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"Media companies are currently falling over themselves to produce the new hive for user generated content. [...] But free beer, as Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman has always emphasised, is not the same as freedom."
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"RETAIL is supposed to be hard. Apple has made it seem ridiculously easy. And yet it must be harder than it appears, or why hasn’t the Windows side of the personal computer business figured it out?"
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Podnosh Blog : High Fibre Podcasting » Archive » Open source tendering - New Model or New Madness?"an online open source collaborative tender for the £1.2 million Cabinet Office programme to create an Innovation Exchange for the Voluntary Sector."
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"In a sign of Russian paranoia about satirising public figures, customs officials turned away six works of art, two featuring the president."
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"The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library"
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"A group weblog on philosophy of art and its various relationships to mind, ethics, and culture."
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Official Ernst Gombrich archive website.
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A philosophy weblog.
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A brilliant blog post on why CC Licenses just aren't right for code.
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A Free Software white paper on "Bugs in the Distribution Business and Recommendations About How to Fix Them"
May 2007 Archives
If we assume that artworks are artefacts designed to stimulate aesthetic responses they are effectively artificial stimulation devices for eyes. They are ocular dildos; eyedongs designed to bring about Duchamp's retinal shudder, the tingle that Goodman disparaged.
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, satire
Hypothesis: The aesthetic aura of art as identified by Walter Benjamin will result in anomalous electromagnetic field readings around artworks. This will vary according to the aesthetic quality of the artwork. We base this claim on results from paranormal research. Ghosts, like aesthetic value, are intangible, yet they manifest anomalous electromagnetic field readings during hauntings.
Subject: A show of abstract paintings by two painters exhibited in a representative regional museum/gallery space.
Equipment: An EMF meter with analogue read-out and separate sensor probe.
Notation: A or B are the artist. A-E is the aesthetic quality of the work, where E is low and A is high. The numeric value is the strength of the EMF in Milligauses.
Data: Readings at approx. 5cm from the surface of the painting.
A1:D/0.05
A2:C/0.05
A3:D/0.1
A4:E/0.05
A5:D/0.1
A6:D/0.05
A7:D/0.05
A8:E/0.05
A9:E/0.05
A10:E/0.05
A11:D/0.06
A12:D/0.05
A13:C/0.1
A14:D/0.05
1:D/0.05
2:D/0.05
3:D/0.05
4:D/0.1
5: -
6:D/0.06
7:D/0.05
8:C/0.1
9:C/0.1
10:D/0.075
11:C/0.1
12:D/0.05
13:C/0.06
14: -
15:D/0.05
16:C/0.2
17:D/0.05
18:E/0.1
19:D/0.06
20:D/0.05
21:C/0.05
22:E/0.0
23:C/0.05
24:-
25:D/0.05
26:D/0.075
Analysis:
The 0.05 reading seems to be the background level.
The meter's other setting (H rather than N) shows a drop when pointed at paintings.
The needle wobbles when the probe is moved towards or away from the painting. Is this because the probe is moving through static radial layers of the aesthetic field?
There is a broad correlation between higher aesthetic score and a higher EMF. Exceptions to this might be due to the personal subjectivity involved in assigning an aesthetic value to work. This is one good reason why using EMF readings to evaluate a work is desirable.
Perhaps readings should be tried at an ideal viewing distance.
Should the EMF reading be scaled by the size of the work?
Conclusions:
There does seem to be some correlation between aesthetic value and EMF field strength.
Further research should be undertaken. Anti-aesthetic work (such as readymades) and more highly aesthetic work (such as Old Masters) should especially be examined.
Technorati Tags: 'pataphysics, aesthetics, paranormal, satire
http://www.robmyers.org/art/like_that/
More "Like That". These ones extend the logic of the two dimensional pieces into three dimensions.
The next pieces will have different motion logic and start introducing symbols.
Technorati Tags: art, art computing, generative art, graphics, hacking, processing
Abstract graphics looping on a computer screen will be seen as screensavers. Even relatively sophisticated digital artworks will be seen unproblematically as screensavers if you make them into an Xscreensaver module. Being seen as a screensaver is problematic if what is being seen as one does not wish to engage with what that means.
Screensavers are trivial distractions for the office. They are contemporary cabinet paintings. They are kitsch, mass-distributed industrialized creativity. Some display useful information or perfrom useful tasks, but they are still not being used by the computer's user to achieve something. They make computing machinery into decoration, and decoration into a mis-use of computing machinery.
"Like That" is abstract, colourful and time-based. It suffers from a strong threat of screensaveriness. Hopefully much of it is too awkward and too referential to high art to succumb entirely to screensaveriness. Hopefully the rest of it will suffer from virtue by association. Any lingering screensaveriness will hopefully be stripped out by appearing windowed on web pages or wall-sized as video projections.
