thousands of British academics being made freely available online.

DRM != SSL

why can't DRM be made open source?

Microsoft abandons its customers AND copyright to kiss up to Hollywood

DRM apologists claim that DRM can be used to model the preponderance of fair uses, but this is completely untrue. Fair use almost always hinges on intention -- there isn't any software that is capable of reading a user's mind and determining intention.

Architecture and Copyright: Order Without Law

The only way to avert the problem of plagiarism is to be a moving target. If your work is copied and that upsets you, it means you waited too long to move on.

Open DRM = Dry Water

That’s the consensus at EFF after we took a look at Sun Microsystem’s plans for an open DRM project perplexingly called “Open Media Commons"

Via Make:

http://www.free-penguin.org/

But you'll have to provide the source with the binaries. :-)

OK, where can I get these in the UK?

sav-a-point

Lots of interesting material on and by Isaiah Berlin, includes some downloadable PDFs of work:

The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library

A software art project where drawings draw themselves:

 

Quagmire

I switched my iBook to Debian GNU/Linux as its main OS on Sunday after finally getting the ASUS wireless dongle working (Airport doesn't work under GNU/Linux). I've kept MacOS X Tiger on another partition, but the only time I've booted it since Sunday was to quickly get my RSS subscriptions out of NetNewsWire.

I'm using BloGTK for blogging, GAIM for instant messaging, Firefox & Firebird for web & mail, and Liferea for RSS.

I'm still using Emacs, Inkscape and Gimp. They're better under GNU/Linux than under the X11 system on MacOS X.

The user interface isn't as good as MacOS X, but with GNU/Linux that's up to me. Freedom and responsibility, it's a groovy combination baby, yeah!

Relational Aesthetics (Bourriaud) is a special plea for the value (virtue, even) of visually impoverished 1990s neo-conceptual art. Bourriaud is careful to distinguish Relational art from what he regards as exhausted modernist forms. But his concept of Relational art is haunted by that modernist prophet Walter Benjamin.

Relational art is an aesthetic social space or event. If a social context is artistic, and activities or materials can be en-art-ed by that context, then the artwork is auratic. And even more so if the work en-arts the context. That is, there is something special and perceivable about the artwork and its context that would be lacking if the same base physical or social materials were not being used as art.
Bourriaud admits that relational art is auratic, but he does not see this as a problem:

"The aura of art no longer lies in the hinter-world represented by the work, nor in the form itself, but in front of it, within the temporary collective form that it produces by being put on show." - Relational Aesthetics, p61.

It is a problem, though. Relational art may not be modernistic but its auratic nature makes it pre-modern, not post-modern. This is the art of icons and fetishes, of ritual and alchemy. It is a deeply regressive art, even beyond its managerial aspirations and the nostalgia for performance and social art that Bourriaud simply chooses to ignore.

There is an important difference between the Creative Commons licenses and several other leading "Free" licenses.

The GPL was written by Richard Stallman in response to non-disclosure of code harming programmers ability to work as they had before. He wrote the GPL to ensure that programmers could continue to program.

The OGL was written by Ryan Dancey in response to the financial collapse of the games company TSR threatening gamers ability to play and write role-playing games, specifically Dungeons and Dragons. He wrote the OGL to ensure that gamers and game authors could continue to work with D&D.

The Creative Commons licenses were written by Larry Lessig in respone to overly strong copyright threatening individuals ability to exercise their fair use rights and gain access to works in the public domain. He wrote the CC licenses to counteract this.

In each of these cases there was a "printer driver moment"; for Stallman not being able to get the code to a laser printer driver (hence the name), for Dancey realising that the collapse of TSR could lock D&D away for ever, and for Lessig the Eric Eldred case where "orphan works" would be lost to unknown rightsholders.

So the GPL was written by a programmer so he could continue to program in the way he was used to. And the OGL was written by a gamer and games author so he could continue playing and writing games as he was used to. But the CC licenses were not written by and for their subject. Eldred did not write the licenses, Lessig did.

