The way artists make art often reflect the means of production of their age. The artist of feudalism was an artisan or alchemist, the Renaissance artist was adept at mathematics and geometry inspired by trade and war, and Andy Warhol's factory embodied the spirit of mass production.If you looked in the jobs pages in the early 1990s, you'd see adverts for "Mac Operators". A Mac Operator would use the only Apple Macintosh in the company to do design work using Illustrator, Photoshop and Quark at a low rate of pay.When I got to art school at around that time I begged and borrowed access to Macs to make art using Photoshop and Illustrator. I acted out the role of the Mac Operator (rather than alchemist, merchant or factory worker) without realising it to make art.The Mac Operator is a kind of knowledge worker. Knowledge work is post-industrial work. Another example of post-industrialism is brand-based outsourcing. The production of Jeff Koon's artistic brand is outsourced. But Koons is a manager rather than a worker.Mac Operators were representative producers of mass culture at that time. But Web 2.0 means that everyone can now use a computer to produce culture as part of the crowd. Outsourcing has become crowdsourcing. Mac Operators, like sign painters, are not now a contemporary phenomenon.I started out remixing images, and I continue to do so, aided now by the Creative Commons licences so beloved of Web 2.0. I am still sat at a computer producing art as an individual, rather than using the crowd to do so. But I am using a GNU laptop rather than a Power Mac desktop system.The laptop-based knowledge work figure is the "laptop warrior" or the Bay-area coffee-shop wifi leeching "bedouin". These are the people who start the Web 2.0 companies and web applications that the crowd use to produce their culture.So I haven't ended up as far from the contemporary creative practice of computing as I'd feared. And I'm not criticising artists who mimic Web 2.0 strategies without adding anything to them, when I do criticise them, from a position of historical irrelevance. I'm just reflecting a different aspect of current computer-based production.
August 2008 Archives
Adbusters have noticed hipsterism:http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html
We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generationApparently The The aren't on Gnutella.K-punk has a good critique of the article and Hipsterism in general that is well worth reading in full:http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/010588.html
the problem with "hipsters" is precisely that they are pathologically well-adjusted, untroubled by sexual anxieties or financial worries. Vulgar Freudianism is not without its point - where is the motivation to produce art in people who can get any satisfaction they want, at any time? The very seamlessness of these unalienated, guilt-free lives leaves no material for sublimation.I loathe hipsterism, but what else *can* there be in a society where most of the history of mass culture is a mouse click away and where everyone can broadcast their lives (also with a click of the mouse) in a way that only mass media personalities could previously? The cultural smog of the post-Napster Internet works against the scarcity and instant obsolescence that defined previous mass culture.And besides, the aim of youth culture has always been to upset the eldsters. ;-) Punk parents would need something pretty radical to upset them. The laid-back ambient historicism of hipsterism certainly does the trick if its lack of something new is something new.I remember watching a 1960s documentary from Swinging London that announced in a voice-over that "The Forties Are Back". As a kid in the late 80s, 60s psychedelia was big with my cooler friends. The past has always been big. And postmodernism was an 80s thing.If it's not the case that hipsterism is just the usual 20-year cycle hitting 80s postmodernism and sample culture then perhaps the hipster generation is just the first with both the economic and technological power to beat the twenty year limit.(Extended from a comment on Art Fag City.)
http://www.adamfrisby.com/blog/2008/08/opensim-c-standards-patents-and-you/A brilliant blog post that answers many of the concerns I raised about OpenSim's use of C#.A couple of points.
If Microsoft decide to add new extensions onto .NET (which they have done with every major release), the OpenSim developers are content to wait until those extensions are available under Mono (which moves fast enough that it isn't a major problem).Does this mean that there will be elements of Mono, used in OpenSim, that will not be included in the ECMA standard and potentially will not be covered by Microsoft's patent pledges?
Java is a beast of a language that has had layers of gunk added in every revision resulting in a hodge-podge of inconsistently named items in the standard library that may, or may not address what you want. The second major reason is that the C# standard library is both larger and more functional - the amount of time and effort the Base Class Library has saved is astonishing.I got fed up with Java with the 1.1 release (Swing and inner classes were turds), so I hold no brief for Java. C# looks like it has some nice CLOS-style accessor magic. I would be surprised if C# has better libraries in aggregate (including the net rather than just out of the box), though.
http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/010588.html
Whereas I would say the opposite: the problem with "hipsters" is precisely that they are pathologically well-adjusted, untroubled by sexual anxieties or financial worries.I don't resent web 2.0 kiddies doing what net.artists used to. I object to careerist net.artists using them as human shields.
