Dance is human activity made strange.
(I just saw the video for Kate Bush's "Hounds of Love" on VH1.)
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, dance
July 2005 Archives
Some good abstract base images from Mitch Featherston:
http://featherston.blogspot.com/2005/07/new-sharealike-images-uploaded.html
Technorati Tags: art, creative commons, free culture
[Adapted from a response on Lessig's blog comments pages to another poster.]
Talent should no more be a requirement for freedom of speech than gender should be a requirement for freedom of association or wealth should be a requirement for freedom of contract.
What was it that Voltaire said? "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it as long as I think it's any good." Or something.
JK Rowling was taken to court in the US by an author who had written a story about a boy wizard and "muggles" a few years before.
White Wolf Games and Nancy Collins sued Sony Pictures for copyright infringement over a vampire film that Sony made.
And in music even my local bus driver knows that George Harrison lost a copyright case in the 1970s over plagiarism despite protesting that the rhythms in question were public domain.
In each of these cases the defendants are generally regarded as very creative. In each of these cases they either didn't know about the original material or it was woefully unoriginal anyway. But neither genius nor ignorance are defences against lawsuits that take thousands of dollars and several years to defend. And George Harrison lost.
If you don't have millions of dollars or several years to spend on this kind of thing, a DMCA takedown notice will suffice.
Technorati Tags: free culture
To start the images, here's a photo by MANIK of me in front of the billboard advertising my show.
Here's a close up of the same image for those of you who don't know what I look like. :-)
Free Culture UK has launched with some cool campaigns and a mailing list:
Technorati Tags: free culture
I'm back home now.
I'll post more about the trip, and release paintr and the new version of draw-something soon. But I need a rest now.
I'm sat in the gallery typing this.
The software has been installed after some last minute hacking to make sure it runs well unattended on the gallery's hardware. paintr and draw-something are projected on the gallery walls. 1969 is being displayed as slideshow on four lcd monitors. Prints of four pieces from Canto and three colour pictures by draw-something make up the rest of the show.
I've spoken to local radio and television, plugging CC as well as my own work, and a few people have wandered in to see what's happening already. The private view is in four hours...
Technorati Tags: art, free culture, free software
Good discussion of code/encoding, and link to an interesting book, at GTA:
Technorati Tags: generative art, hacking
I have a show at Gallery o3one in Belgrade starting next Wednesday:
I'll be showing paintr, draw-something, my recent remixing work such as 1969 and Canto, and talking about Free Culture, Free Software and art.
Supported by the British Council.
Technorati Tags: art, free culture, free software, generative art
Scheme is a member of the Lisp family of languages. Lisp is almost fifty years old, and it's still the most advanced programming language there is. It's also one of the simplest: the only rule you have to remember is that (everything goes between brackets). These are both features that make Lisp good for implementing any new style of programming. Such as livecoding.
Livecoding is the creation of music or animation by programming live in front of an audience. Dave Griffith has a system called 'fluxus' that I've mentioned before. Notice all the brackets around the code, that's a hallmark of Scheme:
And here's Andrew Sorensen and Andrew Brown performing using 'impromptu' in Brisbane. More brackets:
Scheme beats languages like Ruby or Lua because you don't have to remember any syntax, and it beats Python because you don't have to fiddle with the whitespace. fluxus keeps track of your brackets with a syntax highlighting editor, so you have the twin benefits of structured code and something other than your brain keeping track of the structure.
Forget flash-in-the-pan languages like ActionScript or Processing. Real hackers use Lisp. :-)
Technorati Tags: art, generative art, graphics, music, livecoding
At Manik's suggestion I'm reading Isaiah Berlin's essays on Liberty. Berlin describes two kinds of liberty; negative liberty and positive liberty. Negative liberty is essentially the freedom to lead one's life without interference or coercion. Freedom from slavery. Positive liberty is the freedom to pursue one's own ends and realise one's potential. Freedom to create.
Berlin's is a liberal freedom as opposed to more radical conceptions of freedom. The Freedom of Free Software is a liberal freedom, and so Berlin's consideration of freedom may be useful in considering Free Software.