This difference explains the character of the CC licenses and their presentation. And some of their strengths. And, if you believe the CC licenses are flawed, some of their flaws. Despite being an author, Lessig is primarily a lawyer and does not have to "eat his own dog food" using his licenses in his day job. Any weaknesses in the CC licenses will not affect Lessig's ability to practice law. But the GPL or the OGL could bite their authors hard if they have any flaws.

This is not to say that the CC licenses are bad or morally defective. In their own way they are excellent. And they are head and shoulders above half-hearted licenses like Sun's execrable CDDL. But being written for an audience rather than written by their subject has affected their genetic makeup, and this is a factor that is worth considering when discussing them.

Was it Neal Stephenson who said that Lisp is the only beautiful programming language? The excellent DataIsNature has a link to a
snippet of Lisp to draw the Mandelbrot set, which is a case in point:

(loop for y from -1 to 1.1 by 0.1 do

	      (loop for x from -2 to 1 by 0.04 do

		   (let* ((c 126)

			  (z (complex x y))

			  (a z))

		     (loop while (< (abs

				     (setq z (+ (* z z) a)))

				    2)

			while (> (decf c) 32)) 

		     (princ (code-char c))))

	      (format t "~%"))

White

Grey

Black

 

Red

Yellow

Blue

 

Red

Orange

Yellow

Green

Blue

Purple

 

Red

Pink

Orange

Brown

Yellow

Gold

Green

Turquoise

Cyan

Blue

Purple

Magenta

Viral marketing debasing Wikipedia:

BB Punks Wikipedia?

Words don't fail me, but nor does politeness. I'll just mention Bzzzagents and leave it at that.

Hopefully the self-healing nature of Wikipedia will sort this out quickly.

Technorati Tags: free culture, wikis

Stuff The Suits

I heard a recording executive say on the radio that they were no longer looking for talent but rather for a look and a willingness to cooperate, because with Pro Tools they can fix anything.- Joni Mitchell.

Although the point of Punk was that anyone could form a band, the point wasn't then that any band could be fed through Pro Tools and sold to the idiot masses.

When discussing incentives and protection, it is important to consider who those incentives and that protection are being given to. And what they are being incentivised to do. And what they are being protected from.

Technorati Tags: free culture

I'm not a Marxist. I don't know Marx and his followers' work well enough to be able to say whether Marxism makes any more sense than the Cult Of The Invisible Hand. But trawling the web for articles on aesthetics I found this Trotskyite essay on the value of culture that starts from a debate on the virtues of Oscar Wilde:

http://www.music.gla.ac.uk/~tfowler/articles/Aesthetic.html

Giving Wilde to the workers is an example of redistribution of wealth. In this instance it is cultural wealth rather than monetary wealth. I suppose peer-to-peer networks are a degenerate form of redistribution of cultural wealth, but by individuals, not the state.

"Remix Culture" as the official culture of Creative Commons, seems to be about ownership of the means of production, not redistribution of wealth. Is it better to mash up an Eminem song or to read a chapter of Don Quixote? Free Culture would say Mr. Mathers. High Culture would say the Knight of The Sorrowful Face.

Both have a point. Grab Don Quixote from Project Gutenberg then do that mash-up. Redistribute the cultural wealth of millennia, and seize the means of production for the future.

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, free culture

Copyfight on the DMCA being misused to threaten someone who used some boxes to make furinture:

http://www.corante.com/copyfight/archives/2005/08/11/dumb_ideas_never_die.php

Technorati Tags: free culture

Via Make:

RGBLED

Technorati Tags: generative art, graphics, hacking, hardware

The state of Art is hereby declared. For now its government must sit in exile.

Head of State.
The Head Of State is called The Curator. They appoint themself and must re-appoint themself every two years.

