NEWSgrist - where spin is art

Painting Mass Media, now on Youtube

In the Fall of 2004, I was invited by Mark Tribe to kick-off a lecture series he had organized at Columbia University’s Digital Media Center, "Open Source Culture and the Arts." Other lecturers in the series included Jeffrey Cunard, Siva Vaidyanathan, Jon Ippolito and Cory Arcangel. The Media Center website has since been revamped, the Index to the lecture series deleted. Happily, they've been putting their archived videos up on Youtube.

via Youtube:

Lecture Series | Art & Technology

From spring 2004 to fall 2004, leading new media artists, curators and theorists discussed the exciting and diverse field of Art & Technology to the students, faculty and staff of Columbia University. All lectures were taped and made available online. The online presentation of the lectures served as a measure of Instructor Mark Tribe's students' understanding of each presenter's talk as well as its place in the larger discourse of art and technology.

Shepard Fairey Has a Posse

Great statement from Shepard Fairey on art, appropriation and fair use that speaks truth to power. I hope the haters who shout "plagiarism" will read it and think twice. The comments are fun too!

via Huffington Post:

The AP, Obama, & Referencing
by Shepard Fairey
Posted March 26, 2009 | 12:18 PM (EST)

I'm sure a lot of people are wondering about my case with the AP over the Obama HOPE poster. I can't talk about every aspect of the case, but there are a few things I want to discuss and points I'd like to make. 

Most importantly, I am fighting the AP to protect the rights of all artists, especially those with a desire to make art with social commentary.  This is about artistic freedom and basic rights of free expression, which need to be available to all, whether they have money and lawyers or not.  I created the Obama image as a grassroots tool solely to help Obama get elected president. The image worked due to many complex variables. If I could do it all over again, I would not change anything about the process, because that could change the outcome. I am glad to endure legal headaches if that is the trade-off for Obama being president. 

No disrespect was intended to photographer Mannie Garcia, but I did not think (and do not think) I needed permission to make an art piece using a reference photo.  From the beginning, I openly acknowledged that my illustration of Obama was based on a reference photograph.  But the photograph is just a starting point.  The illustration transforms it aesthetically in its stylization and idealization, and the poster has an altogether different purpose than the photograph does.  The AP photo I used as a reference, which I found out much later was taken by Mannie Garcia, (which was actually this one, not the one being circulated in the press) was a news photo that showed George Clooney and Barack Obama attending a 2006 panel on the genocide in Darfur. My Obama poster variations of "HOPE" and "PROGRESS" were obviously not intended to report the news. I created them to generate support for Obama; the point was to capture and synthesize the qualities that made him a leader.  The point of the poster is to convince and inspire.  It's a political statement. My Obama poster does not compete with the intent of, or the market for the reference photo. In fact, the argument has been made that the reference photo would have faded into obscurity if it were not for my poster which became so culturally pervasive. The Garcia photo is now more famous and valuable than it ever would have been prior to the creation of my poster. With this factor in mind, it is not surprising, that a gallery in NYC is now selling the Garcia photo for $1,200 each. As I understand it, Garcia himself did not even realize the poster was created referencing his photo until it was pointed out to him a full year after the poster came into existence. Mannie Garcia has stated in the press that he is an Obama supporter pleased with the poster result.

I did not create the Obama poster for financial gain. The poster was created to promote Obama for president, and the revenue from poster sales was re-invested in more posters, flyers, stickers, etc.., and donated to charity, including the Obama campaign. A free download of the Obama image was available on my website, which should provide further evidence of the desire to disseminate the image, not to benefit financially. 

Lastly, I m very saddened to see many people try to demean my Obama poster as being "stolen" or that because I used a photo I "cheated".  As far as the idea of the image being "stolen", I would love to have the clout to command portrait sittings from world leaders, but for me and most artists out there, that is not an option. For lots of artists, even licensing an image is out of the question financially. Should artistic commentary featuring world leaders be stifled because of copyright of the reference images even when the final artistic product has new intent and meaning? Reference is critical to communication, and in my opinion, reference as a part of social commentary should not be stifled. 

