- "Version 3, 29 June 2007"
- "Getting crazy with Walt's baby is a good way to find yourself up against some suits whose reason to be is a seven-figure retainer and folders full of cease and desists. So when Disney decides to loosen up a little, you'd better jump at the chance. These
- Depressing reading from a Freedom point of view despite impressive adoption numbers.
June 2007 Archives
The Where Are The Joneses website has been improved based on comments from people who have been using it:
http://www.wherearethejoneses.com/
The wiki in particular is now much easier to use:
http://wherearethejoneses.wikidot.com/
Also Loca Records have posted about their involvement in the project:
http://www.locarecords.com/
And Dave showed the first few episodes at CC Salon London on Thursday night to general laughter in the right places:
http://ccsalon-london.org.uk/
So this is it! Participatory, free media that is building on contributions and existing work.
Come and get involved! You don't have to write a whole episode, just add an idea to the wiki:
http://wherearethejoneses.wikidot.com/
http://www.wherearethejoneses.com/
The wiki in particular is now much easier to use:
http://wherearethejoneses.wikidot.com/
Also Loca Records have posted about their involvement in the project:
http://www.locarecords.com/
And Dave showed the first few episodes at CC Salon London on Thursday night to general laughter in the right places:
http://ccsalon-london.org.uk/
So this is it! Participatory, free media that is building on contributions and existing work.
Come and get involved! You don't have to write a whole episode, just add an idea to the wiki:
http://wherearethejoneses.wikidot.com/
Technorati Tags: comedy, free culture
- "We are very excited to announce that vague terrain 07: sample culture is now live. "
I ordered some diamond dust.
Next I need some quantum dots. They're not aesthetic when you don't look at them...
Next I need some quantum dots. They're not aesthetic when you don't look at them...
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, satire
Art is pretty & expensive. Diamonds are pretty & expensive. Art has form. Diamond dust has no form. Art is aesthetic. Diamond dust is pure aesthetic.
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, satire
- Colour palettes from paintings.
- "I'm not going to provide links anymore. My good name should suffice. "
- "Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace,"
http://wherearethejoneses.com/2007/06/24/day10/
"E" by Meme, on Loca Records, is one of my favourite songs of all time.
This is an interesting context for it.
I've only myself to blame.
;-)
"E" by Meme, on Loca Records, is one of my favourite songs of all time.
This is an interesting context for it.
I've only myself to blame.
;-)
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, free culture, music, where are the joneses
- "Beat the cashier in a game of rock paper scissors and save a buck."
- "charging for information leads to the grossest sort of inefficiency"
- Does what it says on the tin. Well worth a read
- "MTV has made the process of painting look cool, with their "Art Battles" show."
- "In order to have a strong primary market you must also have a strong secondary market. History is won and lost on the secondary market. "
- Architecture is generally free, but in Belgium architects do sue for plagiarism. And participatory architecture could be very cool.
some dog shit
N 52°35.130'
W 00°14.581'
a broken television set
N 52°35.142'
W 00°14.577
a large Subway drinks cup
N 52°35.138'
W 00°14.580'
a beer bottle stood upright
N 52°35.143'
W 00°14.566'
two cigarette butts
N 52°35.095'
W 00°14.599'
a cigarette packer
N 52°35.108'
W 00°14.592'
some vomit
N 52°35.140'
W 00°14.568'
N 52°35.130'
W 00°14.581'
a broken television set
N 52°35.142'
W 00°14.577
a large Subway drinks cup
N 52°35.138'
W 00°14.580'
a beer bottle stood upright
N 52°35.143'
W 00°14.566'
two cigarette butts
N 52°35.095'
W 00°14.599'
a cigarette packer
N 52°35.108'
W 00°14.592'
some vomit
N 52°35.140'
W 00°14.568'
- "Hot/Cold - TERRY ATKINSON MICHAEL BALDWIN "
- "the entire making process of the lights is open source and shared publicly online"
- "Sound Internet Insights From the BBC" - Now fix the Creative Archive and make it BY-SA, guys!
- "Madison will eat pudding if and only if it is custard."
- "Every subclass of a set that is defined by a predicate is itself a set."
Logical if (→) and iff (↔) are doing my head in.
→ is if, the "conditional connective". A → B means that A can be true only if B is true.
So → is false when A is true despite B being false. But otherwise it's true. Because we don't care about those scenarios. I don't know why. I suppose otherwise it would just be ∧ . I'm going to have to just accept this like the dot product, which also doesn't fit into my mathematical worldview, which is based on cakes.
↔ is iff, the "biconditional connective". A ↔ B is equivalent to [(A → B) ∧ (B → A)].
See? It's bi-conditional. So ↔ is false when A → B ∧ (B → A), or B → A ∧ (A → B) . Possibly I can come to terms with → as half of ↔ .
Next: the Axiom Schema Of Separation and how you can't model that using cakes either.
→ is if, the "conditional connective". A → B means that A can be true only if B is true.
So → is false when A is true despite B being false. But otherwise it's true. Because we don't care about those scenarios. I don't know why. I suppose otherwise it would just be ∧ . I'm going to have to just accept this like the dot product, which also doesn't fit into my mathematical worldview, which is based on cakes.
↔ is iff, the "biconditional connective". A ↔ B is equivalent to [(A → B) ∧ (B → A)].
See? It's bi-conditional. So ↔ is false when A → B ∧ (B → A), or B → A ∧ (A → B) . Possibly I can come to terms with → as half of ↔ .
Next: the Axiom Schema Of Separation and how you can't model that using cakes either.
Technorati Tags: logic
- Having other people make your art is like...
- CC on the Joneses, complete with link back to my blog post. Thanks guys.
- Good article, and an amazing picture of a sculpture: Tom Friedman, Open Black Box, 2006. (I have some 2d stuff like that I want to do).