Excellent news:http://lessig.org/blog/2008/08/huge_and_important_news_free_l.html
I am very proud to report today that the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (THE "IP" court in the US) has upheld a free (ok, they call them "open source") copyright license, explicitly pointing to the work of Creative Commons and others. (The specific license at issue was the Artistic License.) This is a very important victory, and I am very very happy that the Stanford Center for Internet and Society played a key role in securing it. Congratulations especially to Chris Ridder and Anthony Falzone at the Center.This kind of precedent is very important for persuading corporate and institutional clients to use Free Culture licences.
"Surgical Strike" was a 1996 art computing project concerned with the social history of art computing. "Surgical Strike Free Software" is a 2008 reimplementation of the original project.Computing has trickled down from military applications through corporations to universities and finally into art practice. This history is present in the language and social assumptions of computing. This culture sits uncomfortably with the culture of art, or at least it should. Surgical Strike depicts these contradictions in the form of ironized computer art in order to make them explicit.The source materials for Surgical Strike were military jargon, the art of William Latham (due to its status as paradigmatic "computer art" at the time), 3D models of stealth aeroplanes, 1990s computer software logos, and verbal descriptions of awkward facts from the history of commercial computing. The swirly structures of stealth bombers replaced the innocent spheres and cylinders of Latham's computational Darwinism with more significant forms. The texturing of these forms with commercial trademarks rather than procedural textures was another level of indexicality. These were then sandwiched between texts describing things the computer industry would rather forget in the background and the source code for the depicted form asserting its primacy and interfering with the unreflective consumption of the image in the foreground.The composition of the images produced with the original system was probably based, unconsciously, on Art & Language's "Hostages" series. The idea of an indexical computer programming language came, again unconsciously, from PJH Halls at KIAD. The project came to me fully formed as I walked to the CEA at Middlesex University early on the morning that I desperately needed to have a project to start.Surgical Strike proper is a toy programming language for creating patterns of textured 3D objects. The keywords of the language are intended to sound militaristic. Although Surgical Strike can use any 3D models or textures, it is intended to use models of military artefacts and images of software logos. The language features iteration but not branching or even variables so it is not Turing complete.The original version of Surgical Strike was written in C++ using Apple's QuickDraw 3D for Power Macintosh on Mac OS 7.x . The parser was hand-written and compiled programs were executed using a bytecode format inspired by the public documentation of Display PostScript. Given the unmaintainability of this code and possible rights issues the current version has been written from scratch.Surgical Strike is not anti-militaristic except to the extent that it works with the assumptions of the cultures it is targeted at. Those cultures were idealistic mid-1990s art computing and mid-1990s art criticism ignorant of the content of art computing. The title is a piece of military jargon that served to illustrate the gap between depiction and reality. But the gap that it indicated was in the target cultures, not (neccessarily) between the ideals and reality of militarism.
Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) is the original and still the most popular role-playing game. At the end of the 1990s the original publisher of D&D collapsed and the game was bought by a new publisher, Wizards of the Coast (WotC). Part of their strategy for rescuing the game was a mixed copyleft-with-uncopyable-sections licence called the Open Gaming Licence (OGL) that allowed people to copy the text of the rules of D&D and to produce and sell their own work using it. The OGL gave the game playing public and publishers of third-party tie-ins for D&D the confidence to invest in the brand without fear that it would disappear if the new publisher failed to make a success of it. It also made those gamers and publishers drivers for sales of D&D products by WotC.The mixed copyleft of the OGL was controvercial and WotC's relationship with third party publishers was not always an easy one. But the strategy of using alternative licencing to build confidence in and network effects for the D&D brand was a success.WotC have just released their latest new edition of D&D. It is excellent, with improved game rules, writing and graphic design. But what may not be improved is WotC's licencing strategy for the game. Months after the launch of the new edition, the replacement for the OGL has not been released and there are rumblings that it may be restrictive and exploitative, destroying the trust and network effects that were the core value of the OGL to WotC and the gaming public.http://www.aintitcool.com/node/37864
Whether by accident or design, the new GSL (Game System License) the replacement for the 3E OGL (Open gaming License) is incredibly restrictive in that it has a few provisions that when combined together create a legal nightmare of potential Intellectual property loss.[...]Necromancer has apparently backed out of the d20 biz. And now a bunch of the second and third tier d20 companies are quickly moving in to take their place. And at least one of them is playing with fire by putting out books early under fair use laws before switching to the GSL on the starting date everyone else is being held to (October 1st.)To produce a more restrictive replacement for the OGL will destroy the very value that it trying to avoid losing. The stakes are not low, it is possible that the D&D community could "fork" over this. This would lose WotC far more money than just continuing to support the OGL and the strategy that has made their new versions of D&D such a success.If what AICN are saying is true then Wizards of the Coast are not facing an external marketing problem or a public perception problem with the GSL, they are facing an internal catastrophic failure to understand the OGL strategy. They should not be looking to correct the flaws in the GSL. They should tell their legal team, their management team, or whoever is driving this that the GSL will not stop people making money by selling cheap replacements for the core D&D rulebooks to people who wouldn't buy them anyway. It will just stop the people who would buy the core D&D rulebooks from WotC to run games with those people from having a reason to do so.When a company is more focussed on stopping other people making money than making money itself, it's time to start worrying. And unless they place the new D&D back under the OGL, it will be time to start worrying about WotC.
