June 2008 Archives

Oh fuck not semiotics.

Semitotics is a "geddit???" after somebody else's joke. If you have to explain the joke you kill it. What you kill you gain the power of.

Semiotics is the cold dead hand of the bad ventriloquist. It is ideological formalism. It is the fractality of discourse written only in ink.

Semiotics is semantic management. You get to define the terms and to evaluate your own performance through others against them. And to claim the surplus as your own creation.

There is nothing wrong with significatory exegesis. It can be illuminating. There is nothing wrong with sociohistorically situating significatory exegesis. Freud collapses when the text of his discourse is deconstructed against the text (sic) of his life. I enjoy a good hard deconstruction, particularly with an improving book.

Creating art specifically for semiopsy is fetishistic, indeed it is pornographic. This is unfair on pornography, which is system of signs the density, interiority and indexicality of which postmodern art can only dream of, but it is accurate. Semiowankery is not good art, semiowankerywankery is not good criticism.

They do not often survive deconstruction.

The Problem

Let's imagine just for a moment that the problem with Second Life (SL) isn't that people can copy textures. Let's imagine that the problem is that the business models are wrong, and that IP maximalism is seductive but has been proven to be counter-productive wherever it has been tried.

What Second Life Is

SL's appearance as an imaginary physical world has confused people into believing that it isn't a service and that what goes on inside it isn't services. Its frontier feel has confused people into seeing it as a socially and economically open world rather than a walled garden. But make no mistake, if you want to make money in Second Life you have to recognise that you are providing a service within a walled garden.

The Solution

People can copy textures, models and scripts but they can't copy reputations, the details of experiences, or out-of-Second-Life value. And we've learnt a lot about competing with free, getting people to pay for "free", and rearranging revenue graphs to turn negatives into positives. So let's apply this, rather than dreams of an in-game DMCA, to the problem of how to invigorate monetization of SL.

Servicising Content

Rather than entering into an arms race with piracy, enter into it an arms race with changing tastes. Charge for convenient access to timely and compelling streams of content. Learn from ringtone companies and licenced music stores, who make millions from music, games, and images that could otherwise be copied from the Internet or pre-owned CDs.

Servicising Regions And Sims

Rather than applying locks to textures, apply gates to areas. Theme parks, game zones and other experiences are worth money in-game as well as in real life. If locking out regions of sims offends people, just have pay-access sims. People pay for access to SL, so this is hardly unprecedented.

Servicising Experiences

Charge for "alternate reality games" in-world, charge for night clubs and party events, consider that the escort industry has done well in-world, consider whether the Elvish or Furry communities would pay to access or take part in a spectacular event. Give the dance mat away and charge to play in the league.

Out-Of-World Value

Amazon and iTunes don't charge you for access to their sites, reading their reviews or reading or listening to some of their catalogues. They make money by using their virtual storefronts to charge for the delivery of real-world value. The same is true for ticket and travel services and for all the other service and product sellers that we used to call ecommerce. Build eCommerce in SL. We had a practice run of this with VRML.

Franchising And Commissions

Rather than worrying about how to get people to pay you for your work, pass that challenge on to other people. Start franchise operations for copies of your environments or objects and charge for setup or services, or let people sell on copies of your work for a commission.

Change The Revenue Graph

Treat copying of your work as a reduction in distribution costs for your client's promotional materials. Keep your salt sellar handy and read the "Free" article in Wired. Use indirect monetization.

Apps

Look at how Facebook apps work. They access the in-world data and add out-of-world data to create value. SL objects and environments can do that as well.

Advertising

Compare Second Life to MySpace. Both are "user-generated-content", with some corporate content included. Compare Second Life to FaceBook. Both are social networks with third-party applications included. Compare Second Life to Livejournal. Both are hosting companies for records of people's activities. And all monetize this through advertising. I'm not suggesting advertising blimps over Luskwood, or Goreans getting tattoos from sponsors, but there's much that can be done to improve both the concept of what advertising is and how to make money from it in SL.