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, generative art, art computing
Also at KIAD was David Platt:
http://www.davidplattartist.co.uk/
David's an astonishingly good painter and philosopher.
His heptalectical logic is a "supplementary world view", very 'pataphysical:
And he was the first person I met who was big on Adorno:
Take a look.
Technorati Tags: 'pataphysics, aesthetics, art, philosophy
Free Software as described by Stallman comes from the fact that software is functional, it is basically a machine. A novel, a play, a painting or a concerto are not functional, they are not machines. So we cannot use the same arguments that Stallman advances for software, and the freedoms are not necessarily the same. For cultural artefacts represented as software, Stallman's freedoms do apply but this is because the work is software. The claims of some artists that blahblahblah do not change this.
For cultural work in general you do actually need very similar freedoms to those that you need for software. This is partly an accident (source code is regarded as literary work for the purposes of copyright) and partly because public culture in an open society must not close off comment, critique, study or succession. This requires that you be free to analyse, copy and modify the work.
The minimal freedom that you need for cultural works is Extended Fair Use (XFU) as described by Negativland. I think that Stallman and Lessig agree on this despite Stallman's writing about functional, opinion and expressive works (Stallman's simple "you can copy this essay unmodified" license should make its support for Fair Use explicit). Copyleft is a superset of XFU, it gives you all the freedom of XFU and more, but it frightens the horses economically speaking.
I agree that it does not make sense to try to live on Free Culture alone. Reform is needed in the mainstream, we cannot reproduce the last 70 years of culture in the way that the GNU project has recreated a functional equivalent of UNIX. There is no functional equivalency in culture, and there is no way we can catch up on seventy years worth of work in every medium rather than fifteen years worth of work in a single medium (as UNIX was in 1984). It is very important to lobby for legal reform in the name of Free Culture.
But this does not make alternative licenses useless by any means. We can use Free Software's tactic of producing a free alternative in order to place pressure on a proprietary project could be effective. The existence of a pool of self-identified freedom can show the need for broader freedom when lobbying. And it may be ethical to produce one's own work with the freedom that one would wish to enjoy generally.
Via FC-Discuss. Paragraph 2 is a concise statement of a much longer essay I am working on.
Technorati Tags: free culture, free software
I have an electromagnetic field meter and there's a show of abstract art on in town. I'm going looking for the aura of art.
The thinking behind this is simple. Ghosts cannot be recorded by conventional means but paranormal researchers report that hauntings are often accompanied by anomalous electromagnetic field fluctuations. Like ghosts, the aura of art is intangible So if artworks have an aesthetic aura we would expect to see this manifesting in similar electromagnetic phenomena to ghosts. Additionally we would expect the phenomena to be stronger for more aesthetic works and weaker for less aesthetic works.
By grading works aesthetically, recording any change in electromagnetic field strength around them, and then correlating the results we can gather proof for the aura of art. This can then be compared against data collected on works that claim to be non-auratic such as dadaist and conceptual art.
The danger in gathering such data is that it could be used to create a damping field for the aura of art, or even perhaps a "Ghostbusters"-style trap or containment system for the aura. I'm certainly not proposing firing high-energy particle beams at artworks. Unless they're by Tracey Emin or Gavin Turk.
This project is brought to you by SPAR (the Society for Paranormal Aesthetic Research).
Technorati Tags: 'pataphysics, aesthetics, paranormal, satire
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"a study into how Creative Commons licences, or their equivalent, might be deployed at project,service or institutional level by organisations within the Common Information Environment. This study is being funded by Becta, the British Library, DfES, JISC
Have a look at the base of this Marcel Duchamp readymade from 1920.
I think that the assertion of copyright is being used here to help assert the reality of an imaginary personality, an imaginary author (Duchamp's alter ego Rose Selavy).
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, free culture
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Free Screwdrivers isn't such a fanciful idea
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"The Case Against Homework" is a fine and frightening explosion of the homework myth
This weblog has a BY-SA 3.0 licence at the bottom.
Anything I write and any of my images that I can BY-SA are covered by this licence.
Any third party quotes and third party images are not.
This is the same as an all rights reserved weblog, where any quotes or review images retain their original copyright.
Any code snippets are not BY-SA either. Friends don't make friends CC-licence code.
Wendy Smith was my history of art (OK, OK, cultural studies) tutor at KIAD. She's cool. She has a web site that has some of her art on it:
http://www.wesmith.co.uk/
Take a look.
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art
"Portrait of George W. Bush in the style of Jackson Pollock's 'Number 5', 1948", 2006, is a painting of the current president of the U.S.A executed in the manner of an Jackson Pollock action painting. This refers back to the paintings of Socialist Realist images of Lenin that Art & Language (A&L) executed in the style of Pollock in the early 1980s. Those images brought two opposed ideologies into collision within the same image, synthesizing a dialectic. So does this one.
