Canto is now in the Rhizome Artbase:
http://rhizome.org/object.rhiz?33717
Technorati Tags: art, free culture
June 2005 Archives
Lemonodor notes the latest version of a Scheme-based livecoding environment:
fluxus
I've read Lemonodor for ages, and followed the development of fluxus for a while. Synergy. :-)
Technorati Tags: free software, generative art, hacking
Tattoo someone's body, get ownership of it via copyright. Well, the image of the tattoos anyway:
Technorati Tags: free culture
Via the cc-uk list. Some weird "Open" ideology followed by...
Blogg from the iCommons conference
They've been discussing moral rights, collecting societies, and other hot topics.
Plus photos from the event:
http://www.flickr.com/people/ccsummit/
Did they really throw Lessig in a fountain??? :-)
Technorati Tags: free culture
Free formats are not enough.
Proprietary packages that export Free formats may do so poorly, leaving the output corrupt or incomplete. The code cannot be fixed except by the authors, who may be unable or unwilling to do so.
Proprietary packages that export Free formats may displace Free packages, so that when the Proprietary package stops supporting the Free format, artists are left homeless.
Proprietary packages that export Free formats may "embrace and extend" those formats.
Proprietary packages that export Free formats may not work on a given platform (free or proprietary). Their users cannot port those packages to their platform of choice, and the proprietary authors may be unable or unwilling to do the porting.
Given all this, a Free package with its own format is more free, and better for artists, than a proprietary package that exports free formats.
"Free legal tools to help you build your own copyright."
Creative Commons are a reform organization. They are not the people's revolutionary intellectual property liberation front, nor are they the committe for unlimited commercial exploitation of the public domain. As a charity under US law they cannot even lobby the government for copyright reform, as that would be politics.
They have a reformist agenda, based at least as much on freedom of contract as freedom of speech. And it is based on copyright. But as with the GPL, it is an ironisation of copyright, a legal hack or judo throw. It does not make copyright stronger or excuse copyright maximalism. Copyright will get stronger without CC. At least with CC that increasing strength can be reformed.
Creative Commons's motivations may differ from the groups whose interests they support to a greater or lesser degree. So what? The effects of their actions do not. Consensus-building is a lost art and one that CC have succeeded in admirably. Yes, that consensus does not advance more radical agendas. But those agendas would fail quite happily without CC. At least with CC the groundwork is laid for them.
Technorati Tags: free culture
Tom had some kind words for my series 'San Jose':
and mentions Ryan McGinness and Anton Vidokle . Neither of whom I'd heard of, and both of whom are very good. Ryan in particular offers the challenge of more visually complex work, one that I feel I ought to rise to.
Technorati Tags: art
Jon Phillips on Delete! (is that really not a hoax?) and why open source is more art than art about open source is:
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, free culture, free software, hacking, philosophy
Via make:
http://www.vilminko.net/henri/projview.php?id=19&lang=en
If you need more inputs, do what we used to do at the CEA and use a cheap keyboard...
Via Grafodexia:
Deposit your articles in open repositories rather than just sending people a photocopy...
Technorati Tags: free culture
mount -t hfsplus /dev/hdaX /macdisk
Free Culture does not owe Free Software its fealty. Free Software is concerned with the freedom of hackers to continue hacking, any other concerns are secondary unless they interfere with this freedom. Hardware, for example, is of interest to Free Software only when it prevents the hacker from hacking. Closed BIOSes and 'Trusted Computing' microprocessors are examples of this.
Stallmanian Freedom is a domain-specific, self-reliant freedom. If you do not have what you need in your creative domain, it is your responsibility to create it. And if another domain interferes with your freedom, it is immoral. What happens if your freedom interferes with the freedom of individuals in another domain? What happens if an individual's lack of ability in your domain interferes with their freedom in their domain? And what happens if unfree work in your domain better supports freedom in their domain?
Imagine there was a mature Free Hardware movement that demanded that Free Software use only Free Hardware, because proprietary hardware is immoral. And imagine that although Free Hardware was readily and cheaply available, it could not support branching instructions (if...then...else) because these were of little interest to Free Hardware engineers, who preferred to work on mathematical instructions.
Free Software hackers would have to down tools and study hardware implementation for a couple of years until they could improve the Free Hardware to the point where they could use it for serious programming. Or they would have to lobby the Free Hardware engineers to stop working on more interesting projects (thus compromising their freedom) to add branching. Or they would have to use proprietary hardware in order to be able to exercise the freedom to be able to create functional works.
I am not making the usual apologies for proprietary work here. I am not a libertarian with corporate stockholm syndrome, desperate for the cultural approval and feeling of self-worth that only VC funding can give. This is an internal criticism: with separate domains, there is a conflict here.