Generative Content

If a single work is easy to copy, ten thousand are not only difficult to copy but more difficult to find exactly the right one in. Create large volumes of content generatively and charge for providing the right one (see also Bespoke Services and Servicising Content).

Bespoke Services

Bespoke production and customization are as valuable in in software and music as it is in SL. People aren't going to stop paying for the right modified objects, skins, and environments just because they can get the wrong ones for free.

Brands and Exclusivity

Work to establish your products and services as an exclusive brand, learning from the fashion world that counterfeit copies are reputational network effects for your originals.

Business As Usual

Bespoke builders are making money in SL. What is preventing them making more money is the lack of clear objectives, metrics, and in-world value narratives for their clients. Another generic corporate information centre isn't worth anything to avatar or executive. But building (which includes modelling, texturing, scripting and populating) for individuals, groups (in-or-out-of-world), institutions and corporations is SL's goldmine if people can just get it right. It isn't texture copying that is stopping this.

Gatekeepers and Intermediaries

Provide the SL equivalent of reports or collections, whatever that might be. Embody and sell trends (see Servicising Content).

But I Just Want To Get Rich Writing Code And Texturing Prims!

I have explained precisely how to do that. All of the above need code, models and textures. You just need to do the work of selling them as something people actually want to buy.

Second Life And OpenSim

Once you start treating people like thieves they treat punishment for theft as a cost to be borne not a disincentive to be avoided. Second Life is, like the blogging and social networking sites, a user generated social environment that commercial and corporate activity can learn to monetize part of at various levels of indirection. *If* they don't destroy the neighborhood. The user-generated aspect of Second Life, however inept it may lead to vast swathes of the world appearing, is its purpose and its value, not an inconvenience and an impediment to monetization.

Far from those who support in-world freedom fleeing to OpenSim, I think that corporate users will start using OpenSim to make their own walled gardens that they can add value to and charge for, much as Linden Lab charge for access to the UGC value of Second Life. This will raise its own problems for freedom, but that is another story.

I have two new Free Culture-related reviews up at Furtherfield.

Abstract Hacktivism

A book collecting two essays by Otto von Busch and Karl Palmas transforms the concept of "hacktivism" with well-argued historical analysis and a number of informative case studies.

Big Buck Bunny

"Big Buck Bunny", the second short film from the Blender Foundation, features well animated cartoon animals trying to kill each other in order to advance free software and free culture.

Both of the works under review are excellent and well worth downloading and/or paying for.

"A bit protest-artological"

A readymade is an ordinary object that has been nominated as an artwork by an artist. Nominating the object as an artwork transforms it into an artwork. This is not a million miles away from The Institutional Theory Of Art, which says that the answer to the question "what is art?" is whatever the artworld says it is.

Nominating a readymade is an act of transubstantiation. Readymades are aethetically null, it is a category error to say "look at how curvy and shiny the porcelain of that urinal is". You are not looking at the readymade when you say that, you are looking at the non-art object.

Found art is different from readymades, however confused Wikipedia's entry on the subject may be. Found art is not transformed, its latent aesthetic potential is recognised and capitalised on by the artist. It is a mistake to invoke Duchamp when trying to create a lineage for found art.

Semiotics, the ventriloquial grinding of the symbolism of a cultural artefact to dust, is problematic with regards to artworks. Do you analyse the symbolism of the object qua object, or of the object qua artwork? With regard to readymades it is again a category error; the meaning of the readymade is artistic, not functional.

So in summary:

Anyone claiming to be both working in the tradition of Duchamp and doing semiotics is confused.

I am now on a new weblog platform (Movable Type) on a new server. Many thanks to Matt for helping with this. And by "helping with" I mean "doing".

The Wiki is gone, and Like That isn't back in the art section, but apart from that everything should have been moved over now.

If anything's missing do let me know.

Free culture in action - Exploring Freedom with Matt Lee

My band, furny, have released all the tracks from our two EPs as free downloads. They've been available elsewhere, including Last.fm and for sale as CDs for a while.

We're putting them all up on the web and encouraging people to download, listen and if they like.. donate.

