Joburg’s own Andre SC has developed his first piece of net.art, and it’s definitely a noteworthy feat. Kind of a cross between fridge magnet poetry, geeky guy gluttony, snot flinging, and surrealist games, netVerse’s raining text allows for beautiful poetic formations, zoom-ins and zoom-outs, exports of images and a really big pixel size. Check it.
Remix. Sample. Mash up. Reconstruct. Reformulate. Remake. Reproduce. Reshuffle. Transform. Recreate. Modify. Reassemble. Revamp. Rejuvenate.
These are the words that make corporate copyright protectors shudder and free culture creators grin with glee.
The ‘remix’ has become one of the most powerful tools of the digital age. But the legal barriers to taking an established image or concept and mixing it up for a fresh take have become a hurdle for creativity – leaving those with the most power and wealth the only ones who are able to take the legal risk.
Enter Creative Commons: a set of legal licences developed by those who are willing to share their works and/or have them remixed by creative communities around the world. The result: a pool of some 140 million images, music tracks, samples, and movies that creators can copy and use with legal certainty.
‘Remix Nation’ is the title of the first ccSalon in Jozi. It’s about celebrating cultural pioneers in South Africa who are pushing the boundaries of the digital world and recognising how important legal remixing is to building a vibrant creative industry in South Africa. ccSalons are being held around the world: from San Francisco to Beijing, from Korea to Berlin – and now in Jozi. The salon is a chance for digital artists, free culturists, musicians and creators to get together to chat about what’s new on the digital commons front, where to find material that you can legally remix and share, and to learn about how to incorporate Creative Commons copyright licences into your work.
Presentations at the event include multi-media artist Nathaniel Stern, who will be showing and discussing his remix work from his attendance at the iCommons Summit in Brazil; the dynamic duo, MtKidu, who will be presenting their live beat construct and visual manipulation show; and DJ, producer and sound designer, Richard tha IIIrd, who will be discussing, demonstrating and playing his own brand of South African mashups. Join us for a glass of wine at 6.30pm on Thursday 31 August at Gordart Gallery, 78 3rd Street, Melville and experience some of the sights and sounds of Jozi’s pioneering musicians, digital artists and free culture activists who are making the commons work for them.
For more information about the event please see: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Johannesburg_Salon.
Bring your USB Flash Disk along as content will be made available by the presenters to be downloaded for your remixing enjoyment!
About Creative Commons South Africa (ccSA)
http://za.creativecommons.org
The vision of Creative Commons South Africa is of a thriving African internet community using Creative Commons licences to educate our people, grow our markets, share our knowledge and celebrate Africa’s culture and heritage with people around the world.
Creative Commons licences provide a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors, artists, and educators that build upon the "all rights reserved" concept of traditional copyright to offer a voluntary "some rights reserved" approach.
About iCommons
www.icommons.org
Incubated by Creative Commons, iCommons is an organisation with a broad vision to develop a united global commons front by collaborating with open content, access to knowledge, open access publishing and free culture communities around the world. iCommons will incubate projects that cross borders and unite commons communities, acting as a platform for international collaboration towards the growth and enlivening of a global digital commons.
via site:
a digital ceremony for a war photographer
Literary cult figure and pioneering digital filmmaker, Aryan Kaganof joins Catherine Henegan, Amsterdam based multi-disciplinary artist, for a gripping performance about a war photographer and an insatiable media machine. Also included in the team is James Webb, internationally renowned electronic sound artist who has created an audio landscape for the performance….
I went to go see this piece on its closing day. There were some amazingly beautiful moments, such as when aryan swung naked from the ceiling, blowing out candles in remembrance, or his hilarious first phone call about war being great for his career. A comment on mass media as producing reality, some important messages in the piece (tho occasionally the piece itself felt a little too mediated). Definitely a historical landmark for networked performance in South Africa, if not the world.
Not much more to say about this – except how awesome it is. Intel Macs can now run everybody’s favorite interactive video application in two operating systems…. Downloads here….
PS – I just proposed a free, 5-day workshop on Jitter for The Bag Factory’s ‘for artists by artists’ series; watch this space if you are interested in attending.
Via Rhiz:
This year, Rhizome marks our tenth year of leadership in the new media arts community by celebrating the growth, diversity, and strength of the field. Rhizome was initiated in 1996 as an online platform for the global new media art community. Then, our focus was primarily upon Internet art and, ten years later, we retain this focus and have also grown to support new media art more broadly. Our anniversary festival provides a touchstone moment to celebrate new media art and look forward to further advancements in the field.
There’s some newly updated Compressionist documentation on Compressionism.net. Latest additions to the video reflect, both, some of the performative aspects of the series, and the current hand-made editions; the latter are being created with the help of printmaker Jillian Ross at David Krut Workshop in Johannesburg. For those who have not been to the site in a while, the text has also been updated site-wide, and I am continually uploading new images.
Latest Sound Byte:
Compressionism is a "digital performance and analog archive.” I traverse bodies, spaces and objects with my scanner face, while its head is in motion. After being Compressed into digital images the size of a small sheet of paper, the files are then stretched, cropped and colored by hand, then printed as editioned, archival works. The latest pieces in the series further transform details of these prints into hand-made art objects: etchings, engravings, aquatints, lithographs, spit bites and more.
Compressionism is an exploration of media and perception, a transfiguration in time and seeing.
Thanks also to Niall and Lungi @ Krut for their tireless efforts on this project.
Please watch callandresponse.co.za for updates on my January ’07 exhibition @ Art on Paper, Joburg.