April 2006 Archives

Bloodspell

There's no evidence to show that "piracy" hurts artists' incomes.

So of course:

BloodSpell is released under a "Creative Commons Attribution, No Commercial Use" License.

That clear? Piracy doesn't hurt, so they are releasing the work under a NonCommercial licence. Excuse me whilst I fire up my Che Guevara t-shirt.

Update: Bloodspell's makers tell me that they don't have a licence from Bioware, who make the software they use, to release their work commercially. Since the work is a movie/video, I'm guessing this has more to do with the assets than the engine (it's Neverwinter Nights). But that explains the NC license. And makes it cool that they got it.

I will now do my people's traditional dance of apology and offer various sacrifices to Strange Company.

PingMag - The Tokyo-based magazine about "Design and Making Things" » Archive » Vectors, Hektor and Wobble-Preventing Algorithms

Imagine a horror film about an insane ventriloquist who believes that his possessed dummy is not in fact talking, and that he must speak for it.

It's the business model for Web 2.0:

GBBG - Get Bought By Google

Copyright Culture (Remixed)

Who has the right to borrow, copy, cut, reproduce and remix what, under which circumstances and according to whom?

Copyright, Culture (Remixed) is a series of volumes of short films that looks at the impact that increasingly restrictive copyright laws are having on fair use and the creation of culture.

Remix Reading is hosting a unique art exhibition in the Riverside Museum at Blake's Lock for the weekend of Friday 28th - Sunday 30th April, open from 10am-4pm.

The exhibited artists won our competition that asked artists to remix either the town of Reading or existing works on the Remix Reading web site. Winning entries came from a wide range of individuals, from professional artists to children in a local refugee support group.

All of the works are released under Creative Commons licenses, which allow you to customise your copyright so others can use, share and remix you work. Remix Reading stands in the company of the Beastie Boys, Brazilian culture minister Gilberto Gil and many other supporters of Creative Commons in hosting this exhibition. Visitors are encouraged to create their own remixes of exhibited works and share them on our web site. It was the use of these licenses for the original works that allowed many of the exhibited artists to create their winning entries.

Ali Clark, curator, said: "The exhibition will be a celebration of the diverse culture of Reading, and of the creative freedom promoted by Remix Reading. I hope many people will be inspired to create and share their own remixes with the community."

Details of the exhibition, including the address of the gallery, are here:

http://www.remixreading.org/events

NEWSgrist - where spin is art: Artists' Rights or Copyright Extremism? Miro Estate vs. Google

I meant to blog this but Joy does it better. Moral Rights seem a very important concept to reconcile with Stallmanian Freedom (or Fair Use), but Stallmanian Freedom (or Fair Use) is also a very important concept to reconcile with Moral Rights.
I don't really see why the Miro estate are objecting to free advertising. But then I'm a living artist, so what do I know? :-)

Polite have done an excellent job printing postcards of "belgrade (for manik)", from the series "1969". Email me and I'll send you a few (rob at robmyers dot org). I -er- forgot to put the Creative Commons licence on the back but they are CC licenced. Really.

A relational artist says that I'm with stupid <- .

The trained seal of approval that is Relational Aesthetics (The Institutional Theory + Suspension Of Judgement - Radical Commitment) is unlikely to get its coat based on the chinstroking of Octoberistas. Pointing out that there is someone behind the curtain doesn't help. That someone still has social relations.

Despite Bourriaud's protestatations, RA is deeply, achingly, embarrasingly managerial. It is the managerial mode of regard embodied in materials that managers recognise: assets, particularly human assets.

And RA is auratic. Because without the aura of management -uh- art, what differentiates the social and aesthetic incompetence of RA from just actual social and aesthetic incompetence?

Both these qualities can only increase if people need their passports or whatever as part of the beautific images of managerialism that RA give us as works. Managers' egos will not be deflated by an "art" of ever stronger management of Real People in ever more tighly controlled additions (or revelations) of managerial value (or power) in social situations.

Bishop's assessment of British art criticism in the 1990s is depressingly accurate but there is an account of art from that time that gives us something to work with. Julian Stallabrass's concept of the Urban Pastoral (from "High Art Lite") is far too close to the bone of RA to leave unused.

There's a case to be made that the volume and duration of postings [by a net.art mailer script that accidentally flooded the Rhizome RAW mailing list with spam] makes the work sculpture. That their transgression makes them interrogative of unexamined social norms, which gives them critical content and value. And that this has shocked the bourgeoisie, which you don't get too often these days, making it radical.

To attempt to make that case would be academic narcissism hankering after the decontextualised frisson of an unreflectively transgressive "real". Or would it?

This is the problem with neoconceptualism: would it be if it wasn't? Or rather, is it or isn't it? There's assisted readymades and then there's making something to nominate. The latter is more than a little suspect, a bit like taking a felt pen to a laboratory mouse. If a spam flood attack wouldn't ordinarily be art, which magical aura of art makes this spam flood attack "art"? If this en-arted (created, nominated) spam flood attack is art, can I nominate any real (authentic!) spam flood attack as (better!) art? Particularly one I might (or might not) unleash on the artist as an appropriation of their ouvre to index its (presumably) vitally important content. Surely the Sistine Chapel Ceiling of this particular genre would be a DDoS on the server hosting the project (chosen randomly from a list of one).

Yeah, this (RAW) is the audience to expect to chin-stroke to the bone over a (simulated?) flood attack. If we can ever be bothered to work out whether the skript is functioning as intended or this is just technical as well as conceptual incompetence. Where can we get the source?

The Tate buying a monoprint by someone who simply cannot draw is not the same as Rhizome Raw being graced by the genius of a would-be skript kiddie (please not "hacker", we'll be at "hacktivism" next and then I will have to stab someone to death with their conference name badge). And I say this as someone who can bang out a decent nude as well as a decent killfile entry.

