A Search for Comity in the Intellectual Property Wars: symposium at The New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, April 28-30, 2006 [slides, audio, transcripts]
On January 14th, 2009 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced
that it was deaccessioning more than 100 items from its costumes and
textiles collection. Once carefully collected, catalogued, and cared
for, these items have now been cast back out in to the world. What will
happen to them? Like any other useless item, they will need to be
recycled or disposed of.
Recycle
LACMA is a project of Los Angeles-based artist Robert Fontenot. At
three separate auctions he purchased over 50 items deaccessioned by
LACMA and is now trying to find new uses for these otherwise unwanted
items.
Although each item has not yet been used, each item can have a use.
This is an adult sized, multi-colored, crocheted skull cap. It has a black, donut-shaped, yarn knob on top.
When
deconstructed, it was revealed that the spiral of the hat was crocheted
around a core of multiple strands of cotton twine which had been glued
together to form a thicker cord.
A barbell shaped pattern was
developed. Using this, two pieces were cut from the hat and sewn
together. Before being sewn shut, the hackysack was partially filled
with dried beans. With a diameter of 2.5 inches and a weight of 70
grams, this hackysack conforms to the the Official Rules of Footbag Sports as dictated by the International Footbag Players' Association, Inc. (IFPA).
The accession number has been embroidered on one side of the ball.
scarf dissolves, by Joy Episalla, video loop on 4 monitors.
This work raises questions about how individuals overlap and merge —
transforming time, gender and the body through gestures of touch,
memory and their relationship to nature.
lo scialle si dissolve, video loop di Joy Episalla.
Quest’opera mette in evidenza come gli individui si sovrappongono e
confluiscono - trasformando tempo, genere e corpo attraverso gesti,
ricordi e rapporto con la natura.
JULY 1, 2, 3 2009
Time, each day: h 16.00 — h 21.30
opening: Wednesday July 1: h 16.00 — h 21.30
CASA DEL CINEMA
Largo Marcello Mastroianni 1
www.casa del cinema.it
Tel: 06 808 8854
SENZA FRONTIERE mostra films capaci di scoprire quanto abbiamo in comune noi esseri umani. Il cinema ha l'opportunità di raccontare storie, che dissolvono le barriere sia fisiche che mentali.
SENZA FRONTIERE shows films that embrace a common humanity among people. Filmmakers expose powerful stories, which transcend mental and physical borders.
It is only at the end of Daryl Wein’s documentary portrait of
the onetime AIDS activist Richard Berkowitz that its agenda as a
polemic against societal amnesia becomes apparent. Noting that in
recent years H.I.V. infection rates among gay men have begun to climb,
this sad, useful film sounds an alarm about the return of unprotected
sex among young gay men who believe that contracting the virus is
unlikely.
Twenty-five years ago, Mr. Berkowitz, the musician Michael
Callen and the virologist Dr. Joseph Sonnabend (whom Mr. Berkowitz
describes as his Moses) were among the first public voices to promote
protected sex strenuously and warn against unbridled promiscuity. The
movie concentrates on the years 1982 to 1985, when the three men
developed a theory, controversial at the time, that multiple partners,
drugs and repeated sexually transmitted infections were crucial factors
in contracting the disease. The movie jolts you with the realization
that the AIDS epidemic and the public debate about such issues have
retreated so far under the news radar as to be half-forgotten.
When the epidemic struck, Mr. Berkowitz, now 53, was already
a gay activist. As a student at Rutgers in the 1970s, he led one of the
first gay protest marches in New Jersey, against a homophobic
fraternity prank. Mr. Berkowitz received a diagnosis of AIDS in 1995,
and he is extremely candid about his colorful sexual history. For years
he made a living as a $100-an-hour dominant S-and-M hustler — work that
helped him release his anger, he recalls.
Today he lives on disability and has the aura of an army
veteran who served on the front lines in a war that took the lives of
countless comrades.
“Sex Positive” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian) for graphic sexual situations.
SEX POSITIVE
Opens on Friday in Manhattan.
Directed and edited by Daryl Wein; director of photography,
Alex Bergman; music by Michael Tremante; produced by Mr. Wein and David
Oliver Cohen; released by Regent Releasing. At the Quad Cinema, 34 West
13th Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 1 hour 16 minutes.
More info:
Q&A's are: Fri, Sat,
and Sun at 7:45pm, and 9:45pm shows: Daryl Wein and Richard Berkowitz; (with the exception of 7:45pm on Sat night: Richard only).
