NEWSgrist - where spin is art

MTAA Live in New York! (and a weird remix question)

I'm perplexed here: why does Mike Sarff think he has to ask permission from an artist to make a remix of this image?? This to me is a fair use/transformative project, freeing Mike from the contraints of asking permission and paying a licensing fee should that have factored in.

via iCommons:

                                                                                                 

	Art Collective MTAA Live in New York!                       by Paddy Johnson ·  Jun 16th, 2007 8:47 pm · 10 votes  · no comments made
	Untitled, 2007, CC BY 2.0

Artist collective MTAA work in Dubrovnik AND New York. This week M.River holds down the fort in Manhattan remixing a variety of images taken this week at the Summit. Most of these works are simple Photoshop jobs reflecting the image and using the pen function. I enjoy the crapesque aesthetic of these works and the fact that the act of mirroring itself employs the commons spirit.

As a side note to this brief introduction, M.River thinks his project is bizarrely cursed. In the newest iteration of the curse he learns the boat he had been sampling may have been a copyrighted image. Although I doubt this is the case, I have decided not to post that particular image until he tracks down the history of the photo. For those who are curious however, it can be viewed on the MTAA blog.

The Art Happens Here

The Art Happens Here

Opens 15 June @ 21h30, Croatian time

Lazareti Art Workshop, Dubrovnik  Croatia

Simulcast to Annenberg Island in SL, 12h30 PDT
Second Life

The Art Happens Here is a contemporary art exhibition and presentation at the iCommons Summit 2007, resulting from an ongoing artist in residence programme. Six international artists and a critic were invited to produce physical and virtual work that engages with fair use, copyright, re-mixing, piracy and/or collaboration on some level - whether directly or indirectly.

Works on show will include, but not be limited to, art books, murals, net.art, sculpture, public performance, video and installation -- all conceptually linked by their engagement with the Commons, by the artists' time spent in Dubrovnik.

Participants include: Joy Garnett (USA), Ana Husman (Croatia), Kathryn Smith (South Africa), Nathaniel Stern (USA / South Africa), MTAA (Mike Sarff & Tim Whidden, USA),  Jaka Zeleznikar (Slovenia) and blog-critic Paddy Johnson (of artfagcity, USA). There will also be a special appearance in the SL exhibition by Patrick Lichty, aka Man Michinaga (USA).

Artist Discussion Panel on Creative Commons and its potential uses and effects in professional arts practice will be a part of the iCommons main programme in Dubrovnik, 15h00 Croatian time.

More information: http://iCommons.org

Video from The Art Happens Here
via http://nathanielstern.com/blog/index.php

14 June 2007

The Wireframe Series: Sentimental Construction # 1

Filed under:uncategorical, south african art, art and tech, art, me, stimulus, flickr, creative commons, iSummit07

— posted by nathaniel @ 10:05 am

More from Croatia soon, but we performed the first “Sentimental Construction” here before guests started arriving, and I’m not sure it could have gone any better. Watch the video!

Sentimental Construction #1, part of The Wireframe Series
site-specific, publicly performed “spaces,” made of rope (2007), support by iCommons

These are ephemeral arrangements that, nonetheless, carve out space and frame their various contexts; they are “sentimental” in the tensions they create between sadness and playfulness, nostalgia and possibility, construction and emergence, the pre-formed and the per-formed.

More flickr photos here. Thanks to Joy Garnett for her video space, as well as all the performers / documentarians / collaborators: JC Bukenya, Tomislav Domis, Joy Garnett, Ana Husman, Kathryn Smith, Tim Whidden (MTAA) and Jaka Zeleznikar.

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See You in Dubrovnik!

NEWSgrist will be on hiatus while attending the iSummit in Dubrovnik in June. Yes that's right across the Adriatic from Venice...

To keep up with the conference and our activities abroad, check in once in a while at iCommons.org and at the Flickr set I've put together for the residency :

www.flickr.com

This is a Flickr badge showing photos in a set called iCommons Summit Dubrovnik 2007: Artists in Residence. Make your own badge here.

Media artist Ana Husman Interviewed on Art Intercom

via iCommons [Link]

Art Intercom is a six part series conducted by Art Fag City blogger Paddy Johnson, who will be interviewing the iCommons Summit Artists in Residence. In the weeks leading up to the Summit, interviews will be posted once weekly, profiling the artists’ work and describing their approach to Creative Commons licensing. Artists still to be interviewed in the following weeks are Kathryn Smith and Nathaniel Stern. Interviews with art collective MTAA can be found here and here, with painter, Joy Garnett, here and with Jaka Železnikar, here.

Media artist Ana Husman often speeds up durational video, in effect, animating happenings and actions to underscore the development of social mores. Such techniques throw back to films like Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi, a work known for speeding up shots of city dwellers, and Michael Snow’s Wavelength, which consists of a single 45 minute tracking shot of a room, though Husman’s tends to empart a more pointed social message than either piece mentioned above.

A graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts Zagreb, Husman explores shared experiences and cultural norms. When I spoke with the artist last week over the phone we focused primarily on her conceptual collaborations with amateur artists as well as her professional experiences with Creative Commons licensing, though we also touch upon her film The Market, which was featured on the iCommons Summit 06 DVD. We finish up our conversation with a discussion about the work she will be creating for this year’s Summit.

AFC: The concept of a shared experience is one of the primary concerns of your work, so Creative Commons makes a lot of sense for you. Do you see yourself as being pro-actively copyright friendly?

Ana: I wouldn’t call myself an activist. I just see myself obligated to the people I work with. On the subject of Creative Commons licensing though, I think there are at least two good reasons to being using it, especially for The Market. Firstly, the film was supported by the Croatian Ministry of Culture with taxpayers’ money. Secondly, often when I create work it is drawn from shared heritage; I am “using” other people’s stories. By putting them in my own context I would find it inappropriate to close it, to copyright it or to sell it, in any way to make it unavailable for them to use. [read on...]

'The Philosophy of the Commons' panel at the Summit

via iCommons.org:

'The Philosophy of the Commons' panel at the Summit

May 29th, 2007 by Tom Chance

I've {Tom Chance has} organised a session at the annual iCommons  Summit, this year being held in the lovely Dubrovnik, Croatia. The panel and audience will debate the philosophy of the commons; here's the blurb: "What do we mean by 'free culture'? Is it just a reaction against copyright, or a broader positive movement for the arts? Should we take our inspiration from the free software movement, and if not what philosophical and tactical differences should we account for? Debate over the Creative Commons non-commercial licenses, and the diversity of approaches on show at the iSummit, suggest we have plenty of disagreements to resolve or reinforce!"

With the session I hope to stimulate some critical thinking about the commons, and some reflection on what we are working to build, promote or attack.The argument I will present is based upon my MA Philosophy dissertation and a few years of "in the trenches" work with free culture projects like Remix Reading and Free Culture UK. It's also something I'm currently working into a book, which I'll finish if I can find a publisher interested in it. My main aim is to sound a note of caution for those working on definitions like Freedom  Defined and the Open Knowledge Foundation.

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