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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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'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.
]]>http://gwala.net/blog/2008/08/resources-for-running-your-own-opensim/
A good collection of resources.
How 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 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.
]]>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?
]]>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?
]]>David 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...
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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>