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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]
Will Fair Use Survive? Free Expression in the Age of Copyright Control, by Marjorie Heins and Tricia Beckles.
download the report [PDF]
I just launched Cook-Stir.com, a twitter-generated interface for between-tweets cookery. Upload pics of cooking - especially if you're an artist who cooks while procrastinating in the studio - or post blurry shots of your latest debauched meal out to your twitter stream. use the hashtag #cookstir. The challenge: How to tweet a recipe in 140 characters?
Check it out from your smart phone.
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Ai Wei Wei photographed in Beijing last week, with the scars of his ordeal clearly visible.
via The Art newspaper:
Ai Weiwei on the reasons writing, blogging and tweeting on politics matters
Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, speaking today at Art Basel Conversations (right), is recovering from brain surgery in Munich, the result, he says, of an assault by police officers in Sichuan Province. “The operation saved my life,” he said when The Art Newspaper visited his Beijing studio just before the fair, adding that it will take around four months for him to fully recover.
Ai’s popular blog on Chinese website Sina.com has been removed, and his activities are now limited to Twitter, on which he has around 10,000 followers. “140 characters is enough—following the operation, that is all I have the attention span for,” he said. “I cannot write long articles right now.” Twitter is blocked by the government in China, so users hack into the site.
Recent topics on his prolific feed have included his ongoing struggle with Sichuan police over the assault, his research into the Sichuan earthquake, the nomination of Chinese writers for the International PEN Writers in Prison award and the recent Obama visit to China, often using strong language. The police in Sichuan have issued an official denial of his assault (Ai says he has a recording of the attack that took place against him), and the government has now launched a probe into his finances.
Describing his move into the media, Ai said: “To use art is not enough, to describe your view, in the old traditional forms, such as painting, sculpture…as a citizen you need to express your views. Writing, blogging and giving interviews is a part of that, otherwise you will very easily be misunderstood by the establishment…as long as there is power and people there will be a struggle.”
Ai grew up with his family in exile in Shihezi, on a semi-military farm camp in Xinjiang Province, in the north west of China. “[The Cultural Revolution] was nothing but frightening,” he said. “The whole society was frightening. I was born in 1957—the year my father [the poet Ai Qing] went into exile. First he was sent to the forests in north China to work, then one year later to Xinjiang, so I grew up there until I was 18 years old. During the Cultural Revolution we were sent to live in the poorest conditions as punishment. I hate to tell those stories, there is too much sentiment there. The fact is people died, were dying. My father lost his sight in one eye, he almost died several times, and I came out of there very fragile.”
Ai then went to New York. “A completely different civilisation—1980s art, German expressionism, all these kinds of things there,” he said. His career started as a painter. “In school I majored in animation and then started doing more installations or objects. I came back to China in 1993, having left in 1981.” Ai was one of the original members of the Stars Group, considered the most important movement following China’s reform process of the 1980s. “This was completely new, freedom, but the party wouldn’t let you go too far, unless there was some structure. There were struggles, there was no real understanding of contemporary life then, it was more art for art’s sake—but quite political.”
Ai said he threw away his work from that period. “I never knew I would be so successful today…I had my first show in 2004, in Bern.” Ai had already been in China for more than ten years, working on his underground book project, and had founded the China Art Archives and Warehouse gallery with Hans van Dijk. He also co-curated the Shanghai exhibition “Fuck Off” in 2000 at Eastlink Gallery, with Feng Boyi. “I was quite unhappy about some of the content [of that show], but art is not about making people happy. Not much art touches the taboo—it was ugly, bloody, violent and sickening, but not far from reality. Reality in China is at least one million times worse.”
Ai’s latest work is Sunflower Seeds, 2009, a pile of 1,000 handmade ceramic sunflower seeds. “These seeds, they are a memory of the Communist times, we would share these seeds with friends,” he said. He does not know what effect the Chinese government’s censorship on art exports (The Art Newspaper, November 2009, p1) will have on future shows he may have abroad—works for his previous two major shows this year at the Munich Haus der Kunst and Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum were shipped out of China before the rules came into place in August. “I think strategically China has come to a very crucial moment, they have to re-justify themselves, even the past 20 to 30 years are based on a kind of destructive, suicidal act. Now they are trying to reach a higher level, but I think in any society, culture should have its own rights, not to be touched by the government, not to be promoted by the government, also not to be destroyed by the government.”
