Morning News

Theme of this mornings news seems to be the thin line between the virtual and the real. An interesting article in Slate on 3D printing (The DIY Copyright Revolution - through the CAA newsletter) claims that that technology will radically change intellectual property as we are dealing with useful objects. Left aside the fact that the writer fails to show how these 3D printed objects might be useful, there is nothing new here (as a comment from First Banana confirms). Yes, the objects themselves may not fall under copyright protection but the designs will. Try printing Mickey Mouse figurines!

The other article that caught my attention was "Ship's anchor cuts Internet access to six East African countries" - the real getting in the way of the virual. For real. The way the internet is set up it did not result in a total blackout, but still.

Free Culture!

I recently finished reading "Free Culture" by Lawrence Lessig. The actual book from our local public library, not the freely available PDF - that site seems to be down unfortunately. Even though it is written by a law professor, the book from 2003 is a pretty good read. I wonder how depressing the time since then must have been for him, as things have not gotten any better with the presumption of innocence being totally disregarded with the increase in corporate police state like things as the DMCA Takedown notices

Copyright is a subject that has had my interest for quite a while. While at Ohio State I created a website called "CopyRight/CopyWrong" for a class I took ("Cyber Theory and Practice"). At filmschool our brilliant but pedagogically challenged professor Wim Verstappen taught us how to put the © sign in the right place and urged us to always use it. I have put it on all my work since. I am seriously considering changing that by adding the extra c and re-releasing everything under the Creative Commons license, probably CC BY-NC-SA. Stay tuned!

She stole my audio!

Well, not exactly. Through YouTube I received a message from Poland with a request for permission to use audio from my "Multi Dimensional Eye Virus 2.2" animation. It is always nice to hear someone likes your work, and I take it as a compliment that she refers to the soundtrack as music. This is the project in question, like most her work with some quite suggestive imagery:

wro2011 / SPATIAL MULTI CONCEPT PROJECT from Agnieszka Maria Kalwinska on Vimeo.

She saw my animation at the WRO Bienale 2009, and alerted me to the extended deadline for the 2011 edition. I just entered my latest video there.

The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Duplication

Still Reading Gene Youngblood's "Expanded Cinema" and came across an interesting section on television and the gallery oriented art world (p292):

"The traditional triangle of studio-gallery-collector in which art historically has thrived is slowly being transformed. The psychological effect of television's totally immaterial nature may be largely responsible for the contemporary artist's awareness of concept over icon."

The operator of a "television gallery" (Fernsehgalerie), Gerry Schum, is quoted:

" '&hellip After the broadcast there is nothing left but a reel of film or videotape. There's no object that can be seen 'in reality' or be sold as an object.' "

This immateriality, the absence of an object to be sold, is even more pressing for digital artists. Back then the original video tape master was the highest quality original, any copies would be degraded (generation loss). Digital copies on the other hand can be identical to their original. The original? The file in which the data was stored for the first time? Is that file not a copy of the data that was stored in memory first? One step further back and one could argue that the original is the input data from which the computer calculated the output data, the manifestation of which is the digital work of art. Which brings me to The Big Paper I may never write: "The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Duplication". Maybe it is time to read Benjamin again.

Unfortunately the Art world transformation never materialized. Video artists in stead created objects: installations. Still enjoying reading the optimistic text though!

DaliDisney Update

The Dali / Disney cooperation I blogged about earlier is back on YouTube, again including the full FBI warning. Let's see how long this one stays up!

Dali Disney

I wanted to re-blog a post on boing-boing about a Disney / Dali cooperation. I saw the Amazing animation on YouTube, and immediately wondered how long that would be up. It contained the full FBI warning and a text overlay that it was a copy not for distribution. And indeed, it has been taken down

Amazing piece, truly surreal, as is the collaboration itself. From the credits I gathered that it was a collaboration with Roy though, not Walt. The animation is kind of crude with a lot of cross fades but the imagery is wonderful. And the story... who needs a story?

Some images can be seen here

Creative Commons

Now that everything on change.gov is licensed under a Creative Commons license, I have finally added a similar one to this blog (again: thank you Boing Boing)

Free Software

If you arrived at this post thinking you might get pointers to places where you can download software for free, I'm sorry to disappoint you. NOT :)

A post on the system managers mailing list of ACM SIGGRAPH about possibly forming a Free Software SIG (Special Interest group) got me thinking again about Open Source. On gnu.org it is made clear that the 'Free' in 'Free Software' should be interpreted as referring to 'Freedom' and not just without monetary charge ("'free' as in 'free speech', not as in 'free beer'.."). And therefore it has to be open source, since only that gives you the freedom to see its inner workings and alter it.

One of the main reasons why I'm interested in free software is its relation to democracy. We want our media to be free, since that is a prerequisite for the functioning of democracy (Freedom of Speech only works if there are also means by which dissident voices can make themselves heard). Now that the most media outlets have turned digital the means by which the information is distributed has to be free as well. Monopolies in media land are bad for free speech. Proprietary file formats and closed software controlling the flow of news are too. And as for DRM....

A monopoly in the mobile phone business sounds a bit scary as well. Anybody think the iPhone will actually give Apple / AT&T too strong a hold on that market? I'm pretty sure they get a huge chunk of the +$400 segment simply by creating it. :) Anyway, I was interesting to find out through an article in the New York Times that "Motorola, based in Schaumburg, Ill., plans to sell this summer the Razr 2, the successor to its once-popular Razr upgraded with a Linux operating system and full-scale Web browser." I hope they will make it open source, like this one!

Related post: > ANTITRUST <

> Antitrust <

Yesterday we watched the movie "Antitrust" (2001) on TV. We tuned in because we saw Tim Robbins was in it, always a pleasure. He plays an evil genius Silicon Valley CEO aiming for world domination through a multi media platform, called "Synapse", which can broadcast to all possible media simultaneously: TV, computer, cellphone, whatever. It is a tale of conspiracy and betrayal. The Evil Company steals code from young geeks programming in their garage and even kills them when they got what they wanted. It is not a good movie, at times it is almost an activist pamphlet. They made Tim Robbins look a bit too much like Bill Gates.

But the movie does raise interesting issues. Like what if one company actually controls all media outlets? This Synapse system somehow manages to overrule everything so its broadcasts from outer space show up on every device in the whole world that has a screen on it, including Times Square (just one of the extreme improbabilities in this flick). More realistic is the scene where the "heroes" look for a media outlet to tell the world about the evil doings of this company and find that the major outlets (I think they mention CBS, ABC, CNN) all are owned by or have ties with that same company. That is scary. Nice trivia for conspiracy nuts: this movie was broadcast on ION (channel 31 here) and not one of the major channels. But I guess it says more about the quality of the movie than it's possible subversiveness, since apparently ION is linked to NBC/Universal.

The movie containes a blatant plea for open source software, proclaiming that information should be owned by everybody. A noble thing! I am an avid open source user myself, but unfortunately a lot of the software has geeky GUI's (for normal people: GUI stands for Graphical User Interface) and is often hard to install. No, I don't like having to compile a program myself from source code in order to be able to run it. But I much prefer using something open source that resorting to software piracy!

Fair Use of Disney Animation

Received a great link from Rick Barry (ACM SIGGRAPH Education Committee). It's a movie completely made up of fragments of Disney Animation, explaining Fair Use (the use of parts of copyrighted material for teaching, parody, news and critical comment), found on BoingBoing, originating from this page at Stanford University. It has also been posted on YouTube, let's see how long it stays up there...