For an artist, art is the highest calling. Preventing the realisation of art is immoral. And most current Free Software for graphics and presentations is therefore immoral. It is functionally incomplete compared to proprietary offerings. As with the imaginary Free Hardware/Free Software conflict, the artist is not immediately technically capable of working in the domain of Free Software to implement the features that they require to support freedom in their own domain. Nor it is their responsibility to do so for artistic freedom. So again they have three choices: limit their freedom by doing non-artistic work to answer the demands of others, limit a Free Software hacker's freedom by demanding that they implement the feature, or use a proprietary alternative.
Even if a piece of artistic Free Software was functionally complete but lower quality it would be immoral to demand that artists use it. Art is not software. It is qualitative, not quantitative. The fact that a Keynote presentation looks better than a Beamer presentation is part of the work, part of its content, part of its function, not a secondary consideration.
The problem I have is that I am, non-trivially, both a hacker and an artist. I cannot fall back on protecting the freedom of my own domain, as the demands of Free Software would stop me using proprietary software, and the demands of artistic freedom would stop me throwing away functioning tools to use non-functioning ones.
Without common ideological ground, future proprietary problems or current "free" problems are both shackles on creative freedom. That common ideological ground should be a general commitment to freedom, not contained within domain limits. Even with this guiding principle, the problem of how to least compromise one's freedom in order to least compromise the freedom of others remains. This is a historic problem of the ideal of liberty, and is not to be taken lightly.
I believe that it is a defensible position that one should not base one's freedom on unfreedom. It is also a defensible position that one should minimise the risk of future unfreedom occurring as a result of one's actions or failure to act, whether for oneself or for others. Therefore whilst Free Culture may not owe Free Software its fealty, it cannot take an "I'm alright Jack" attitude to exercising its own freedom whilst supporting unfreedom in another domains.
Bad art (and code) comes from the best of intentions, but good art (and code) often comes from engagement with interesting general (social, technical) challenges as (personal, creative) individual opportunities. Freedom is such a challenge^D^Dopportunity, like colour theory, tube paint, psychoanalysis and video before it.
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, free culture, free software, philosophy
Art is
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.5/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA.
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, free culture, humour, philosophy
I have long fingernails. :-(
I'm installing Debian on my iBook. Text based installers, yay! I've botched the X window install so now I need to fix that before I can do anything useful. It was a very fast install, though.
Technorati Tags: free software
Free Culture film logo competition:
Via Jon Phillips .
Technorati Tags: competition, film, free culture
If you like Wired, you'd have loved Mondo 2000. If you'd have loved Mondo 2000, you'll like this:
RU Sirius in Discussion With DJ Spooky
Technorati Tags: free culture, music, philosophy
1.The highly developed products of software, net. or web art require a transparent (free) infrastructure and free access to source (code). Your work is connected with Creative Commons, Free Software, Free Culture.
Yes. I was using other people's work in my own from when I first started seriously making art. When I was at college I asked other people If I could photograph their work to scan in to the computer, and I took photographs at galleries (when you were still allowed to do that in London!). And when I did programming later we were given lots of code and we all looked at each others code.
Free Software/Free Culture is a way of reclaiming that way of working, of protecting and extending it.
How do you feel as an Individual, (after your experience in the collective project SoDa),
SoDA was a group of people who'd been at college together taking what we'd learnt out into the worlds of business and art. In 1996 at the height of the Internet boom those worlds seemed like they were very close, or that they could be.
I didn't like working on catalogues or websites with other people, with a client and a deadline.
about working in groups, institutions? Differences? Advantages? Difficulties?
Possibly I'm just antisocial but I like the way that the Internet and 'copyleft' licenses allow you to build on other people's work without having to have more than one ego in the room. I like being able to use what other people have made, culture is my nature. I'd hate to work on a project like Art & Language's early Indices, they had such bad internal politics. I'd rather share and participate in a public culture than get caught up in the problems of a private project.
But perhaps that just comes from feeling such an outsider and feeling so shy and awkward as a child.
"Net" art supposed the presence of many (virtual) people. You said that your work's connected with other people's work. But you don't like "more than one ego in the room". What is the artist's ego in the epoch of new technologies?
I suppose the danger of the artist's ego now is what programmers call "not invented here syndrome", resisting 'standing on the shoulders of giants'. For example people always want to write their own free/open license for their work, even though that's a bad idea. And people always want to write their programs from scratch, even though they could use other people's code. It's the same for making images.