Parliament.
The parliament consists of four Critics, one for each corner of the state. They are to appoint themselves every four years. If no appointment can be reached then parliament shall be dissolved and elections called.

Holidays, Festivals.
The festival of Opening Night shall be celebrated regularly, with merry-making, vitriol and free alcohol by order. 
There are no holidays. Art never rests.

Citizenship.
Citizens of the state of Art are known as "Artists". Citizens of Art gain no priveledges or responsibilities by virtue of their citizenship. 
Art welcomes applications for joint citizenship.

Laws.
The laws of Art are the laws of aesthetics and composition. Whilst all volumes are not created equal, we must strive to make them harmonious in their parts.

Territory.

The territory of Art will be its map, and vice versa.

Flag.
The flag of Art is a Malevich square. As is its map.

National Anthem.
Cage's 4.32 is the national anthem of Art.

GNP, National Debt and Resources.
The worth of Art cannot be measured monetarily.

Internet Top-Level Domain.
Art will propose .rt as its Internet top-level domain name. If this is unavailable, .ae will be accepted.

Technorati Tags: art, satire

Good debunking of Danto's latest excesses at iconoduel:

http://www.iconoduel.org/archives/2005/08/000679_fallacies_aint_too_pretty_neither.php

Technorati Tags: aesthetics

http://www.citizensrequired.com/

At the Fortean Times convention a few years back I bought a book called "How To Start Your Own Country" from Counter Productions. It's a good read.

I started a country called "Art". So when people asked "what is the state of art?" there would be a definitive answer. The flag, the map of the country and the country itself are a Malevich square. The currency and the coat of arms are also black squares. The law is aesthetics. The national drink is absinthe.

If anyone wants joint citizenship, or if any other countries out there want mutual recognition, email me. :-)

update: I found the original project. It wasn't a Malevich square, but that's a better idea than the original flag so I'm going to change that and upload some stuff.

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art

The new version 0.2 of rob-art is now available at:

http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/rob-art/

Version 0.2 adds a more freehand-looking pen and random colour to draw-something.

If you just want to run draw-something on MacOS X 10.3 or MacOS X 10.4, download the draw-something-carbon.dmg package instead. It will clear your screen to a blank white then have a think for a few seconds before starting drawing. Press command-q to quit the application once it's running.

This is the version of draw-something that was shown at O3one.

Technorati Tags: art, generative art, hacking

Impossible Figures:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_object

Stereograms:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereogram

Anamorphosis (esp. Ambassadors)

Calligram / Arcimboldo:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcimboldo

3D Glasses:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaglyph_image

UV Images (Warhol):

Optical Illusions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Optical_illusions

Perceptual Interference (Riley)

Image double-coding (lenin-pollock, duck-or-rabbit, crone-or-maiden)

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art

Auratic Artwork Test 1.

Good enough to proceed with the idea. Need to make it an all-around-the-edge glow. Neon or electic glow strip rather than LEDs?

Technorati Tags: art

http://www.libresociety.org/library/libre.pl/Copy%2c_Rip%2c_Burn
Copy, Rip, Burn

Free, Libre, Open Culture

Showcasing art/film/music inspired by the Libre Manifesto. Due to be unveiled in late 2005. Contributions from Artists, Authors, Filmmakers and Musicians and to be toured in Galleries internationally end 2006-2008
Work can either be based on a single section of the manifesto or more generally inspired by the entire text. We particularly welcome work that uses the text of the manifesto in interesting ways, in effect deriving art from the text-work.

The Project

The aim is to allow both the project itself and the artworks to be decentred in production. You are welcomed to sign up to the mailing list at
http://libresociety.org/mailman/listinfo
or even start your own to work collaboratively. Create Wiki pages to develop this project and to help manage it as they are needed.

The format as unspecified but naturally it seems logical that free formats would be better.