For the full version of this interview, see the January issue of The Art Newspaper
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"To the museum’s credit, the sensibility of openness that leads to the collection concept works on both sides of the site database – content is added and edited using a distributed, wiki-style content management system (CMS) unique to Linked by Air, the design firm responsible for the new Whitney site. [...That ] part of the goal of the new site [... is to allow] a broad range of museum employees to contribute directly to it assures currency, accuracy – and staff ownership."
Philip Bump offers some insight and analysis.
via MEDIAite:
The Whitney’s Re-Design: Web Done (Nearly) Rightby Philip Bump | 10:27 am, November 12th, 2009
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Image via Andrew Sullivan's The Daily Dish (great coverage of Iran, post-election).
via Gauravanomics (Gaurav Mishra’s Weblog on Social Media & Social Change):
I had earlier written about the use of social technologies in the 2009 Iran presidential election campaign.
Now, Mir-Hossein Mousavi’s supporters are disputing the overwhelming victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the elections (Hamid Tehrani at Global Voices).
Various observers have called the protests ‘Facebook/ Twitter protests’, claiming that social media tools have been critical in organizing these protests (Clay Shirky on TED Blog, Lev Glossman in Time, Mark Ambinder at The Atlantic). The #IranElection Twitter feed has indeed been hyperactive all week (Ben Parr in Mashable).
Social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and Delicious have also been used to organize DDOS attacks against government and pro-Ahmedinejad websites, including Ahmadinejad.ir (Noah Shachtman at Wired). It seems that some US bloggers are also promoting these DDOS attacks (Nancy Scola at TechPresident) and a DC based political firm is actually participating in them, in a misguided (and illegal) attempt at digital activism (Evgeny Morozov at Foreign Policy).
Some Ahmadinejad supporters are also using blogs and Twitter to explain why they believe he legitimately won (Hamid Tehrani in Global Voices).
In an attempt to quell the protests, the Iran government has blocked several social networking websites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, apart from several international news websites (Richard Sambrook at BBC, Associated Press).
On the other side, the US State Department has reportedly “asked Twitter to refrain from going down for periodic scheduled maintenance at this critical time” (Elise Labott at CNN, Nancy Scola at TechPresident).
Twitter is being used in many ways in post-election Iran: for organizing protests, for sharing first hand reports from the ground, for focusing international attention on the protests and for changing the news agenda for international news organizations.
When the dust settles down on the Iran election crisis, we will see that Twitter was more useful as a media tool and not as an organizing tool. We will see that Twitter didn’t really change much in Iran in terms of organizing the protests, but it did play an important role in engaging the international community in the protests and focusing media attention on the protests (see Evgeny Morozov at Foreign Policy, Daniel Terdiman at CNet and Marshall Kirkpatrick at RWW on #CNNFail).
In fact, there are less than 10,000 Twitter users in Iran (Sysomos via BusinessWeek) and less than 100 of them seem to be active. Given these small numbers, it’s quite amazing that their tweets have generated such a multiplier effect via retweets etc. (The number of Twitter users in Iran might be artificially high as of today because of a misguided campaign that asked people to change their Twitter location to Tehran to make it difficult for the Iran government to target dissidents.)
However, the on-ground organizing in Iran is probably happening via mobile phones and offline networks, the same networks that were previously used to mobilize Mousavi’s supporters to go out and vote for him.
Calling the Iran protests a ‘Twitter Revolution’ is not only distracting but also dangerous because it reduces a legitimate broad-based grassroots movement to what’s quickly becoming a cliche, after Moldova.
Mary Joyce at DigiActive.org uses my 4Cs social media framework to evaluate the campaign and says: “this campaign has achieved Content Creation and Collaboration on Collective Action, but will it be able to create a Community which will sustain long term action once the Iranian election is gone from the headlines?”
Evgeny Morozov shares my skepticism about “the claims that Twitter has been instrumental in organizing the protests” and thinks that it mostly played a role “in publicizing the violence or the already planned protests and rallies.”
Nancy Scola at TechPresident agrees that, “as we saw in Moldova, the idea of a “Twitter Revolution” isn’t always borne out by the facts, at least to the extent that the uprising would have not taken place without the tool.”