The Cold War was still being played out in the early 1980s. Socialist Realism was the state art of the USSR and Abstract Expressionism was the high-water mark of American art. Lenin and Pollock were iconography of the mutually reinforcing and self-deceiving public faces of state capitalism and market capitalism. Putting the two in conflict criticised these self-and-other-images. But the map of the world seems to look very different now. Lenin has been disinterred and Pollock is admired for his surplus value not his inner necessity.
Bush is now the other of Pollock. Pollock, the epitome of rugged American democratic individualism and freedom. Bush, the epitome of privileged incompetence and reactionary illiberalism. A grinning idiot rather than a stern-faced revolutionary. This is not a picture of two drunks, it is a picture of two different historical periods. It is an historical dialectic. It is not that history has ended and that the world is politically unipolar. It is just that the best critical resources for America come from its own history, not from religious or nationalistic reactionaries.
There is a "map" of the painting, so this isn't a visual puzzle where the trick is to find the image hidden in the drips. The portrait of Bush doesn't seem like a straight travesty of A&L's earlier work, like the hybrid or historically bogus images that made up part of "Homes From Homes". A&L don't refer to their own earlier work in the title, instead they refer to the Pollock directly as the earlier series did. This sets the opposition between Pollock and (media representations of) Bush rather than between Bush and earlier A&L work. The latter would not have the same power.
It is true and illuminating that Bush is the illiberty to Pollock's freedom, but there is potentially more to the substitution of Bush for Lenin. Bush serves the same place in much mainstream leftist thought that Lenin once did. He is the icon, the person who determines how you are meant to think. But he is an icon for everything that is wrong in the world, and the person who determines how you must not think. Moral virtue simply consists in opposing everything that Bush is regarded as standing for during working hours. If that opposition is to erstwhile leftist values, so be it. Bush is a come-down from the world-changing words and actions of Lenin. He has the opposition he deserves in the form of an opportunistic, incoherent and part-time left-on-your-behalf that keeps the forms of opposition having long since discarded the social content that originally led to those forms. This is the "we" of "we are all Hezbollah now".
Political Art is big again, but it is generally an art of mindless petulance and vapid recycling of established iconographic and technical resources. It is untransformative market-friendly gestures of resistance to whatever is actually being done at the time. It is hippy wigs at Woolworths. A&L's Bush serves not as a parody of this so much as an example of how to do it right, how to produce an art that is aware and raises awareness, that gives the viewer something to think about that they have not thought about a hundred times before. It may just be a reacion to too-much, on the order of A&L's song "Prisoner's Model". But even if that's all it is, this is how you do it.
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, critique, review
"Songs Held In Offices", 2006, is a seried of works by Art & Language (A&L). They consists of colourful paper chains mounted in shallow wooden vitrines. The chains are modernist in their coloured formality, set in minimalist boxes. The effect is a kind of Art Povera postmodernism. Until you consider what the chains mean.
The chain-link looped strips of coloured paper are a kitsch decoration for cheap parties. They are ideal for transforming the office into the site of a crazy party. They are decoration and an inducement to social activity, to human relations. In these works they are frozen and sealed into wooden boxes, stretching across a shallow white space that they are mounted to either side of. There's a literal reading to be had of the work with the paper chains somehow representing songs and the shallow featureless space representing an office.
From reading A&L's writing about previous projects it is obvious that the title is from the text of a sado-masochistic pornographic novel. Originally it read "dongs held in orifices", but Mrs. Malaprop got to it. The loaded fantasy of interpersonal relations is rendered inept. Songs in offices implies an office party, which reinforces the idea of an office party.
Perhaps these chains are a record of social acivity. If so they have missed the point, parties are a collection of people, not a set of decorations. Perhaps they are meant to induce social activity. If so they have missed the point, they are too sterile and in too sterile a place in the gallery to accompany a party, and in themselves have not the power to start a party. They are indices of social activity, but to what end it is hard to say. They would look different during the private view, but we are not all invited to that. Ironically they will have caused that particular social context by being part of the work on display, but they will have done so only in as much as non-relational art does.
This is the social illiteracy of the managerialism-that-protests-too-much of Relational Art laid bare. The happenings and flea-markets of Relationalism are a socially exclusionary art hiding behind gestures of democracy and collaboration. Only the rich and/or well connected can afford to participate in the actual event or to buy a record of it. Relationalism looks like crowd-sourced art as Koons's art was outsourced art and Warhol's was mass-produced art. It is not. It is a socioeconomic allegory, but a mystificatory and inept one. Don't look behind the curtain. This is not crowdsourcing, it is art by Steve Jobs.