The potential of the artist's ego is that individuals' sense of self will drive them to distribute and seek out work globally, which with free licensing and peer to peer technology means more people can build on each other's work than ever before. Imagine a global chain of Picassos and Braques.
Less body, more idea?
In films and television the expression of someone's self is usually through their body, how it looks, how they move and the actions they take, rather than their words or ideas. This is romanticism. But it is not the case that removing the limits of the body removes the negative expression of the animal self. Without physical limits animal minds tend to engage in flamewars on mailing lists...
Could you explain what "ego" represents to you?
I suppose it's arrogance and self-interest, self-defeatingly so. The negative of the social self, the bit that gets in the way of art being made by trying to make art. Possibly I mean "id" rather than "ego", but I don't know that there's such a clean split, and common usage of "ego" is generally negative; egomaniac, egotism.
2. Once you mentioned "Photoshop fascism". Could you explain that?
I did??? was probably referring to the use of image processing software (such as PhotoShop) to make people look more like an impossible, Romantic ideal:
    like this.
Fascism loves "perfect" bodies. Beautiful bodies are seductive, they can hide ugly ideology. Technology allows most bodies to be made to look "perfect", ideal. It is anti-individualistic, it is certainly not democratic. The visual trappings of fascism imposed through technology. Are the ideological trappings hiding behind the pretty visuals?
If we use new technology as a weapons (to rebuild ourselves and the whole world) does that mean that our (supposed) ethic changes the weapon-nature of new technology into something good-natured?
It depends how strong the technology and the user are. Or maybe how strong their aesthetics are? In Surgical Strike I think I assumed that the technology, and the ideology it presupposed, was more powerful. I wouldn't be so defeatist now. As William Gibson said, "the street finds its own uses for things".
If it does we have a paradox: weapons questionable by the definition...?
Certainly the weapons can be used to attack themselves. And perhaps with general purpose machines (computers), the definition of what they are is what they are.
3. The aesthetic is kind of your "obsession".
Yes. It's an obsession because I feel I understand it so little but that it *must* be what art is about. I don't believe that a truly ugly art can be made, an art that is un-aesthetic but still conceptually interesting. All art "looks good" to someone if it is art.
I don't even know what 'aesthetic' means other than 'looks good'. But why does something look good? And what does that mean?
What about a "trash aesthetic" It looks like a rhetorical question, but could "ugly" things become a branch of aesthetics that you could accept?
My work has always had low cultural or non-artistic inspiration. And I like uncool popular music, and films, and television. Including MTV. And I am a big fan of Jeff Koons.
I went to London last week, and I saw a work by the graffiti artist "Banksy" in a new gallery near Denmark Street. I've never liked pictures of Banksy's work, but the real thing was very fresh and funny. It's not that I'm a snob, quite the opposite: I don't like the idea of bourgeois artists making authentic low culture inauthentic by appropriating it and doing it on canvas like 'proper' art.
I don't know about really embracing a "trash aesthetic". I'll need to think about that. I'd be worried about producing an "urban pastoral" (Julian Stallabrass). I'd rather not use low culture as a ventriloquist's dummy for my morality or my aesthetic. But maybe it could be liberating.
Aesthetic, ideology and technology in your work?
Every person has an aesthetic, every company or politician or religion does. I suppose that 'aesthetic' here means 'style', but 'style' that links to ideology. And I also feel there's a deeper sense of 'aesthetic', one that tells us how all these little aesthetics work. Like Chomsky Grammars. Aesthetics is to art as linguistics is to language. Maybe.
Ideologies are aesthetic, they are choices are about how things should look. Philosophy is actually a branch of aesthetics, and ideologies are degenrate philosophies. ;-)
And technologies are the products of ideologies. In a way they are physical ideologies, they are rules about what you can and cannot do. And technology is aesthetic, very aesthetic, it has to be made to 'look good' to the people who use it, not just visually but in its effects, what it does.
The best example of this connection is Surgical Strike, that was about, how the history of a technology (computing) that has come from a particular ideology (American militarism) may affect attempts to make an aesthetic (computer art). But 1968 and 1969 are about that as well, and Psychetecture was about how architecture serves capital by affecting your perceptions.
4. "Remixing"?
Not all of my work is literally remixing. That's more an early theme I've recently returned to. It's a theme I'm very glad to return to.
The series that are most obviously remix based are my early Mixes and sampling based work, Surgical Strike, 1968 and 1969, and Canto.
But my work always uses the ideas and imagery of others. Psychetecture was based on the calligrams of Ahmed Mustafah, Titled uses colour diagrams from famous twentieth century artists and I've mentioned the designers that influenced me. The only work I've made that wasn't directly influenced by anyone else is San Jose, which I regard as my weakest work.
