March 2006 Archives

A little while back, Lessig (rightly) praised The Andy Warhol Foundation for their permissive stance on artists re-appropriating Warhol's media appropriations:

Wired: When Theft Serves Art

But he didn't pick up on the fact that they don't let anyone else use Warhol's work without the usual licensing fees. Even a book like "Dear Images", which is an academic work and with its frequent mention of Warhol and appropriation art can only add to the value of Warhol's ouvre, had to licence its cover image through DACS.

Why have the Foundation taken this position? Warhol appropriated from commerce. Why shouldn't commerce appropriate from Warhol? What higher moral status are we claiming for art, even anti-art, that this is a one-way door here?

An example of a living appropriation artist going all Warhol Foundation on an alleged commercial appropriator is Jack Pierson:

NEWSgrist - where spin is art: Appropriation, Advertising and Misplaced Blog Outrage

Do read the comments below the Tom Moody weblog entry that Joy links to. Artists seem to view this sort of thing differently to lawyers and legal foundations. :-)

Boing Boing: DRM is Killing Music parody of "Home Taping is Killing Music"

Remember how home taping killed music? Ex-actly.

I've just read another apologia from a sampling artist who is releasing their work under a NonCommercial Creative Commons license.

On the face of it this is simple hypocracy. Someone denying others the freedom they themselves are exercising, that of commercial use of appropriated material. Possibly the worst example of this are JibJab.

But if we are arguing that sample-based works or mashups are first-order cultural works, that is works that are as valid as an "original" piece (e.g. a Jeffrey Archer novel or a Britney Speares single), then this is not so clear-cut. Because regardless of the origin of its materials, there is a work here that has as much right to the protection of copy and moral rights as any other. To argue otherwise is to argue against the validity of remix culture.

Asserting copyright on transformative fair use works (in the US, we don't get TFU in the UK :-( ) is an important claim of authorial and artistic validity for remix culture. If exercising TFU is virtuous, then the artist is virtuous by virtue of their having exercised TFU. If every work is derivative anyway then there should be no special penalty or responsibility attached to works that recognise this.

The accruing of rights by sampling artists is therefore a hard-won and important thing. Those artists should be able to handle those rights however they wish.
All that said, you cannot CC license something that you do not hold the rights to. CC licensing is therefore an assertion of rights in itself. And it is simple self-interest for sampling artists to work towards more easily sampled work.

Talk of protecting economic 'rights' or reputation or sticking it to the man is suspect coming from people (the majors would regard as) ripping off recording artists to debase their work with an eye to getting the results into record stores or onto iTMS.

We should not single out sampling artists when considering the ethics of NC. We should not give them any special privilege when considering the ethics of NC. This being the case, sampling artists choosing NC is no worse than anyone else choosing NC, but it certainly isn't any better.

So sampling artists choosing NC still sucks.

• If there are no criteria for art, are there criteria for criteria for art? Some kind of meta criteria (without turtles all the way down), language,  or point design system.
• If conceptualism was the descent of the theoretical superstructure of art into art, what would the intrusion of the managerial context be?

DataIsNature on the (long!) history and the aesthetic value of procedural drawing:

http://dataisnature.com/?p=299

The reason why our plans for freedom work better than other peoples' is that they include a sequence of activities — proof of concept, running code and the solicitation of partnership. First you make it, then it works, then you invite people to make it better.

Most of the people that have struggled for freedom have proposed a utopia — "I know of a place that's never existed, but if we go there it will be better." It turns out that as a mode of constructing freedoms there are problems with that method.

http://insight.zdnet.co.uk/software/linuxunix/0,39020472,39257499-5,00.htm

I will be at the Creative Software conference on Thursday to talk about my art computing work (such as minara and draw-something) and why it is Free Software:

Creative Software

My bio and statement are now on the page.

GNOME Art - Icons

BY-SA SVG icons for the GNOME desktop.

BY-SA SVG icons:

Tango Icon Gallery - Tango Desktop Project

A BY-SA children's book project with SVG illustrations:

Aardvark The Aardvark

So I went to help out at Remix Reading's open access lab two Saturdays ago.

On Tuesday I met up with the extremely cool Jon Philips of Creative Commons (amongst other projects). Then I discussed Ken Wark's "Hacker Manifesto" (buy! buy!) with Tom Chance. Then I discussed free culture with Dave.

On Sunday 19th March I'm hoping to get to Cory Doctorow's last Copyfighters' drunken brunch in the morning then to Dorkfest in the afternoon where I'll be talking about draw-something.

