If we treat information as a proprietary good, we commodify information, and create ownership and control regimes. In such a commercial milieu, information becomes unaffordable to the workers and to poorer people.
“Today I’m going to give you some background on Group Material and show slides of Group Material projects in public places as well as other relevant artists’ and groups’ work. That will be followed by account and evidence of some recent developments in the Times Square area of New York and public art projects which precipitated these developments.
Group Material is an artists’ collaborative founded as a constructive response to what we found to be the unsatisfactory ways that art was being taught, exhibited, and distributed in American culture at that time. When we started in 1979 there were thirteen of us but within a year and a half there were only three (Mundy McLaughlin, Tim Rollins and myself). Group Material has had a changing membership over the years but for the majority of its history there was a group of four working within a non-hierarchical organizational base. There were various conditions and shared purposes that led to the formation of the group. A lot of us had just come from art school, where we were trained to develop a ‘unique’ artistic voice. We were also trained to believe that after school you then can go exercise this voice in the so-called real world. This seemed to be pretty much of a false promise considering the limitations and biases which accompanied market principles and the commercial art system, and, many of us were not interested in making objects, but in collaborative processes. We were collectively intent on combining our social and political motivations with artistic practices, which is more common now than it was at that time. Then, the lines between art and politics were more clearly drawn and that delineation was commonly supported, often with the stated interest of preventing the contamination of art with politics.”
ZeD is a launch pad for independent creative expression that uses TV and the Web to seek out and broadcast the best new short films, videos, animation, visual art, performance and music in Canada and around the world.
Every weeknight from October to April (coast-to-coast at 11:25 p.m. on CBC Television), host Ziya Tong showcases performances, short films, animation, indie-culture reports, and interviews with movers and shakers in the culture industry.
Since our March 2002 launch, we’ve aired almost 3,000 individual works by emerging and acclaimed artists and performers. Almost half of these were found right here on this website, which was created so that you artist and/or audience member could not just watch all the items you saw on TV, but also submit your own work for broadcast consideration. Impressed? Intrigued? Keep reading.
ZeD.cbc.ca is where about 41,320 members meet, collaborate, and upload their work (currently over 46,328 original submissions and counting). ZeD staff screens every single submission and greenlights the best for TV broadcast. It’s a match made in artsy heaven. We win. The artist wins. Our audience wins.
“My experience of the last 18 months has been one of constant travel. I have had so many different ideas of home, destination, and departure, that I feel like I am constantly missing or expecting something. It is as if I am nostalgic for a place I have yet to visit. In order to clarify and contain these contrasted feelings of emptiness and intimacy, I take pictures. I see myself not as a tourist, but as a traveller.”
“The difference between a tourist and a traveller is that, the tourist carries his own atmosphere around him, while the traveller tries to lose himself in his surroundings.”
“The difference between a tourist and a traveller is that, the tourist carries his own atmosphere around him, while the traveller tries to lose himself in his surroundings.” – Freya Stark, The Valleys of the Assassins: and Other Persian Travels, Modern Library: New York, 2001, 9.
“One day a little girl walked up to a man, he was holding a ballon. She was strangely infatuated with the man, the red ballon he was holding, she just had to have it.
“Excuse me sir, what is the ballon for?” she asked lightly.
“Well, it’s for you my dear.” he said with a grin handing the little girl the ballon.
The little girl took the ballon from his hand, and was immediatly whisked away into the sky. She wasn’t scared or frightened, but excited and she squealed with happiness. She touched her face and found her eyes caked with sugar crystals and her lips tasted of strawberries.
“Oh, what is this!” she exclaimed as she climbed higher and higher into the clouds, her feet landed on a platform. She was stunned to see that she landed in a place full with happy children and candy.
The little girl started to run towards the gates but was stoppped by a short man.
“Stop!” the man yelled at her, with a stern mean face her father usually does.
“Excuse me, sir. I would like to go to the kids and candy now.” she said with glee, looking over the man’s shoulder.
“Oh, very well then miss.” he said noticing her red ballon.
The little girl skipped inside and saw all the happy children, laughing, singing, dancing, and eating loads of sweets.
She walked through the mist but all of a sudden fell into a hole, a scream escaped her lips as she fell. It seemed like a lifetime before she landed on the ground beyond frightened at what was happening around her. She saw a white bunny rabbit, she thought it was adorable and went to go grab it but it just jumped away.
She pouted and ran after the white rabbit, it was getting darker at every turn. She was scared beyond her small minds reason, but when she turned the corner she encountered a scary dog that was viciously barking at her. She shut her blue eyes shut fast, and covered her ears.