These are embarrassing photos of Relationalism trying to dance at the office party. The competent Relational viewer will be frustrated and excluded by the work. The rest of us are actually given something to talk about amongst ourselves by it, although the Relationalist may not like what we have to say.
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, critique, review
"Like That" now has a page in the art section of my site:
http://www.robmyers.org/art/like_that/
As it says, this is a work in progress. First up are the simple coloured square burst pieces.
Technorati Tags: art, generative art, processing
Two of the most interesting pieces of writing on art that I know of are misunderstandings of paintings by Art & Language (A&L).
A review of the later series of "Hostages" that I now forget the details of made the mistake of treating the paintings as metaphors for a literal hostage situation. The relations of figure and ground were taken as indicating the uncertainties of unfolding reposts of a hostage situation. What is interesting is that the reviewer saw the painting as constructed of these relations but didn't see (or read) what they represent.
A review of "Index: The Studio At 3 Wesley Place (Painted By Mouth)" by Barbara Kruger made the mistake of judging the painting from a black & white photograph. This renders her confident disparaging of the technical effects of the work funny, and her consideration of the work's content and ambitions bogus.
I mention these reviews because I am probably about to make the same mistakes as both. I don't have access to Art & Language's writings about their latest work and I am going to be looking at photographs of them. A&L's work is always rewarding in real life whether or not you are in on its textual content, but some of it is designed to resist reproduction. I am deliberately opening myself to embarrassment here. Hopefully A&L will have a show at the Lisson soon and I'll be able to find out just how embarrassed I should be.
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, review
One of the advantages of Free Screwdrivers is that anyone can screw together anything they want. To some this will appear as a novel technological and social phenomenon rather than as simple reform. For corporations this novel phenomenon is another example of society's progress that can be rerouted into private profit. They could just let their products be opened or taken apart freely by anyone with a screwdriver, but this will not directly maximize shareholder value. So they set up special events and organizations to induce and capture this new value.
To corporations this obviously has nothing to do with screwdriver freedom. They are in charge, it is their playground and their ball. Any idiot can use free screwdrivers, and they can use them to screw up anything they want. A corporate-sponsored event isn't Free Screwdrivers, it is an Idiot Screw-Up.
Some people may not like being called idiots, and some may not like being told that what they are doing is screwing up. These people are most likely thieves, and so should be ignored.
Some people may not like the fact that because they are regarded as idiots and because what they do is regarded as screwing up the corporations regard it as of no value to them and take it without giving them any rights over it. These people misunderstand how little what they do is worth compared to what the coporation originally provided, and can be ignored as commies.
Idiot Screw Ups provide less shareholder value than the old fashioned way of doing things (sic). That both the increasingly untenable old fashioned way of doing things and the half-hearted embracing the new of Idiot Screw-Ups do not provide as much shareholder value as just letting people tinker and help their friends as they always have done relative to technology is neither here nor there.
Technorati Tags: critique, free culture, free software, satire
People who see or construct the need for a market friendly name to replace "Free Screwdrivers" can look at incidental features or epiphenomena of screwdriver freedom for inspiration. Screwdrivers are a kind of tool. And restricting their use makes them functionally incomplete. So a good market friendly replacement for "Free Screwdrivers" would be "Complete Tools".
This will cause confusions of its own. How exactly do you ensure a tool is complete, surely any tool that has been manufactured is complete when its manufacture is finished? What happens if you are using a screwdriver as a tool other than the one it is meant to be (e.g. as a lever or chisel), is it still a tool?
This will also spread confusion further into society. Artists will start using paintings as ironing boards and producing ever more elaborate gesamtkunstwerks. Activists will protest at corporations that don't sell Swiss Army Knives. Philosophers will produce lengthy tracts attempting to combine functionalism with completeness under Lacan or set theory.
Despite all this confusion, those who abandon the Free Screwdrivers banner and brand as zealots any who fail to agree with them will not get any richer than they would have otherwise. Sadly for them, nobody wants to be associated with complete tools.
Technorati Tags: free culture, free software, satire
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"Death to the brainstorm. Long live great ideas."
Some people might argue that the ability to stop other people from using screwdrivers freely is such an important freedom that to remove this freedom is the worst imaginable ethical harm imaginable, far worse than just removing the freedom to use screwdrivers. They should read Mill or Berlin.
Some people might not like the idea of defending the ability to use screwdrivers freely but may still want to be able to try to undercut expensive unfree screwdrivers. They would come up with a more market-friendly name that avoids the "confusion" of mentioning ethics. They should read Jemima Puddleduck.
Some people might argue that scrwdrivers with strange new shapes, added prongs or holes, different sized heads are not enough like older screwdrivers to make their use a matter of freedom. Likewise if existing legal and economic strategies to prevent people using screwdrivers freely were defeated and screwdrivers that explode when you turn them the wrong way to prevent you using them as you wish were created in response these same people would argue that we are concerned with the freedom to use screwdrivers, not the freedom to not be affected by explosive devices. They should read debian-legal.