On Thursday 23rd March I'll be talking about my work and discussing art computing with the panel at Cybersalons's Creative Software conference.

Then on Saturday 8th April it's fc-uk's practical free culture meetup, where I hope to talk about free art. I believe I am the first artist to have had an all-copyleft solo show (corrections in the comments section please :-) ).

So this is why I am not blogging very much at the moment. :-)

ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive Project Blog: Media: John K's Storyboard For Stimpy's Invention

Note: this post is tagged free culture but the images in the link are not free. 

"Stimpy's Invention" is a very funny episode of "Ren and Stimpy", the cartoon show that launched the postmodern cartoon genre before being ruined by a change of creative team.
The storyboards are the source code for the cartoon. Well, one of the source codes: the pencil rough animation would be something to see as well. If you're familiar with the episode you can see its the lyrical rhythm and flow even in these still images. And if you're not familiar with it, then you still can. :-)
These are beautiful drawings, and it is a privilege to be able to see them. Which is a shame, as there are so many drawings that we do not have that privilege for.

The Open University in the UK (very good for MBAs apparently) are becoming the first in the UK to offer open content under a Creative Commons Licence:

http://oci.open.ac.uk/pressrelease.html

OK so the Creative Commons licenses look good, but has one ever been tested in a court of law? Yes. And it won:

http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-community/2006-March/000984.html

Our taxes fund the collection of public data - yet we pay again to access it.
Make the data freely available to stimulate innovation, argue Charles Arthur
and Michael Cross.

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1726229,00.html

Benjamin Edwards : Works, Projects, Archive

Wow, wow wow!

This is brilliant!

Excellent post-digital art with an architectural and iconographic emphasis, with lots of public domain illustrations as source material.

Take a look!

Via Happy Famous Artists.

Free society needs free culture.

Free culture needs free networks.

Free networks need free software.

Free software needs free hardware.

Free hardware needs free society.

http://www.wunderland.com/icehouse/Default.html
http://www.zoki.com/
http://www.dvorakgame.co.uk/
http://www.eblong.com/zarf/werewolf.html

http://www.cricro.com/smartdice.html
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/viewitem.php3?gameid=4474

http://www.wunderland.com/LooneyLabs/Fluxx/Default.html
http://www.piecepack.org/
http://www.tjgames.com/

http://kennexions.ludism.org/old/kenning.html

Commons Enterprise Working Group:
Many business, non-profit and public projects use creative commons licenced works to accomplish their mission. A substantial number of these the non-profit and public projects are interested in some type of revenue generation from work under creative commons licences, to ensure sustainability of the projects. These projects are all commons enterprises.
These projects face a number of common challenges including; devising revenue generation models, potential liability for infringement of work by others and possible infringement of the cc licenced work by other people. The learning curve is steep, so to aid us Creative Commons has created a group to discuss these various challenges, sharing experiences and questions from the full range of commons enterprises. Sharing information on commons challenges across a wide spectrum will facilitate mutual learning.

Issues to be discussed include:

• Revenue generation models

• marketing commons enterprises

• Managing diverse licences in composite works

• Potential risks in revenue generation models including:

• Potential liability for copyright infringement of others works

• Infringement of cc licenced works by third parties

• New challenges to commons enterprises

http://www.ludism.org/gbgwiki/GismuGlyph  

Lojban calligrams for a Glass Bead Game implementation.

Excellent.

http://www.sourcelabs.com/blogs/ajb/2006/02/creative_commons_is_broken.html

A thoughtful critique of Creative Commons.

Two points in response to this:

1. CC have worked very hard to produce a definition of "NonCommercial". It is excellent and they are just soliciting feedback before finalising it. See:

http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5752

2. A good example of derivation from CC work can be found here :-) :

http://www.robmyers.org/canto 

The OpenBusiness survey I mentioned is back. And this time you could win an iPod! See:

http://www.openbusiness.cc/2006/03/06/win-an-ipod-from-us/

And they have one of my images from 1969 on their gallery page (along with lots of other good stuff):

http://www.openbusiness.cc/uk/art-gallery-2/

LA Time's rips into Thomas Kinkade AKA "Painter of Light"

Kinkade is the anti-Koons. I once watched him on a shopping channel pitching his DNA-ink encrusted encrustations. For hours. I was drunk. I don't know what his excuse was. Duchamp just exhibited a urinal. Kinkade pissed on Winnie-The-Pooh. In Disneyland. Allegedly.

This reminds me of Wright of Derby's paintings of a tranquil cottage and the same cottage at fire at night:

Photoshop fun with Kinkade paintings