Theora for Film
http://www.theora.org/

Ogg for Sound
http://www.vorbis.com/

HTML and freely sharable dynamic graphics plug-ins.
Player for the above format are the excellent VLC
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

All work submitted will be released under the
http://creativecommons.org/
license
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0/

Current
http://www.libresociety.org/library/libre.pl/CRB_List_of_Projects
CRB List of Projects

More info as the project develops on
http://www.libresociety.org/

Copyleft info from
http://www.creativecommons.org/

Mailing list:
http://libresociety.org/mailman/listinfo

The manifesto can be downloaded from
http://www.libresociety.org/

[Via David Berry on fc-uk-discuss]

Technorati Tags: competition, free culture

Many of my works are falsifications with surplus value. I mean "falsification" in the scientific sense, showing a theory to be false. A negative proof, a disproof. I mean surplus value in a straight-faced sense: the falsification is not all there is to the work. This is most notable with Psychetecture, Surgical Strike, and paintr. All are a kind of parody of a particular ideology that are nonetheless entirely serious and very effective in themselves.

I've said that with much of my best work I can't tell whether I'm joking or not. I think this is one of the reasons why.

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, philosophy

Following on from Remix Reading and LETS schemes, a local social networking system for sharing out grants in Vienna, via BoingBoing:

netznetz.net

This is a quite literal take on the idea that reputation drives remuneration for artists. :-)

Technorati Tags: free culture, net.art, online communities

paintr is now available to view online:

click here for paintr

The source code is also available under the GPL:

click here for the source code

The source code for the full-screen application that I used to show paintr at O3one is not yet available. I need to rewrite it a bit for public consumption.

About paintr:

Paintr was created by Rob Myers. It was inspired by the writing of Harold Cohen and the projects of Pall Thayer.
It is written in PHP, and uses several web services to gather and process aesthetic materials in order to create an analogue to art or artistic activity:
• colr
• flickr
• autotrace

All the images from flickr used by paintr are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license, and are therefore free to be used in this manner.

Technorati Tags: free culture, free software, generative art, net.art

Tesla rocks. I went to the Tesla museum whilst in Belgrade, and I saw a Tesla Coil operating (which impressed the kids standing near it holding neon tubes). The idea of transmitting energy, and the idea of radiant energy receivers, both Tesla ideas, are two types of Free Energy.

Transmitted Energy is free because, once the energy is transmitted, you can't control who uses it. It is "free for all". Tesla's unfinished Wardenclyffe Tower was designed to transmit energy. And any radio station does, although not in useful amounts for modern electronics (I built a crystal radio as a kid, though).

Radiant Energy is free because anyone can extract it. If this design strikes you as crank science, just think of solar power instead. Radiant Energy is also distributed creation of energy rather than the distributed consumption of energy from a central transmitter.

Free Energy as it currently stands is crank science. But a free information society rests on energy, and it rests on non-renewable and non-free (unshared) energy at the moment. Moving to an ideal of and a system for Free Energy, by which I mean renewable and distributed energy, is going to look a lot more urgent when people add up how many barrels of oil it takes to support their internet habit.

Technorati Tags: free culture, free software

Liberty is what people often mean by "freedom". The freedom of "Free Culture" and "Free Software" is a matter of liberty, and is essentially liberal freedom, rather than a more radical freedom (such as anarchism).

Liberty.
"On Liberty" by John Stuart Mill (and the full text .)
"Two Concepts of Liberty" by Isaiah Berlin.

If anyone knows of any good writers on the subject more recent than Berlin, let me know. Opinion seems divided online. :-)

Technorati Tags: free culture, free software

..."Freedom" must not become Socialist Realist-style orthodoxy, or direct, or coerce, art. This must be literal freedom, not an illustration of or pandering to the ego of a culture of Freedom.

Technorati Tags: art, free culture, philosophy

Cool hack to let users set their own logo on MediaWiki wikis:

http://mohala.org/index.php?title=MediaWiki_Hack:Allow_Logo_Uploads

- Rob.