But your works are formally ("they look like") Neo-Modern, Post- Hard-Edge. Does that style have a quality of expression that is lacking in more recent work?
When I got to art school there was a Macintosh there for the design students to use. But none of the artists were using it, so I had to look to designers to see how it could be used. The look of much of my work therefore comes from British graphic design in the early 1990s, especially design by the design groups 'Designers Republic' and 'Me Company'. The look of their work was in many ways a result of the availability of the Macintosh and programs like Illustrator or Freehand. The Macintosh was the lithographic stone of the 1980s/1990s. Think of Toulouse-Lautrec a hundred years earlier.
I have no problem with the idea that my art has been so heavily influenced, even determined, by technology. There's more to Lautrec than lithography and toothbrushes, there's more to the Impressionists than paint in tubes and state-sponsored colour theory, there was more to the Renaissance than plaster, perspective and archeology. There's always technology, and there's always more than technology.
I believe that much of the traditional role of art has passed into graphic design anyway. But some of its content remains left behind. Certainly its most important content. And that content is not caught by conceptual art, performances, or other attempts at making an "expanded image". Not in the way I personally wish to catch it. So I have to make images rather than any newer form of expression.I feel very awkward doing so.
5. Art & Language are your favorite artists. Your latest works are inspired by Matisse. Could you explain that?
It was an accident. :-)
Art & Language are interested in the canonical works of Modernism, which means they have based paintings on work by Picasso, Pollock, Rothko and others. They use these works to analyse their social content through their form. So I'd love to be able to say that I read up on Matisse's work then decided to make work that uses the social content of his work to make a serious point.
What really happened is that I found an image on the Remix Reading website, I liked some of the shapes in it, and I wanted to make work that was a remix. So I used those shapes, without thinking very much about what they meant, just enjoying working hard on the compositions. I think my subconscious remembered the Matisse prints that I sit next to in McDonalds with my children when we go for hamburgers sometimes(!), and that is what guided me.
But I am open to accident and humour (and embarrassment) in my work, so once I realised that the first work (Canto For Evie) looked like Mattise, I decided to make more work from the same source material. And I had to re-evaluate Mattisse, who I didn't like before. I'm now doing some paper cut-outs.
There is a quality my work often has where I don't know if I am being very, very serious or very, very silly. I think that quality is present in my best work, and I think it means that the work is doing something that can't be fully described in words. Which is one reason Art & Language give for making art rather than doing anything else; if it says something that you can't describe any other way.
6. Connection between theory and praxis? In computer generated art the artist must know so many thing. Isn't that a paradox in a time of narrow specialization?
But art is made for the ruling classes, and the ruling classes are now managers. Even the politicians are managers. Managers are not specialists, they have only general, conceptual skills. And so these are the skills we see artists using to make art now, to reflect the ego of the manager.
Therefore for an artist to learn a practical skill, like programming, well enough to practice it themself is the real paradox. Even although they do so alongside learning about many other things, such as aesthetics, or drawing, or art history. Specific ability in any area, rather than just general, conceptual, managerial ability is the paradox.
The Modernist artist was not a modern subject: even when they tried to be boring or ordinary they made this interesting and it took a heroic effort on their part to do so.
Your last comment invokes an essential, romantic vision of the artist. Tragic and impractical for contemporary aims. But your activity seems to us like something quite far from that. How do you live with this opposition?
Hacking is technological Romanticism. I am an art hacker (in the sense of a good programmer rather than a computer criminal).
My work is Romantic; emotion projected onto the environment. It's also tragic, it's melancholic and it's dispossessed. But it is a romanticism that finds its excesses funny, like the best Goths do.
A perky Romanticism. My Smileys are the art Munch would have made if he'd had access to a Macintosh and a presciption for Prozac. :-)
paintr is now beta. That means I'm going to leave it running for a while to check that it works OK, then come back to it in a few days to finalise the supporting HTML.
The original hack took a morning, the Java applet took about a day, but getting the damn thing working online has taken ages. This is why I don't like writing software for public performance.
Technorati Tags: art, generative art, net.art
It seemed that Gödel hatched an audacious ambition while still a young student: to produce a mathematical result that would have meta-mathematical implications implications, or at least suggestions, about the nature of mathematics itself. It's as if a painter produces a picture that has something to say about the nature of beauty, perhaps even something to say about why beauty moves us.
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/goldstein05/goldstein05_index.html
Via ALDaily.
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, philosophy
"Common sense isn't". So what should we make of OpenMind? Thousands of statements of common sense input by contributors (then licensed, ugh), available either in their raw format or as a computer program.