A writer asked me why I "didn't just draw Obama from my imagination". My response was that I needed to make my image look like Obama, who is not an imaginary character. I know few people who could capture a convincing likeness of close friends or even their own family members from their imagination or memory. I use my own family members as models, taking my own photos of them to illustrate from -  VIVI LA REVOLUCION and COMMANDA.  Were Obama a member of my family I would have employed this technique. 

Another suggestion someone made was "why not splice two or three photos together and illustrate from that?"  Well, though a direct match would have been harder to find, with an image as popular as the HOPE poster, internet sleuths would probably have found the references and maybe I'd be facing two or three lawsuits. This leads to the next question: is illustrating from a photograph "cheating"? I studied art, illustration specifically, at one of the most prestigious art schools, The Rhode Island School of Design. At RISD I was taught to draw from life, to draw from photo references, and to appropriate and re-contextualize imagery. All of these techniques had historical precedents which I learned about. Here are some great examples of famous painters working from photo references, and not always their own photos. 

I have respect for, and have frequently collaborated with, photographers, but I do not think permission, or a collaboration is warranted in every case where an artist works from a photo reference. I collaborate with photographers because I WANT to, not because I believe I HAVE to. Usually, when I work directly with a photographer as a collaboration, I do so because I am building upon, rather than transforming their original intent. Of course, as with everything, the definition of transformation and fair use is somewhat subjective. I'm an artist, not a lawyer, so I'd prefer to see more latitude for creativity even though I do respect intellectual property. 

This case has raised many issues, including the use of references in art. Some of my earlier works have been attacked by some as "plagiarism". I think reference is an important part of communication and it has been common practice in the art world. When I flipped through the Christie's auction house catalog from November 2008 I found many pieces that are based on reference or appropriation. Most are selling for over $100,000. Some are more clever than others, but these are all works that are at auction being taken very seriously. Take a look.

If the AP wins their case, every Obama art (or any other politician) that was based on a photo reference that was not licensed would be rendered illegal. Here are just a few that were an important part of the political discourse during this election cycle. I also think art that is critical of leaders that neither the subject or the photographer approve of need to be a legal form of expression. I think this Bush image is a perfect example.

This is a blog post that speaks more to the legal issues in the case. Thanks for reading.

more info:

Hypocrisy And Bad Faith In The AP's Countersuit Against Shepard Fairey
by Jonathan Melber
Posted March 12, 2009 | 10:31 AM (EST)

Conyers Tries [and Fails] to Explain His Opposition to Public Science Access

 

By contrast:

[Images: source]

via Huff Post:

John Conyers Tries [and Fails] to Explain His Opposition to Public Science Access
By Michael Eisen, Assoc. Professor of Genetics, Genomics and Development, UC Berkeley.
Posted March 9, 2009 | 12:56 AM (EST)

[excerpt]

Lawrence Lessig and I have been writing about the link between publisher contributions to members of the House Judiciary Committee and their support for H.R. 801 -- a bill that would end the newly implemented NIH public access policy that makes all works published as part of NIH-funded research freely available online. On Friday, House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) -- lead sponsor of the bill -- responded in a letter on Huffington Post.

The first several paragraphs of Conyers' letter contain an outline of his record as a progressive politician. But no record, no matter how distinguished, is an excuse for introducing an atrocious piece of legislation that sacrifices the public interest to those of a select group of publishing companies.

Conyers would have us believe that it is just a coincidence that his bill would erase a government policy vehemently opposed by publishers who have contributed to his campaigns. But his response to our letter -- like the bill itself -- is taken straight from the publishers' playbook.

Conyers trots out the publishers' two favorite lines of attack against the policy: 1) that the NIH policy is taking a right (in this case a copyright) away from publishers, and 2) that making taxpayer-funded research available to taxpayers will bankrupt publishers and thereby destroy science.

Both arguments are specious and reflect fundamental ignorance about how science and scientific publishing work. The accusation that the policy is bad for science because it will drive publishers out of existence is the more serious one, so I will deal with it first. Here is what Conyers wrote:

... on the narrow merits of the issue, Professor Lessig and proponents of "open access" make a credible argument that requiring open publishing of government-funded research information furthers scientific inquiry. They speak out for important values and I respect their position.