Technorati Tags: hacking, wikis

A&L mentioned this in their article on Luhmann in Radical Philosophy:

Laws Of Form

lawsofform.org

Memory Forms

George Spencer Brown and his Laws of Form

Looks interesting. Wonder how it could interact with shape grammars? :-)

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, philosophy

Posters from May 1968 in France. Spot the Chemical Brothers cover...:

29 affiches de mai 68

Technorati Tags: art, politics, visual reference

Absurdism or serious protest? Imagine artists actually unionising and striking effectively. Serbia seems to have an artists' guild that could actually do this...

The Art Strike

THE ART STRIKE PAPERS

ART STRIKE HANDBOOK

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, humour, philosophy, politics

Saul mentions Community Arts in one essay. WtK are Community Arts? Must research...

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, free culture

LETS, Local Exchange Trading Schemes, are local money systems. They aim to keep value within the local community by using a kind of labour barter system.

The very strength of LETS, that they are local schemes, works against them in a globalised society. Local value cannot compete with global value, indeed it is ghettoising.

Remix * is an organisation that is working to create projects across the UK to help people share culture. These are local projects, such as Remix Reading or Remix Brighton. The cultural value of each project is identified locally. But the cultural value of each project is made globally available, through the internet, under Creative Commons licenses. Remix *'s local focus contrasts with other Creative Commons projects such as OurMedia, which rely on a globally distributed community to provide large volumes of "content".

Like LETS, the Remix * projects are locally targeted and keep existing value in the local community. Unlike LETS, the Remix * projects allow both global use and global return of value through the Internet, assuming the local contributors use the copyleft 'SA' license.

LETS, like Remix *, are a kind of gift economy. This stretches the definition of a gift economy, but it is true at least trivially; money is not exchanged, only the promise of a return of labour or culture. For LETS this promise is quantified, for Remix * it is

The Remix * projects therefore take the best of LETS, capturing local value and building local community, and add the potential of the internet, global building of reputation and sharing of value. Each seems appropriate to the age that spawned them, the post-industrial 1980s for LETS, and the post-dot-com 2000s for Remix *.

Technorati Tags: free culture

Saul runs the University of Openness.

He applied Open Source ideas to art very early on:

Open Source and Collective Art Practice

And thought generative art through in an art history context, which isn't done anywhere near often enough:

Artware

I met Saul at Ways of Working Two where he was running a UO workshop, which was cool.

Technorati Tags: free culture, generative art

Banksy's current "manifesto" is a moving-if-true (Banksy's site is the only place on the web with any mention of this story) account of absurdist aesthetic intervention bringing humanity to a liberated death camp:

http://www.banksy.co.uk/manifesto/index.html

And his current project is decorating the Israeli wall along inside occupied territories:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/gallery/0,8542,1543331,00.html

I hope this isn't the kind of bogus, lazy, ahistorical moral equivalency that is all too prevalent in the British chatterati regarding the illegal wall.

Technorati Tags: art, politics

Trailer for the next Harry Potter Film.

"...you must choose between what is right, and what is easy." - Dumbledore to Harry.

Charlie & The Chocolate Factory.

Charlie regards Veruca getting the ticket by her father buying tens of thousands of bars and getting his workers to open them all as unfair. Mike Teevee just hacks Wonka's numeric system to predict where to find a ticket.

"Only a dummy would give this up for something as common as money" - Grandpa George, regarding Charlie's one of the five golden tickets.

Willy Wonka is an IP maximalist. he fires all his workers because of industrial espionage and replaces them with a tribe of servile addicts, who at least won't go to the competition. :-)

"Why is everything so pointless?" - Mike Teevee, unimpressed by the factory.
"It doesn't have to have a point, that's why it's candy!" - Charlie.

