Under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share-Alike license; thanks to Cary Peppermint for being so SUPERCOOL. I know I could not have done this without you. I’m on the path, I know it, I can feel it, cuz I don’t care:
nathaniel is SUPERCOOL video link, 424kb, 7 seconds
No sh!t. Tomorrow, the NAN blog is three years old! As I write this, we are at “1,010 posts and 393 comments, contained within 25 categories.” On February 20th, 2003, I started using blogger in a frame on the front page of this (back then, a very different) site, to say, in my very first post:
So, I decided to take a leaf out of the books of josh and jonah and start a weblog on my site. This is the first week of the class I’m lecturing at MCAD, and things are looking good so far. In other news, odys, Nathaniel, hektor, x goes up in Cape Town on Saturday and [odys]elicit has been selected as an exhibition piece for The Chiangmai First New Media Art Festival [note: used to link, but now dead], Thailand. More to come…
Funny, Josh never really updated his blog (like, three times in 3 years) and Jonah, at that point, really just used it for news in a pop-up (and later down the road started the awesome Coin-Op blog, tho this has taken a back seat to his other great writings for more popular web sites). But hey, I didn’t know, and wanted to join (what I perceived to be) the cool club! Art Fag City says that, “2004 saw the rise of blogs in popular mainstream media, but the art community has started to see this medium explode only recently,” and MTAA-RR also only celebrated its 3rd b-day this month, so I am Mos Def an Innovator (early 2003! do I get double points for being in SA, and kind of still being the only art blogger?) and am undoubtedly in good company. (Shout out to Tim – the ‘T’ in MTAA – wazzup?) I win. W00+.
Some highlights of blogging here have been, I think:
Not bad for a three year run, and as I said in the very first post, More to come….
left: photo actually by Stefan Pildes, 2004, creative commons license So I only managed to stay awake for a little while yesterday, but I dragged my ass into the city for lunch on Halloween. We saw an old friend of Nicky’s, and a new friend that we met whist in Prague about six months ago. I don’t have to tell anyone who has ever lived in NYC, and then gone away, how right it felt to be wandering the streets again. I love walking this city; I love chatting to the crowds, people watching, taking in the many faces of what it means to breathe this space. No, I didn’t actually make it to the parade – the closest I came was watching some kids play in their costumes in Washington Square Park (and I forgot my camera). But I was there in spirit…. It’s good to be home. Art soon.
Nathaniel and I met at the Creative Commons conference in May and had been planning a cross-blog thing since then, which due to some very bad interference from the world never realized. The worst of which was of course Nathaniel falling ill, and of course everyone here will agree that we’re really glad he’s better now. A lot of what you need to know about Nathaniel you can determine from the fact that he posted his own welcome on silentcoder.co.za, a lot of what you need to know about me, you can determine from the fact that I’m not going to post a welcome. Having given you this short bit. Let’s jump right into something. Tonight I am invited to a cocktail party in Sandton as a speaker for the ACT summit(my slot is Friday morning, drop by if you wanna meet me). I have never been to a cocktail party. The invitation says, "Wear business dress" What exactly IS business dress ? Well I suppose a suit right… erm until a month ago I didn’t even OWN a suit, and the one I have now I only bought because I was best man at a wedding and did not wish to offend anybody. My typical style is a funky slogan t-shirt and black jeans, simple, and in my own way stylish (or at least, unique which is quite probably better) Being (by choice) rather unfamiliar with the upper echelons of the business world, I am thinking of it as a sort of exploration. Like Indiana Jones and the temple of doom except with free drinks. What do the owners of multimilion dollar corporations discuss over social drinking ? I volunteer to venture forth into their domain and find out. Should I not make it back, please tell Silvia I love her, and the little bottle with the coloured sand pictures is hers no matter what my parents say. If I survive, I’ll report back.
ralph borland matt hindley theresa anne mackintosh physicalcomputing.co.za ccmixter (creative commons SA, make music!) are you a south african artist, gallerist or dealer with a web site? gimme, and i’ll post it – even link to it permanently (at right)! bonus: i am also still looking for more contributors to SA arts writing for this site! contact me if interested….
Lawrence Lessig, digital copyright guru, Stanford Professor of Law, advocate of creativity, and chairman for creative commons, gave a talk to a bunch of artists and businesspeople over at Wits yesterday afternoon. It was really great. Most of the gist of his talk can be found here; it was about Exclusive Rights vs. non-Exclusive Rights economies, how we need both to foster creativity, and that there needs to be a space between the two, where the world can reside (and thanks to America, this is not happening… we are leaning too far to the "ER" economy). It was actually a pat on the back. Look at Joburg’s small community of bloggers (JoBlog, plankman for example) and anti-copyrighters (Christian Nerf, Aryan Kaganof for example) who both encourage re-mixing their work, and also sell their "big guns" to the likes of collectors/consumers. I, myself, have a CC blog (with loads of content – text and images – I’ve seen re-used), and also give away a lot of my software source code, video, images, etc, to any who ask… On the flipside, I use this popularity to sell works like step inside to the JAG (did I mention they bought it? First sale of a digital interactive installation in the country!) as an edition of 3, and promise NOT to copy it and distribute. It was cool to hear how cool we are. And he also said a lot of other stuff I hadn’t thought of that was pretty smart. Watch Lawrence Lessig for more – he says he posts all his content online, and for free. Oh, and also check out creative commons and ccmixter – the remix family tree. Creative commons, south africa launch party tonight, 17h30, Rosebank Hotel. Don’t miss it!