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What about the Creative Commons Sampling Deed?

The Sampling Deed grants remix permission - it gives anyone "out there" freedom to mash-up or transform your work both for commercial and noncommercial purposes. It also grants people the freedom to perform distribute or copy the whole work in a noncommercial context.

But for any commercial use - well, its back to a one-on-one negotiation between you the creator and the person who wants to use the work. Great for a song you license on a per-use basis. But what do you sell in a fine art gallery, where they want an edition of ten?

Perhaps copyright law can be used here too? Imagine a legal copyright framework which achieves something like:

1) This work exists freely on the web, anyone can look at it, the source code is published, people can remix, modify and mash it. However, use of the free work cannot be labelled or presented as an artwork (in a gallery, museum, or on the wall of someones home.
2) There are ____ certificates/shares(?) which are fungible (i.e. which can be bought and sold without getting the artist involved) and which grant the holder permission to label their use of the work an artwork and present it in an art context".

Does such a copyright license exist? Is this a crazy notion? Is this something Creative Commons would be interested in? Anyone with experience in this? Or other ideas/suggestions?

Links:
Creative Commons
Interview with Robin Gross
The Open Art Network

1) How does your art exist as something that can be bought and sold in the fine art market - in other words, what exactly do you sell in a gallery context? Do you sell a CD-ROM (or DVD) with a copy of the work? Do you sell a PC running it? What happens when bugs are found, or if the PC breaks, upgrades to the operating system introduces bugs, etc? - do you send out a new CD, and if so does the old CD suddenly become non-art?

2) Let's say you decide to make the artwork only available for purchase on a limited number of CD-ROMs. What do you then show on your website? Perhaps you show a screen snapshot of it running? But what if the artwork itself is a website? Or if using the artwork involves interacting with it in some way - do you show pictures of people interacting with a web browser? Wouldn't it be better publicity to let people actually interact with it?

3) Finally, if you restrict access to the work, how can you then contribute to the "remix" culture of the web. Say you wish to publish the source code to the work so other artists can learn from it - how does this fit with your decision to sell a limited edition in a gallery context?

Can Copyright law be molded to help address these issues? More in the next post...

In 2004 I wrote about Google's state of permanent Beta. Now that concept is enshrined in a museum: The Museum of Modern Betas. As their About page succintly says:

The MoMB is a site dedicated to listing webbased applications on a beta trip.

This site is in early alpha, I still need to figure a few things out.

Link

"Simple," said Kate, "Natalie is the kind of person who turns up to a computer science department on the 12th floor wearing rollerblades."

Congratulations, Natalie, on being part of the Whitney Biennial 2006.

Links: Bureau of inverse technology | XDesign

See jonmeyer.com for other artworks.

Check out http://www.http.uk.net/.

"HTTP is London's first dedicated gallery for networked and new media art. Working with artists from around the world HTTP provides a public venue for experimental approaches to exhibiting artworks simultaneously in physical and virtual space, and for online projects that explore participative and collaborative art practice. Artists' projects on DVD, real-time, webcast, software art and live art also play a role in the curatorial work of HTTP".

Their current exhibition is by Andy Deck, an American web artist.

They are also connected to node.london.

(Thanks Devon Ostrom).

Lawrence Lessig made a passionate case at FlashForward this year that every child should be taught Flash (not an exact quote, I didn't write notes).

Lessig's talk back in 2002 on transparent creativity shows him extolling the benefits of open source software and denouncing patents. [It also gives you a flavor of Lessig's mesmerizing talking style, if you haven't heard him speak definately check this out].

So it is odd that Lessig, the legal mind behind the creative-commons organization, solidly advocates a single proprietary software package, Flash, as a teaching platform - as if teaching that one technology will act as some kind of catalyst to unleash a Remix utopia and ignite the read write web.

Somehow, I can't picture Lessig saying "every child should be taught Microsoft Word", though I'm sure he'd agree that word processing, too, is an essential skill.

A year ago at FlashForward, he argued that Flash has got to learn this lesson from HTML about the need for open source content. So why has he gone soft on the player itself?

I agree. But that doesn't make the read write web a panacea for cultural hegemony.

The majority of examples of remix culture I've seen simply take existing media objects (rap tunes, video of politiceans, sports products etc) and use them to echo established value systems.

As Victor Burgin might argue, echoing Rancier: how can you change the language of consumer culture when you create works filled with the symbols of that culture?

In other words, isn't the Read Write web just more of the same? More Nike shoes, bling bling and rampant individualism?

Ajax for ActionScripters mapped the current state of the "Ajax" nation. Ajax is an approach to building rich web applications using JavaScript and HTML, as popularized by applications like Google Maps and Gmail. I looked at tools, frameworks, and issues surrounding building Ajax apps. I also showed how to code up a basic ActionScript animation using DHTML and JavaScript. Many ActionScript skills can be leveraged to create dynamic JavaScript content.

