Categories
Free Culture

You Can Find Papers That Argue Anything On The Internet

…as any idiot can tell you. But these ones are interesting:

LSE economists: file sharing isn’t killing music industry, but copyright enforcement will

U.S. Paper Says No Decline in New Music In Napster Age

Natural and intrinsic motivations will cause technology and the arts to flourish even in the absence of externally supplied rewards, such as copyrights

Categories
Free Culture

“Open Source Culture”

I had a great time talking about “Open Source Culture” with Marc Garrett on Furtherfield‘s Resonance FM radio show last night.

Here’s a mini “Open Source Culture” reader for anyone who wants to find out more about this area:

Culture is Public Because Meaning Is

Sal Randolph

http://salrandolph.com/text/9/culture-is-public-because-meaning-is

In Their Own Words

Joy Garnett

http://www.nyfa.org/level3.asp?id=349&fid=6&sid=17


Open Source and Collective Art Practice

Saul Albert

http://twenteenthcentury.com/saul/os.htm


Open Source Art

Jon Phillips

http://rejon.org/media/cvsbook/cvsbook/src/openSourceArt/openSourceArt-phillips.doc.pdf


Open Source Art Again

Rob Myers

https://github.com/robmyers/open_source_art/

(Original, shorter version)
http://OFFLINEZIP.wpsho/weblog/2006/09/20/open-source-art-again/


Why Art Should Be Free

Jon Ippolito

http://three.org/ippolito/writing/why_art_should_be_free/

Categories
Art Free Culture

Artistic Freedom Of Speech Under Threat

In the US a judge has declared a series of paintings illegal because of copyright. They cannot be shown by their owners:

http://www.edwardwinkleman.com/2011/03/appropriation-prohibition-or-why-i.html

This will have a chilling effect on artistic production in the US. It’s also deeply silly.

In the EU a clothing manufacturer is suing an artist for making a painting including an image of one of their handbags. Again:

http://eyeteeth.blogspot.com/2011/03/louis-vuitton-sues-artist-nadia-plesner.html

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110316/01551613518/louis-vuitton-wins-lawsuit-supressing-artwork-about-lv-ish-bag—-genocide-maybe.shtml

This would have a chilling effect on artistic production in the EU if we had any kind of Fair Use culture here to chill.

But don’t worry, Fair Use still applies to lawyers’ blogs when they want to explain that it shouldn’t apply to artists:

http://artmeetslaw.blogspot.com/2011/03/as-simple-as-asking-for-permission.html

Permission culture and censorship may seem reasonable when they don’t apply to you. But they’re not.

This is the worst environment I’ve seen for artistic freedom in the West in some years. We urgently need to promote and protect artistic freedom as part of free culture and freedom of speech in general.

Categories
Art Art History Free Culture Projects

Shapeways Urinal Print

My print of the Urinal has just arrived from Shapeways.

Here it is in its packaging with an SD Card for scale:

IMG_20110215_135052.jpg

And here’s a tasteful installation shot of it:

IMG_20110215_135403.jpg
The original blog post about this project, with links to the source files, is here.
Categories
Art Art History Free Culture Projects

Freeing Art History: Urinal

I commissioned the ultra-talented cwebber to make a 3D model of a urinal suitable for 3D printing and signing. It’s licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported licence. Here’s a picture of it:

urinal.pngYou can download the original Blender file here.

And there’s a version suitable for 3D printing available for download here.

Which you can also download from thingiverse here.

(You’ll need to scale it to fit your printer.)

If you don’t have a 3D printer yet, you can order a 3D print of the model from Shapeways here. If it’s too large/expensive you can upload and print a smaller version.

Next I’d like to commission a 3D printable model of a glass ampoule suitable for containing a small volume of air from a town such as Paris…

Categories
Art Open Data Free Culture Free Software

Art Open Data 2

How To Use Art Open Data

Interface With APIs

Web APIs provide read access to data and may allow data to be written back to share as well.

This allows data to be accessed and published more quickly than with downloadable datasets, often instantaneously.

Load Datasets

Datasets can be loaded into applications and programming environments directly.

This makes social network analysis and statistical analysis much more efficient.

Perform Statistical Analysis

Datasets can be analysed to find statistical features such as averages and outliers. This can direct further analysis or suggest subjects for critical consideration.

Perform Knowledge Discovery

Text and images can be processed to discover patterns, similarities between different works, relationships between subjects, and even limited kinds of aesthetic and affective qualities.

Perform Social Network Analysis

The interactions of individuals in the artworld over time can be analysed to model relationships and the relative importance or position of individuals within their social cliques.

Create Data Visualisations

Static or interactive graphical presentations data can be useful for finding interesting properties of a dataset or for better understanding the features or relationships within a dataset. It can also be art in its own right.