The major Free Software licenses are public domain fig-leaf licenses such as BSD, and copyleft licenses such at the GPL. Negative liberty is the freedom that the BSD license gives. Positive liberty is the freedom of the GPL.
In his essays, Berlin considers the limits of, and the disastrous historical consequences of misrepresentation of, both modes of freedom. But I think this simplistic comparison (BSD == negative liberty, GPL == positive liberty) is illuminating because it gives a historical context to the appeal and the dangers of both licenses.
And it gives yet more weight to the argument that BSD sucks. :-)
Do read Berlin if you're interested in Free Software or Free Culture.
Technorati Tags: free culture, free software, philosophy
On The Commons on wikis:
Wikitravel's an excellent resource and has been around for a while now, long enough that it had to manage the upgrade from the 1.0 to 2.0 Creative Commons licenses. Evan, who runs Wikitravel, is one of the regulars on the CC lists.
Technorati Tags: free culture, wikis
OooOooOooh! An Open Source ActionScript compiler and other Free Software Flash goodies:
Technorati Tags: free software, generative art
Mackenzie Wark's website:
http://www.ludiccrew.org/wark/
which has more on the excellent 'A Hacker Manifesto' and his other works.
Technorati Tags: free culture
A conference called "Copyfight" in Spain, via Copyfight (in the US):
The second conference looks more interesting (to me anyway), it's about art...
Technorati Tags: art, free culture
I can't remember whether this was via Drawn!, Boing Boing, or both:
Adult posters of the 1960s and 1970s
Interesting reference to art showing the (socially) unshowable.
Technorati Tags: art
I'm not a Bob Dylan fan. I used to make fun of people offering bootlegs on comp.lang.dylan . But this article is an excellent explanation of how someone who is regarded as an original artist, indeed a musician who was regarded as the unprecedented voice of a generation, built on the work of others:
Striking originality and derivation are not mutually exclusive. Insert Steve Jobs quote here...
Technorati Tags: free culture, music
The Drink-Soaked Trotskyite Popinjays may have described this blog as reading like a parody, but I quite like it, although I have just bought a new packet of sea salt.
Charlotte Street on Badiou:
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, philosophy
Does this explain the horror that is the Crazy F***?:
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, cognitive science
Note to the lackwits who drivelled:
Britain is now burning with fear, terror and fright from the north to the south, east and west.
Um. No. We're not:
Call that terrorism? My granny could do better.
Fuck You Osama! I'm going by London Transport
This is London. We've dealt with your sort before. You don't try and pull this on us.
"I've been blown up by a better class of bastard than this!"
And our friends don't seem scared either:
Posting may slow down for a while. I'm getting the house ready to sell, and getting ready for a trip to Belgrade...
Remember, kids, gravity is "only a theory":
http://www.bringyou.to/apologetics/p67.htm
Technorati Tags: humour
I'm about an hour north of London. I have friends and family there, some of whom were on public transport in Zone 1 this morning. Fortunately they weren't caught in the attacks.
The terrorists can fuck right off. As can their apologists.
Software patents kicked out:
http://swpat.ffii.org/log/05/ep0706/
The future will see more struggle over software patents in Europe: each country in the EUEUEUE can do its own software-patenting thing, software patents weren't explicitly banned, and you just know the companies that were disappointed by this outbreak of democracy will be back.
But that doesn't matter for now. Because this battle was won.
Hah.
Technorati Tags: free culture, free software
Liquid Culture on a show considering the role of copying in art:
http://liquidculture.blogspot.com/2005/07/lets-once-and-for-all-kill-solitary.html
Technorati Tags: aesthetics, art, free culture
As I was getting on the bus to dash home from work and collect my son from nursery, the driver saw my "Creative Commies" badge and asked what it was.
Which led to a discussion about copyright and music.
I talked about how the artist whose show I went to see at PDA the other week had to change her work two weeks before the show because of copyright concerns, mentioned the Bridgeport/Dimension decision, and how culture always builds on other culture.
He talked about George Harrison, how many bars of a song you can use before licensing, and FACT's claims that illegal copying funds organised crime, before concluding that the record companies are a form of organised crime anyway. :-)
Technorati Tags: free culture
Making an LED colour mixer controlled by a PIC:
