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Class #21
Today while you WORK I will chatter on about copyright, fair use and gleeful brazen theft.
(image downloaded from YTMD created from oodles of copyrighted material)
Internet larceny makes the rocking web world go round.
A current thread about fair use issues here:http://www.artfagcity.com/2008/11/10/afc-receives-cease-and-desist-from-the-estate-of-helmut-newton/
A good site for info on all those cease and desist letters that you will receive after taking this class:http://www.chillingeffects.org/
Tom Moody's Optidiscs:
And their travels all over the web:
From http://artmovingprojects.blogspot.com/2008/05/tom-moodys-optidisc-online-installation.html
Now as we joyfully trip across the web grabbing what ever we need, keep in mind that someone could also grab your web art and slap swastikas on it. (I was going to say: use it in a porn production, but you little pervs would probably be delighted)
A terrific source for info on current Canadian copyright issues, is Michael Geist:
Dr. Michael Geist is a law professor at the University of Ottawa where he holds the Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-commerce Law. He has obtained a Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.)degree from Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, Master of Laws (LL.M.) degrees from Cambridge University in the UK and Columbia Law School in New York, and a Doctorate in Law (J.S.D.) from Columbia Law School.It is Fair use to copy and paste, quote, a small section of the text from his web site to criticize it, comment upon it or teach about it.
Works without copyright are considered to be in the Public Domain. you can use them any way you want. (restrictions will still apply for commercial use, and academic use: Attribution everyone)
-One thing to note is that the reason the CRIA hasn't been suing your asses for all the music you download is because, currently, it's (sort of) legal in Canada, because the Canadian government taxes recordable media on the presumption that every DVD and CD is purchase in order to record copyrighted material. (we are talking about personal use here)
From The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism by Jonathan Lethem (if you haven't read his novel Motherless Brooklyn, it's stellar.)
Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one's voice isn't just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing.
[...]
It's worth noting, then, that early in the history of photography a series of judicial decisions could well have changed the course of that art: courts were asked whether the photographer, amateur or professional, required permission before he could capture and print an image. Was the photographer stealing from the person or building whose photograph he shot, pirating something of private and certifiable value? Those early decisions went in favor of the pirates. Just as Walt Disney could take inspiration from Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill, Jr., the Brothers Grimm, or the existence of real mice, the photographer should be free to capture an image without compensating the source. The world that meets our eye through the lens of a camera was judged to be, with minor exceptions, a sort of public commons, where a cat may look at a king.
Novelists may glance at the stuff of the world too, but we sometimes get called to task for it. For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside. In a graduate workshop I briefly passed through, a certain gray eminence tried to convince us that a literary story should always eschew “any feature which serves to date it” because “serious fiction must be Timeless.” When we protested that, in his own well-known work, characters moved about electrically lit rooms, drove cars, and spoke not Anglo-Saxon but postwar English—and further, that fiction he'd himself ratified as great, such as Dickens, was liberally strewn with innately topical, commercial, and timebound references—he impatiently amended his proscription to those explicit references that would date a story in the “frivolous Now.” When pressed, he said of course he meant the “trendy mass-popular-media” reference. Here, transgenerational discourse broke down.
I was born in 1964; I grew up watching Captain Kangaroo, moon landings, zillions of TV ads, the Banana Splits, M*A*S*H, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. I was born with words in my mouth—“Band-Aid,” “Q-tip,” “Xerox”—object-names as fixed and eternal in my logosphere as “taxicab” and “toothbrush.” The world is a home littered with pop-culture products and their emblems. I also came of age swamped by parodies that stood for originals yet mysterious to me—I knew Monkees before Beatles, Belmondo before Bogart, and “remember” the movie Summer of '42 from a Mad magazine satire, though I've still never seen the film itself. I'm not alone in having been born backward into an incoherent realm of texts, products, and images, the commercial and cultural environment with which we've both supplemented and blotted out our natural world. I can no more claim it as “mine” than the sidewalks and forests of the world, yet I do dwell in it, and for me to stand a chance as either artist or citizen, I'd probably better be permitted to name it.