The kind of art that Eve Sussman and Rufus Corporation make often
requires a bit of explanation, so bear with me: their current project,
ongoing at this point, is titled White on White: A Film Noir.
Devotees of art history will quickly recognise that Sussman and Rufus
are once again drawing upon a significant work of past art, and in
particular of past painting, as – how to describe it? Let’s call them
'datums': facts of orientation that can serve as a reference point with
which to find one’s way. For 89 Seconds at Alcazar (2004), the datum was Valesquez’s Las Meninas (1648); for The Rape of the Sabine Women (2007), it was David’s 1799 masterpiece of (roughly) the same name; now the datum is Kasimir Malevich’s Suprematist Composition: White on White from 1918.
The cartography in which Sussman and Rufus engaged for their own White
on White involved a kind of nomadic travel through central Asia. As
Jeff Wood of Rufus describes it at one point in a dispatch from the
Caspian Sea: “This is a research trip. For an art film about extreme
combinations. Architectures. Economies. Landscapes. Personalities.” The
Rufus Corporation website has been given over to a blog that details
some of the travelers’ more bizarre and enchanting experiences, from
sharing vodka in the early morning with a pair of freelance
hydro-geologic archaeologists in Almaty, Kazakhstan, to bribing their
way onto a train heading for Turitam, the rail stop for Baikonur, the
former Soviet settlement and location of the Cosmodrome, birthplace of
the world’s first space program.
The contents of the Cosmodrome are of particular importance for Sussman
and Rufus. There, preserved like some eighteenth-century period room,
lies the office of Yuri Gagarin, the world’s first spaceman. This is
where the group’s travels reconnect with Malevich. Suprematism was
Malevich’s answer to that most revolutionary of questions, What is to
be done? His suprematist compositions, beginning with the
quasi-mystical Black Square
(1915), supplied a visual proving ground for the creation of a new
consciousness, one that would free itself of all spatial and temporal
limits. (The paintings trace their roots to Malevich’s costume and set
pieces for Matiushin, Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh’s cubo-futurist opera, Victory Over The Sun
(1913), a utopian space drama if there ever was one.) Malevich’s
declaration in 1918 that he was “the commissar of space” led Wood to
imagine Gagarin as heir to Malevich’s dream world and, eventually,
Sussman and Rufus to the gates of Baikonur.
White on White: The Pilot (just like being there) thus stands as
the first or pilot “episode” in this science fiction tale (all good SF
is noir by nature). The centerpiece, Yuri’s Office, is a replica of
Gagarin’s office. Actually, this is incorrect. What is stationed in the
gallery is a full scale, three-dimensional replica of Gagarin’s office
as it is pictured in a photograph that Sussman surreptitiously shot
while touring the site. What this means is that the office reproduced
in three dimensions in the gallery is not really a duplication of the
office itself. It is a 3D duplication (the office in the gallery) of a
2D representation (Sussman’s photograph of the office) of the thing
itself (Gagarin’s office at the Cosmodrome), which, it seems important
to note, has been preserved to look like it did in the 1960s.
As with all such mise en abyme, this one is not without
its distortions: the geometry of Yuri’s desk “recreated” in the gallery
is just off square (Nicolas Locke, Sussman’s collaborator on the
production of the office, told me that its inside angles come out at
roughly eight-seven degrees), as is the rug, and even the ink blotter
on the desktop. These details may be very small and easily missed, but
that of course does not mean that they are not there and available to
be seen and registered—“just like being there.”
The mock-ironic tone of that tagline uncovers what I think is
ultimately central and deeply important to not only this but all three
of Sussman and Rufus Corporation’s recent projects: each is deeply
interested, if not invested, in certain problems, or rather mechanisms,
of reference. This may seem obvious at the outset given their choice to
hitch their wagon to significant works of the art historical past, but
in no sense are any of Sussman and Rufus’s works simply about the
paintings to which they point. Think about Las Meninas
for a moment: the great achievement of that work was to shatter the
barrier, to that point taken for granted, which had split pictorial
from real space (indeed, it was just this revelation in front of
Valesquez’s work that sent a young Richard Serra, then living in
Florence, to dump his paintings in the Arno and to begin making
sculpture). I like to think that 89 Seconds in Alcazar takes up
residence in that moment of shattering and extends it for us so that we
can magnify the points of stress between reality and representation.