Imagine releasing everlasting gobstoppers onto the market. The displacement! :-)

Someone once told me about how they thought they could get the food out of the telly as a child living in a council house. The scene with the TV chocolate hasn't seemed so funny since then.

Technorati Tags: film

Free Nursery Rhymes Volume 1.

Copyright (c) 2005 Rob Myers.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

Ipsy Dipsy.

Ipsy dipsy, baby and me,
Making castles by the sea.
Ipsy dipsy, seagulls fly,
Over the castles in the sky.
Ipys dipsy, baby and me,
Eating strawberries for our tea.
Ipsy dipsy, that was fun,
And now it's over and our day's done.

Sleepy Time For Babies.

Sleepy time for babies,
Babies time for sleep.
Slumber in your cradle,
Slumber do not weep.
It is time for sleeping,
Sleepy time for you.
It is time for sleeping,
That's what you must do.

I Don't Know.

I don't know, the fireman said,
Our fire engine should be red.
The funniest thing I've ever seen,
Is somebody's come and painted it green.

Counting Bears.

Counting bears is easy.
What you have to do,
Is mix their honey,
Up with glue.
The bears eat the honey,
And stick to the pot.
Counting bears is easy,
But they do get cross

Lions.

One lion, two lions, three lions, four,
Five lions, six lions, seven lions, ROAR!

Technorati Tags: free software

By which I mean it needs work on the proportions of the letters, not that it's digital faux-rough:

Remix Brighton has put out a call for logos. This is my effort, a remix of the Remix Reading logo.

Technorati Tags: free culture

Groklaw on Eric Laffoon on:

Defending the GPL

We need to cooperate to insure the enemies of freedom don't overcome us, not attack those who should be our allies

Technorati Tags: free software

I found a small-press-produced booklet called "In The Making, Number 5 1878, A directory of co-operative projects" in my local Oxfam today. The copyright block ends:

"Copyright (c) In The Making, 1978. Alternative publications may reproduce freely provided acknowledgement is made."

This is clearly a predecessor to CC-BY-NC. It's important to note that when comparing CC to GPL, the GPL doesn't have to work to keep its resources within the community as the resources are code and the community are coders. So the "Alternative publications" bit may look non-free compared to CC's explicit support for moving work into other media and other communities, but I would argue that it is CC that is different here (although probably correctly so).

The (c) was hand-drawn. :-)

Technorati Tags: free culture

Game theory seems to have displace the "invisible hand" as the moral excuser for economics. From "it will be OK" to "it cannot be OK".

http://blog.visiblepath.com/archives/incentive_systems.html
http://www.steveverdon.com/archives/gametheory/002107.html
http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2004/11/11/siegal_mem.html#comment12995
http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2005/07/physics_wealth_.html
http://www.makeoutcity.com/Archives/2003/12/25/141600/

Technorati Tags: free culture

Economic concepts that you'll encounter (or which might be useful) when discussing Free Culture:

The Dismal_science

The Invisible Hand

Public_goods_game
Club_good
Public_good
Network_effect
Externality
Common_Property_Resource
Commons
Tragedy_of_the_commons
Tragedy_of_the_anticommons
The_Long Tail

and:

Folk Economics
On The Commons's Key Concept List

Technorati Tags: free culture

In 1941 Franklin Roosevelt gave a speech in which he outlined four freedoms. They're different from Stallman's. :-)

The Four Freedoms

The first is freedom of speech and expression --everywhere
in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his
own way-- everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world
terms, means economic understandings which will secure to
every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants
--everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear...

This is basically a statement of human rights, after Wells but before the UN.

Wikipedia article on The Four Freedoms Speech.