The GPL-licensed raw statements have the gnomic banality of so much conceptual and net.art that making art using the dataset is irresistible:
A box can hold things
A flag is for displaying in public the political group of the owner of the flag
A goldfish is a type of carp that makes a nice pet
A lawn is a place outside where grass grows
A nightgown is a long, loose garment worn to bed
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, artificial intelligence
Legal documents and art:
Mel Ramsden's Guaranteed Paintings.
Angela Bulloch's Rules Series.
Carey Young's Disclaimers.
I love all these works, but Young's disclaimers are for me the most artistic because they involve negative space. They were exhibited at the Moore centre, their creation of form through negative space makes them appropriately sculptural.
I wanted to do some indemnified paintings, but I think using licenses themselves, as assisted readymades could be more interesting. CC-*, FDL, OGL. It would be good to do the Gödel thing of encoding a contradictory message using the license, ironising it. It would be even better to encode a meta-message, also Gödel-style.
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, law
I'll read this later. Via 43 Folders:
OVERCOMING PROCRASTINATION THROUGH THE PULL METHOD
Technorati Tags: productivity
Via CopyFight:
One might think that open access to high resolution 3D scans of Michelangelo's David and other cultural heritage works would be a goal of the works' trustees. Nope. They're busy figuring out how to keep people from "pirating" the data.
http://www.corante.com/copyfight/archives/2005/06/20/stealing_the_david.php
Technorati Tags: free culture
Cool work by Tom Moody, and images of how it was made:
I like the technique used to make the image (repeated printing, alteration, scanning and retouching). Using the computer as part of an ongoing, iterative, creative process.
Update (27/06/05): Tom says it was overprinting and an X-acto knife rather than rescanning. Which is even cooler. :-)
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, hacking
Via NewsForge:
Open Source Academy Logo Competition
Technorati Tags: free culture, free software, competition
Via Boing Boing:
Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein
A side-by-side comparison of Lichtenstein's paintings and the usually far superior original frames from comic books.
Wikipedia notes that: Artist Dave Gibbons, who illustrated the graphic novel Watchmen (written by Alan Moore), said of Lichtenstein's works: "Roy Lichtenstein's copies of the work of Irv Novick and Russ Heath are flat, uncomprehending tracings of quite sophisticated images."
Lichtenstein's graphic design-inspired work is much better than his comic book-inspied work, though.
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, drawing
Via Future Feeder:
find the physcial materials you need for that project.
The EU has produced a united Europe - a Europe united against the EU technocracy. But this time the technocrats can't just keep on telling the people to vote until they give the right answer:
Reason on bogus socila critiques of too much choice, via ALDaily:
"At the heart of the anti-choice argument is a false dichotomy: We can have a narrow range of standardized choices, or we can live with options that are infinite, dizzying, and always open."
Technorati Tags: free culture, philosophy
Via GTA:
Reading Potential: The Oulipo and the Meaning of Algorithms
Article on a writers' group encountering computers in the aerly 1960s.
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, generative art, hacking
Article on productivity via 43 Folders:
Your Central Nervous System: Your Biological Key to Productivity
My most productive times over the last couple of months have been going for a walk by the river and doing the gardening. So I think there might be something to this. :-)
A high-quality 2D graphics engine in C++ under a revised MIT-style license:
could be useful for portable 2D graphics (I hate getting tied down to platform APIs, even good APIs).
Technorati Tags: free software, generative art, hacking, graphics
An idea from MTAA-RR:
One of the things very few people get about Koons is how incisive and indexical his work is on/to class criticism. Moving a stainless steel bunny into CGI might shear this off, might bring in a whole new set of indexes/insights, or might update them for an age when intangible property is valued more than steel.
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, humour
Not the "awfully big marine", the fabric and patterns:
via makeblog.
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, visual reference
More blog art from Manik, taking a different meaning of the word "graphic" from the typography of "For Beginners":
(Not worksafe.)
Things to stop holding back on:
• Hardware hacking for art visuals, especially games consoles.
• Custom 'display' hardware.
• Textual descriptions of work.
• Mash-ups and sampling.
• 'Expanded pixels'; art quark systems (a la AARON's cells / n-d space & various space systems), retro-style bitmap & icon references, and realworld/artistic quantization.
• Game engines & 'Second Life'.
Things to spank:
• Managerial ('Relational') Aesthetics.
• Decorativeness.
• "Committed" net.art .
• Art as advertising (GPS art...).
Technorati Tags: art
Another excellent competition from Creative Commons:
"Real: industry is used to competitions, and uses them as a driver for innovation and value. The music industry can learn from this and from Magnatune's example here.
Technorati Tags: free culture, music