- "Rhizome Editor's Note: An interesting debate has begun to unfold, on the significance of copyright licenses to works of art, between AFC's Paddy Johnson, MTAA's TWhid, and Rob Myers. "
- "Since EMI ditched the DRM on iTunes it has seen sales of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon increase by between 272 and 350 percent..."
- A Jeff Koons equilibrian tank in Lego.
- "Werewolf Research Kit, complete with an albino lycanthrope foetus in a jar, handwritten notes and drawings, other forensic samples, and some silver bullets to have on hand, just in case"
- ""Need a poem written while you shop?" said Zach Houston."
I won a book from an a-n magazine competition!
"The Nature Of The Beast" by Richard Hylton, published by ICIA 2007.
ISBN 0861971361
Thank you a-n!
"The Nature Of The Beast" by Richard Hylton, published by ICIA 2007.
ISBN 0861971361
Thank you a-n!
I got the LeWitt set comprehensions wrong. I've fixed the others (I edited this blog without declaring it, I feel unclean...) but the 4 line, 4 colour one was a bit harder. Here's a sketch for the fixed version.C = {r,y,b,k}L = {|, \, /, -}V = C x L = {(r, |), ... (k, -)}W = PV = {{(r, |)}, .. {(r, |), ... (k, -)}}X = {x :∈ W | #x > 0 ^ #x < 5} % All sets of 1..4Y = {x :∈ X | #x = # U (U x) } % All sets with unique first pair itemsZ = {x :∈ Y, y :∈ x • U (U y)} % Each item of each member set combinedAlternative Z:Z = {x :∈ Y • U (U x)} % Each member set combined
Technorati Tags: conceptual art, mathematics, notation
Free Culture is just freedom of speech. Is that it?
As Lessig so eloquently explains in "Free Culture", we have been facing a perfect storm of factors that act to limit, among other things, free speech. Since "Free Culture" was written we have faced further governmental and economic reductions in the possibility of pluralism in the US and the UK (where I am). Protecting freedom of speech is vital to protecting pluralism and to keeping our societies open. This is hardly a side issue.
Negative free speech can be aided by lobbying for legal reform and by activism against state, corporate and community closure and capture of public debate.
Positive free speech can be aided by economic, technological and social innovation and organization.
So freedom of speech doesn't reduce the challenges or limit the options, it clarifies and underwrites them for both activists and entrepeneurs.
And "speech" isn't just speech.
A journalist once chided Lessig for an example from "Free Culture". A group of kids were given access to video production equipment, allowing them to document and communicate their situation in a way that was, for them, unprecedented. The journalist asked why they couldn't just pick up guitars, accusing Lessig of technological reification.
Even assuming they could afford guitars the answer would be no different: because the public conversation that shapes our society today is formed in the media. A democracy cannot and must not have a media underclass. Freedom of speech means the freedom to participate in the discussion of society as peers in whatever form that discussion takes. That form is changing faster today than ever, and keeping that conversation open is vital.
As Lessig so eloquently explains in "Free Culture", we have been facing a perfect storm of factors that act to limit, among other things, free speech. Since "Free Culture" was written we have faced further governmental and economic reductions in the possibility of pluralism in the US and the UK (where I am). Protecting freedom of speech is vital to protecting pluralism and to keeping our societies open. This is hardly a side issue.
Negative free speech can be aided by lobbying for legal reform and by activism against state, corporate and community closure and capture of public debate.
Positive free speech can be aided by economic, technological and social innovation and organization.
So freedom of speech doesn't reduce the challenges or limit the options, it clarifies and underwrites them for both activists and entrepeneurs.
And "speech" isn't just speech.
A journalist once chided Lessig for an example from "Free Culture". A group of kids were given access to video production equipment, allowing them to document and communicate their situation in a way that was, for them, unprecedented. The journalist asked why they couldn't just pick up guitars, accusing Lessig of technological reification.
Even assuming they could afford guitars the answer would be no different: because the public conversation that shapes our society today is formed in the media. A democracy cannot and must not have a media underclass. Freedom of speech means the freedom to participate in the discussion of society as peers in whatever form that discussion takes. That form is changing faster today than ever, and keeping that conversation open is vital.
Technorati Tags: free culture
Free Culture[1] is the culture of an Open Society[2]. An open society must be Pluralistic[3]. Freedom of Speech[4] is a necessary condition for pluralism.
Freedom of speech can be Negatively and Positively[5] supported.
Negative support is lack of legal and institutional opposition to free speech. Traditionally this means lack of government censorship, but as media and corporations mediate social relations ever increasingly this means law and institutional power as it relates to all players in society.
Positive support is economic and technological support for free speech. Traditionally this has meant innovations in the physical means of reproduction and the legal means of charging for it.
In this scheme, alternative licensing schemes are a technology, albeit a legal technology.
It could be argued that P2P is negative support rather than positive innovation; it removes legal and institutional opposition to free exchange. This shows that these categories must be dynamic. It also shows that positive and negative freedom can be in tension. Berlin or Mill[6] are helpful in considering this.
References.
1. "Free Culture" - Lawrence Lessig.
2. "The Open Society And Its Enemies" - Karl Popper.
3. "Four Essays On Liberty" - Isaiah Berlin.
4. 1 ibid
5. 3 ibid.
6. "On Liberty" - John Stuart Mill.
Freedom of speech can be Negatively and Positively[5] supported.
Negative support is lack of legal and institutional opposition to free speech. Traditionally this means lack of government censorship, but as media and corporations mediate social relations ever increasingly this means law and institutional power as it relates to all players in society.
Positive support is economic and technological support for free speech. Traditionally this has meant innovations in the physical means of reproduction and the legal means of charging for it.