User Experience: Meet FlashBlock looked at the social issues surrounding Flash, in particular Flash adds. I talked about people like Guy Debord and the Society of the Spectacle, as well concepts like the Experience Economy.

I don't know how what I said was received - after all I wasn't exactly waving the Flash flag. Any feedback?

I've uploaded my speaker notes and Keynote slides. See:

» Flashforward slides and notes

I still haven't uploaded the Ajax scripts themselves - I'll do that soon.

The slide decks include little yellow "stickies" that I added in Apple Keynote, which give you the basic narrative thrust of the talk. The Philip K Dick excerpt I refer to in the talk is included in the notes. Have fun!

More details in the full post...

If you want to buy one book on the subject, I like The New Media Reader. I am friends with Noah, which may color my reaction to the book, but I really like the range of topics he and Nick covered in the book, and the insightful intros which give each article a bit of context.

The Ajax talk went like clockwork, though it was a lot of material to cover so it ended up being more scripted and less interactive. As usual with tech talks, cracking open a code editor was the fun part. It was hard to guage the audience's interest level or involvement with Ajax, but I think most people got a flavor of what's involved.

For the theory talk, I decided NOT to talk solidly for an hour. An hour of philosophical talking quickly turns people's brains off. So instead I tried to break the talk up by having people ask questions and then finding things in my slide deck to respond. It was a bit experimental, but I think it went OK.

Because I'd left my laptop's pen behind I didn't have time to get organized at the start of the session, which really threw me off stride. For example, I didn't discuss TAZ, which I think is a really important idea. I also didn't have a conclusion slide, or give people references and pointers at the end so they can follow up. And by the end I was so zoncked that I didn't do Kate's piece justice. All told, though, I felt great afterwards.

In retrospect, if I had a conclusion it would be this: When working in this field, you MUST MUST MUST spend time away from the rockface - read theory, do creative work, find something that is unpaid and outside your comfort zone, whatever. It may cost you a lot of time and energy, and the immediate rewards may be meager. but think about the long term: the broader your skill set and range of thinking is, the more likely you'll be satisfied down the road.

There is a new feeling at the FlashForward conference this year. For starters, the swag bag covered a sizeable portion of my hotel bed (above). I was most impressed by the FlashFoward/Adobe beer mat and napkin.

Then there was the keynote...

ActionScript 3 and the new VM are welcome, and essential to address "serious" apps.

The new licensing model for Flex is crucial. Its going to take them a while to explain what "free" means exactly (read the comments on this post). Flex is not free as in PHP (say). PHP is open source and Flex uses a proprietary runtime. But at least you can create and deploy Flex apps without handing over lots of cash, removing a major obstacle to Flex adoption.

As a side note, Macrodobe appears to be moving into the Java camp just as others are fleeing it. FlexBuilder's use of Eclipse is just one example. In my office a few months back we drew up a matrix of programming languages and who on the team was using what. It was a gory picture. Although we were a team of five, we discovered we were actively using: Perl, Python, PHP, JavaScript, ActionScript, C#, Objective C, and C++ and SQL. That's two languages each! Java was the only language we listed which had no claimants.

My two cents: ActionScript 3 on the server side too! (And while your at it, how about FlexBuilder written in Flex itself :-)

A few things puzzled me in the keynote. We saw a demo showing Flash working with a video with an alpha channel. Nice feature. But in the Flash (not Flex) design tool the video was represented as a big black rectangle showing its bounding box - how are you supposed to position the video without a preview of the video content in the design tool? I presume they will fix that.

Another issue is the gap between the Flash IDE and FlexBuilder (which is built in Eclipse). Both tools target the same Flash runtime, but it is quite blurry how those two different environments play together.

Although I was wowed by Macrodobia's progress with Flex, I was very disappointed that there is still no announcement about moving the Flash player to the 3D pipe, something Adobe must do if they want to remain a player on the desktop.

I am also curious about how the fusion of the Adobe and Macromedia cultures is going internally. The Flash player is under a megabyte is size. Acrobat Reader is over 20MB. That is not a difference in size, it is a difference in philosophy. I can only imagine things like this give the teams quite a lot to talk about.

They need to talk quickly. Sparkle and WPF (sorry, still sounds like a sneeze) use the 3D pipe today, and .NET is one of the engineering marvels of this planet. I played with the Sparkle beta only very briefly. I immediately hit some clunky UI (a couple of dialog boxes and panels looked so mysterious I clicked "close" as a kneejerk response). That's to be expected from a v1.0 product from Microsoft. The question of what people will create in Sparkle remains to be seen.

I recently moved to New Cross, near Peckham in London. Its not exactly a cultural hotspot (its mostly a long row of butchers shops), so I was quite surprised when Kate forwarded me a link to Area 10, whose space is pictured above.

Check out their calendar.

They say they are renonvating their space til March 6 - that's this week! They also are part of the city-wide media arts festival...

Some words have peculiar and surprising ripples, where the images don't seem to match the meaning of the word. permanent is one of those.