Tom Moody is a talented New-York-based visual artist with a penchant for bitmap imagery. He can draw more expressively in Microsoft Paint than I can with a box of soft pastels, and his use of this skill in such a restrictive medium to pull in fine art and low culture references is good stuff. Solving the technical problems of representing the forms that society creates is what art is about.Tom's image work is an embodiment of the current forms and means of production of internet-based society. But, and this is crucial, it is phrased unavoidably in terms of art history and artistic production that mean it would fail as simple web illustration. It is too interesting and has too much internal complexity. It makes a context for itself. History, problem solving and interiority are anathema to the easy post-historical consumerist cool of Web 2.0.Tom's pixels-as-symbolic-form MS Paint drawings of graffitti, or of found image elements then mixed in with art-historical precedents, present the viewer and critic with work to do both visually and conceptually. They are vivid and timely images without being tricksy or issue-illustrating. These stand-alone pieces are where I feel the best of Tom's work is. You can gain a lot of insight into contemporary culture by looking at them.
Why does Girl Talk, the hipster Jive Bunny, have an NC licence on his latest work? NC for sampling musicians is fail, doubly so when they are selling the work.
I've found it surprisingly easy to get started running OpenSim. Here are some good guides to going beyond just starting a sim.http://gwala.net/blog/2008/08/resources-for-running-your-own-opensim/A good collection of resources.http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/other-grids-virtual-worlds/13507-howto-get-opensim-running-osgrid.htmlHow to get your own OpenSim hosting for 15USD a month.http://opensimuser.wordpress.com/2008/07/16/opensim-mysql-install-guide/How to use OpenSim with MySQL.
OpenSim is a Free Software re-implementation of the Second Life (SL) virtual world server. The popularity of Second Life and the availability of a Free server (from OpenSim) and a Free client (from Linden Labs, the original authors of SL) means that OpenSim and SL's scripting language may become the standard for networked virtual reality in the same way that the Apache server and HTML have for networked hypertext.OpenSim is an excellent project but it has two issues that are of concern for the freedom of OpenSim users. These are not being discussed within the Free Software and web freedom movements, and they need discussing quite urgently before detrimental norms become fixed.The first problem is that OpenSim is written in C# and allows users to write scripts in C#. There are alternative implementations of some of the less complex parts of OpenSim (in Perl for example), but the main sim (virtual world) engine would be more difficult to replace. Is it worth trying to do so, or at least trying to produce a non-C# alternative in parallel, or are C# and Mono a safe environment for at least this Free Software project?The second and far more serious problem is Second Life's existing user restriction mechanisms, its implementation in OpenSim, and how this interacts with ip maximalist calls for further restrictions.SL objects and scripts are software and/or data, they are owned by their users, and they are run by their users on the server. But Second Life has a built-in DRM-style "no copy/no change" flag system for virtual objects that can remove the freedom of the users of that code to modify and share it.The flag system is implemented by OpenSim but can be turned off by the server administrator. This is as it should be; the flag system is a restriction that has been rejected in CD, cable TV and other media. It destroys fair use and discourages consumers, destroying the very value it is supposed to protect. But the ability to turn off the flag system disturbs some IP maximalists. And even the flag system is not enough for some IP maximalists who demand encrypted textures and other ridiculous security theatre for Linden Labs' implementation SL.The flags are unnecessary for administrators and for rightsholders. Linden Labs and OpenSim operators can claim safe harbor protection under the DMCA, like web hosts and like video sharing sites, and rightsholders can appeal under this system. Calls for further restrictions should be resisted, and the established norms of Fair Use and free use of software espoused and defended. And they are ineffectual for "content creators", as shapes and textures are ultimately sent over the network to the client anyway.One solution to "protect" content encumbered by control flags, although more to protect virtual world administrators from endless protests that they are enabling "content theft", would be a system to strip flag-encumbered objects from a user's avatar when it teleports into a Free sim (one with the flag system disabled) and restore them when they teleport out. Proper DMCA safe harbor compliance would be preferable, but such a system would answer critics and inform users.It is possible to establish norms and systems that protect the freedom of users of virtual worlds while obviating the demands of ip maximalists. For both the freedom of users and the profits of rightsholders Networked Virtual Reality should be like the World Wide Web not the old walled-garden dial-up network services that lost to it.So, in summary.1. Decide whether C# and Mono is the best environment for OpenSim and if not what can be done.2. Resist calls for stronger restrictions on users and explain why they are counter-productive.3. Establish that control flags are legally unecessary, destroy users rights and will depress adoption and exploitation of worlds.4. Establish DMCA/EUCD best practice for OpenSim operators and implement code to support this.5. Implement control flag firewalls that strip and restore restricted content when avatars teleport to and from a sim.6. Establish both software and web user/data freedom standards for OpenSim users and promote them as part of the value of OpenSim.7. Promote the use of Free Software and Free Culture licences within virtual worlds for scripts, objects and textures.8. Reframe the terms of the debate using the growth of Free Software, the Web, and online music sales as counter-examples to IP maximalist claims.Free Software and free Culture advocates and organizations such as the Free Software Foundation, Creative Commons, The Open Knowledge Foundation and autonomo.us must step up to this urgent task.
When I got to art school in the early 90s, cultural studies was the face of the literary theory land grab in that part of the academy. Its stranglehold wouldn't be broken until the Sokal Hoax some years later. I resisted semiotics and deconstruction as the hegemonic narratives of a coercive authoritarian culture. The long cry of denial of those who'd missed the boat in '68 echoed through the postmodern era. It was vapid, tedious bullshit entirely congruent with the managerial ideology of the day.Technology was opaque to the Derrida-and-Deleuze brigade, however much they protested to the contrary, so mid-90s interactive multimedia was a good place to resist Theory from. Computing machinery was part of another land grab, but criticism of it was possible. And numbers were at least a means of resisting the claim that everything was a text(e).You'd think given this that I'd be all for the Cognitive Science land grab on literature, but no. To try to explain Shakespeare or Austen in terms of evolution, cognition or economics is fucked up. Literature and the aesthetic are what is needed. Parsing the literary into consumable and mashable data is complicit with corporate (and academic) information culture, the terrible cool of Alan Liu's excellent "Laws Of Cool".The literary and the aesthetic are desperately needed by a culture that threatens to prolapse into mere information. Cognitive Science can explain why you see stripes or why events follow one another in time, and economics can excuse any crime, but the indigestible objects of THE literary and THE aesthetic, not as mystifications but as emergent (epi)phenomena of socialized humanity are needed as an irrational to the sociopathic "rationality" of neoliberalism and managerialism.We do need another hero. Because no amount of economic incentives or cognitive exegesis is going to escape the gravity well of vapid cool.If art cannot be grounded in cognitive science, where can it be grounded? In a non-cognitive aesthetic. What can a non-cognitive aesthetic be in the post-postmodern era?
There are often two sides to any story and trying to flatten it breaks both. Contradictions are ever present.Fine art is absolutely dependent on money. It is all but an economic category. Taste (and aesthetics) is the product of social class, it is a socioeconomic shibboleth. Yet art historians and artists are often dismissive of the profit motive. Artists' behaviour, starving if not in the garret then in bedsits on three or more jobs for decades to make art that may or may not eventually sell for much more than they will ever see, is economically irrational.The current insane prices for art instrumentalized as stock-market-beating commodities is a problem for aesthetics. Should aesthetics recognize the importance of works paid attention by the market? To do so all but discards the artwork as the subject of aesthetics. It is aesthetics in quotation marks, a state of being that makes hipsterism seem authentic (sic). Should aesthetics try to ignore the market? To do so leads to the clammy embraces of academic radicalism or state art.How can the aesthetic flatland of the market be escaped by an art that may nonetheless be destined for it? How can that question be answered without the word "crash"? How can the Hardt-and-Negri-and-Zizek dinner party radicalism of the academy and the equally instrumentalised art-as-a-substitute-for-regeneration of state art be avoided into the bargain?