When she opened her eyes she was in bed, a lot older than in her dream and listening to her parents fight.
Welcome back Alice, you’re back in your hell. You didn’t catch the white rabbit, did you?
FEMALEPERSUASION.NET was conceived in 2001 as a virtual network and gallery for emerging female artists who were showing on the web. By interpreting the theme “female persuasion”, the artists began to address (both purposefully and inadvertently) the current state of feminism-a word which surprisingly to many still evokes the mythology of 70s granola-crunchy radicalism with a strangely persistently nagging fear. (“I’m not a feminist, BUT…”)There’s no denying that post-post/3rd-wave feminism is currently a hot topic, and it’s hard to ignore the strange mixed messages of sexy/intelligent a la Natacha Merritt or Vanessa Beecroft. Many of the artists participating in femalepersuasion.net explore a certain narcissism that is exceedingly prevalent on the web-an attempt to forsake isolationism and explore sexuality through exhibitionism and objectification. Additionally almost all maintain their own websites on which resides live journals and further self-portraiture. We seem to have hit a nerve. If feminism originally was born as a rejection of the objectification of women, what does it mean for us to objectify ourselves? Is is ok as long as we’re in control of it, and what are the long-term consequences? With the state of current events in this country and elsewhere, it seems even more crucial, and at times, more difficult to want to both show and question our work. Our conclusion in these heady times is simply that in allowing ourselves to opinionate, we are continuing to make progress. Please look out for the next show dates. If you are a gallery owner interested in hosting a femalepersuasion show, please contact:
A reBlog facilitates the process of filtering and republishing relevant content from many RSS feeds. reBloggers subscribe to their favorite feeds, preview the content, and select their favorite posts. These posts are automatically published through their favorite blogging software.
Why should you reBlog?
reBlogs are useful to individuals who want to maintain a weblog but prefer curating content to writing original posts. They can also enable organizations to tap the contributions of their employees, members, and communities-at-large in order to easily redistribute relevant content.
What if I don’t want to blog anything?
reFeed, the RSS aggregating component is damn sexy and worth using if you just want to read lots of content and not be constrained to one computer.
ForwardTrack is a new system created by Eyebeam R&D designed to promote on-line activism. The system tracks and maps the diffusion of email forwards, political calls-to-action, and online petitions. It can trace email forwards, map the impact of blogs, and facilitate web-based sign-ups and social networking. Our goal is to help people understand decentralized networks and see the power of “6 degrees of separation.” ForwardTrack technology helps prove that one person can make a difference.
How ForwardTrack Works: Much like Friendster and other social networking softwares, ForwardTrack works by building a database of specific people and their connections to others. By recording each person that participates in a given campaign, and who he or she has invited or emailed, the system is able to calculate and display the actual impact of every individual. The hope is that by allowing people to track their own impact on a cause, it will motivate them to try even harder to spread the word.
ForwardTrack allows tracking over a variety of internet media. Participants can forward an email to friends while CC-ing the ForwardTrack server, post links to a personalized ForwardTrack page from their blogs and website, or send those same links over chat systems or email lists. We hope that by obliging the multiplexity of the internet and its various communication systems, ForwardTrack will enable anyone with a good cause to reach a large audience.
This study explores the implications of the rights clearance process on documentary filmmaking, and makes recommendations to lower costs, reduce frustration, and promote creativity. It focuses on the creative experience of independent, professional documentary filmmakers.
FINDINGS
Rights clearance costs are high, and have escalated dramatically in the last two decades.
Gatekeepers, such as distributors and insurers, enforce rigid and high-bar rights clearance expectations
The rights clearance process is arduous and frustrating, especially around movies and music.
Rights clearance problems force filmmakers to make changes that adversely affectand limit the publics access to—their work, and the result is significant change in documentary practice.
Filmmakers, while sometimes seeing themselves as hostages of the clearance culture, also are creators of it.
Filmmakers nonetheless exercise fair use, and imagine a more rational rights environment.
RECOMMENDATIONS
Make the most of fair use:
Develop and disseminate models of best practices ;
Establish one or more legal resource centers to support filmmakers.
Facilitate the clearance process:
Establish a non-profit rights clearinghouse;
Work for legislation on orphan works.
Build greater awareness of filmmakers use rights:
Facilitate filmmaker access to sound pre-production legal advice;
Develop learning materials -to provide a balanced general account of intellectual property, for filmmakers and film students;
Educate gatekeepers about creators use rights.
