July 2008 Archives

NonCommercial is Creative Commons's most popular licence module (Attribution doesn't count, it is automatic). Richard Stallman and Tim Berners-Lee support a baseline of non-commercial use. And cool music acts like Radiohead and Girl Talk release work under NC.

There seems to be a growing consensus around NC.

Compared to standard copyright, NC is a gain in freedom. I do not deny that. But it is not enough. It is still a restriction on freedom of speech.

How can this be? After all, you are free to make any work and place it on a P2P network under NC. But, as Negativland point out, your freedom of speech can be expensive to exercise. It takes money to make work, the more major the work the more major the cost, and if you cannot recoup your costs there will be a chilling effect on the production of work that you can't make in a few minutes on a laptop.

I understand that people wish to reserve the right to economically exploit their work, or to deny that right to exploitative entities such as major media corporations. But I think that this cuts off freedom's nose to spite censorship's face. NC is triangulation, it is censorship. A lesser censorship, indirect and with the best of intentions, but censorship nonetheless.

The emerging NC consensus must be broken before it becomes institutionalized. I hope that Wikipedia converting to BY-SA at some point will help to achieve this, but more is needed. People are starting to recognize the link between freedom of expression and alternative licencing again. It is a link that Lessig made in "Free Culture", and it is the lost content of debate around the Creative Commons licences.

We need practical ways of re-emphasizing the link between free expression and alternative licencing, and in particular between free expression and copyleft (or ShareAlike). We need this quite urgently.

Mike Linksvayer has an insightful and thought-provoking blog here.

Crosbie Fitch will help you imagine a world without copyright here.

Matt Lee explores freedom for cultural work as well as for software here.

Joy Garnett's NewsGrist has the best fair use and free expression coverage in the art world, and more, here.

"Like That" turned into a code generation project but I think this was more trouble than it was worth. Beware the seduction of time-saving code that doesn't save time. I took the "make a large number of exhibitable works" part and missed out the "quickly" part. And I ended up having to exercise editorial control, and Processing isn't the right environment for it, and it didn't make doing the hard things any easier, and so I got discouraged.

So I'm going to roll back "Like That" to the hand-written works, re-make some of the more interesting generated works, and try to push on into the areas I wanted to go but that the code generator made difficult to do.

Now I just need to rescue that work and put it back on the restored web site...

http://gwala.net/blog/2008/07/virtual-worlds-why-drm-cannot-protect-you-for-long/

There's a very fundamental problem facing many content creators in Virtual Worlds these days (such as Second Lifeâ„¢, IMVUâ„¢ and others), and that is the problem of Piracy - where one unscrupulous individual takes content from a designer or developer, and then attempts to resell it as their own.

It's a problem - no-one can deny that, but the solution to the problem is not 'deep' DRM. There are a few reasons for this, especially when it comes to content

Some good (and familiar ;-) ) suggestions for real solutions as well.

I'm working on reviews for Furtherfield, having long conversations about digital art on Rhizome, reading William Gibson, and learning Rails, Open Inventor and Second Life.

I'm also hacking on some data visualization code (you've seen the patterns on this blog) but I'm not sure whether that's going anywhere. I think 1968/1969 may be my ultimate statement on data visualization. They have the critical distance and irony that a straight piece of data visualization lacks, whatever its input.

Like That is struggling to break through the Processing barrier. I can't think of a language that Like That would be easy in, but it certainly isn't Processing. Maybe I can switch to JavaScript or OpenFrameworks. I've sworn to just use whatever tools do the job at the time, so I'm looking at OpenSim, but when there are no good tools that doesn't help.

I need a project that I can just do.

If you are on MySpace please make friends with a colour or a shape or a compositional principle that you like. Friending The Aesthetic needs friends...

Duchamp's readymades are acts of ontological transubstantiation, they nominate non-artistic objects as artworks. This is aesthetic blasphemy.

Nominating a non-art object as an artwork requires that the object not be an art object. But imagine that you have a time machine. Now you can go back in time to ancient Rome or Greece with any non-art object the artist seeks to nominate as an artwork and have it accepted as a work of art. Not declared, displayed and accepted.

Assuming you avoid paradoxes, the object will not have been nominated as an art object and will never have been a non-art object. Is this just nomination at an extra level of indirection, or does it undo the readymade?

(From a conversation with Evie.)

In 1976 Tom Waits sang "Tom Traubert's Blues".

In 1992 he sang "I Don't Want To Grow Up".

Each is equivalent given its environment.

Dealing with a last-chance careerist nonentity and their agenda generates neither light nor heat. There's a shuffling embarrassment and gazing into your glass that results from being faced with a cretin riding out. When said lackwit also persistently misrepresents what you are saying (or is too incompetent to stump for a clue), giving them the oxygen of google juice is an own goal.