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/04/arts/design/04pica.htmlDavid Galenson seems to be part of the wave of culturally triumphant economic explainers who are dining out on neoliberalism's success since that nasty business with Keynesianism in the 70s meant the economic paradigm had to be reset. They definitely have it right this time, it's a science. You know, like Marxism was.Galenson's mission is to bring the explanatory pixie-dust of market economic analysis to art. The NY Times article linked above contains a number of extraordinary claims about art inspired by Galenson's latest book. Not all are made by Galenson, but they do not contradict the quotes from him. I am hoping that Galenson's book has been misrepresented by the article, but the article itself requires addressing.Galenson apparently claims that markets and conceptual innovation are what differentiates Twentieth Century art from previous art. But markets in art have existed since classical times. Particularly wherever a merchant class has emerged but also with nobles and royalty. Courts are, in economic terms, markets. And the competition of different dynasties, courts or worthies for the scarce resources of artistic production constituted a monopoly only in so much as everyone who buys a can of coke does.Michael Rushton goes further than Galenson by claiming that innovation requires markets. If there was no innovation in art prior to the existence of markets then the historical emergence of cave art is inexplicable, and tribal art must be an haullucination.Galenson seems to claim that quantitative methods or market economics have not often been applied to art and that art history is hostile to them. This is ahistorical. There is a long history of Marxist analyses of art history, and the history of aesthetics is largely a history of economic class and economic development. The question of who pays for art, and how the sale price of a work of art relates to its aesthetic worth, is not a new one.Galenson follows these claims with a quick count of image frequency in recent art history textbooks in order to establish the most important works of the twentieth century. But text books are not the same as the museums, journals, catalogues or collections that create the importance of works of art that these books report. Applying simple quantitative methods to this tertiary information renders them both information destroying and parasitic. At best they can prove only that someone else has proved something somewhere else.Books were chosen because actual great art does not come to market often enough to provide useful data for quantitative analysis of what the market determines great art to be. Read that sentence again. It is fortunate indeed that Galenson didn't have to rely on the art market to provide the information he needs to prove that markets are the producers of great works. But is there not a problem with a thesis when attempting to follow it through disproves it on a practical level?Economics can tell us much about the sociology and history of art, as it always has. Galenson is wrong if he thinks that he is bringing new cargo to the art world. And his premises and methodology are bogus.That said, let us suppose for a moment that Galenson is right. What would Galensonist art look like?Since it cannot be measured by sales, it need not be expensive. No Damien Hirst skull bonds for hedge fund managers and oil oligarchs to use to out-pace the market for lesser commodities, you could sell an unmade bed as long as you get in the next art textbook. Since the interior structure of the work is irrelevant, it need not be aesthetic. Easy reproducability is more valuable than beauty or internal complexity. Since it must get in the textbooks it needs to be popular, but this need not be because of its artistic worth. It could illustrate fashionable theory or trends, and/or be produced by an artist who is good at parties.Galenson's artist is Tracy Emin. He is welcome to her.The post-historical Hegelian idealism of market economics is anti-humanistic. But art is part of the human condition. It is no surprise that the figures an economist is interested in are numeric rather than compositional. The problem is that art considered quantitatively has no interior, yet it is the content of art that makes it "great".The failure of Galenson's project is the failure of neoliberalism laid bare without the concealing effects of economic transition or state intervention. Markets cannot provide Galenson with the material he needs to fulfill his project. It's a good thing we don't have to rely on them for anything more important. Such as, say, food or energy...
http://aboutfoo.com/blog/2008/08/04/exploring-freedom-the-book/In more book news, I'll have some blog posts ^D ^D essays in a new book about Free Culture issues out later in the year.
Lawrence Lessig is finishing off his series of Free Culture books later this year with "Remix".See here for details.
Dedicated to Lyman Ray Patterson and Jack Valenti, it pushes three ideas -- (1) that this war on our kids has got to stop, (2) that we need to celebrate (and support) the rebirth of a remix culture, and (3) that a new form of business (what I call the "hybrid") will flourish as we better enable this remix creativity.It's available for pre-order now.
Thanks to Matt for getting the web site back up.