In this scheme, alternative licensing schemes are a technology, albeit a legal technology.
It could be argued that P2P is negative support rather than positive innovation; it removes legal and institutional opposition to free exchange. This shows that these categories must be dynamic. It also shows that positive and negative freedom can be in tension. Berlin or Mill[6] are helpful in considering this.
References.
1. "Free Culture" - Lawrence Lessig.
2. "The Open Society And Its Enemies" - Karl Popper.
3. "Four Essays On Liberty" - Isaiah Berlin.
4. 1 ibid
5. 3 ibid.
6. "On Liberty" - John Stuart Mill.
Technorati Tags: free culture
Cultural works are not functional, and so do not require the same defence of use value as software does.
But software is represented as, and legally protected as, text.
The mechanisms and arguments used to protect the freedom to work with the text of the software apply to the text qua text. They are therefore available to arguments regarding the freedom to work with text in general.
Speech is encoded in text much the same as software is; both speech and code are "uses" of text. If these uses should both be free for their own reasons then the same arguments and mechanisms for supporting this freedom can be used for both.
The mechanisms that free software uses when protecting software freedom can therefore be used to protect freedom of speech. This despite the fact that software use and speech are very different acts.
Software, as the expression of functionality rather than as functionality itself, can be thought of as a form of speech, and indeed this is the conclusion that the EFF encryption free speech case reached.
Stallman does differentiate between the freedoms that he believes are needed by functional works, works of opinion and works of expression. But I am arguing that his "four freedoms" should be applied to the texts of free speech as well as to the texts of free software for different reasons, not that cultural works are functional.
But software is represented as, and legally protected as, text.
The mechanisms and arguments used to protect the freedom to work with the text of the software apply to the text qua text. They are therefore available to arguments regarding the freedom to work with text in general.
Speech is encoded in text much the same as software is; both speech and code are "uses" of text. If these uses should both be free for their own reasons then the same arguments and mechanisms for supporting this freedom can be used for both.
The mechanisms that free software uses when protecting software freedom can therefore be used to protect freedom of speech. This despite the fact that software use and speech are very different acts.
Software, as the expression of functionality rather than as functionality itself, can be thought of as a form of speech, and indeed this is the conclusion that the EFF encryption free speech case reached.
Stallman does differentiate between the freedoms that he believes are needed by functional works, works of opinion and works of expression. But I am arguing that his "four freedoms" should be applied to the texts of free speech as well as to the texts of free software for different reasons, not that cultural works are functional.
Technorati Tags: free culture, free software, philosophy
http://www.mtaa.net/mtaaRR/news/twhid/artificial_legal_add_ons_to_art.html
Most artworks have a legal status as copyrighted works, as designs, or at the very least as insured objects. Some, such as works by Carey Young, are legal documents themselves. The law provides a kind of ontology for artworks. But unreproducable artworks are more interesting when the unreproducability is a technical rather than a legal effect.
Artworks often have certificates of authenticity, and contracts and guarantees were the stuff of 1960s conceptualism. Sales documents are important in establishing provenance, and recipts are important when filing tax returns. But usually the paperwork of an artwork is of peripheral interest at best.
Alternative licenses are not part of the legal orthodoxy of society though. They are a signal of dissent (or at least a desire for reform). They are political to a degree. Applying one to a work is a small political act.
The political commitments of artists are more often a cause of embarrassment than an interesting component of the work even genetically. For every David a dozen surrealist members of the communist party. And a David. The political commitment of artists is too often empty, and empty-headed, gestures. "Career building bullshit that cares" as Art & Language said.
The difference with alternative licenses is that art is directly implicated in "The Copyfight". This is not political volunteerism, these are issues that actually affect art. The production and consumption of art is part of the debate. Warhol, Koons, Garnett and others have all been bitten by copyright. Christo, the owners of a work by Kapoor, and others have all bitten others with copyright.
In an open society it is vital that we not allow the closing off of artistic freedom through the legal means that alternative licences are a protection against. We cannot force Magnum photographers or toy manufacturers to adopt the same licence, but we can use our own adoption as a reason why they should. We can take a stand for our principles that affects us for a change.
Commitment is bad for art because it limits artistic freedom. But the copyfight is commitment to artistic freedom. And alternative licenses are a tactic in the copyfight. Using one is a sign of commitment to a non-artistic cause, a limit on artistic freedom. But that non-artistic cause is the cause of removing limits on artistic freedom.
This is reflexive, or at least a kind of loop. It has something to do with the genetic character of the work and its aesthetics. Where a work is concerned with aesthetic freedom, and few modernist or postmodernist works are not, the licence of the artwork may not be part of the visual aesthetics of the work but it will impinge on the experience and effect of it.
The reception of a work and what is known about it can affect what is seen in it. Nelson Goodman uses a work's status as a fake as an example of this, and cites elements of fake Vermeers that are obvious to us now but that weren't obvious when they were first seen. DJ Spooky describes remixes as "interrogation of meaning". The licensing of a work can prevent its reproduction and thereby its analysis and discussion of it, and can prevent remixing of it, to the point where its content or meaning are unrealized or unextended. This is an aesthetic loss for the work.
The licence of an artwork is interesting because even if it cannot make a work look better it can make the work be seen better and can lead to the creation of better work. This is not incidental to art or to artworks, it is part of the very conditions of their existence. The canvas of a painting isn't interesting until you wonder what would happen if it wasn't there.
Most artworks have a legal status as copyrighted works, as designs, or at the very least as insured objects. Some, such as works by Carey Young, are legal documents themselves. The law provides a kind of ontology for artworks. But unreproducable artworks are more interesting when the unreproducability is a technical rather than a legal effect.