I like blog art and group blogs. I would go to bat for them. I don't like semiowankery or art-historical overbidding or chin-stroking, ladder-climbing, self-regarding idiots who don't know the genealogy of Claris Works. Of the two principles, the latter is the stronger.

British libel law, eh? What can you do.

The bloggers and surf clubs discussed at the Net Aesthetics 2.0 panel follow a similar model. But instead of stoically re-creating the art world online, they are opening themselves to a galaxy of experience that could potentially be considered art, while at the same time subversively slipping in their own content.
- Tom Moody.

The solution to The Institutional Theory Of Art is to recognize artworks as members of the artworld. - Rob Myers.

we would agree that the opacity of the aesthetic offers some much needed resistance to the kinds of transparency increasingly demanded in so-called "knowledge work" - Art & Language.

Harold Cohen will be giving a talk at Dorkbot London tomorrow.

Of course I'll be there! ;-)

Friend the aesthetic on MySpace.

Like blue? Friend it here:

http://myspace.com/aesthetic_blue

Like red? Friend it here:

http://myspace.com/aesthetic_red

Like yellow? Friend it here:

http://myspace.com/aesthetic_yellow

Like squares? Friend them here:

http://myspace.com/aesthetic_square

Like circles? Friend them here:

http://myspace.com/aesthetic_circle

Like triangles? Friend them here:

http://myspace.com/aesthetic_triangle

Like stripes? Friend them here:

http://myspace.com/aesthetic_stripes

Like checks (or cheques)? Friend them here:

http://myspace.com/aesthetic_checks

Like dots (or spots)? Friend them here:

http://myspace.com/aesthetic_dots

Like the fibonacci sequence? Friend it here:

http://myspace.com/aesthetic_fibonacci

Like the golden section? Friend it here:

http://myspace.com/aesthetic_golden

Like grids? Friend them here:

http://myspace.com/aesthetic_grid

If you are in the UK and haven't already joined ORG then now is a good time to do so.

Click here to join ORG.

In just three short years ORG has effected real policy change on a number of issues, from copyright reform to e-voting. But threats to our liberties are not subsiding, they are increasing, from unchecked snooping by advertisers and bureaucrats to the entertainment industry's war on online freedoms. From July to December this year, we are working to double the amount of financial support we receive from individuals so ORG is ready and able to meet these threats. This page shows how you can help and what we will spend your money on.

http://www.openrightsgroup.org/org-gro/

And they've got a widget:

A neural game controller. Kim Plowright mentioned it in her talk at OpenTech.

http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/ocz_peripherals/nia-neural_impulse_actuator

I want one, I want it now and I want it jacked into my GNU box.

A quick dash from Opentech to the ICA got me to Fiddian Warman's "Neurotic" art performance in time to order some Myers rum and then to buy an evil weasel from the merchandise stall (which proceeded to cover the inside of my bag with white paint that rubbed off the plastic).

Fiddian built and trained three robots to pogo to punk music. He then installed them in the ICA theatre and had punk bands perform to them for three nights. When the robots' neural nets decided that the music was punk, they pogoed. When they didn't recognise the music as punk, the bands got suitably aggravated.

I'm hoping to get a review together.

On a personal note I met lots of ex-CEA (Centre For Electronic Arts, the Middlesex University bunker^D^Dfaculty that I first met Fiddian at) staff and students in the bar. Some I hadn't seen for over a decade(!), some of whom had sometimes weirdly synergistic news, and all of whom are extremely cool. It was great to meet everyone again, and I must get better at keeping in touch.

ONE TWO THREE FOUR!

OpenTech 2008 was amazing.

It was a day of talks about free software, free data, cyberculture, economics, digital rights, the whole technology and society thing. I met lots of ORG, OKFN, OSM and other generally cool people, some familiar faces and a few names I previously knew only from email.

I went to about 10 talks and I can't mention them all but they were all great. To mention a few examples: I'd like to see Ben Gimpert's slides from his talk on financial quantitive analysis put online. Danny O'Brien mentioned identi.ca and really put it in the context of restoring freedom "in the cloud". Kim Plowright used the word 'jouissance' in a way that made sense of more complex ideas of virtual presence (the Lacanian league will have dispatched assassins). And Adrian Hon presented some wonderful hypermedia fiction to considerably more than twelve people (the Doctor Who finale having started five minutes previously).

I hope we don't have to wait another 3 years for the next one.

Evan Prodromou's new project identi.ca may look like just a twitter clone that signs you out if you don't post anything for a few hours but don't be fooled. It is in fact a giant leap forward for the freedom to use Internet-based software.

• The code is AGPL, so even if someone tries to modify it to lock users' data in to the modified version, the users have access to those modifications.


• The system supports federated multiple hosts, so anyone can host an instance and any user can use any instance.


• And the interface supports licencing posts under CC-BY, so that users are free to quote each other and the federated network is free to replicate their data.

The fail whale shows that freedom in Web 2.0 matters to both customers and those who think they want to trap them.

http://identi.ca/robmyers