While this approach appears to further and enhance access to scientific works, opponents argue that, in reality, it reverses a long-standing and highly successful copyright policy for federally-funded work and sets a precedent that will have significant negative consequences for scientific research.

These opponents argue that scientific journals expend their own, non-federal resources to manage the peer review process, where experts review academic publications. This process is critical because it provides the quality check against incorrect, reckless, and fraudulent science and furthers the overall quality and vigor of modern scientific debate. Journal publishers organize and pay for peer review with the proceeds they receive from the sale of subscriptions to their journals, thereby adding considerable value to the original manuscripts of research scientists.

The policy Professor Lessig supports, they argue, would limit publishers' ability to charge for subscriptions since the same articles will soon be publicly available for free. If journals begin closing their doors or curtailing peer review, or foist peer review costs on academic authors (who are already pay from their limited budgets printing costs in some cases), the ultimate harm will be to open inquiry and scientific progress may be severe. And the journals most likely to be affected may be non-profit, scientific society based journals. Once again, a policy change slipped through the appropriations process in the dark of night may enhance open access to information, but it may have unintended consequences that are severe. 

Far from being the reckless act Conyers portrays, the NIH policy is actually fairly conservative. It requires that papers that arise from NIH funded research be made freely available, through a website run by the National Library of Medicine, within 12 months of publication -- not immediately. This delay between publication and free public access was put in precisely because it will allow publishers to recoup, and profit from, their investment in publishing by charging for access to the freshest material.

Science moves far too fast for active researchers to afford a year's delay before reading papers in their field. Thus universities and other research institutions have to maintain subscriptions to journals even if their year-old content is freely available. Many journals, realizing that their revenue comes primarily from new material, already make their complete contents freely available online after a year or less. And these journals have not reported a wave of canceled subscriptions -- or any appreciable loss of revenue. So both empirical data and publisher actions refute Conyers' central argument against the NIH public access policy.

Conyers' argument is also clouded by several misconceptions about scientific publishing. He correctly identifies peer review as the most important role of scientific journals. But he is incorrect in his assertion that publishers make a tremendous investment of "their own, non-federal resources" in the process of peer review. While publishers supervise peer review, the process itself is carried out voluntarily by members of the research community. Scientists receive no remuneration whatsoever when they review a paper -- they do it instead because they recognize that peer review is central to the scientific process.

Since the salaries of most American scientists are paid, directly or indirectly, by the US government, the peer review process is actually a massive federal subsidy to publishers, whose very existence is based on the tens of billions of annual taxpayer dollars invested in scientific research. That even after they have had a year to profit from this taxpayer largesse some publishers are still unwilling to grant the public access to copies of papers they paid to produce and review is unconscionable.

And while Representative Conyers' publishing friends may have convinced him that there are severe unintended consequences that will arise from the NIH public access policy, the scientific community -- who has been debating this issue for over a decade -- strongly disagrees. [read on...]

via lessig.org:

A Reply to Congressman Conyers

March 9, 2009 5:32 AM - comments (10)

Mr. Conyers says I "cross the line." He says I label his motivations for introducing this bill as "corrupt," that I accuse him of "shilling," and that I "dismiss" his bill as nothing more than a "money for influence scheme." On the basis of this "one piece of legislation," he says I have waved away "forty years of fighting against special interests." He insists that he has "earned a bit more of the benefit of the doubt" and "that there is far more to the 'open access' story than [my] muckracking tale lets on." (Mike Eisen and my original posts are here and here. My blog post is here.)

First, as to substance: As others have shown without doubt, there is absolutely no "more to the 'open access' story" than my and Mike Eisen's criticism let on. (See the rebuttals especially here and here.) This bill is nothing more than a "publishers' protection act." It is an awful step backwards for science -- as 33 Nobel Prize winners, the current and former head of the NIH, the American Library Association, and the Alliance for Taxpayer Access have all said. And Mr. Conyers knows this. Practically the identical bill was introduced in the last Congress. Mr. Conyers' committee held hearings on that bill. The "open access" community rallied to demonstrate that this publishers' bill was bad for science. Even some of the cosponsors of the bill admitted the bill was flawed. Yet after that full and fair hearing on this flawed bill, like Jason in Friday the 13th, the bill returned -- unchanged, as if nothing in the hundreds of reasons for why this bill was flawed mattered to the sponsors.

