Click here to go there.

I’ll be scanning in the preparatory sketches and releasing those as well soon.

http://www.remixreading.org/

I have two examples of this that feature work in the style of Jackson Pollock. From the point of view of an artistic producer, at art school I was set a project to make a painting that combined two existing images. I chose a Pollock painting and a Futurist cyclist. The library had a book on the Futurists that had the preparatory sketches for the painting of the cyclist, showing how the forms of the finished painting had been abstracted from a fairly literal sketch of a man on a bicycle. This allowed me to understand and reproduce the compositional structure of the piece far more effectively than just copying the finished result would have.

From the point of view of an artistic consumer, Art & Language did some wonderful paintings of and titled “A Portrait of Lenin In The Style Of Jackson Pollock” around 1980. They made sketches of the images before painting them, and these are very useful if you can’t quite “get” the images when you first see them. Those sketches are often reproduced in exhibition catalogues and are available online.

Having access to the source material for even traditional media like painting can be very valuable for both consumers and producers. For consumers, it’s like being able to read the source code to figure out what’s going on in the binary. For producers, it enables remaking, reworking or build on the original work as surely as being able to hack and make the sources to a binary.

In my own work this can best be illustrated by the case of some images I made about ten years ago using Adobe Dimensions (a *vector* 3D package). I couldn’t have done the work any other way at that time, I can’t convert the work to another editable format now, so what do I do? I can release the all-but-unreadable editable format, or I can render the work as a 2D vector image which is editable as far as it goes, but does not have the full editability of the 3D version. I’m about to make some more of this work in Illustrator CS, again using its unique capabilities. As I said before, if one takes FSF-style Freedom as a guiding principle, I shouldn’t even be using Illustrator. But as an artist, I need various facilities it has until Inkscape catches up, facilities Inkscape can’t even render (full-strength masking for example), and I want to provide editable files containing those features.

In the absence of a guiding principle of FSF-Freedom, this is a dilemma. A producer will want the fully editable format, they will probably have the software. A consumer will want the accessible format. I provide various formats, but even with scripts to derive various formats for me from the original, this takes effort, and with (say) a movie, the space requirements would become a consideration.

I’m not arguing against editability or accessibility, far from it, they are vital. But I do want to illustrate that this may mean something (or some things) different for Creative Commons than for Free Software.

Loca
Opsound
Positron

Positron have got a CC-remix competition here. This is good because you get the “sources” for the track to play with, which is more what Free Music should be about.