I, for one, welcome our new net.prick overlords.

Pawfal :: FluxusNotes

Fluxus is an amazing realtime coding enviroment that uses Scheme and OpenGL. Like a 3D Minara for livecoding, only much more highly developed.

Prominent VC: Abolish software patents!

When even venture capitalists start attacking software patents, and Paul Graham starts defending them, you know something is wrong.

How Sun's "open DRM" dooms them and all they touch

The important part is the truth of the "DRM", not the lie of the "open". Finding the middle ground between DRM and freedom is like finding the most palatable mix of excrement and ice cream.

Copyright maximalist troll gets screwed by DRM

Losing all your course materials thanks to DRM should give you some kind of hint that DRM is not entirely benign.

REVIEW: Lev Manovich on Remix Culture, by Trebor Scholz

Wasn't Lev big on new media art a little while back? More people seem to be making the jump (although I still get more Art Computing gigs than Free Culture gigs).

More free culture meetups

Tom Chance on free culture meetups in the UK. Things are definitely picking up here now.

CC travel sites acquired | Creative Commons

Can I just echo what Mike says, I couldn't put any of it better myself.

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Calcutta's colourless campaign

The social and economic impact of banning political art.

Boing Boing: GW Bush's iPod contains "illegal" (according to RIAA) music

Will they tell him to drop out of college to pay for the fines? Oh, wait...

Rhizome.org: Diagram, Procedure, Algorithm

But Processing is still a tough swallow apparently for many that have an artistic past steeped in other environments. There is also a (somewhat justified) fear of visually (and procedurally) formatting the art to a specific school of thought.

When I was in Belgrade last year I appeared on an arts program to talk about my work, Creative Commons, and Free Software. I gave a lecture on the same topics, which was recorded and ended up being used in the program as well. MANIK also very kindly talked about my work, but I haven't screengrabbed them.

Click on each image for a larger version.

Complicit art is radicalism to radicalism (two lefts make a right). It is a way of shocking the bourgeoisie when the chattering classes are all as radical as fuck. The complicity of shocking the complicit bourgeoisie with radicalism (modernism) simply swapped for the complicity of shocking the radical bourgeoisie with complicity (relational aesthetics). This is as naive a negativity as that alleged for modernism. Nothing to see here, move along.

But be careful what you wish for. The managerial aura of Relational Aesthetics, like the still life of fruit on a merchant's wall, is a presentation of what is absent. And what is absent in the age of Complicit Art is a unified masses that is an unreflective market for the mass media that CA desperately aurates. In real life it is winter, the fruit is gone. The flesh has withered on the face that remains youthful in the portrait. There is a riot on the other side of the wall on which the gridded canvas hangs. We all have weblogs.

Complicit Art is the Venetian landscape for those unwilling or unable to take the grand tour, the pr0n site for the Slashdotter. This is not a reassuring lullaby, a harmless deathbead lie, this is a snuff movie. You don't have to do criticism to be critique. There is something wrong about a world with Paris Hilton in it.

What would be unforgivable would be to abandon reflexive awareness, to fail to animate the world of references created in the work (is this managerial?). Sometimes careerist opportunism is just careerist opportunism. But sometimes it is Jeff Koons.

Ro-co-co.

I comment on "We-Make-Open-Source-Not-Money" at MAzine

This is related to the "How To Make Money Off Copyleft Art" wiki entry.

Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog

And moft fyne it is. Feer Chaucer's 1337 middel English skylls!

The review of Chris Ashley's HTML drawings that I wrote for Furtherfield is now live:

Look, See. (2006) - Chris Ashley

And Chris has posted a review of my review:

Essay at Furtherfield by Rob Myers

Read both and hopefully get an insight into some excellent art.

I bought one of these and used it to take notes at the fc-uk meetup:

Clairefontaine Recto Verso Polypro

I like the covers. They look kinda familiar:

Inbetween Cities

We must have both been Designers Republic fans in the early 1990s. :-)

The free culture and free software threads of my work have a commonality. Both are post-scarcity strategies. A program like draw-something can generate everyone in the world as many images as they like. Its work is not scarce. A series like Canto draws on a world already saturated with images as its nature.
I do not make any claims about the idea of a post-scarcity society. Just that this work exists in or creates a limited domain of post-scarcity.

artblog

Good critical take on a talk by the excellent Jeff Koons.

How to make money off copyleft art (with examples):

http://www.robmyers.org/wiki/index.php/How_To_Get_Paid_For_Copyleft_Art 

Examples of online collaborative art systems:

http://www.robmyers.org/wiki/index.php/Online_Collaboration 

Bid on a genuine British identity on eBay:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=9507150481&fromMakeTrack=true 

Teri Sue Wood's WANDERING STAR!

Wonderful comic from a wonderful artist, now being presented online.

Take a look.

Chris Ashley on "Will Fair Use Survive"

Good article link.

Artliberated.org

Case studies in chilling effects and censorship on images.

Come to a Free Culture UK meetup Limehouse Town Hall this Saturday, 11am-6pm:

http://www.freeculture.org.uk/meetings/2006-04-08

This informal meetup and talking shop is the follow up to the first one at my house a couple of months ago. Kinda. :-)

Copyright is an account of the value of art. It is a descriptive system, and is meant to be a complete system, it even accounts for the (lack of) value of work outside its scheme.

This makes copyright an aesthetics, or at least an analogue to aesthetics. This may be one of the reasons why it is of interest to artists and to philosophers.

Fans being denied access to something they've helped make great. But not music fans this time, sports fans:

http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/CA6321064.html?title=Article&spacedesc=news

http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/news/recent_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002275742

Via Mitch Featherston.

I passed my driving test.

wOOF!