Technorati Tags: free culture

Good articles from (and a couple via) On The Commons:

What Did Dylan Borrow?
Bob Dylan On The Commons
An Economic Theory Of The Commons
When Theft Is Not Theft
Newton, Lord Camden, and "Common Things"
A Privilege Or A Right?
Incentive Systems
A New Grand Narrative About Creativity
How Intellectual Property Is Not Property
Fashion As A Creative Commons
Et Tu, Christo?
The Illusory Self-Made Man
Who Owns What?
What Can Evolutionary Science Teach Us About Designing Online Commons?
Collage And Creativity

Bottling The Air
Copyright Fees Required To Take Photographs In Chicago Park

Technorati Tags: free culture

The image only becomes secondary in amateur art. Much electronic art is amateur because of this; making the work was far more engaging and interesting than suffering the finished piece is. But To privilege code over image simply makes the work code, not art. Code is preparatory work, it is underpainting, it is not, of itself, art in any useful sense.

Kuspit on Digital Art via MTAA

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, generative art

A free presentation package that runs in a web browser and doesn't suck. Get that proprietary slideshow software off your conscience with S5 (via NTK):

S5

This is a good one to use rather than, say, Keynote when speaking about, say, Free Culture. :-)

Technorati Tags: free software

In the second half of 2004 I began exchanging emails with a pair of artists called MANIK (MArija Vauda & NIKola Pipilovic). We had met on the New-York-based Rhizome mailing list. I live in Peterborough in England. Manik live in Belgrade in Serbia (formerly Yugoslavia). The Internet dissolved that distance, allowing us to discuss art, aesthetics, and occasionally old television comedy programs.

Early in 2005 MANIK suggested that I have a show of my work in Belgrade, and began working to find a suitable gallery. The gallery that eventually agreed to show my work, O3one, specialises in new media art, and had exactly the kind of space and technology that I needed. With the show confirmed for the end of July, The British Council agreed to pay for me to travel to Belgrade.

In Belgrade I stayed with MANIK (who were the perfect hosts) for a week to set up the show, attend the private view and give a talk. Setting up the show went quickly and smoothly, although I had to do some last minute hacking to ensure the software part of the show would run well unattended.

The work I showed was:

Canto - http://www.robmyers.org/art/canto
1969 - http://www.robmyers.org/art/1969
draw-something - http://rob-art.sourceforge.net/
paintr - http://paintr.robmyers.org/

At the private view people liked the work and some had interesting questions. The talk two days later - about my work, free software and free culture - also went well. I chatted to a couple of other artists before and after.

One thing I wasn't prepared for was giving interviews to radio and television (a music TV channel called Metropolis, and a national TV arts program). That and the heat of Belgrade's summer were the only two real surprises I had.

Whilst in Belgrade I had enough time to see MANIK's work and talk art with them in real life, to see some of the city, to visit some of MANIK's artist friends, and to look around some of the city's galleries and museums. Like Jack White I had to see the Nikola Tesla Museum.

This experience has confirmed my belief in the potential of collaboration over the internet, and driven home the importance of real world, international, collaboration between artists.

Show photos - http://www.robmyers.org/weblog/2005/08/02/rob-myers-howto-images/

My web site - http://www.robmyers.org/
MANIK's weblog - http://tiija.blogspot.com/
O3one - http://www.o3.co.yu/
Rhizome - http://www.rhizome.org/
British Council http://www.britishcouncil.org/
Remix Reading - http://www.remixreading.org/
Creative Commons - http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5509

Technorati Tags: art, creative commons, free culture, free software, generative art

Coloured squares from words, or as the artist puts it:

"The Aesthetiscope is an interactive art installation whose wall of color reacts to portray the relationship between some idea (a word, a poem, a song) and a person (a realist, a dreamer, a neurotic) standing before it."

aesthetiscope

Technorati Tags: art, generative art

There's a new breed of pro-DRM FUD doing the rounds. DRM, they say, is a means of protecting our secrets from prying eyes (apart from the backdoors), of keeping our baby photos from perverts (who won't DRM their hard drives), and of selling our intellectual property to make money (because everyone will pay for bad guitar music and have DRM-ed systems to play it on).