Some people might decide that the techniques used to protect people's ability to use screwdrivers are interesting and try to apply them to art or activism. But they would quickly find themselves confused if they concentrated on the ways in which this freedom is manifested rather than on the general goal of freedom. The result would be endless arguments over whether art should be cross- or flat- headed and whether activists should try to have a clockwise or anticlockwise thread. Whatever they read, they shouldn't read Eric Raymond.
Technorati Tags: critique, free culture, satire
"User Generated Content" (UGC) is one of the worst misunderstandings of (or substitutes for) Free Culture. It is a description of some the effects of Free Culture as observed by corporate interests and translated into terms comprehensible to them. Like "Open Source" it is a meaningless and counterproductive misdescription.
Under certain conditions, "users" will be able to create "content". Under certain conditions this enabling can be corporate. And under certain conditions this can be of benefit to either the users, the corporation, or both.
The temptation is to assume that these conditions must be created economically. Once these conditions have been created economically, any failure to directly capture the value created by these conditions is a loss. And anyone who benefits from that loss is stealing value from the corporation.
To prevent this loss, technological and legal restrictions must be part of the economic conditions. Technologically, large "walled garden" internet servers must be set up to ensure that all UGC and thereby all UGC's value is returned directly to the corporation. Legally, the source materials provided to users must be carefully licensed to prevent redistribution or sale, and the user's contributions must belong unquestionably to the corporation in order to ensure that all UGC and thereby all UGC's value is returned directly to the corporation.
The result is happy users, who get to generate content, and a happy corporation, which gets lots of new value while losing none. Nobody loses, and there is no disruption or threat to the corporation's communications despite their adoption of radical new methods.
This logic is as seductive as it is wrong. This is not the adoption of radical new methods, it is their neutralization.
UGC in fact means that everybody loses. The users lose by being reduced to sharecroppers (to use Lawrence Lessig's term) who provide their labour for free. The corporation loses by stifling the creation of the very value that the exercise is meant to create.
The second point may seem counterintuitive. How can keeping value reduce value? In two ways. Firstly, the most competent potential producers of "content" are (semi-)professionals and students, who will understand the law well enough not to lose the rights to their own work in return for nothing. Secondly, the value of such "content" is in its spreading and improving of your communications, in its free circulation and derivation on the internet. UGC strategies are a search for value, so restricting the potential search space is self defeating.
To create a scenario in which everybody wins, forget about UGC. Think of how to encourage the individuals who encounter corporate media communications to engage with and be affected by those communications. To encourage people to talk about you requires that you allow them to talk about you. To do this requires not a glossy website but a guarantee of a few basic rights. To maximize the benefit of this requires helping their speech spread and gain further comment. Again this requires not a multi-page restrictive legal covenant but a guarantee of a few basic rights.
Rather than undertaking expensive and restrictive UGC initiatives, open your archives or release your latest advertising under a copyleft license such as the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license (BY-SA). Don't try to restrict usage. Trademark, libel and other laws are unaffected by BY-SA, and it makes no sense to restrict commercial use of something that you don't charge for. If a competitor uses your materials, the beauty of BY-SA is that you get to use the results in return, and the same goes for any groups critical of your corporation's activities for whatever reason.
If your communications are engaging they will end up on sites across the internet, saving you bandwidth, finding unexpected niches, and spreading your communications further than if they remain on a single site. They will also see mash-ups, commentaries and parodies, finding new ways of reaching new audiences and keeping established audiences interested.
For corporations, Free Culture is a way of starting cascading conversations. These conversations are a more efective way of communicating than the spelling bee mentality of UGC contests and the tannoy mentality of a mass media that consumers are increasingly ignoring.
Technorati Tags: critique, design, free culture
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Art & Language's latest work on Spanish TV.
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A & L on top form with works including a Pollock portrait of Dubya. Click on the works link for images.
The current sub-Lacanian anti-philosophical wunderkind clutched to the bosom of the unemployable theory fetishists of academia is Zizek. The world of haute couture is as nothing compared to the lockstep crazes and seasonal tastes of the humanities faculty.
Those of you still trying to slip more references to Hardt and Negri's Empire into each sentence than your workmates will have to book a month or two off, this man can write impenetrable theory-like verbiage in such volume that individual sheets could have been dropped on Parisian May '68 rioters to intimidate them intellectually.
Get with the programme people!
(What is it with Lacan? The obvious falsity of his nonsense seems only to inspire his acolytes to greater conviction.)