Artworks often have certificates of authenticity, and contracts and guarantees were the stuff of 1960s conceptualism. Sales documents are important in establishing provenance, and recipts are important when filing tax returns. But usually the paperwork of an artwork is of peripheral interest at best.
Alternative licenses are not part of the legal orthodoxy of society though. They are a signal of dissent (or at least a desire for reform). They are political to a degree. Applying one to a work is a small political act.
The political commitments of artists are more often a cause of embarrassment than an interesting component of the work even genetically. For every David a dozen surrealist members of the communist party. And a David. The political commitment of artists is too often empty, and empty-headed, gestures. "Career building bullshit that cares" as Art & Language said.
The difference with alternative licenses is that art is directly implicated in "The Copyfight". This is not political volunteerism, these are issues that actually affect art. The production and consumption of art is part of the debate. Warhol, Koons, Garnett and others have all been bitten by copyright. Christo, the owners of a work by Kapoor, and others have all bitten others with copyright.
In an open society it is vital that we not allow the closing off of artistic freedom through the legal means that alternative licences are a protection against. We cannot force Magnum photographers or toy manufacturers to adopt the same licence, but we can use our own adoption as a reason why they should. We can take a stand for our principles that affects us for a change.
Commitment is bad for art because it limits artistic freedom. But the copyfight is commitment to artistic freedom. And alternative licenses are a tactic in the copyfight. Using one is a sign of commitment to a non-artistic cause, a limit on artistic freedom. But that non-artistic cause is the cause of removing limits on artistic freedom.
This is reflexive, or at least a kind of loop. It has something to do with the genetic character of the work and its aesthetics. Where a work is concerned with aesthetic freedom, and few modernist or postmodernist works are not, the licence of the artwork may not be part of the visual aesthetics of the work but it will impinge on the experience and effect of it.
The reception of a work and what is known about it can affect what is seen in it. Nelson Goodman uses a work's status as a fake as an example of this, and cites elements of fake Vermeers that are obvious to us now but that weren't obvious when they were first seen. DJ Spooky describes remixes as "interrogation of meaning". The licensing of a work can prevent its reproduction and thereby its analysis and discussion of it, and can prevent remixing of it, to the point where its content or meaning are unrealized or unextended. This is an aesthetic loss for the work.
The licence of an artwork is interesting because even if it cannot make a work look better it can make the work be seen better and can lead to the creation of better work. This is not incidental to art or to artworks, it is part of the very conditions of their existence. The canvas of a painting isn't interesting until you wonder what would happen if it wasn't there.
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, critique, free culture
- "Think of one of your favorite art works. Do you know its license? Do you just assume copyright has been applied? Would you really think it was more [beautiful, intelligent, engaging, enthralling, etc] if the license changed? "
- The best art computing blog bar none is back!
- Free TV online. Some of it is even legal!
- "The exhibition itself looks good over all." But why all BY?
- "I really want to praise [...] Rob Myers for the original conversation back in Nov 2005 and the continuous remarkable insights into new forms of media production"
- "it was a wonderful surprise to sit through a discussion between the artists in residence nominally set-up to discuss their engagment with the 'copyfight'"
- Daemonic and fantastical images from old books.
Thank you to my family for an amazing fathers day. I feel like I have had about three parties today.
Where Are The Joneses? (WRTJ) is designed to be scripted in an open, participatory way.
So it needs people to contribute to the script. It needs you. You can be funny, good at working on wikis, both or neither. WRTJ just needs your input to help it be a success.
See here: http://wherearethejoneses.com/participate/
Technorati Tags: collaboration, comedy, free culture
(Image CC-BY-SA www.wherearethejoneses.com/)
Details
• http://www.wherearethejoneses.com/
• A Free comedy series created and distributed online.
• Scripted on forums, a wiki and a blog in a participatory, collaborative way.
• Produced by Baby Cow (Steve Coogan).
• Cast are professional actors.
• Filmed to broadcast quality.
• Distributed via YouTube
• 12 Weeks of daily five minute segments add up to twelve 35 minute episodes.
• License is Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 (BY-SA 3), pure copyleft.
• Pure copyleft is an explicit part of the value of the project.
• NC would break this.
• Music from Loca Records and others.
• Concept by Dave Bausola at Imagination.
• Sponsored by Ford as a promotion for them.
• Features a Ford car.
Notes
• From a gift economy point of view, you contribute a joke and you get back a TV series.
• From a rights point of view, this is Freedom Defined free / Stallman free, although the rights of the actors and any trademarks will affect this as usual.
• This is the Free Culture project equivalent of IBM paying for a Free Software product that runs on their hardware, they lose no money on it because they'd have to pay for it anyway, it helps sales of their hardware, and they may even gain value from outside involvement.
• To relate this to existing models, it's a sitcom with a sponsor remade as Free Culture to take advantage of the realities of the Internet rather than trying to fight them.
• Product placement and sponsorship are standard, this isn't anywhere near as bad as the average Hollywood blockbuster or broadcast TV comedy, and there are no ad breaks.
• Dave and I have been discussing this model of media production since November 2005.
Technorati Tags: comedy, free culture
- Useful collection of ignorant FUD about iCommons collected together by a Second Lifer, without irony. Somebody had to do it.
- "Creative Commons – The Next Generation: Creative Commons licence use five years on"
- "This really is an interesting idea: create websites using Inkscape exclusively and publish them on the web in SVG."
- You can upload OGG Theora to YouTube!
- "The most exciting and important advances in how we're making sense of this miscellaneous soup is that we're doing it socially."
- "for several reasons the current milieu of contemporary art is predicated on visual quality as a subordinate concern"
- 3D graffitti. Brilliant.
- "a study ... to examine the issues surrounding sustainability of open source software"
- "it was concerned with marital and sexual freedom, as well as more strictly political aspects of anarchism"
- "In many respects a Benesh Movement Notation score resembles a music score: The notation is written on a five-line stave that is read from left to right and from the top of the page to the bottom."