Where To Find Data Sources And Tools

Datasets

CKAN is a directory of datasets.
http://ckan.net/

archive.org is an online media repository. It contains scans of many important and useful art historical primary documents.
http://www.archive.org/details/texts

gutenberg.org is an online library of electronic texts. It includes books and lectures by John Ruskin, William Morris, and many others.
http://www.gutenberg.org/

freebase is an online database that extracts information from Wikipedia and makes it available for download. It has datasets on artworks, artists, and other art-related subjects.
http://www.freebase.com/

APIs

Culture24 provides and API to access data about exhibitions and other current events at UK galleries and museums.
http://www.culture24.org.uk/

The Culture Grid API provides access to aggregated information from UK museum websites.
http://www.collectionstrust.org.uk/culturegrid

flickr commons provides images from museum collections tagged by volunteers, searchable and taggable through an API.
http://www.flickr.com/commons

Wikimedia Commons provides images uploaded by volunteers, searchable through an API.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/

Applications

Wordle is an online service that creates “word clouds” from text. This can be useful for visually getting the feel for a text quickly.
http://www.wordle.net/

Many Eyes is an online data repository and graphing service. It can be a convenient way of sharing data and visualisations.
http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/

SocNetV is a social network analysis application. It allows social network data to be analysed and visualised in various useful ways. http://socnetv.sourceforge.net/

GNUPlot is a data graphing utility. It supports many different kinds of graphs and can be a useful tool for plotting data.
http://www.gnuplot.info/

Programming Environments

R is a statistical analysis programming language. It is useful for statistical analysis, machine learning, and for drawing high-quality graphs of the results. http://www.r-project.org/

Python is a general-purpose programming language. It is useful for accessing APIs, text processing, machine learning, and data visualisation. http://www.python.org/

Processing is a simple data visualisation programming language. It can easily be extended to use more advanced facilities and is useful for creating interactive information graphics. http://processing.org/

PD is a graphical programming language popular with digital artists. Using it with art open data helps to include artists in the analysis and visualisation of that data. http://puredata.info/

How To Proceed

Locate And Index Data

Find new APIs and new sources of data, and explore existing sources to find new datasets, then add them to CKAN.

Digitise Primary Sources

If you have physical access to an out-of-copyright primary source, photograph or scan it and upload the results to archive.org.

Extract Data From Primary Sources

Once primary sources have been scanned, more structured data can be extracted from them. Text scans can be cleaned up and converted to machine readable formats using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Artwork scans can be cleaned up, be tagged or categorized or otherwise have metadata added, or be processed algorithmically to find features or extract aesthetic information such as palettes.

Produce Interfaces To APIs

Web APIs are no good if people can’t use them. Creating libraries of code in a programming language you use to access an art open data API opens that API up to all the users of that language.

Combine Datasets

Combining multiple datasets can add information that is missing from a main dataset or extend its coverage of dates or regions.

Add Non-Art Open Data

Using geodata from OpenStreetMap, bibliographic data from the British Museum, economic data from OpenEconomics, and other sources of Open Data can complement Art Open Data. Combining data from diverse fields can provide context and reveal or explain unexpected features of the original dataset.

Analyse Data

Having got all this data, it’s time to explore it and to find interesting things that are hidden in it. Theories can be suggested, supported or undermined by the data, and it’s here that the traditional skills of art history or art theory can come into play.

Visualise Data

Data visualisation of art data is where art and data truly join together. Whether a simple chart or a complex interactive animation, making data about art visual can provide inspiration to both the study and production of art.

Categories
Art History Free Culture

A Comment On A Boing Boing Post

Boing Boing don’t seem to be publishing my comment on their post here –

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/12/02/1895-viennese-archet.html

It’s probably hit a link spam filter or something.

So here it is:

Scans of two dimensional images do not attract copyright in Germany –

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Image_copyright_%28Germany%29#Two-dimensional_Originals

Even if they did, doing so conflicts with the Europeana Public Domain Charter –

http://version1.europeana.eu/web/europeana-project/public-domain-charter-en

And they certainly don’t attract copyright in the US –

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corp.

The Creative Commons non-commerical licences are *not* friendly, they are non-free –

http://freedomdefined.org/FAQ#Why_isn.27t_a_Non-Commercial_restriction_considered_free.3F

And they are *copyright* licences. They cannot create restrictions on public domain works, which are out of copyright.

Alexander Ferdninand Wüst died in 1876, some time before 1895, and more than long enough ago for these images to definitely be in the public domain –

http://www.artnet.com/artist/554390/alexander-ferdinand-wust.html

Given all this, please consider using the correct CC tool for these wonderful images –

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain

Categories
Art Open Data Free Culture

Art Freedom Of Information Requests

WhatDoTheyKnow is an excellent website that allows you to make,check on and search Freedom of Information (FoI) requests in the UK.

Some of those FoI requests concern art.

Art organizations:

http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/search/art/bodies

The National Gallery:

http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/body/the_national_gallery

The NPG:

http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/body/the_national_portrait_gallery

And of course The Tate:

http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/body/the_tate_gallery

It’s interesting to see not just the answers but what kinds of things peopel are asking which organizations about (and whether they’re answering).

Categories
Free Culture

Name That License

When you are blogging, tweeting, denting, or otherwise writing about a Creative Commons licensed work, please always state the actual licence rather than just saying “Creative Commons licensed” or “under a Creative Commons license”.

If the work’s license is important enough to mention, it’s worth mentioning the actual license.For people who know the licenses it helps to frame their expectations for the work, and for those who don’t it helps educate them about the different licences. If space is short, CC-NC-ND is shorter than “a Creative Commons Licence”.

So state the actual licence and help inform and educate people about which Creative Commons licenses works are actually under.

Thank you! 🙂

Categories
Art Free Culture

Good Thinking On Free Art

I follow these six easy steps to make sure my art doesn’t get stolen online:

http://www.gwennseemel.com/index.php/blog/comments/ripped_off_on_the_internet/

And they’re good ones, showing an awareness both of the advantages of the internet for promotion and the disadvantages of rent-seeking for career development.

Go and have a read…