The dialectical possibilities presented by BLAHY [i.e. Young British Art] and its others are highly fugitive. British sculpture in the grand manner confers necessity on the Chapman brothers, just as the post-structuralist academy compels the existence of Practical Uses for Theoretical Essays. The necessity disappears as soon as it is identified. The artistic matter of BLAHY is marked with the philistine and the everyday all over. It is simultaneously inflected with the rebarbative aesthetics of adolescence and public relations. The useful stuff is swallowed by its empty self-description and by the barbarities of its distribution. BANK is almost alone in recognising the practical significance of the contradictions involved.
- Art & Language, "BLAHY".
It is universally recognised that the Chapmans are quite serious. So is the average teenage poet. They are the twin Adrian Moles of art.
When I was working at the ICA they were putting up Chapmanworld. Out of politeness I declined to talk to an American camera crew. I didn't say "It's trying to pretend that it's not trying to shock, and it's failing. It's tired, academic, adolescent bollocks of the lowest order. It will go far."
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The trend of OTT reviews for books that don't deserve them continues
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"a critical review and journal of the arts in Second Life"
The name "like that" comes from two places. The first is the remix of the Run DMC song "That's The Way It Is". The second is from my youngest son's use of "like that!" as a general assertion when he was little (equivalent to "really!" or "I'm serious!").
The colour schemes are: white (actually grey) from Rachel Whiteread's "House", multicoloured (randomly) from Julian Opie's "Imagine You can Order These", (caucausian) flesh pink (from Jeff Koons and from Art & Language's "Now They Are), black (actually grey) from Malevich, and red yellow blue and black from De Stijl.
The forms are squares (from any modernist work), cubes (ditto, but with special reference to Opie's modernist deconstruction), circles (from more practical data visualization), arrows, and silhouettes of various real-world objects.
The compositional schemes are a simple scatter burst, a radial burst, and various kaleidoscope schemes.
The intent is to create visual allegories for various experiences and activities and conditions. Events, travel, war, art, various aspects of social history notably to do with race and sexuality.
This is a sequel of sorts to Inbetween Cities, strongly influenced by yBA art but with an emphasis on a kind of temporal grammar or rhythm all of its own. It is far simpler visually than technology currently allows (I am always a late early adopter) but hopefully far subtler and richer.
It is haunted by the kitsch spectre of screensavers, but hopefully rescued from this by its failure as distracting spectacle. If it doesn't end up far enough from Inbetween cities it will be a failure. It is not object orient and is neither chaotic nor anti-war. The possibility of success requires the possibility of failure, even its likelihood. I have a lot to pull together and move beyond here.
It is GPL licensed.
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I'd love to see someone force a Bridgeman vs. Corel in the UK by doing this to all the photographs of long-out-of-copyright paintings on the Tate site.
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" Now Linux users are being offered a "patent peace" with Microsoft in a very similar way, only this time, it's supposedly patents backing up the threat. Or is it? Let's see if we can quantify. First, on the patent study Microsoft misquotes, here's what i
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"Harper's Magazine's Gideon Lewis-Kraus spent a lot of time with us and wrote a smart (and kind) piece about Prelinger Library and where he thinks it's pointing."
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"Dalà pitching Lanvin chocolates and Veterano brandy. There are others on the YouTube page too!"
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OK that's just generally not right.
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IP Maximalism raises its head again in the UK parliament. Write to your MP!
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Does what it says on the tin.
Write to your MP now to support the Gowers Report recommendations and to oppose this well-meaning but fatally flawed example of IP maximalism.
Two little bats were flying around the garden last night.
I like bats.
Look out honey 'cause I'm using technology
Ain't got time to make no apology
- Iggy Pop, "Search And Destroy", sample used on Utah Saints, "Techknowlegy."
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"radioactive and decomposing cityscapes of post-apocalyptic Tokyo" Reminiscent of that old series of images of abandoned nuclear power stations.
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"Hammer Horror Group, the cult film production company, has been acquired by a consortium led by John de Mol, the Dutch media billionaire who revolutionised TV worldwide with Big Brother."
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"Brit horror studio Hammer Film Productions, best known for the Quatermass franchise and a string of '50s and '60s flicks that featured the likes of Dracula, Frankenstein and the Mummy, is being brought back from the dead by producer John De Mol."
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"After seeing the difference between American and Japanese emoticons, it dawned on me that the faces looked exactly like typical American and Japanese smiles,"
The UK has three different legal systems; one for England & Wales, one for Scotland, and one for Northern Ireland. All three are common law systems, and for copyright they have had to incorporate the Berne Convention and various European Union directives which makes the copyright law quite similar. But we do have separate Creative Commons licenses for England & Wales and for Scotland for example. For an (inaccurate) American comparison the three legal systems are like state law, with the EU as Federal law.
The UK has Fair Dealing rather than Fair Use. Fair Dealing is much, much weaker than Fair Use from a Free Culture point of view. There aren't that many rights under Fair Dealing for DRM to restrict.