Brand Stone and Noam Cohen at NYT agree with me that “labeling such seemingly spontaneous anti-government demonstrations a “Twitter Revolution” has already become something of a cliché.
Kara Swisher at AllThingsD is annoyed at the media hype for Twitter “because it is how the tools are used by people, more than the tools themselves, that should be the focus.”
Ethan Zuckerman is amazed at “the extent to which reporters from really good newspapers are all asking the same questions.”
Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic reminds the intelligence community that most reports on Twitter are noise, not signal intelligence.
Tom Watson at TechPresident reminds us that there are limits to what technology can do, “especially when men and women are marching in streets patrolled by the troops of an absolutist religious dictatorship, facing soldiers’ guns in public and the noose behind the prison wall.”
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Many interesting posts at boingboing covering Iran -- here's one of them:
It's been an interesting few days for people who study social media. As
the protests over election results have continued in Iran, and Iranian
authorities have prevented most mainstream journalists from reporting
on events, there's been a great deal of focus on social media tools,
which have become very important for sharing events on the ground in
Iran with audiences around the world. I, like many of my friends at the
Berkman Center and Global Voices, have spent much of the past two days
on the phone with reporters, fielding questions about:
- Whether social media is enabling, causing or otherwise driving the protests in Iran
- How Iranian users are managing to access the internet despite widespread filtering
- The ethics (and practice) of distributed denial of service attacks as a form of information warfare
- Whether such online activities are unprecedented
Rather than tell you what I and colleagues have been saying to reporters, I'll point you to one of the better stories, by Anne-Marie Corley in MIT's Technology Review - she interviews several of my Berkman and Open Net Initiative colleagues and outlines the argument many of us are making:
- Social media is probably more important as a tool to share the
protests with the rest of the world than it is as an organizing tool on
the ground.
- Iranians have been accessing social networking sites and blogging
platforms despite years of filtering - there's a cadre of folks who
understand how to get around these blocks and are probably teaching
others.
- Because so many Iranians use social media tools - often to talk about
topics other than politics - they're a "latent community" that can come
to life and have political influence when events on the ground dictate.
(via):
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» 1 comment
I don’t envy those who have to redesign the website for a museum – balancing institutional structure and needs with the requirement that it reflect the appropriate aesthetic. Moreover, the process of transitioning a sensibility to the web in itself requires decisions about what the organization represents – a staid, classical collection would justifiably be nervous about embracing an open engagement of the general public.
The Metropolitan Museum, for example, probably won’t be holding a contest on YouTube any time soon. Its website, which looks like it was created by a medium sized corporation in 2002, is staid, muted, and tucked behind a splash screen. The Museum of Modern Art’s website, by contrast, is, well, modern, with a palette and structure that would bore Mies van der Rohe. It’s the Obama of websites – so cool, it’s dull.
Late last night, the Whitney Museum of American Art, known for its modern and contemporary exhibitions and its Biennial, unveiled the latest example from this world. It’s a great improvement over what was there yesterday, though that’s a low hurdle to conquer. Yesterday, the site was a card catalog. Today, it’s a website.
What establishes the Whitney’s new site as a success is not the aesthetic revamping with which, frankly, I’m not impressed. Various elements are laid in a casual grid, anchored by the logo, nice and big, at the top. The navigation is awkward, with elements jumping to the head of the line to show additional options once clicked. The background is either black or white, in order to accommodate a conceptually interesting feature in which it changes when the sun in New York rises or sets. (That would be at 4:41 this afternoon or 6:40 tomorrow morning for those wanting to witness it.) As I said – conceptually interesting. In practice, though, it tends to make the site feel a bit flat, and perusing the collection is negatively impacted by the black background. (White borders would do wonders.)
That’s particularly a shame, because said perusal and its accompanying tools are the real hook to the site. The collection itself is easy to navigate and well indexed. Every page, one notices, has at the bottom a small dot which, when clicked, adds an item to your “custom collection” (assuming you take advantage of the free registration, which you ought to do). This is not unique – the afore-mentioned MoMA site has a similar function – but the Whitney takes it further. When, above, I said every page, I meant every page. In addition to works of art, you can add artists, site elements, upcoming exhibits, even the contact page. Collections are an opportunity to interact with more than the art – you can in essence create your own museum website.
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