This pleading has the quality of calling for easier eviction to make more empty homes available for homeless people.

To see how DRM and trusted computing will really work, here's Microsoft's next OS blurring DRM-ed content on monitors that aren't "trusted" (locked) systems (via BoingBoing):

Windows Vista demands monitors with copy-protection for best viewing

The useful idiots telling you that DRM is voluntary and doesn't affect non-DRM-ed content need to stop and think for a moment about whether the law will tolerate the inducement of copying by the existence of non-trusted hardware once trusted hardware and software is generally available. And about whether a technology that will allow governments, software corporations, employers, media conglomerates and criminals to lock away, lock down, lock out, erase and steal your content will even give any of the feeble and revocable benefits that are being bleated for individuals.

Technorati Tags: free culture, hardware

52.589768, -.250879
52.588342, -.250276
52.588554, -.248737

Technorati Tags: art

Which is why they use it as they do :-) :

the consumer-durable middle-sized dry good as a paradigm of art

Art & Language .

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art

http://libraryofvinyl.blogspot.com/2005/06/six-degrees-of-reggae-riddims.html

Not surprisingly, a small number of riddims get versioned a lot and most get versioned only once or twice. This kind of picture is typical of cultural industries (e.g., a few composers do most of the scores in Hollywood, a few actors do most of the movies, etc.) and is related to the idea of long tails

A riddim is a reggae track, a version is a remix or cover version. The basic idea behind the long tail is that products that sell only one or two items online add up to sell more in total than blockbuster items do.

So here, more versions are made in total from riddims that are only versioned once or twice than from the ones that are most popular.

Is this right? What if this was the case in culture generally?

And are there more works downstream of the long tail than there are downstream from blockbusters? That is, are there more derivatives of derivatives of the long tail?

How would this affect debates around copylefting / public-domaining work? To my mind, the risk of losing any downstream work to proprietary work through public-domaining is unacceptable. But the risk of losing the long tail to the public domain and thence to proprietary works would be completely unacceptable. This means that the blockbuster potential, or the likelihood of proprietary displacement, cannot be the basis for deciding between copylefting or public-domaining work.

Technorati Tags: free culture

52.584017, -.235176
52.583182, -.235863
52.584069, -.234747
52.583704, -.233459
52.584382, -.234833
52.585320, -.234146
52.584330, -.235519
52.584799, -.236721

Technorati Tags: art

Click on images to view full-size:

The billboard announcing the show (with me in front of it).

The gallery, O3one

A panorama of the show inside the gallery.

draw-something.

Canto.

1969

1969 close-up.

Prints of colour pictures by draw-something.

Technorati Tags: art, creative commons, free culture, free software, generative art

Monsanto try an exploit that would make ordinary pigs patentable:

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/08/02/monsanto_patents_pig.html

This kind of thing is why a Free Culture means more than just sticking a CC button on your blog...

Technorati Tags: free culture

An article on a Life Drawing class in Second Life:

http://secondlife.blogs.com/nwn/2005/04/artists_muse.html

Looks fun. (Oh, and raises all sorts of philosophical blah blah blah).

Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, virtual reality

I sat in the gallery, using its wireless network connection. As I formatted up images for my talk, something was nagging at my brain. I looked up at draw-something, projected on the wall to my left. A complete image, no problems. After a couple more minutes in GImp, I got that nagging feeling again. Looking up, I saw that draw-something was still showing the same image.

I counted to twenty. Same image. Another twenty. Same image. They're only meant to display for twenty seconds once drawn.

So I started hacking the copy of the code on my iBook. Maybe I could add a limit to the number of steps the code would take around its guide shape when drawing. I compiled it, it ran, I popped the new version onto the PowerBook driving the projector.

Back to Gimp. But after a while draw-something jammed again. So I went through the code, eventually realising that I'd put a counter increment in the wrong place. I moved it into position, set the count to a ridiculously low value to watch it work,