Categories
Sketchblog

1969 – London (For Evie)

Categories
Sketchblog

1969 – Belgrade (For Manik)

Categories
Free Culture

Reform Again

I’ve posted about Open Source as being a reform movement before (confusingly in the Aesthetics section of this blog).

One of the things that has struck me about the most successful Open licenses is that they come from a personal desire to be able to continue working with and producing materials in a particular area. So the GPL came from Richard Stallman, a programmer, wanting to be able to continue reading and writing program code. The OGL came from Ryan Dancey wanting to be able to continue playing and writing role-playing games.

And the Creative Commons licenses came from- well, that’s slightly different, and I believe this explains some of the problems with the Creative Commons licenses. The Creative Commons licenses came from Lawrence Lessig, a lawyer, wanting Eric Eldred, a publisher, to be able to republish old materials. Whether this is wanting to be able to produce materials in any sort of primary way isn’t important, what’s important is that the CC licenses were not produced by Lessig for he himself to use on his primary work (the CC licensing of his book “Free Culture” doesn’t affect this argument). What would a Free Law license look like? I don’t know, but it wouldn’t look like the CC licenses. What would a free culture license look like? For me, more like the GPL: providing source so a work can be remade is pivotal to the success of the GPL for programs, and should not be underestimated for music, art, film and literature. Likewise the precise scope of the GPL’s effects, even CC-SA is more LGPL-like than GPL-like.

This is not to say that the CC licenses are not usable, or even that they are anything less than excellent. But the few flaws I personally regard them as having make more sense considered in the context of their creation.

Categories
Projects

1969 In Progress

The colours are either straight Pantone runs, references to natural scenes, or fashion and product colours. No sweets or food yet this time.

See my Sketchblog for images.

Categories
Free Culture

More About Loca

CC-BY-SA licensed original music from Loca.

Listen online: http://www.locarecords.com/downloads.html

It’s good stuff.

Read about them in Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,61282,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1

Buy! Buy! I have… 😉

Categories
Free Culture

Wired CD Is Out

The Wired CD of Creative-Commons licensed music by top performers including The Beastie Boys, Chuck D (neither of whom allow sampling from their tracks!), David Byrne and Brazil’s Minister of Culture (now that’s what I call government taking a positive interest in the arts!).

Read all about it:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.11/sample.html

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.11/beastie.html

Get the tracks legally online via bittorrent and get sampling (unless you’re a Beasties or Public Enemy fan. Ironwhat?):

http://www.legaltorrents.com/index.php?fuse=71

Categories
Generative Art

How Was The Artist Feeling?

One project I want to do is a system to map random emotional states (encoded using one of the systems discussed in “Affective Computing”) through a slipnet onto to visual expressive qualities that a drawing module could use to constrain an image. An Emotron. That would answer a recurring criticism of computer art; that it’s cold and unemotional. 🙂

Categories
Generative Art

De/Repersonalisation

Generative art, making external processes make your art, is a form of depersonalisation. Yet getting the art you want is “repersonalisation”. It’s a form of irony, I suppose, if I can add that leaden weight to the idea without it heading straight to the bottom.

Another of my research interests, shapeshifter mythology, is also about depersonalisation and, in its modern form, repersonalisation as well. I think I’m trying to tell myself something, or possibly I’m just overintellectualising things.

Good consumers don’t repersonalise, but the cultural creolisation that “kitsch” theory insultingly doesn’t capture does. The street finds its own use for things, as William Gibson said.

Categories
Generative Art

Untouched By Hands

Harold Cohen’s latest show.

http://www.teleculture.com/2004/09/untouched-by-hands-aarons-art.html

http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20040909/news_lz1w9art.html

http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20040919/news_1a19artslets.html

Categories
Projects

1969 Preliminaries Finished

I’ve finished the initial transferral of images from my sketchbook to Illustrator pictures. Now I need to colour them up and fine-tune the compositions, which could take a while.