- Why should consumers pay for copyright filtering?
- Funny if true (my spider sense is tingling over the fake status of this...).
- "Blogumenta may be the first art fair ever to be hosted within the Facebook social networking space."
Something of a Rhizome takeover of the iCommons summit with the excellent Joy Garnett and MTAA part of the artists in residence posse.
See here:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2007/06/the_art_happens.html
See here:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2007/06/the_art_happens.html
Technorati Tags: art, free culture
The LeWitt formulae come from an email exchange with MANIK where I joked about combining LeWitt and Vermeer.
LeWitt can be claimed for either conceptual art or minimalism, but his works rendered from verbal descriptions are more conceptual. They can be made even more conceptual by removing words, by using mathematical notation. This is a line of resistance to the lit-crit land-grab of Art Theory. Art may be a language (an insight at least as old as Ruskin) but it also has a mathematical basis that goes back to the earliest geometric cave art and was hardly reduced by perspective or by modernist abstraction.
The LeWitt pieces are in part about what the verbal and mathematical descriptions cannot capture. This is a kind of aesthetic platonism by counterexample, which is a very Rob thing to do).
Vermeer is resistant to language as well, but he is also resistant to simple mathematical encoding, so a lot more would be lost in a mathematical description. Taking this loss for the moment, the poses of the people in Vermeer's paintings can be expressed as dance notation. This can then be further abstracted (Gödel Numbering, Saville Colouring, etc.). The LeWitts can become Vermeers by converting them to dance notation then rendering that. The Vermeers can become LeWitts more easily.
Somewhere they will meet.
LeWitt can be claimed for either conceptual art or minimalism, but his works rendered from verbal descriptions are more conceptual. They can be made even more conceptual by removing words, by using mathematical notation. This is a line of resistance to the lit-crit land-grab of Art Theory. Art may be a language (an insight at least as old as Ruskin) but it also has a mathematical basis that goes back to the earliest geometric cave art and was hardly reduced by perspective or by modernist abstraction.
The LeWitt pieces are in part about what the verbal and mathematical descriptions cannot capture. This is a kind of aesthetic platonism by counterexample, which is a very Rob thing to do).
Vermeer is resistant to language as well, but he is also resistant to simple mathematical encoding, so a lot more would be lost in a mathematical description. Taking this loss for the moment, the poses of the people in Vermeer's paintings can be expressed as dance notation. This can then be further abstracted (Gödel Numbering, Saville Colouring, etc.). The LeWitts can become Vermeers by converting them to dance notation then rendering that. The Vermeers can become LeWitts more easily.
Somewhere they will meet.
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, notation, Vermeer, Sol LeWitt
1151311181138213831384131241118113821383138413122142514392929292929122445112
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, conceptual art, Gödel, mathematics, notation, Sol LeWitt
- Tom Chance insightfully critiques Lawrence Lessig's current vision for Creative Commons and suggests a way forward.
"Distress Signals V", 2006, by Art & Language (A&L) is where looking at a photographs of an artwork rather than the work itself breaks down if it hasn't already. It consists of a paintings mounted inside a shallow wooden box that looks like a bespoke packing crate of the kind that paintings are shipped in. Into the front of this box large holes have been cut, allowing the viewer to see some of the painting's surface. This frustrates the viewer's gaze and tantalises them with the prospect of recovering the image.
This scheme refers back to the most deliberately frustrating work in the series "Index: Incident In The Museum", Incident XIV, the work that A&L exhibited when they were entered for the Turner Prize. The standard painting of a view of a museum was covered with wooden cladding into which random holes were drilled and onto which a simple schematic diagram of a perspective view of a room was drawn. This referred to the literal outside of the museum used as the model for the paintings, the Whitney Museum of American Art.
The holes in the wood of "Distress Signals" are much wider relative to the size of the painting than those of Incident XIV. They give the viewer greater hope of simply recovering the concealed image. Unless they are the (re)viewer of a photograph of the work, in which case they can only guess. Is the painting coloured plaid of the kind that "No Secret Painting" refers to?
This is a work that quite literally reveals the inner workings of the global art market's distribution networks, and that quite literally penetrates its obfuscations and representations. This is art quite literally as middle-sized dry goods ready for shipping. We can see through this its content, but this is not the view of the audience that such art is made for.
This scheme refers back to the most deliberately frustrating work in the series "Index: Incident In The Museum", Incident XIV, the work that A&L exhibited when they were entered for the Turner Prize. The standard painting of a view of a museum was covered with wooden cladding into which random holes were drilled and onto which a simple schematic diagram of a perspective view of a room was drawn. This referred to the literal outside of the museum used as the model for the paintings, the Whitney Museum of American Art.
The holes in the wood of "Distress Signals" are much wider relative to the size of the painting than those of Incident XIV. They give the viewer greater hope of simply recovering the concealed image. Unless they are the (re)viewer of a photograph of the work, in which case they can only guess. Is the painting coloured plaid of the kind that "No Secret Painting" refers to?
This is a work that quite literally reveals the inner workings of the global art market's distribution networks, and that quite literally penetrates its obfuscations and representations. This is art quite literally as middle-sized dry goods ready for shipping. We can see through this its content, but this is not the view of the audience that such art is made for.
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, critique, Art & Language
Todo: transparency.
(After Sol LeWitt.)
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, conceptual art, mathematics, Sol LeWitt
Todo: L should be four boxes striped with the lines it currently maintains.
(After Sol LeWitt.)
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, conceptual art, mathematics, Sol LeWitt
N is the set of all possible combinations of the lines L.
(After Sol LeWitt.)