Fair Use and Fair Dealing are both examples of exceptions to copyright. Exceptions to copyright are allowed by the Berne Convention:
http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/berne/trtdocs_wo001.html#P140_25350
Fair Use is a generic exception, where use has to pass a four-point test to be allowed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#Fair_use_under_United_States_law
Fair Dealing is a series of specific exceptions, where use has to be explicitly mentioned in law to be allowed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing
Fair Dealing in the UK has been reduced over the years to the point where it now just covers copying for academic research and time shifting. Oh, and review and criticism. We have no right of personal copying or format shifting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_Kingdom#Fair_dealing_and_other_exceptions
We are hopefully getting some more Fair Use-like exceptions for parody and transformative use, as well as format shifting, as a result of the Gowers Review of "Intellectual Property":
So that's the state of play for copyright exceptions in the UK.
(Revised from a post to FC-discuss.)
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"So we tried an experiment -- we tried implementing Agile Marketing."
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Why the fuck is "their software is Open Source" a weakness? Lack of user contribution, centralization and other issues are solid criticisms though.
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"Agile marketing is about flexible ideas and tactics and using existing relationships to deliver value to current and potential clients through the medium of the internet."
The new series (of Processing work) now has a title: "Like That".
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"Western governments are granting patents, trademarks, and copyrights over yoga to con-artists who claim to have invented the millennia-old practice. The Indian government is retaliating by publishing a giant, multi-lingual database of yoga-stuff"
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"The BBC Trust -- the organisation that oversees the BBC's operations -- has driven another nail into the BBC's relevancy for the 21st century today by giving the broadcaster permission to use DRM on its online offerings."
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"Whilst I’ve been working on a longer text about the relationship between agile software development and comedy, I spotted this clip via Kottke."
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iCommons » Blog Archive » Art Intercom: featuring painter, Joy Garnett
To me painting has always been a remix. It is a really old technology that excels at remixing. But the remixing has to do with the eye, the hand, the memory…
Good interview with the excellent Joy Garnett at iCommons. Her current show, "Strange Weather" looks wonderful as well.
Look, See: May 06, 2007 - May 12, 2007 Archives
A little while ago I wrote a review of Chris Ashley's weblog "Look, See" for Furtherfield.
Chris has continued making engaging art in HTML at a phenomenal rate . His current images with their drop shadows and eight-bit-looking palettes are wonderful.
Do take a look.
Boing Boing: Stephen Fry Talking Clock goes Creative Commons
Dave talked the manufacturers of the Stephen Fry Talking Clock into releasing their Stephen Fry samples as open, Creative Commons licensed clips
One of the very useful thought experiments that we discussed during the Creative Commons 3.0 licenses debate on the cc-licenses mailing list was what happened if a musical snowglobe used CC licensed music coded into its ROM and played through its piezo speaker.
With the Stephen Fry clock the rightsholder is both making the embedded electronics and licensing the samples, so there's no problem. But this is close enough to life imitating thought experiment that I found it amusing.
Pere Ubu (Pa Ubu) is the protagonist of several of French writer Alfred Jarry's more absurdist plays. Ubu is a violent buffoon who is sometimes the King of Poland, sometimes a galley slave and always engaged in some scheme. On his enormous belly is a spiral, his umbilicus.
Here's the logo of the popular Free Software distro Debian:
Yes, it's an umbilicus.
There's a very popular derivative of Debian called Ubuntu, which is allegedly named after a Bantu word. But given the density of wordplay in the Ubu plays we see that Ubuntu is actually a corruption of Ubu en tu, "Ubu in you". Which reminds us of "Intel inside", and given that the umbilicus-branded Debian is included, it is literally true. And probably rude.
Ubu Enchaine (Ubu Enchained) is the third of Alfred Jarry's Pere Ubu (Pa Ubu) plays. After refusing to say "merdre", Pere Ubu arrives in France sets himself against the ideal of liberty, demanding to be made a slave.
The effects of liberty can be seen in the behaviour of The Free Men of the French army. They assert their freedom through disobedience and contrariness, struggling to find the best way to not only disobey orders but to act differently from their comrades. They remain in an army that requires them to act freely, with their commander demanding that they not follow his orders properly, not entirely unaware of the contradictions that this entails.
Ubu's slavery is as proactive. He attaches himself to various masters, deciding what is best for them and then doing it without being asked, thereby taking over their lives and imprisoning them. When taken to court for this he demands to be thrown in prison, where he will be free from society.
Soon others are inspired to join Ubu in the freedom of the prison and all the cannonballs in the kingdom are used for impromptu balls and chains. When the Free Men con a visiting English tourist into accepting Ubu as the King this is not entirely untrue. Ubu to all intents and purposes is running the country, the demands of his incarceration being met by enormous taxes.