[read on...]

jonCates' COPY-IT-RIGHT project

via furtherfield:  VIEW PROJECT 

The early experimental video art scene in Chicago, and its indispensability in developing an understanding of contemporary New Media practices, is something that I learned from jonCates and that jonCates learned from Phil Morton. Well, maybe it's not quite that simple, but that is one possible set of connections that can be traced from jonCates' COPY-IT-RIGHT project.

The Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive was initiated in 2007 by jonCates and is housed in The Film, Video & New Media Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It exists to organize and freely distribute Phil Morton's new media artwork, and also to perpetuate the COPY-IT-RIGHT ideal that Morton advocated. As you can read on the blog for the COPY-IT-RIGHT project, Morton sought to disseminate an anti-copyright attitude towards media and its distribution, especially artwork that is based in digital technologies. By referencing these ideals under the phrase 'COPY-IT-RIGHT', Morton sought to completely replace ingrained notions of copyright law by re-framing the term's meaning as a call to action. Make copies! It's the right thing to do! jonCates states that COPY-IT-RIGHT ranges in meaning from copyright reform to pro-piracy. "The COPY-IT-RIGHT ethic is presented by Morton as a value, even as a moral imperative, to share and freely exchange media," he said.

jonCates began researching Morton's work shortly before he learned of Morton's death from Jane Veeder, one of Morton's collaborators. Veeder put him in contact with Morton's surviving partner, Barb Abramo, who later entrusted all of Morton's archived material to him. jonCates said that this took place after a couple years of correspondence and a developed understanding. The creation of the archive is, "a personal and subjective process that involves developing trust and friendships."

The personal degrees of separation enabling this archive, however, should not betray it's larger goal, which, according to jonCates, is to facilitate discourse. "This discursive work is intended to be productive, engendering the development of theory/practices that are informed by these archives and contributing to ongoing conversations," he states. The archive is a central point of investigation, but also exists as a mediating voice within existing networks and issues, in both form and content. The intermingling of the archive's personal and institutional roots is exemplary of how individual archives might begin to bridge recognized authority and the histories that are important to individuals.

Because COPY-IT-RIGHT is a project that seeks to freely distribute media art, as well as create a networked discourse around it, we are invited to explore ideas such as influence and the generative origins of our knowledge. This process eclipses antiquated visions of the archive as a static source of 'knowledge' or 'history'.

COPY-IT-RIGHT's latest web entry is a transcript of a talk jonCates gave at McGill University on anti-copyright approaches to media. In that talk, he refers to "the artistic role of archives". jonCates provided some further examples of "artistic archives", such as Emily Jacir's Material for a Film and Walid Raad's The Atlas Group, which both seek to illuminate history and contemporary contexts through materials that might not be automatically absorbed into our stateliest cultural institutions. They represent an independent approach to information collection, at the same time that they contain material that is itself a challenge to dominant cultural and historical knowledge. Likewise, COPY-IT-RIGHT is a lesser-voiced exploration of Chicago’s art history, but also an open-ended call to discuss and develop material on the future of media copyright attitudes.

The COPY-IT-RIGHT project, as mentioned, also exists to provide entry into Morton's media art, for study or copy. The work he did with Dan Sandin, creator of the Sandin Image Processor - an analog computer for video image processing. Morton and Sandin's "Distribution Religion" is a project that documents the process of duplicating the Sandin Image Processor. Morton wanted to create a duplicate of the processor itself, and in the process, created an outline of the method for others. The documentation became part of the copying process, and also includes remarks on the COPY-IT-RIGHT ethic.

[read on...]

 VIEW PROJECT 

Live! Lessig, Fairey & Johnson @ NYPL: REMIX, feb 26

via Lessig.org:

Of course, no one will believe this, but this event was actually scheduled before the AP threatened Shepard Fairey. It is the last of my REMIX events, which was the last of my copyright/cyber books. Tickets here.