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, conceptual art, mathematics, Sol LeWitt
- "Artist Rosemarie Fiore converted an amusement park ride called The Scrambler into a giant drawing machine. "
- "a Gödel number is a unique number for a given statement that can be formed as the product of successive primes raised to the power of the number corresponding to the individual symbols that comprise the sentence."
- "city workers to go around and stick "cancelled" stickers on all the illegal gig posters put up around town"
- "You can get the official PDF version here or my friend Sam Smith's annotatable version that he just threw together."
Index 01 (1972) by Art & Language consists of a set of filing cabinets filled with texts written by the extended Art & Language collective of the time, with printed indexes of the texts indicating their compatibility with each other in the collective's discourse placed on the wall. It is a piece of art that is open to a possible audience of readers. It seems unprecedented and isolated in the history of art, belonging more to the office furniture of bureaucratic management or of libraries than to painting or sculpture.
Index 01 is radical, but it doesn't exist in a complete vacuum. There are three examples I would contrast with Index 01, the latter two of which are contemporary with it.
Marcel Duchamp's "The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Batchelors, Even (The Large Glass)" predates Index 01 by some sixty years. It is a free-standing painting in metal and oil paint on glass, about as painterly as a set of filing cabinets. The forms in it were determined by Duchamp's writings and were produced in a series of studies before being assembled in The Large Glass. Like Index 01 is a combination of forms determined by writing. It is a form of index, an assemblage of forms whose relations embody conceptual concerns. The Large Glass is the embodiment of its index rather than the indexical relations of the work being explained by texts placed on the wall, and the texts are elsewhere.
Sol LeWitt's drawings have a similar concern with platonic form, although they are more immediately aesthetic than Index 01. LeWitt's drawings constructed from verbal descriptions, whether colours or coloured shapes or geometric shapes constructed according to constraints, are conceptually determined forms. They are more aesthetic than Index 01, but they do construct form conceptually. Like Index 01 and The Large Glass the text precedes and creates the form of "the work". The platonism of this is critical, it is a line of resistance.
Gilbert and George's work as living sculptures is arch- (and arch) romanticism rather than analytical philosophy and politics or sociology, but it has commonalities with Index 01. Gilbert and George substituted social form for sculptural form, declaring themselves sculpture. Body rather than text, and romantic conservatism rather than materialist radicalism, but non-aesthetic form expressed socially. The "singing sculptures" are the negative of Index 01, the defensible and resistant production of form in an ironically conservative mode.
I don't expect that Art & Language would find these comparisons flattering or interesting. But I believe that they provide at least an interesting contrast, and that they may be instructive.
Index 01 is radical, but it doesn't exist in a complete vacuum. There are three examples I would contrast with Index 01, the latter two of which are contemporary with it.
Marcel Duchamp's "The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Batchelors, Even (The Large Glass)" predates Index 01 by some sixty years. It is a free-standing painting in metal and oil paint on glass, about as painterly as a set of filing cabinets. The forms in it were determined by Duchamp's writings and were produced in a series of studies before being assembled in The Large Glass. Like Index 01 is a combination of forms determined by writing. It is a form of index, an assemblage of forms whose relations embody conceptual concerns. The Large Glass is the embodiment of its index rather than the indexical relations of the work being explained by texts placed on the wall, and the texts are elsewhere.
Sol LeWitt's drawings have a similar concern with platonic form, although they are more immediately aesthetic than Index 01. LeWitt's drawings constructed from verbal descriptions, whether colours or coloured shapes or geometric shapes constructed according to constraints, are conceptually determined forms. They are more aesthetic than Index 01, but they do construct form conceptually. Like Index 01 and The Large Glass the text precedes and creates the form of "the work". The platonism of this is critical, it is a line of resistance.
Gilbert and George's work as living sculptures is arch- (and arch) romanticism rather than analytical philosophy and politics or sociology, but it has commonalities with Index 01. Gilbert and George substituted social form for sculptural form, declaring themselves sculpture. Body rather than text, and romantic conservatism rather than materialist radicalism, but non-aesthetic form expressed socially. The "singing sculptures" are the negative of Index 01, the defensible and resistant production of form in an ironically conservative mode.
I don't expect that Art & Language would find these comparisons flattering or interesting. But I believe that they provide at least an interesting contrast, and that they may be instructive.
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, critique
Starting a project to intimidate Deleuzians using baroque-looking mathematical notation^D^D^D a project to recast verbal descriptions of conceptual art into a more rigourous formal notation and to see how this can be extended then mapped back into art.
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art
- A crash course in typesetting maths using LaTeX
- LaTex maths symbols.
- How to use colours in LaTeX.
- An art show featuring Cohen, LeWitt and more.
- A cavalcade of crap from the UK government regarding CC and the BBC Creative Archive.
- "here's the first of five simple steps to better typography"
- "an interesting two-part analysis of the Long Tail in online media"
- Michael Corris on the techno-intellectual background to 1960s conceptualism.
- Ah, the dismal scence.
Life drawings in the flickr photostream on this blog (if you're reading it on the web site).
I'm only posting the ones where I have permission from the model. Or, in this case, a request to do so.
I'm only posting the ones where I have permission from the model. Or, in this case, a request to do so.
The Bleeding Obvious
"For The Love Of God" by Damien Hirst is not art, it's ethically dubious for various reasons, its costing is suspect, the big jewel on the forehead spoils any claim it might have to aesthetic interest, and it's basically a simple reversal of the usual formula of blinged up teeth in a living skull.
Ceci n'est pas l'art
More interesting is why it isn't art. An overheated art market assigns and justifies the price of a piece of art as the measure of its worth. It doesn't matter how materially impoverished the art is, it can be some rags with oily earth scraped on stretched over some pieces of wood and still be worth tens of millions of dollars. This is the point of the market for those who buy. They are doing with art what they did with hedge funds. This is ritual, the economic becoming the symbolic, aesthetic mythology being made into economic icons. This is the assertion of a new class's self-image and a rearguard action against any newer money. That is what high art usually is.