Each work—89 Seconds, The Rape, White on White
– holds tightly to a notion of reality (I hesitate to say 'realism')
upon which much contemporary talk of 'mediation' (new and otherwise)
has little purchase. White on White appears as if it will be most
adamant about this. For all its oddity, for all of the directions—both
spatial and temporal—in which the references point, there simply is no
getting over what we might as well call the 'fact of the image' (is
this not the very hinge of cinema verité?). How to tell the future from the past v.2,
a three-channel video installation that captures a 72-hour train
journey across the central Asian steppe (and joins Yuri’s Office in the
present exhibition), attests to this undeniable reality, to its
veracity. There is the landscape of Kazakhstan passing by; it’s just
like being there. Only it isn’t.
I finally got a chance to watch this great documentary on my flight home from Berlin yesterday -- perfectly fitting after participating in the ECLA State of the World Week conference on the Politics of Cultural Ownership, and then catching the surprise talk by Lessig at the Sophiensaele along with some of "my" students on my last night in town.
(I'll be remixing some screen grabs from this film for my powerpoint keynote at Iona College's inaugural Conference on Intellectual Property in June -- more on that soon!)
When it comes to remix culture, copyfight and crowd-sourcing, Brett
Gaylor walks the walk. The director of “open source documentary” RiP: A Remix Manifesto
released his feature-length film under a Creative Commons license and
even adopted Radiohead’s name-your-own-price business model when he
made the movie available online.
“We’ve gone to really great lengths to make this film as accessible
as possible,” Gaylor explained in an e-mail interview conducted after
announcing the download Monday. “It’s already on the Pirate Bay, and
that’s great — it’s another delivery format. We didn’t put it there
ourselves, though; we didn’t need to. Had we gone that route, it’s
fairly likely, given the realities of the film-distribution universe,
that we wouldn’t have these other opportunities to get the film to
people who still watch TV, rent DVDs or go to movies, which is, in
fact, most people. We wanted those people to watch this movie.”
Featuring mashup artist Girl Talk and luminaries like Lawrence Lessig, Gilberto Gil and Cory Doctorow, RiP: A Remix Manifesto debuted in Amsterdam and Canada last year and in North America last month. It opens theatrically Friday in New York.
The movie’s compelling analysis of sampling, sharing and
copyfighting was pieced together over six years, during which Gaylor
shared his raw footage with other filmmakers, some of whose remixes he
spliced into the film. Given the realities of remix culture, where
there is no such thing as a final cut, Gaylor subsequently offered the
movie online as a remix experiment at Open Source Cinema, which he founded and beta-launched in 2004.
Since then, the little doc that could has nabbed awards, screened at
panels and walked the tightrope between theatrical and internet
distribution, original art and open-sourced amalgam, without falling
off.
Gaylor talks about copyfight crusaders, the trials and tribulations
of the distribution war, and the joys of messing with the media.
RiP: A Remix Manifesto director Brett Gaylor asks fans to pay what they will for his downloadable doc. Photo: Mila Aung-Thwin
Wired.com: The pay-what-you-want initiative makes
perfect sense for this film, but I’m betting it wasn’t easy to pull off
from a business perspective.
Brett Gaylor: It’s been a peculiar road to get to
the point where we could release the film as a download, because
obviously this is something we wanted to do right from the get go. But
since we have so many partners that helped us make the film, including
theatrical and television distributors, it was a delicate balancing act
to make sure the good faith they showed in making the film would be
rewarded, that we wouldn’t undercut their efforts to promote and recoup
on the film by giving it away. So we waited a while before launching
the various online permutations. The National Film Board [of Canada]
put up a chaptered version during our U.S. premiere at South by
Southwest in March, and we embedded calls to action into each chapter.
Around SXSW, we partnered with two American partners —
Disinformation for our DVD release, and BSide for the theatrical side
of things. And at the first meeting I had with them, it became clear
that we needed to go down this road. We knew the film would appear on
file-sharing networks immediately and we knew the audience for the film
wanted and expected it to be online. So knowing that, we wanted there
to be a method for those who wanted to pay to do so.
Wired.com: Are you satisfied with the arrangement so far?
Gaylor: It’s still not moving as fast as I’d
ultimately like. The pay-what-you-can is at the moment just available
for those in the U.S., while some of the other world territories do
their thing theatrically or on DVD. And we, being the National Film
Board of Canada, and our production company EyeSteelFilm, want those
territories to be able to have a chance to define their own business
model, so it’s fair. Its been a lot of tricky e-mails.
Wired.com: How has the theatrical run gone, and how are you feeling about the New York City opening?
Gaylor: The theatrical run so far has been amazing.
In Canada, it played literally coast to coast, and there is something
immensely satisfying as a filmmaker to see your film’s title on a
marquee and have people watch it together on a big screen. We went to a
lot of lengths for it to work well in that format; it’s got big sound,
beautiful graphics and animation, and the cinematographer Mark Ellam did an amazing job.
