Month: April 2004

Categories
Free Culture

And Some UK Links

Online rights:

http://www.netfreedom.org/

http://www.cyber-rights.org/

Open Source advocacy:

http://www.affs.org.uk/

Copyright basics:

http://www.cla.co.uk/

Categories
Free Culture

Good Links on (American) Copyright From Groklaw

From an old article at the excellent Groklaw :

http://www.patents.com/copyrigh.htm
http://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/unprotected.html
http://www.eff.org/IP//eff_fair_use_faq.html
http://www.quinnemanuel.com/in_the_news/articles/article_working_title.htm

Categories
Aesthetics

Art As Programming

Here’s Knuth’s original “Art As Programming” lecture as a PDF:

http://www.bluetail.com/~luke/misc/knuth-turingaward.pdf

Any new activity tries to dignify itself by declaring itself “the same as” an older, more respected activity. Art is still trying to make out it’s a liberal art… As the new activity becomes more respected for its own achievements, this becomes less of a necessity.

I’d make the opposite claim to Knuth. It’s not that programming is an art. it’s that art is a form of programming. By this I mean it is a way of structuring a set of symbols to generate a state or set of states in a given system, in this case human consciousness. The state generated may not be the same in all people but then a program may not generate the same states (or even run) on different machines, even if it’s written in java or ANSI C.

Cave paintings are programs for hunts or rituals, and it goes on from there…

Categories
Projects

rob-art In Progress

Here’s rob-art (formerly Got To Start Somewhere) making some baby steps drawing around shapes. The second image is the bottom-left part of the first image to show how the path around the shape is slightly random.


Categories
Aesthetics

Drop The Constraint

An aesthetic can be regarded as a set of constraints. “Realistic” representation has the constraint that everything share a common viewpoint and space. Other constraints may be more important. If showing forms from their canonical viewpoint is more important, you have to drop the constraint on showing things from the same viewpoint. If you do so, you get Egyptian art or some of Picasso’s work.

Categories
Free Culture

Drafting The Gift Domain

Greg London’s “Drafting The Gift Domain” is an excellent introduction to the legal basis of Free Culture. Greg takes a nonpartisan look at the history, development and current state of copyright and patent law (in America), the recent development of Copyleft and why some licenses are better than others for ensuring the development of what he calls the “gift domain”. Well worth a read.