"For The Love Of God" has catastrophically misunderstood this. It seeks to justify the economics of the market economically. It is an object that has been ridiculously expensive to manufacture and is therefore worthy of a ridiculous price. This doesn't give the market anything to do. If Hirst wanted to give the market something to really get its wallet out for he should charge 100 million dollars for one of his concepts, or for each of an edition of 100 skulls, or for a genuinely awful painting (his assistants can crank those out by the dozen). That would take some serious dollar transubstantiation.
The argument that Hirst and his business manager are just taking the market for a ride, Jasper-Johns-two-beer-cans-style, doesn't work. And Hirst's move here isn't a Stella-like aesthetic observation of the letter of the law rather than the spirit. It is an erroneous error theory of the market value of art made into an artwork.
Dust Brothers
A limited edition is available of silkscreen prints of a photograph of the skull complete with diamond dust applied to the glaze. Those American commentators who dismiss Hirst as a Koons copyist don't have an interesting point, but this is pure Warhol. Warhol produced silkscreens of a skull and of himself with a skull. The images over which he sprinkled diamond dust weren't his best work, the cash value added by diamond dust is an implicit admission of the lack of aesthetic value.
With Dead Head
This is Hirst's contemporary self-portrait. He is no longer gurning fearfully next to a decapitated head, he has taken its skull and made it a model of his own. There is no contrast between this empty sparkle and his own flesh and bone. The spark has gone, his head has been emptied of what art it contained and replaced with economics.
There is no aesthetic or emotional value in a multi-million dollar memento mori, it is a self-defeating object. All that remains under the bling is the crooked yellow smile. This used to be Damien Hirst. There is the ghost of a tragedy here, but the materialism of economics leaves no place for ghosts.
"For The Love Of God" by Damien Hirst is not art, it's ethically dubious for various reasons, its costing is suspect, the big jewel on the forehead spoils any claim it might have to aesthetic interest, and it's basically a simple reversal of the usual formula of blinged up teeth in a living skull.
Ceci n'est pas l'art
More interesting is why it isn't art. An overheated art market assigns and justifies the price of a piece of art as the measure of its worth. It doesn't matter how materially impoverished the art is, it can be some rags with oily earth scraped on stretched over some pieces of wood and still be worth tens of millions of dollars. This is the point of the market for those who buy. They are doing with art what they did with hedge funds. This is ritual, the economic becoming the symbolic, aesthetic mythology being made into economic icons. This is the assertion of a new class's self-image and a rearguard action against any newer money. That is what high art usually is.
"For The Love Of God" has catastrophically misunderstood this. It seeks to justify the economics of the market economically. It is an object that has been ridiculously expensive to manufacture and is therefore worthy of a ridiculous price. This doesn't give the market anything to do. If Hirst wanted to give the market something to really get its wallet out for he should charge 100 million dollars for one of his concepts, or for each of an edition of 100 skulls, or for a genuinely awful painting (his assistants can crank those out by the dozen). That would take some serious dollar transubstantiation.
The argument that Hirst and his business manager are just taking the market for a ride, Jasper-Johns-two-beer-cans-style, doesn't work. And Hirst's move here isn't a Stella-like aesthetic observation of the letter of the law rather than the spirit. It is an erroneous error theory of the market value of art made into an artwork.
Dust Brothers
A limited edition is available of silkscreen prints of a photograph of the skull complete with diamond dust applied to the glaze. Those American commentators who dismiss Hirst as a Koons copyist don't have an interesting point, but this is pure Warhol. Warhol produced silkscreens of a skull and of himself with a skull. The images over which he sprinkled diamond dust weren't his best work, the cash value added by diamond dust is an implicit admission of the lack of aesthetic value.
With Dead Head
This is Hirst's contemporary self-portrait. He is no longer gurning fearfully next to a decapitated head, he has taken its skull and made it a model of his own. There is no contrast between this empty sparkle and his own flesh and bone. The spark has gone, his head has been emptied of what art it contained and replaced with economics.
There is no aesthetic or emotional value in a multi-million dollar memento mori, it is a self-defeating object. All that remains under the bling is the crooked yellow smile. This used to be Damien Hirst. There is the ghost of a tragedy here, but the materialism of economics leaves no place for ghosts.
- "convergence”an unlikely, striking pair of images, along with a paragraph or three exploring the deeper resonances"
- "Currently indexing 467 projects"
- Map not to indicate non-nuclear-capable nations
- "The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today released the fourth and “last call” draft for version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), the world's most widely used free software license. "
- "Korea has just finished negotiating a free trade agreement with the US that is a complete disaster on copyright. Korea has agreed to give up all fair use to copyrighted works"
- "the latest wave of British werewolf sightings"
- "In this paper I examine and refute the new conceivability arguments due to Frank Jackson and David Chalmers."
- "One of the most influential thinkers of ontology at the beginning of our century was the Austrian philosopher Alexius Meinong, Ritter von Handschuchsheim. His best known conception deals, among other things, with objects that do not exist."
- "Meinong posits that "existence" is merely a property of an object, just as color or mass might be a property. Thus, according to Meinong, a figure such as Sherlock Holmes would lack the property of existence, just as Sherlock Holmes lacks the property of
- Nice sauce-for-the-gander refutation of Philosophical Zombies.
- "Here are the diagrams used by Jacques Lacan in Les Écrits."
- "The Lacan phenomenon is a bizarre one. "
- "Students were spellbound, owing to the standard ingredients of cult status”ideas and charisma..."