(Myfanwy Ashmore made a similar observation to me years ago in reference to her flaunting of copyright withr the computer games she hacks into. The copyrighted property of these game producers littered her childhood.)
More from Lethem:
Artists and writers—and our advocates, our guilds and agents—too often subscribe to implicit claims of originality that do injury to these truths. And we too often, as hucksters and bean counters in the tiny enterprises of our selves, act to spite the gift portion of our privileged roles. People live differently who treat a portion of their wealth as a gift. If we devalue and obscure the gift-economy function of our art practices, we turn our works into nothing more than advertisements for themselves. We may console ourselves that our lust for subsidiary rights in virtual perpetuity is some heroic counter to rapacious corporate interests. But the truth is that with artists pulling on one side and corporations pulling on the other, the loser is the collective public imagination from which we were nourished in the first place, and whose existence as the ultimate repository of our offerings makes the work worth doing in the first place.
Class #20
http://www.as-found.net/ and http://www.moresoon.org/blog/moresoon.html from http://www.moresoon.org/
http://www.potatoland.org/ (click words > Grass)
http://www.leegte.org/ (click Internet Overexposed)
http://www.base-apex.com/
More from Justin kemp: http://www.justinkemp.com/bluesteel.html, http://www.justinkemp.com/sixpack.html (more horrifying than Goatse), http://www.justinkemp.com/hardtimez.html
http://castlemorbius.com/
http://trackingtransience.net/
Collection: http://ifoundyourphoto.blogspot.com/
GET TO WORK
b/t/w someone unhacked Madeleine's hack on The Royal Society of Intertubes site, so she has to go back and unhack the unhack. (so I can show it off a bit more)
Class #19
Joe McKay: ALH84001,0
(the animation above, an example of what he teaches his student in Foundations of American Cyber-Culture at UC Berkeley, suddenly makes this class look restrained and rigorous in comparison)
http://www.20q.net/
http://www.sketchswap.com/
http://www.trippytext.com/ (if you go on to do post-graduate studies, a thesis in Trippy text will give you that extra edge.)
Joe sent this to me with the subject line: BEST GIF IN THE WORLD
The rest of the class is a work period so that you don't show up at the end of November, bleating like baby goats about not having time to finish the final asignments.
(if we get bored I am going to play this over and over again with the speakers turned up WAY HIGH)
Class #18
SSSSSSSSSSSSWWWWRRRRRLLLLLL from petra on Vimeo.
666 Smielyz from petra on Vimeo.
Petra Cortright
-vimeo is another hosting option for you, unlike youTube, if you roll off the controls they disappear and there isn't any branding while the video plays
(its the same object embed scripts as you use for youTube so you can apply your favourite tricks to it as well.
(vimeo's embed script included the credits and links below the video, you can take that out if you want)
I appended autoplay=1 and loop=1 to the URL on the first video
-don't forget LiveLeak if you want to post your war footage or your topless gymnastic floor routines.
Check their faqs.
a collection: http://www.paetau.com/picturepeople/
Just stinking beautiful: http://www.turbulence.org/Works/sms/sms9/index.html
This too: http://iamchriscollins.com/albers.html, http://charlesbroskoski.com/usehypnosis/
http://dvblogh4ck.blogspot.com/,
http://www.artonline.jp/personals/jakriborg.html,
http://moresoon.org/projects/introducing.swf,
http://lal-blog.blogspot.com/2008/10/thats-terrible-still-to-come-on-this.html,
http://www.marisaolson.com/projects.html, and some of her youTube posts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mC4hgxJiuI
-some youTube, QuickTime and general web video production info
-As we have discovered with the constant crashing of our browsers, (our machines and connections are good), there are some issues with the QuickTime player on PC's.
That said, QT gives you more freedom with your video proportions. But it doesn't have the social networking potential of YouTube, and I maintain that it's
not as robust as an FLV. (but I think that might be a problem with producers of QT's not paying enough attention to data-rates)
- Great examples of QT's:
http://www.damonzucconi.com/index.php/Work/ColorsPrecedingPhotographs1
http://www.damonzucconi.com/index.php/Work/ColorsPrecedingPhotographs2
(you still have to compress a QT but you can choose a higher data rate for better quality and risk your viewers getting bored waiting for the damn thing to play)
(or me getting pissed because QT has crashed my browser once again, though the links above from http://www.damonzucconi.com/ are worth the trouble).