Eventually Ubu demands that he be made a galley slave...
"The Curse Of Frankenstein", the first Hammer Horror film, was released on the second of May 1957. So it's now fifty years old.
Christopher Lee played the monster in that film and he's still going strong, appearing recently in the Lord Of The Rings movies and the Star Wars prequels.
For those of you reading this blog for the Free Culture side of things, the monsters in the Hammer films were public domain by the time Hammer were filming them, but Hammer signed a fifty-page licensing agreement with Universal Studios to make sure they could distribute the films in the US. Now that is scary. ;-)
"Man is born in freedom but he soon becomes a slave
In cages of convention from the cradle to the grave
The weak fall by the wayside but the strong will be saved
In a brave new world."
- The Artilleryman, "Jeff Waynes Musical Version Of War Of the Worlds".
There's something wonderful about summing up everything that went wrong with the 20th century because of 19th century ideology in less than one verse. The Artilleryman's description of his plan to the Journalist is wonderful because it makes clear the seductive logic of historicism in a way that invokes both communism and fascism equally.
The title of this post is something else the Artilleryman says. It's funnier if you say it while opening a bottle of the cheapest cava.
The market, like copyright and art theory, is an ontology of art, or at least some kind of substitute for one.
Conceptualism dematerialized the art object in favour of its theoretical description, an ontology.
The market has similarly dematerialized the artwork in favour of the entities and relationships that it posits, an ontology. How much? When? Who? Where? Who else?
This is an impoverished ontology, the reliance on simple tags, numbers and data from outside of the artwork creates an ontological proxy for the artwork that has very little to do with the artwork qua artwork.
But in any system of relations figures and grounds emerge and gain proportion and composition. And the physical artwork (even for relational works) remains as the grit in the pearl. Either is a point of friction and a possible point of critique. It's just not clear what of.
Viewer A looks at artworks as more or less competent illustrations of theory. They are expert in the latest translated French theory and understand the semiotic and technical content of the work. The economics and social relations of an artworks production are admissable only inasmuchas they excuse theoretical failings.
Viewer B looks at artworks as more or less valuable assets. They are expert in the work's provenance and the artist's personal history and social standing. The theoretical and aesthetic content of an artwork is admissable only inasmuchas they excuse any aesthetic interiority on the part of the artwork.
Did I mention that Mr. Agreeable is back?
"The Ubu Plays", Alfred Jarry.
"Writings", Art & Language.
It's good to have a Moleskine as well.
An artist should only receive public money when the value of the art that they make using that money is made available to the public.
It should be a condition of receiving Arts Council funding that any work produced is made available to the public under a Creative Commons Attribution or Share-Alike licence (not Non-Commercial or No-Derivatives licenses as these deny value to the public).
This ensures that the public are able to benefit from the work they have paid for by copying from it while the artist is still free to sell the original work.
Wednesday night was the second life drawing session I've been to at The Glass Onion. I got two drawings done, and during the second drawing something just clicked and I remembered how to draw from life. Last time I was struggling to get everything in proportion and ended up with some drawings with accurate individual sections that did not come together to form a whole that could be appreciated by anyone other than Victor Frankenstein on a bad day.
A book I hadn't read when I first did life drawing (getting on for 20 years ago now) but would recommend highly to anyone who's convinced they will never be able to draw is "Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain". See if your local library has a copy.
"Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain" is concerned, amongst other things, with the skills of sighting ratios and angles. The skills of sighting ratios and angles are Renaissance mercantile and civil engineering skills. They have a class/social origin, a historical origin. Does this make practicing life drawing in the age of relational aesthetics socially irrelevent, mere historical nostalgia, civil war re-enactment for aesthetes? I don't think that it does.
Charcoal remains in use for drawing despite the many more modern alternatives that are available because it has a useful quality that is very hard to surpass. Photography or actually arranging people in a gallery do not have the same quality as life drawing. It is a different investigation, a different way of relating to the subject. Life drawing is a record of protracted consideration and representation of understanding of the human form that you can't get any other way.
Carres are generally B hardness.
So black B Carres should be about the same hardness as other colours.
Great Art do them in the UK.
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"A group of students from Brown University have launched an open-source museum in the virtual world of Second Life."
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"It’s the UK’s first comprehensive survey of Public Art – based entirely on pictures from the camera phones of art-lovers nationwide."
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"here chromograms are used to analyze the behavior of Wikipedia users, in order to find patterns in histories of tens of thousands of edits."
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"Open source exhibition in Linz, Austria. All pieces included free take home instructions, diagrams, and materials list."
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"The question is how we can apply the necessary principles when creating visual content in an open source environment."
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""Lisp isn't easy to grasp. It's deep and strange." - MUCH LIKE YOURSELF, THEN."