- "one of the weirdest things to cross my path was the British werewolf"
- More UK werewolf cases
- "a collection of image mosaics that visually compare peculiar mundane objects in urban space"
- A show of Chris Ashley's excellent art.
- "More than 180,000 copies were downloaded from Jeremy's mirror (which is one of five!), yet the book has still been quite successful, selling almost 19,000 copies in a year and a half."
- "Here's a PDF of a "graffiti report card" that you can fill out and place next to graffiti in your neighborhood. "
"No Secret Painting V", 2006, is a work by Art & Language (A&L) consisting of a large square dark abstract canvas accompanied by a smaller framed text that seems to refer to it.
The accompaniment of a dark abstract square by a text is a scheme that Art & Language used in their "Secret Paintings" and "Guaranteed Paintings" of the 1960s. These referred to Malevich and to Stella, and to certificates of authenticity for conceptual artworks. But unlike the secret paintings the composition of the squares (and lines) within the canvas are perceptible.
The plaid pattern is from A&L's earlier piece "Wrongs Healed In Official Hope", an installation of canvases and of filing cabinets made from canvases as a parody or travesty of A&L's earlier text-based Indices of the 1970s. The text it contained was not a piece of art criticism, politics, or set theory, but an extreme pornographic sado-masochistic fantasy set at a girl's boarding school rendered increasingly abstract by textual transformation and substitution.
Eventually the text in "Wrongs Healed In Official Hope" became an abstract pattern of squares and lines, a decorative plaid pattern. This decorativeness appears to have no content, only decorative effect, but it is haunted by typographic grids and these lead back to a textual expression of degenerate taste. The implication seemed to be that the plaid was no less a product of that taste. There are no comfortable chairs in the work of A&L.
Accompanying texts that seem to describe or specify some aspect of the image that they are counterposed with were also a feature of A&L's "Flags For Organizations" and "Gustave Courbet's Burial At Ornans Expressing...". It is this last piece that the text in "No Secret Painting" seems to serve a similar function to. It specifies or describes the four sections of the canvas as having certain content. But unlike "Burial At Ornans..." there is an aesthetic and genetic connection between the text and the image. Some of the text of "Wrongs Healed In Official Hope" is incorporated, and the composition of the plaid is mentioned.
In both the visibility of the painting's pictorial content and in the fact that the text does actually shed some light on that content this is not a secret painting. A secret is neither set up nor revealed. Where the secret paintings pointed an accusing finger, deflating the mysteries of other works and of the viewer's regard, "No Secret Painting" is self-deflating.
But this is not A&L For Dummies. The painting and the text both refer not just to each other but to "Wrongs Healed...", and to more than "Wrongs Healed". This is an index, and the viewer has work to do. As with the apparently blank surfaces of "Index: Now They Are", these are allegories of an artistic paradigm. I just haven't quite worked out exactly which one just yet...
The accompaniment of a dark abstract square by a text is a scheme that Art & Language used in their "Secret Paintings" and "Guaranteed Paintings" of the 1960s. These referred to Malevich and to Stella, and to certificates of authenticity for conceptual artworks. But unlike the secret paintings the composition of the squares (and lines) within the canvas are perceptible.
The plaid pattern is from A&L's earlier piece "Wrongs Healed In Official Hope", an installation of canvases and of filing cabinets made from canvases as a parody or travesty of A&L's earlier text-based Indices of the 1970s. The text it contained was not a piece of art criticism, politics, or set theory, but an extreme pornographic sado-masochistic fantasy set at a girl's boarding school rendered increasingly abstract by textual transformation and substitution.
Eventually the text in "Wrongs Healed In Official Hope" became an abstract pattern of squares and lines, a decorative plaid pattern. This decorativeness appears to have no content, only decorative effect, but it is haunted by typographic grids and these lead back to a textual expression of degenerate taste. The implication seemed to be that the plaid was no less a product of that taste. There are no comfortable chairs in the work of A&L.
Accompanying texts that seem to describe or specify some aspect of the image that they are counterposed with were also a feature of A&L's "Flags For Organizations" and "Gustave Courbet's Burial At Ornans Expressing...". It is this last piece that the text in "No Secret Painting" seems to serve a similar function to. It specifies or describes the four sections of the canvas as having certain content. But unlike "Burial At Ornans..." there is an aesthetic and genetic connection between the text and the image. Some of the text of "Wrongs Healed In Official Hope" is incorporated, and the composition of the plaid is mentioned.
In both the visibility of the painting's pictorial content and in the fact that the text does actually shed some light on that content this is not a secret painting. A secret is neither set up nor revealed. Where the secret paintings pointed an accusing finger, deflating the mysteries of other works and of the viewer's regard, "No Secret Painting" is self-deflating.
But this is not A&L For Dummies. The painting and the text both refer not just to each other but to "Wrongs Healed...", and to more than "Wrongs Healed". This is an index, and the viewer has work to do. As with the apparently blank surfaces of "Index: Now They Are", these are allegories of an artistic paradigm. I just haven't quite worked out exactly which one just yet...
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, critique
- "But what is puzzling about this book is that it purports to be a book attacking the sloppiness, error and ignorance of the Internet, yet it itself is shot through with sloppiness, error and ignorance. "
- "how the Internet is exposing and undermining the arbitrary categories we use for knowledge, social organization, and employment."
- "Third, we need to modernise our intellectual property framework, and in places it may need to be strengthened."
- "Tim goes on to suggest a simple and cunning mechanism for minimizing copyright's impact on authorship, a method that will allow the largest variety in art and expression. This is great stuff"
- "Freedom Defined" is now at version 1.0. Good stuff.
The idea of a monadic taxonomy of knowledge raises the spectre of structurelessness with its hidden power structures. But it also opens the possibility of shaking up taxonomies and even ontology, which is good as long as it doesn't result in mere eclecticism.
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, philosophy