I don't expect many people will donate, but I do hope a lot of people will download them. We're encouraging people to file share them, and even to make their own CDs and sell them, for profit, and not share that money with us.

Why? Because it's all great publicity.

Want to make your own furny t-shirts and sell them? Great Let us know.. we'll link to you

Want to make your own furny CDs and sell them in your record store, or online store? Fantastic.

Using furny music in your game, or movie? Awesome

We're even including a bundle of someone else's artwork in each download -- with 1999-2005 EP you get CC Ironies and with more mature escapades in hi-fi, you get Canto -- both of these by Rob Myers, a friend of the band after he wrote a nice little write up on our licensing.

Artist/roboticist teaching neural-net bots to love and dance to punk music - Boing Boing

Artist Fiddian Warman built some robots controlled by a neural network. neural networks can learn, so he's been playing them classic punk records in an attempt to turn them into robotic versions of his younger self. the robots are 2 metres tall and have the ability to pogo. It all culminates in a gig at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London 3-5 July 2008: bring your friends

This should be good.

(Disclosure: I was at the Centre For Electronic Arts with Fiddian, I was also briefly in SoDA with him, and he's great.)

Old Time Out article on the Strange Attractions shop

Strange Attractions is a freaky new "sort of front-line cultural science centre cum fractal_art/boutique" in Kensington Park Road, Portobello

Or was in 1991. I used to make my way there to get fractal stuff in the early 1990s. Well, it was generally 2 or 3 dimensional, but it had images of fractals on it. I never got any of the music. I must try to find some.

I've a soft spot for fractals. I'll write about why another time.

As well as destroying proprietary implementations, VRML 2 has resisted full implementation by Free Software projects for over a decade. That's no mean feat.

There are no VRML plugins in Ubuntu (my current distro) at present. So I downloaded a copy of FreeWrl and installed that. After working out how to actually get Firefox to take notice of it I found that the plugin's menus draw behind its drawing area and (Update: This was a problem with the window compositor, not FreeWrl. Uninstalling Compiz fixed this. that those worlds I could get it to draw it didn't seem to place the camera in properly.

I then downloaded the source for OpenVrml. After several hours of building and the same plugin installation dance as FreeWrl I found that it just jammed on the worlds I looked at.

I wish both projects well, and I'm sure they work well with the worlds they are designed to render, but they are a dead loss for just getting on with browsing web 3D. I'll see if I can dig out some of my old worlds to try them on.

Crosbie (in the comments) recommends OpenCroquet, which I am downloading. And I am installing the Microsoft anti-Free Software timebomb that is Mono in order to run OpenSim and try Free Software Second Life networking.

But I still just want a VRML browser plugin that just works.

In the mid-1990s there were four problems with internet-based Virtual Reality (VR).

1. The plug-ins were all for Windows, not Mac. Ignoring early adopters and designers is a bad idea when launching a new visual medium.

2. People's PCs had anaemic graphics cards and processors. Skilful design could offset this, though.

3. People were on 24-56k dial-up modems for the most part. Again, skilful design could offset this but it did set a limit.

4. VRML 2 was an unimplementable turd of a standard. It destroyed any company that tried to implement it.

I think people underestimate the Mac angle. Apple had a miniscule market share but Macs were disproportionately represented on the Internet and within that there were a disproportionate number of the kinds of people you need making and consuming your new medium if you want it to succeed. But I digress.

Reading the VRML 2 standard when it first came out I was struck by its complexity and by the naivete of some of the implementation notes. I couldn't see how to implement it without much more work than the notes seemed to suggest was needed.

Events showed my concerns to be well founded. Cosmo, SGI's VR outfit, was spun off and failed before they managed to finish implementing VRML 2. Intervista also failed to implement it and got bought out. A trend was emerging. Try to implement VRML 2, fail, lose your company.

VRML 1 had been OK. Black Sun had based a multi-user VR system on it. It would have been better for VRML 2 not to have been specified and for VRML 1 to remain the standard with external animation added by the likes of Black Sun than for VRML 2 to destroy the industry.