-Much of the art we are looking at in this class is from people who participate in communities of users and producers, and by now you've noticed that lots of artists
are playing with youTube. (remember that 3nd class when you all wanted to get rid of the flash player controls and branding? http://www.justinkemp.com/cowboy.html)
- youTube wouldn't be so big if they hadn't made the actual uploading brain-dead simple: http://ca.youtube.com/t/yt_handbook_produce.
So we can talk a bit about how you control the quality of your youTube uploads.
And I mean control the quality even if you want the low-res look with lots of compression artifacts (those trembling out of place pixels that can animate an on-line video)
http://www.mteww.com/five_small_videos/
- Bandwidth is an important term that you will hear a lot when it comes to digital video. It's also referred to as bit rate or data rate.
Think of it as the amount of information can can flow through a conduit in a given amount of time. It's not the same thing as file size for a video.
I used to shriek that out constantly to a rather thick client of mine.
- Anyhooo, there's a variety of video and sound compression codecs for web delivery that will all result in a loss of quality at present.
As well there are no sure fire formulas for what compression will give a particular video the best quality and playback.
(much of the time it's case by case. depending on dozens of variables in any work)
YouTube takes lots of video file formats (.WMV, .AVI, .MOV and .MPG) but remember they will be converted to .flv's, the video format from Flash.
They recommend a 640 by 480 res for your video and their program will encode (for our purposes, resize and compress) it to 320 by 240 res and
a rumoured data rate of 330 Kbps, so pay atention to the original data rate of your videos, and compare the quality to your uploaded youTube.
You'l also notice that it displays the video on their site at a 480 by 360 res., so they are blowing that little video up a bit with even more loss of image quality.
(I like it and I always resize embedded videos to twice the size for blog posts, but you might not) YouTube also offers a high quality option (sort of)
This article explains how you can trick the site into returning a better video: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2330990,00.asp.
Hint: try uploading a video that is 480-by-360.
So today, we can do a few tests with your videos, it's optional if some of you want to work on your final assignments.
cats spirt spsit spit from petra on Vimeo.
(this one is blown up 3x, the quality is still good)
Class #17
No links today since I want to show you some of your fellow student's first assignment. I'm thrilled that they are so varied and distinct and I'm also thrilled that so many of you solved your own technical problems or pushed yourselves beyond what you had learned in class.
I'll show you some stuff from Amber, Asta, Ellen, Judith, Kyla, Neil, Stephanie and Nguyet. They all did strong work that I think we can talk about a bit. The full selection of files are on the server in the OCTOBER_ASSIGNMENT folder. Check out what everyone else did when you have time.
Finally, Madeliene, for her project, did a nice hack of the Royal Society of intertubes that I found to be generous and great to look at too - http://23ac.appspot.com/ She added the radial buttons at the top with theme options, One of them being the original hacker's work, the other being her own pacman hack and of course the classic version.
When Paul shows you how to post these on the university servers, I'll link to some of the other pieces on this site.
Also, Madeliene pointed out that image bucket can do batch uploads, so you might want to get an account there so that we can post some of the earlier projects that you did.
For today, I want you to look at the addendum to class 16 post and do a bit of navigation scripting in your flash movies. I want you to have that as an option for your other projects this term.
I'll go into more detail on navigation options, but I wanted to get some scripting on line so that you could copy and paste, since I got tired of looking for curly brackets in the right places etc. etc.
We probably won't have time to go into video uploading today, but use your work time to download an flv, convert it to an avi and start playing with it, we aren't using final cut pro here but there are a lot of things we can do to video with the tools we have. (alternatively, you can output a flash file to avi or quicktime as well) Play around with it.
Finally, some of you did halloween pages and here is a good one from Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied: http://www.igac.org/container/midnight/