It’s also really challenging to engage the public in theaters,
because you’re playing your film to this broad demographic. We had
people in the lineups at the AMC trying to decide if they’d go see Benjamin Button
or this crazy copyright remix movie, so that was a surreal pleasure. It
also generated a ton of press for the film, mostly great, but the film
enraged the right-wing papers in the country who took a lot of umbrage
with its central themes.
Battle lines over free culture are drawn in this RiP collage, entitled Copyright vs. Copyleft.
Wired.com: Tell us about the New York screening, which coincides with a panel from the Open Video Alliance about standards and practices.
Gaylor: We’re doing a sneak preview on Friday and
then following up with the launch at the Open Video Conference, which
I’m extremely excited to participate in. I was part of the initial
planning sessions for this group back in the fall, and it really feels
like a culmination of all this disparate work that has been going on in
the free culture world for years. Filmmakers, free software geeks,
remixers, lawyers, academics — all these different people who have been
working on these parallel tracks are starting to feed their work into
one another, and I find it incredibly inspiring. So it will be an honor
to show the film there. It’s a tough crowd, too!
Wired.com: What are your thoughts on the future of open video?
Gaylor: I’m generally optimistic about it. There
are a lot of challenges, for sure: Lack of universal standards,
third-party rights, bandwidth, access for the developing world, and a
lack of basic media literacy among users. On the flip side, I think the
internet will very quickly overtake TV as the content-delivery medium
of choice, and with that comes the opportunity for a genuine
participatory experience. I think the time is now for developing the
tools, standards and practices to make sure we don’t just see TV 2.0.
Party music remix champ Greg Gillis, aka Girl Talk, fights the good copyfight in RiP: A Remix Manifesto. Photo: Andrew Strasser
Wired.com: Talk about working with Girl Talk’s
Gregg Gillis and Negativland’s Mark Hosler on this film and its various
openings. What role have both played in the evolution of remix culture?
Gaylor: Working with Gregg was a lot of fun. One of
the reasons I wanted to include him in the film is because he doesn’t
see himself as a copyright crusader. He’s a serious musician whose work
points out a lot of flaws, contradictions and challenges in current
copyright law. The fact that he’s been able to reach such a level of
success without a lawsuit has created a lot of elbow room for musicians.
When you think about Negativland,
which had a fairly major lawsuit filed against them over a decade ago,
it’s obvious that things are changing. Negativland had a huge influence
on my life. Watching it take such an intelligent, activist stance was
very inspiring, and you could tell they were taking such joy in fucking
with the media. It was something I looked at and said, “Yeah, I could
do that! I want to do that!”
Wired.com: How about Lessig and Doctorow?
Gaylor: Their writing put some meat on the bones,
and framed the debate for a whole generation of copyright activists.
For a lot of people, it was like suddenly realizing: “That’s what kind
of activist I am.”
Wired.com: You’ve said in your blog that
“theatrical distribution is a war.” Can you elaborate? And what does
internet distribution, legal and otherwise, offer in terms of an olive
branch?
Gaylor: It’s a war in that you have to do so much
to get the proverbial butts in the seats. It’s extremely costly and the
stakes are high, whereas I think the internet gives some opportunities
to speak directly to an audience. With RiP, we tried to have
the best of both worlds. It was important that folks who weren’t
exposed to these issues were able to see it, but we also wanted to try
and lower the friction as much as possible to those who were active
online and who would really see themselves in the film.
Wired.com: Now that you’ve made a film on these
issues, has your mind changed about intellectual property or ownership?
What’s the tightrope there?
Gaylor: The classic copyright ones: Providing an
incentive, while at the same time ensuring the public’s access to the
work. Ultimately, that’s what I, and most people in this movement, are
pushing for — a balance. So the film release was a lot more “free as in
speech” than it was “free as in beer,” because it was important for me
that average folks could see the film on TV or in theaters. And
eventually, after a limited term (measured in months!), the film will
fall into the public/pirate domain and be copied freely.
Wired.com: Do you envision a day when theatrical distribution is a dinosaur, and we’re all paying to stream films online?
Gaylor: We’ll see how I feel about that in a year.
The remixing is just starting to take off, and I envision a time when
these sorts of interactions will create an environment where a
theatrical screening is to filmmakers what live performances are to
musicians. The ability to create something unique for a particular
screening or event allows you to offer an added value to that audience
member, as well as have something unique that’s different from what you
can get on a DVD or online.