A couple of years ago the corpse of VRML 2 was exhumed and wrapped in XML to produce X3D. The problem with VRML 2 was not that it wasn't verbose enough, and wrapping it in an extra layer of verbosity in the form of XML tackled the wrong problem. As a comparison, SVG is basically PDF in XML but it is easier to parse than PDF and better suited to inline web graphics because of the choices that were made when considering which bits of PDF should be included or left out.

VRML 2 played a unique part in the failure of the first wave of Internet virtual reality. It wasn't until the mid-2000s that a second wave arrived with less powerful scene description than VRML 1 and a walled-garden, service-based approach that is at odds with the freedom of the hypertext internet that VRML sought to extend.

I long for the return of internet virtual reality based on open standards, distributed client-server systems, and text-file-hackability. With meshes.

A debate about net art at Rhizome.org has some of the younger hipsters of the New York internet art scene circling the wagons. I'm not sure what around.

There's not being careful what you wish for and then there's not being touched by your own irony. Surf Clubs remind me of the night club events I've been to that have been organized by cultural studies lecturers. Empty dancefloors with a few scattered would-be observers around the edges.

Turning the dross of popular media into fine art has a long pedigree, one that I am invested and implicated in. Art may be the superstructure of kitsch. Animated gifs and lolcats are not immune from this, in fact they are a logical progression. Internet time is measured in months, and to ironically act out a group blog a la 2001 in 2006 is no worse temporally speaking than screen-printing Marilyn Monroe in 1962. Or 1984.

But to act out acting out, that is to make a performance of a culture that is already more performative than the artist's performance, and to regard oneself as terribly clever for doing so misses a layer of irony. Several layers of irony. And to be terribly offended by people mistaking what you are doing for what you are doing shows that you should retain a lawyer before rubbing any lamps.

Yes, I am curmudgeonly about the current state of the internet. But the Jemima Puddleduck economics and reified, servicized social relations of Web 2.0 isn't a case of be careful what you wish for, it's a case of don't pawn the family silver. And even within inauthenticity there can be refinement. Hipsterism is an ethic of consumption masquerading as an aesthetic of flaneurie. Compared to that, the technohippies of the early 1990s were gods.

I'm not a US citizen so I've been staying out of the Orphan Works Bill debate for the most part. But I am getting more and more emails about it and reading more and more blog post about it. All are against the bill, so to balance this here are some pro-Orphan Works Bill posts:

Orphan Works Myths and Facts

Release The Orphan works

A Riposte To Lessig's Comments On The Bill

One of the tenets I hold to is that creative genius is often transformative. Yes, creating a new axiom is amazing, but as much as Shakespeare created new forms and idioms in English that have lasted for centuries he also plagiarized existing work. The two may not be unrelated. But in our current culture of the monetization of small differences (what is the difference between yBA art and German art of the 1960s and 1970s, or between Britney and Christina?) they have a restraining order on each other.

This brings us, as Crosbie has already guessed, to Star Wars (the title is an improvised exchange from "The Empire Strikes Back", the work in the series that transformed the initial impact of the first film into a lasting cultural touchpoint. Harrison Ford was also present when Rutger Hauer improvised the climactic "tears in the rain" speech of Bladerunner, but I digress...).

The book "The Secret History Of Star Wars" carefully destroys George Lucas's claims of a creative immaculate conception for the series, leaving a story of creative desperation, appropriation, and lucky escapes that presents each film in the Star Wars series as a destructive digression from the one that precedes it. It takes the claims of a mythology for our times and shows that it is based on the dross of popular culture. "I am your father" was a fix for a creative problem, as was "she is your sister". The plot of Star Wars was taken from a classic Japanese film, The Empire Strikes Back escaped George Lucas's control while providing the best realization of his vision and Return Of The Jedi was a case of recycling and readjusting to embrace, extend and escape a plot that would otherwise have been entirely determined by what had been promised before.

In other words it reveals Lucas's creative genius. It is well worth a read for anyone interested in popular culture, creativity or aesthetics. And it contains strong hints for Free Culture activists. You won't love Jar Jar Binks after reading it, but you will understand him.

"So you see what I told you was true. From a certain point of view."