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Various Links

Werewolves in Music

New UK edition of “Lonely Werewolf Girl” in shops now

Graphical perception – learn the fundamentals first

More on the Synthetic Aesthetics residencies

Hacker Conference Calls for Projects and Tech Art

(Link to) The Economics of (Art) Fakes

Lady Gaga – a neccessarily empty posthuman sign

K-Punk didn’t like Burton’s Alice (and I agree with them about RTD’s Who)

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SaaS – Why Isn’t Wikipedia The Same As Google Docs?

Richard Stallman’s new essay on Software as a Service (SaaS) is quite explicit about why a group of friends or colleagues collaborating to write an article on Google Docs, which is SaaS by Stallman’s definition, is different from them collaborating to write the same article on Wikipedia, which is not SaaS despite providing very similar collaborative text editing functionality?
“Using a joint project’s servers isn’t SaaS because the computing you do in this way isn’t yours personally. For instance, if you edit pages on Wikipedia, you are not doing your own computing; rather, you are collaborating in Wikipedia’s computing.”
The difference between Google Docs and Wikipedia is not a matter of technological or legal form, although the difference is reflected in those forms. The difference is social. With Wikipedia you are volunteering your labour on Wikipedia’s servers to help the Wikipedia project achieve their ends within society. With Google Docs you are trying to achieve your own ends within society by using computing resoures that Google control and can deny to you or use against you.
The key question is the one that the title of Stallman’s essay poses – who does the server serve; the people who access it over the internet, or the people who run the software on their server? To put it another way; whose ends are being realised using the software? Where people wish to use software as a tool to achieve their own ends, they must be free to do so. Where people wish to volunteer their labour to a project to achieve someone else’s ends by accessing that person’s software, that is a (slightly) different matter.
Whether something is Software as a Service or not does not exhaust the ethical issues of web applications. We still need the Franklin Street Declaration and AGPL-licenced software. What Stallman’s essay adds to this is insight into how what we do online affects our freedom to use software, strong guidelines for how to protect that freedom, and possible future directions for people writing software that respects users’ freedom. 
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Old Illustrations

Until I move them to a local gallery, here’s a flicker set of scans of illustrations from the old (pre-1923) National Encylopaedia –

http://www.flickr.com/photos/robmyers/sets/72157614306272022/

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If you can see this, Rob’s DNS is working!

Yay.

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Where I Will Be Tomorrow Night

Open Source Embroidery: Craft and Code

HTTP Gallery
Unit A2, Arena Design Centre
71 Ashfield Road
London N4 1LD

Come and see the show and meet up with lots of extremely excellent people. And me.

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Robert Rauschenberg RIP

Robert Rauschenberg, RIP – Boing Boing

Robert Rauschenberg, a pioneer of multimedia art in the truest sense of the phrase, died last night. He was 82.

Rauschenberg’s work had a massive impact on me when I first arrived at art school. His art was high stakes aesthetics in which either everything was transformed into art or… But it was always transformed into art. Rauschenberg convinced me that freedom was not only possible but worth pursuing in art, and that art could transform any materials while still (or possibly thereby) retaining a link to real life.

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Thought For The Day

Look out honey ’cause I’m using technology
Ain’t got time to make no apology

– Iggy Pop, “Search And Destroy”, sample used on Utah Saints, “Techknowlegy.”

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Dematerialization

The market, like copyright and art theory, is an ontology of art, or at least some kind of substitute for one.
Conceptualism dematerialized the art object in favour of its theoretical description, an ontology.
The market has similarly dematerialized the artwork in favour of the entities and relationships that it posits, an ontology. How much? When? Who? Where? Who else?
This is an impoverished ontology, the reliance on simple tags, numbers and data from outside of the artwork creates an ontological proxy for the artwork that has very little to do with the artwork qua artwork.
But in any system of relations figures and grounds emerge and gain proportion and composition. And the physical artwork (even for relational works) remains as the grit in the pearl. Either is a point of friction and a possible point of critique. It’s just not clear what of.

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Work

Work1852-65, oil on canvasFord Maddox Brown (1821-93)

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Deontological Singularity

“she’s a deontological singularity”